by Becky Wicks
‘No luck? You can always swim for it,’ he teased as she approached them.
She rolled her eyes, but he didn’t miss the slight smile on her lips. Esme skipped off to view the ship’s departure through the railings.
‘Thanks for that—she seems a bit happier now, at least,’ Sara said with a sigh.
Her green dress blew against his legs. ‘She’s going to have a great time,’ he assured her.
‘She’s bullied, you know. The kids call her names because of the central line in her neck. I got her the camera so she could make a video diary—show people she can live a normal life, doing stuff like this. I thought she could put it on her donor page.’
Sara swept her blonde hair behind her ears, following Esme with her eyes. Fraser thought again how messed up it was that they hadn’t found a donor for her yet. ‘That’s a great idea.’
‘I don’t want anything to ruin this trip for Esme, Fraser.’
‘Neither do I.’
‘What’s this doing here?’ Dr Renee Forster had walked over and was pointing down at Sara’s suitcase in the middle of the deck. ‘Everything OK?’
‘She spilled some water on it downstairs,’ Fraser said quickly. ‘She thought the sun would dry it off faster.’
Sara held up her hands. ‘Silly me. But it worked; it’s already dry.’
Renee raised her eyebrows. ‘I see. Good to have you both on board. You know each other well, I take it?’
‘We did a long time ago.’
Sara shifted uncomfortably on the spot and he tried not to smirk.
‘We dated for six months, actually,’ he said. ‘We’re in a kind of the-one-that-got-away situation.’
Sara turned to him in shock, but he shrugged his shoulders. Staff on these cruises had no secrets. And anything that needed to be addressed was bound to come out, one way or another.
As the ship finally pulled away to the cheers of the crowd, the thought made him anxious almost as much as it thrilled him.
CHAPTER THREE
‘CAN I HAVE pizza tonight?’ Esme asked. ‘Because we’re on holiday?’
Sara finished unhooking her daughter from the dialysis machine. ‘Sorry, sweetie, but you already know that’s not a good idea. Your diet should stay the same, so you’re not poorly.’
Esme groaned and laid her head down heavily on the pillow.
‘I know it’s hard,’ Sara sympathised. ‘There’s a lot of great food on this ship.’
That was an understatement. The food on the Ocean Dream was unlike anything she’d ever seen or tasted. Each buffet was like a dream, with everything from lobster sushi rolls to king crab soufflé, to marinated steaks and more cakes than she could count.
‘If I can’t have pizza, can I have ice-cream? Just a bit?’
Sara turned off the dialysis machine and readjusted the lines from Esme’s catheter. ‘We’ll see. You have to stop pointing that thing at me!’ She play-swiped at the camcorder lens that was pointed at her face.
‘Dr Fraser doesn’t mind being on camera.’
‘Yes, well...’
Sara snapped off her gloves a little too loudly. She was burning to know more about Fraser—why he’d left the family practice, how often he did these cruises, whether he’d met anyone else since her. Especially that. But she didn’t want to appear as if she was invested in anything Fraser Breckenridge had going on any more.
She’d meant what she said. Esme came first. She was all that mattered. Besides, they were professionals, and Renee was already looking between them like Cupid eyeing up the perfect target for an arrow.
Fraser had asked if they could talk privately once they reached Aruba and left the ship. She’d refused, maintaining she was there to concentrate on her work and Esme, not dwell on their past relationship. But a mish-mash of memories had kept her up the last two nights—things she hadn’t thought about in years.
‘Code Blue. Is anyone close to the casino? Can we get help in the casino, please?’
The Tannoy was practically screaming. Jess stood up from her chair in the corner. ‘Code Blue in the casino? That’s just next door!’
‘Take Esme to the playroom, will you?’ Sara unhooked another dialysis patient beside her and hurried outside.
The flashing lights and jingling slot machines in the ship’s casino launched an attack on her senses. She gripped her Ocean Dream branded medical case harder as she started down an aisle, waiting for her eyes to adjust.
‘Sara! Over here.’
People were being ushered away by a security guard wearing the ship’s smart grey uniform. Fraser was crouched on his haunches over a large balding gentleman in his mid to late fifties.
‘What happened?’ She dropped to her knees beside him. It could have been the sight of him, knee-deep in an emergency, but her heart immediately upped its pounding.
‘Cardiac arrest. Help me intubate him. I’ve already called for a stretcher.’ He paused for a beat to meet her eyes. ‘They said he won some pretty big money. He obviously got so excited he collapsed.’
Sara felt stabs of adrenaline, as if she was hot-wired to Fraser as he started CPR. Nosy onlookers in cruise ship attire and enough bling to sink the ship stood out against others who were happily still playing on the slot machines, only feet away.
She finished fixing the Ambu-bag and an oxygen cylinder, then quickly lifted out the nasal tubes. Fraser took over. His Adam’s apple rose subtly above the collar of his white shirt and she followed it up to the dark line of stubble around his jaw as he pumped on the rich man’s hairy, tanned chest. A Rolex watch caught her eye. A golden wedding band.
Fraser held the man’s head back so she could help, and she lifted his puffy eyelids, noting the pale green irises. Behind her a slot machine dispensed more coins with a happy jingle. So bizarre.
She inserted the tube into the man’s trachea slowly, while the efficient blur that was Fraser administered more CPR. His biceps flexed through his shirt. Sweat glistened on his neck. Someone was talking about a stretcher. It was close. But she could barely hear a thing against the pinging and spinning and chinking of the coins.
‘Go again!’
Holding the man’s head on her lap, she put two fingers to his neck as Fraser commenced with another set of compressions. His hair was falling almost into his steely blue eyes. He was completely focused.
She held her breath. Still no movement under her fingers. Fraser watched her shake her head and used the Ambu-bag for rescue breaths. Their shoulders were touching. A stretcher was being carried down the aisle.
‘Everyone move aside, please. We have a medical emergency. Move aside, please.’
People responded quickly to Fraser, reading the waves of urgency in his words. Where was this man’s wife? Sara wondered. Was she on board too? Maybe he’d come here without her? Lots of people came on cruises alone—some kind of escapism, she supposed, from whatever they hoped could be left on shore.
They lifted the man onto the stretcher together.
Was Fraser Breckenridge escaping something out here? He’d tried to call her after she’d left him six years ago, but she hadn’t answered. When she’d fallen pregnant, after an out-of-character, grief-stricken, vodka-fuelled one-night stand, she’d seen it as one more sign that she and Fraser were truly over—especially when he’d stopped trying to contact her. Even if Fraser had wanted to be with her, there was no way she would have asked him to help raise another man’s baby.
‘Let’s get him on life support,’ Fraser said, jolting her back to the moment.
The medical centre, which was more like an infirmary, was located on the second deck. The smell of disinfectant was an extra punch to her swirling gut as they hurried in, and she clicked onto autopilot as they passed oxygen masks and pads and the IV.
Fraser arranged the patient on one of the few beds. It was just the two o
f them in the room. She started tugging the man’s shirt open even further, noting the soft gleam on his bald forehead, the dents around his ears from his glasses. Where were his glasses?
She prepped him for the defibrillator, just as Fraser rushed to hook it up. She watched him administer the jolts at one-fifty, eyeing the defib screen for signs of life, and noticed, despite herself, the faint lines on Fraser’s face that hadn’t been there six years ago—extra layers of thought around his forehead.
There was still no pulse.
‘Give me more,’ he instructed.
She obeyed and prayed it would work. The room was getting hotter. It felt as if hours had passed in the tiniest space she’d ever had to work in, packed with lab test equipment, immobilisation boards, X-ray and EKG machines and bottle after bottle of pills. Through the window land was now in sight, shimmering green under bright sunshine.
It was still a whole new world to her. It clearly wasn’t to Fraser.
‘We have a pulse!’ she announced finally, and relief flooded her veins.
A knock on the door minutes later made her jump, and she found her hand on Fraser’s arm. He steadied her, and at his touch she felt something inside her waking from a deep slumber.
‘Is he alive? Oh, God, please don’t tell me he’s dead. He always said he wanted to die on a cruise ship... He blimmin’ well said that before we left...’
A busty, tanned woman was talking at the speed of an auctioneer as she tottered over on high heels and placed two leathery brown hands on their patient’s cheeks, peering with squinty eyes into his big round face.
‘He’s breathing,’ she stated.
Sara couldn’t tell specifically if the woman thought that was a good thing or a bad thing.
‘You’ll be happy to know he has more than a few years left in him yet,’ Fraser told her.
Sara watched the woman pull something from her glossy designer handbag. ‘I’m so sorry, Harry. I was in the wine club with the ladies.’ She placed a pair of glasses on his face before dropping a tender kiss on his forehead.
Maybe she really did love poor old Harry, Sara thought, glancing at Fraser, who promptly shot her a wink. Love wasn’t always black and white, after all. Perhaps she should give Fraser a chance to say his piece. What had happened between them hadn’t all been his fault, after all; maybe they owed it to each other at least to get the past out, so that they could put it behind them and work together without it hanging over them.
Right?
No. Bad idea.
Hearing Fraser explain himself might mean she’d open a door that was better off closed. No matter the attraction that would never go away, everything was different now. Esme needed her mother’s full attention. What if they couldn’t find a donor for her?
Oh, God, she couldn’t lose Esme.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘WHAT’S THAT THING stuck to your body?’ The kid in the bright green board shorts was pointing a finger at Esme’s catheter. ‘Are you an alien?’
Fraser’s brow creased where he sat three feet away on a beach chair, but Esme dropped the spade she was carrying and turned on her camcorder.
‘What do you know about kidneys? Three, two, one—go!’ She was challenging the kid, with five years of confidence behind her words. ‘I bet you don’t know anything.’
The boy’s face scrunched up. He put a hand over the lens as his mother called out from beneath a giant sun hat in the shallows. ‘Marcus! What are you doing?’
‘You’re weird,’ Marcus told Esme loudly, and ran off.
Sara was off her chair in a flash.
‘It’s OK, Mummy.’ Esme sounded tired. ‘I know he just doesn’t understand.’
‘No, he doesn’t.’
Fraser watched Sara reapplying her daughter’s sunscreen, listened to her chatter, trying to make her smile. She made a great mother. He’d always known she would make a good mother, and there had been a time when he’d actually thought they’d make a great team as parents some day—not that he’d ever told her that.
Sara had her work cut out for her, though. Esme was smart and resilient and beautiful, and who knew her fate, exactly? Some people on dialysis lived a long time. Others didn’t.
He stood and got them both to pose with their backs to the ocean for a photo. Jess, the carer, took the camera and urged him into the shot.
‘That’s OK,’ he told her, but Esme had other ideas.
‘Dr Fraser, come and be in our photo!’
He waded into the shallows, eyes on Sara. Her expression gave nothing away. The hot sun was playing on her blue bikini top as Esme clung to their hands in the middle of them and demanded to be bounced up and down in the waves.
‘Again!’ she cried as they lifted her up and down.
‘You’re a bossy little Spielberg,’ Fraser told her, picking her up and putting her on his shoulders in the surf. He pretended he was about to dunk her, lowering himself down into the water and then standing again quickly.
Esme screeched with laughter. When he caught her eye, Sara was laughing too.
‘Where is this place?’ Sara asked him later, taking his hand and letting him help her off the scooter he’d hired. He gestured widely in front of him, to the brownish-red boulders standing tall like fallen pieces of a distant planet in the middle of the desert.
‘I thank you, fine lady, for accompanying me to the Casibari Rock Formations.’
He helped her unbuckle her helmet and held it as she shook out her hair. The sky was a deep blue, the scalding sun was trying its best to break through his sunscreen, and all around them cactuses sprang like gnarly hands from the dusty ground.
They’d left Esme playing on the beach with Jess and some other kids, and he’d seized his chance to get Sara alone—finally.
‘They’re so smooth and weird-looking,’ she said about the rocks, stepping forward along the dusty path.
He couldn’t help but see her bikini bottoms through her sarong; the curve of her ass. ‘How did they get here?’
‘No one really knows,’ he said. Some people think aliens brought them here.’
She smiled. ‘“ET phone home”?’ Her fuchsia sarong was billowing softly around her in the breeze. God, she was so beautiful. He could tell she didn’t really know it. He wondered if there had been anyone serious in her life, since Esme’s dad, and felt a sharp twinge of jealousy.
Sprinting onto a nearby rock ahead of her, he held a hand down. On the top of the huge, flat boulder, he watched Sara’s face as she looked at Aruba, stretching out beneath their feet. They were about three kilometres from the capital, Oranjestad, where the ship was docked.
‘On a clear day you can see Venezuela from here,’ he told her, taking in the dusty browns, and then the emerald-greens and clear blues of the waters beyond. ‘The first inhabitants from the Arawak tribe used to climb on these boulders and watch for storms on the eastern horizon.’
Sara lifted her sunglasses to her head and looked at him. ‘You always did absorb this kind of stuff like a sponge. No wonder you took this job.’
He smiled, ran his eyes over her lips. ‘How long did you say you’ve been doing these cruises?’
‘This is only my second.’
He brushed a strand of hair from her face, gently. It coiled around his fingers. She didn’t move, but she averted her gaze. Did he make her uncomfortable out here? Memories were funny things. He wanted to say he remembered the curves of her body, the way she’d used to moan when he pressed kisses on her ticklish tummy. But she’d made it quite clear that she wanted things to stay professional between them. He had to respect that.
‘I know you love to see the world, but I still don’t get why you’re here—working, I mean.’
Sara lowered herself onto the rock and he did the same. She hugged her sarong-wrapped knees to her chest.
‘You were pr
etty married to your family’s practice, from what I recall.’
He was quiet for a moment and the birds sang in the silence.
‘My father died two years ago,’ he told her, watching a warbler flit from a tall bush. ‘I put a locum in—just to get away for a while, you know? I did the cruise and really enjoyed it, and they asked me back for a second this year.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ Sara put a hand to his on top of his raised knee. Her voice was tight. ‘About your dad. Fraser, I didn’t know.’
‘It was a heart attack.’
He missed his father, of course—he’d grown up worshipping the guy—but he’d never come to terms with the fact that his dad had resented his and Sara’s relationship six years ago. Dr Philip Breckenridge had been an excellent doctor, but managing the finances of the practice had never been his strong point.
The money Fraser’s late grandfather had left in trust for him was to have been released to him when Fraser qualified, on the proviso that he spent it to further his career. By pumping it back into the practice, Fraser would appease the practice trustees and save his parents from an uncertain retirement.
But when he’d gone to tell Sara he needed some time to concentrate on qualifying, so the money for the practice could be released, even knowing it wasn’t great timing because her mother had just died, she’d already made her mind up.
‘We should just call it a day, Fraser. It’s too crazy right now; everything is changing.’
Her movement beside him startled him back to the present. Sara had turned to face him, cross-legged on the rock.
‘I mean it, you know; I really am sorry about your dad, Fraser.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I know what it’s like to lose a parent.’ She curled her fingers around his, holding both his hands in the space between them.
His mind flashed back to them walking hand in hand around Edinburgh Castle, taking photos of each other on the cannons. She’d known grief herself then, of course, and he’d wanted to keep on helping her through it. He’d wanted her with or without all the problems surrounding them at the time.