Charlotte Hawkes - The Surgeon's One-Night Baby

The minute she’d spotted him, her body hadn’t quite felt her own. As though it wasn’t completely under her control. Even now the memory of his eyes scanning over her left her blood feeling as though it was effervescing through her veins, making her entire body hum.

It was an unfamiliar, but not altogether unpleasant sensation.

Ducking behind the pillar, Archie pressed her back against the cool, smooth concrete and rested her hand underneath her breastbone. She could feel the tattoo her heart was drumming out, leaving her unable to even catch her breath. And it had nothing to do with the dancing. Oh, she’d tried to ignore him, especially when his usual harem had draped themselves around him and he’d barely had the decency to offer any of them the time of day.

But who could ignore Kaspar Athari?

‘So, if you’re getting a drink why are we the other side of the room from the bar?’ Katie bobbed under her nose, her brow knitted.

‘Hmm? Oh. I just...needed to catch my breath.’

It wasn’t exactly a lie, but she might have known her old friend would see through it.

‘Archie, you’re about as jittery as a beachgoer trying to get across hot sand.’

‘No, I’m not.’

Katie’s eyes narrowed sharply.

‘Is this about “the Surgeon Prince of Persia”?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she managed loftily, only for Katie to snort in derision.

‘Yeah, sure you don’t. He’s been devouring you with his eyes all night and you’ve been lapping it up.’

‘I have not,’ Archie spluttered, her knotted stomach twisting and flipping. ‘And it hasn’t been all night. It has been half an hour at most.’

‘Aha!’ Katie declared triumphantly. ‘So it is about the perennially sexy Kaspar Athari.’

‘No...not at all...well, not really. That is... Why are you frowning? Aren’t you the one who said I needed to get back out there and have fun, like we used to in uni? Like I did before my dad...died? Before I married Joe?’

She tailed off awkwardly as Katie pulled a face.

‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I always hated the way you changed when you married Joe. You went right into yourself. Nothing like the fun, sassy Archie I’d come to know.’

‘It wasn’t Joe who did that.’ Archie wrinkled her nose. She’d tried a hundred times to explain it to Katie, but her friend had never quite understood. Still, she couldn’t help feeling she owed it to Joe to try again. ‘He was exactly what I needed at that time in my life.’

‘I disagree.’

‘I know you do. You remind me often enough.’

Still, there was no rancour in Archie’s tone. In many respects it was buoying that her friend cared enough to do so. And Katie’s wry smile of response revealed that she knew it, too.

‘I just feel that, while he may not have intended to, Joe took advantage of the fact that you were young and naïve. You were grieving for your dad, and your brother and his new wife were half a world away.’

They were falling into a conversation they’d had a hundred times before, but it was impossible to stop.

‘He didn’t take advantage. It was mutually beneficial.’

Katie’s eyebrows were practically lost in her hairline, but at least she had the tact not to bring up any painful reminders of more than three years of failed pregnancy attempts. The miscarriage at eighteen weeks.

Agony seared through her. Black, almost debilitating.

Faith.

As though it didn’t lacerate her from the inside out just thinking her unborn daughter’s name.

She swayed dangerously.

Had it not been for the silent, supportive hand at her elbow, Archie was afraid she was about to tumble to the floor. She blinked at Katie gratefully. Unspoken, unequivocal support shone back at Archie. Bolstering her. Making her want to forget the fact that, barely a year after she’d lost her unborn daughter, Joe was expecting a baby with his new wife.

It hurt.

Though not, perhaps, in precisely the way Archie might have thought it would. She couldn’t pinpoint it, but neither could she help suspecting that it had less to do with Joe than it ought to, and more to do with the simple pain that another woman seemed to find it so easy to have a baby while her own traitorous body hadn’t been able to do the one thing she felt it had surely been designed to do.

‘Fine, let’s say it was mutually beneficial...’ Katie conceded at length, though Archie could hear by her friend’s tone that she didn’t remotely believe that.

‘You look like you’ve swallowed a bee.’

She couldn’t help a chuckle, even it did sound half laugh, half choked-back sob. Katie valiantly attempted to ignore her.

‘Mutually beneficial,’ she repeated firmly. ‘And you’re right. Now is your time to get back the Archie I used to know. The one I admired so much that I used to wish I was more like you. The Archie who threw herself out of a plane today, for her father, for Faith, for a new start.’

‘You make it sound so easy.’ Archie smiled softly, the sadness she tried so hard to shake but couldn’t still tiptoeing around inside her.

But she wanted to. And the jump today was the first time she’d felt she might actually be ready to do so.

Because of the jump? Or because of Kaspar?

Archie slammed away the unbidden thought in an instant but it was too late. It couldn’t be un -thought. Instinctively, her eyes were drawn back to where Kaspar had been standing, staring at the pillar as though they could bore a path straight through it to see him.

It was pathetic.

But it was also the biggest vaguely positive reaction she’d had to anything or anyone in a very long time. And that felt strangely compelling.

Kaspar Athari, back in her life after all these years. He’d been her first, only crush. Except back then he hadn’t even noticed her and so she hadn’t had the guts to do anything about it. Suddenly, here he was again and this time he had certainly noticed her. It was as though she was being offered a second chance. It couldn’t be just a coincidence, surely? It had to be fate . Either way, it was making her want to... do something. Anything.

She turned to Katie with as firm a nod as she could manage.

‘Fake it till you make it, right?’

‘Absolutely.’

It was easier said than done, but what the heck.

‘Fine.’ Archie sucked in a deep, steadying breath. ‘Then if I’m going to...what did you say earlier this evening? Get back on the horse? Then why not go all out with the infamous “Surgeon Prince of Persia”?’

Why did it feel easier to call him by his ridiculous nickname? Was it because it felt too close to home to call him Kaspar?

‘Yes.’ Katie didn’t look remotely abashed. ‘I did say that. But not with him. He’d gobble you up and spit you out. The man is pure danger.’

Seriously, how difficult could it be to dredge up a casual grin while simultaneously trying to stop her stomach from executing a perfect nose-dive?

‘Maybe that’s what I need?’ she tried hopefully. ‘A bit of danger.’

‘Absolutely not.’ Katie shook her head so vigorously her shiny halo of curls bobbed perfectly around her pretty face. ‘No chance. There’s absolutely no way I’m letting a guy like that get anywhere near you. Over my dead body. You can count on me for that.’

Archie frowned, confused.

‘I’ve heard you drool over the Surgeon Prince a hundred times. Are you really saying you wouldn’t go there after all?’

‘Of course I would,’ Katie scoffed loudly. ‘Trust me, I’d be in there like a shot if the guy so much as squinted in my direction.’

‘So he’s okay for you, but not okay for me?’

Archie didn’t know whether to feel insulted or honoured.

‘He’s not okay for you right now . If you were the old, fearsome Archie from back in uni, then I’d say go for it. That Archie could have handled a man like Athari.’

This was it. She could either go along with what her friend was saying, proving Katie right. Or she could show a little spirit. Like she had on that skydive. Not that she’d told Katie, who’d been occupied with her own charity water-polo match, about the tandem jump.

Archie blew out sharply.

‘You know, I think I can handle one little prince.’

Katie opened her mouth, eyed her and closed her mouth again. A crooked smile that Archie knew so well hovered on her friend’s lips.

‘I do believe you mean it.’

‘I do.’

Katie paused, considering.

‘Then far be it from me to stop you. Okay, you know that sexy, dangerous scar across his jawline?’ Archie nodded silently. ‘Apparently it was the result of some big fight when he was younger.’ Katie hugged her arm tightly and whispered in conspiratorial tones. ‘You remember those massive Hollywood kung-fu, karate-style blockbusters he did as a seven-and eight-year-old?’

The Hollywood life he’d been only too desperate to run away from, Archie remembered. Not that she could say anything.

‘Yes, I think so,’ she hedged instead.

‘Of course you have to know them. They were huge , until his mother apparently demanded too much money or riders or whatever and he got kicked out and replaced.’

The rumours didn’t come close to the damage his volatile mother had caused. But she couldn’t say that either.

‘So you heard he got the scar on those films?’ Archie tactfully changed subject.

Katie’s eyes sparkled with excitement.

‘No, the rumour I actually read somewhere was that the fight was down some back alley when he was about seventeen or something, and wasted after a drinking session. Apparently he was outnumbered five to one but he still beat their collective backsides. Juicy, isn’t it?’

‘Juicy,’ Archie agreed half-heartedly.

The idea of the quiet, controlled Kaspar of back then drinking, let alone fighting, was a complete anathema to her. No doubt a lie the press had spun to help them with their paper-shifting image of the playboy Kaspar. Not that he hadn’t played his own stupid part to a T.

But the man in the media bore little resemblance to the boy she’d once known. And it was the latter who had stolen her adolescent heart.

Besides, she’d been there when he’d really got that scar, climbing the forty-foot oak tree outside Shady Sadie’s house when he’d been fifteen. Or at least she’d been in the living room with her father when Robbie had raced back to say that a damaged limb had given way and Kaspar had fallen to the ground. He’d been carted off to the hospital with a few superficial cuts and bruises and that one deep gash. He’d worn it with all the pride of a battle scar, of course. Trust the media to come up with something far more dark and exotic to explain it.

But they couldn’t have made up everything , could they? The playboy lifestyle? The dangerous reputation? It had been fifteen years since she’d last seen him so of course he wasn’t going to be the same boy she’d known. As Katie gabbled on, Archie let her head drop back, the cool concrete of the pillar seeping into her brain, and tried to think a little more clearly. Maybe opening the Kaspar Athari can of worms really wasn’t the best idea she’d ever had.

As Katie’s hands grabbed her shoulders and hauled her off the pillar, Archie was tugged back to the present.

‘This is your chance, here comes your Surgeon Prince.’

Before she could stop it, she was being swung around and thrust out around the column. The breath whooshed from her body. She didn’t need to turn to know that Katie would have already gone.