The Surgeon's Meant-To-Be Bride

The thought of her with someone else hurt like a fresh bruise deep inside. But she was right. If he couldn’t give her what she wanted it was wrong to keep her bound to him.

Gill sighed as he removed the divorce papers from the envelope. “Are you sure, Harry? What we have is special. Are you sure you can find that with someone else?”

He didn’t mean to sound conceited—he was just stating a fact. And it was buying him time. Putting off the inevitable.

“No, Gill.” She shut her eyes briefly and opened them again. “I’m just looking for a different kind of love. One that has room for three.”

He nodded slowly. Their love had always been all consuming. Blocking everything and everybody else out.

Yet, she looked so lovely standing in front of him and the desire to hold her in his arms was overwhelming.

Dear Reader,

It’s nearly seven in the morning and I can’t sleep. Today is the last day of our medical team’s rotation in this war zone. One of many over the years. The team and I operated for sixteen hours straight yesterday and didn’t finish until well into the night. But I don’t mind—I thrive on the challenge. And as great as it is to leave, it won’t take me long to miss it again. I love being part of this great team of people. Sure it can be dangerous, but what we do makes a difference to so many lives.

So why am I lying here awake when I should be sleeping? It’s Harriet. My wife. I’m losing her. I can’t put my finger on it, but last night, as we were standing together side by side and she was passing me instruments, I could feel her pulling away from me. We’ve been reconciled for two months now and I thought we were past the baby stalemate. Why is it that I can fix broken bodies with my eyes shut, but can’t seem to fix the rift in my marriage?

I love Harriet. From the moment I saw her, I’ve never wanted anyone else. The year we were separated was hell. Worse than living in a war zone. Our marriage had been perfect, an extension of our operating style—flawless with a poetic symmetry. But suddenly she wanted a baby. And I didn’t. And we were at an impasse. When she came back, I thought the issue had been resolved but…maybe not.

And so now I have a day to pull her back. It’s not much time, but a lot can happen in twenty-four hours—particularly here. I simply can’t bear the thought of losing her again.

Wish me luck, dear reader. Wish me luck.

Regards,

Dr. Guillaume Remy

The Surgeon’s Meant-To-Be Bride

Amy Andrews

To Mark. For everything. LUVVM

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER ONE

0700 HOURS

THE divorce papers burnt a hole in her hand as she carried the large yellow envelope to her soon-to-be ex-husband’s sleeping quarters. Nausea threatened and she swallowed hard to dispel it.

Just knock on the door, hand it over, then leave, Harriet lectured herself as her rubber-soled shoes squeaked loudly on the aged linoleum in the hushed corridors. Do not stop for a chat. Do not go in for coffee. Do not let him make love to you.

She tossed her head and clamped down on the irony that threatened to bubble up in her chest and escape as sarcastic laughter. Sex, Harriet. Have sex with you. Their days of love-making were long past and she couldn’t afford such romantic stupidity.

They were getting divorced. The end. Finito. Period. They were just having a little difficulty remembering their differences in the haze of lust that descended upon them every time they got a little too close. Harriet hadn’t yet worked out the co-ordinates of that invisible line—the one that separated close and too close—but she certainly knew when she’d crossed it. Except by then it was usually…always…too late.

Harriet stopped in front of his door, gathering her courage. Tomorrow. She gripped the envelope tighter. She would be gone tomorrow and his signature would be on the papers and she could get on with her life. So she had to do this now.

She’d had the papers since she’d arrived in this country over two months ago but part of her had held back. Somewhere inside there had still been a small kernel of hope. A little Pollyanna ray of sunshine that had believed she could truly convince him to change his mind.

But two months of alternating between fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants medical drama and snatched moments of incredible can’t-get-enough-of-you sex hadn’t resolved anything. Sex they were great at. Marriage they weren’t.

Harriet took a moment to tie her wavy hair back in a hastily constructed ponytail. He was going to look all messy-haired and sleepy and sexy as hell, so she desperately needed to look no-nonsense. And he hated her hair tied back, and for this task she needed him to hate her a little.

Harriet knocked on the door. The noise echoed loudly down the corridor and she hoped she hadn’t woken anyone else. All the surgical teams had been up until 1 a.m. and she didn’t think they’d appreciate such an early wake-up call. But this had to be done. She’d put it off too long already.

She heard a mumbled expletive on the other side of the door and smiled to herself as she pictured Gill emerging from under his pillow, staring at the clock and frowning. Please, put a shirt on, she begged silently.

The door opened abruptly and Harriet was confronted with his magnificent naked chest. She looked into his grumpy face and watched as he bit off a retort and a slow lazy smile warmed his sleepy face. Oh, hell! Of all the men in all the world she had to marry one that looked like a naughty angel.

‘Harry,’ he murmured.

His morning voice stroked across her skin, sending every nerve ending in her body into a frenzy. She knew where the line was today. And she was standing on it.

‘I’m sorry I woke you,’ she said, lifting her eyes off his smooth pectoral muscles and trying to shut down her peripheral vision so she couldn’t see the bulge of his naked biceps.

‘I’m not,’ he said.

Harriet frowned at him. He lifted a hand and caressed the St Christopher hanging from the delicate silver chain around her neck. He had a mouth that was made for kissing and Harriet could feel herself teetering on the line. She wanted to lean forward and draw his soft bottom lip into her mouth and bite it.

She could feel his gentle tug on the necklace drawing her into the room. Harriet resisted. She knew that crossing the line was not what this was about. Give him the papers and go. Run like the wind.

Harriet brought the envelope up between them, abruptly displacing his hand.

‘What’s this?’ he asked, a small smile playing on his lips and dancing in his grey eyes.

‘Divorce papers,’ she said, and felt stronger just saying the words.

Gill stared for a moment and shot her another slow smile as he took the envelope from her. He tossed it over his shoulder and Harriet heard it land on the floor behind him.

‘Gill…’ she chided softly. ‘I need you to sign them. It’s time.’

He stood to one side and gestured her into the room with a flourish of his deft surgeon’s hands.

Harriet shook her head vehemently. ‘No.’ She knew what would happen if she put her foot over the line. His quarters were three metres by three and dominated by an unmade bed and an undressed man.

‘Harriet,’ he sighed, but she could see the sparkle of amusement lighting his eyes. ‘I’m not going to discuss our divorce with you in the corridor.’

His rich, deep voice oozed like warm chocolate, coating her in its sweet, sticky web. He held out his hand to her. It sounded so reasonable. She looked behind her at the empty hallway and hesitated briefly, before taking his hand and feeling the gentle tug pulling her over the line.

When he reached behind her and pulled her hair free she didn’t protest. Neither did she when he kissed her. In fact, she welcomed it greedily, ready to join in this dance they did so well, eager to be naked with him one last time.

Harriet had felt the pull the moment he had opened the door and had known deep inside that resistance was useless. She could pretend as much as she liked that it was over between them, but she knew this would never be over. This insane lust that had blinded her with its ferocity for seven years.

He’d sign the papers and their union would be broken, but this endless urge to be with him, to know him carnally every time they were together, could never be broken. Her only hope was distance. Come tomorrow she was staying the hell away from him—for ever!

Harriet felt a quiver low in her abdomen as the sheer hunger and force of his kiss had her clinging to his broad naked shoulders. She heard him groan her name into her mouth and she whimpered in response.

‘Harry,’ he said again, tearing his mouth away and looking searchingly into her eyes as his breath came in harsh gasps, his grey eyes stormy with passion.

She claimed his mouth quickly, empowered by his almost bewildered look. The fact that she could do to him what he did to her was a powerful aphrodisiac and she felt her kiss become wild and savage against his full lips. Just for one last time she wanted him to realise what he was turning his back on.

Her hands roamed to the smooth muscles of his chest, trailed down his flat abdomen, and she took pleasure in their quick response to her touch. She could feel them contract beneath her nails and when she slipped her hands beneath his boxer shorts to grab handfuls of his tight buttocks she grinned in triumph as the hardness of his erection pushed urgently between her hips.

Gill grasped the bottom of her scrubs top and whipped it over her head in a swift movement. He didn’t bother fumbling with her bra clasp but yanked the cups aside, freeing her breasts and roughly stroked his thumbs over her nipples until they peaked into hard nubs.

He pushed her backwards and she fell against the rumpled bed. Harriet had a moment of clarity when she realised how she must look. Half-naked, her hair spread in wild abandon against the sheets, her bra ripped aside, her breasts achingly aroused. Then Gill removed his boxers and all rational thought fled.

He stood for a moment tall and proud, just looking at her with more lust than she’d known existed in the whole world. He wasn’t embarrassed by his arousal and already she wanted to feel its silky smoothness in her hands, her mouth, deep inside her.

She licked her dry lips and noticed Gill’s eyes widen at the unintentional come-on. He reached down and pulled the cord at her waist that held her scrubs up and yanked both them and her undies down in one swift movement. Now she lay totally naked before him as he stood before her, and she couldn’t stop the whimper of need that escaped her mouth or holding her arms out to him in silent consent.

And then his weight was on her and his mouth was everywhere. Drawing wet circles around her breasts and sucking her nipples to tortured peaks, nibbling her earlobes, tickling her stomach and licking inside her until she thought she would faint from the need.

And then when the desire built to fever pitch his mouth claimed hers and he let his fingers do the walking. They stroked and caressed and danced their way all over her body, and when he put them deep inside her she had to bite hard on her lip to stop the scream. Even crazed with lust, she remembered how thin the walls were!

‘Now,’ she whispered urgently, clinging to his neck as his fingers wove a magical rhythm and she could feel her orgasm rushing out from deep inside her, threatening to engulf her at any second.

Their gazes locked as he plunged inside her. Each stroke hurtled her closer, at each stroke his eyes seemed to dare hers to close. She refused. She would not look away or shut her eyes, even as the pressure built. She wanted to look straight at him as she came. She wanted to watch his eyes as he came, too. She wanted their last time to be indelibly imprinted on her retinas. She wanted to see his face as he lost control inside her.

Harriet bit down on her lip as the first wave broke against the shore.

‘Say it. I want to hear you,’

The demand was magnified by his panting breaths, trying to hold off his own pleasure until she’d reached nirvana as well. Harriet shook her head. If she let it out, the earth would shake and the parrots in the sparse trees outside would lift in noisy flight and every doctor and nurse in the complex would be woken from their slumbers.

‘Let it out,’ he demanded again.

She shook her head again and tried to internalise the orgasm that was eroding the edges of her endurance.

‘I want to hear you,’ he said. ‘One last time, Harry. Let me hear you.’

Harriet felt the guttural noise move through her from the tips of her toes, gaining momentum until the sheer enormity of it demanded an escape. She held his gaze, noticing the sheen of sweat on his brow, and realised she could stem the noise and the tide no longer.

‘Please, Harry.’ His voice was halfway between begging and groaning and she knew that she didn’t have the power to deny him this one last request. And she wanted to anyway. She wanted to yell and scream like a banshee. She wanted their last time to be memorable, imprinted on his mind for ever. So she let herself go, crying out his name as the tumult of her orgasm flung her into the far reaches of the galaxy.

She vaguely heard his voice joining hers, crying out in abandon as she hovered above the earth, amongst the stars, at one with the beauty of the heavens.

CHAPTER TWO

0800 HOURS

‘THE papers, Gill.’

Dr Guillaume Remy had been enjoying the disconnected feeling of being outside his body, letting his mind drift through the silky tendrils of sexual limbo. In the strange world between slumber and wakefulness he could forget about the papers lying discarded on his floor and that the woman he loved no longer wanted to be with him.

There was only the wonderful haze of pleasure that reached deep into his bones, making him feel heavy and weightless all at the same time. A semi-conscious state halfway between arousal and satisfaction that he wished they could stay in for ever. He supposed this was the high that drug addicts craved and thanked his lucky stars he didn’t need to inject anything to attain it.

He just needed Harriet. Oh, sure, he was no novice. He’d had his share of women with whom he’d experienced sexual pleasure before his marriage, but Harry…it had never been like this with anyone but her. They were so perfectly in tune, so intimately in sync, that sex with her was an addiction he doubted he’d ever manage to control.

They’d been apart for a year but when she’d rejoined his team two months ago it had been as if their separation had never happened. The way she talked and the way she laughed and the way she moved and her smell were as familiar to him as breathing. The way she kissed him, caressed him, touched him was still the biggest thrill he had ever known.

‘Gill!’ Her voice broke into the fog floating through his brain. He half opened his eyes and watched her pulling on her clothes, hiding her body from him.

‘Come back to bed,’ he murmured.

There were few things on this earth better than a naked Harriet. Her body was superb…perfect. She had the body and grace of a ballerina. Naturally slender. Toned arms, thighs and calves, flat stomach, long legs, a perky bottom and pert breasts. Her olive skin was blemish-free and the small mole on her left hip was as fascinating today as it had been seven years ago when she had broken all her rules and slept with him after knowing him for three hours.

Her gorgeous wavy hair flowed like a river of molasses down the elegant arc of her back almost to the curve of her buttocks. He had spent many an hour combing his fingers through its heaviness. It was long enough that if she brought it forward over her shoulders it covered both breasts, mermaid-like.

He had a sudden vision of himself as a lust-struck sailor scooping her up from a rocky outcrop, hypnotised by her beauty, and making love to her on a beach as the waves crashed around them. He felt himself twitch and knew that he wanted her again.

‘Gill,’ she said again, and the note of exasperation in her voice brought him fully out of his fantasy.

Harriet blasted a glare at him that would have vaporised most men, but still he could feel his erection build. If anything, her crankiness was turning him on. He watched her as she realised what was happening to his uncovered anatomy and the look of hunger on her face had him completely ready.

‘Come back to bed,’ he repeated in a low growl, and he watched the widening of her eyes as temptation flitted across her features and she absently dug her teeth into her bottom lip.

‘You know you want to, Harry.’

He knew instantly he had said the wrong thing as he saw the battle end and a look of grim determination set her lips into a thin line.

‘For God’s sake,’ she snapped, ‘get dressed and sign the papers.’

Harriet turned her back to him and Gill knew that he had lost her. He sighed and got up, pulling his boxers on.

‘You can turn around now,’ he said, amused by the rigidity of her back and the way she was impatiently drumming her fingers against her folded arms.

Gill scooped the envelope off the floor and sat on the edge of the bed as Harriet faced him, her arms still folded. They stared at each other for a few moments, not saying anything.

‘So this is why you came back to the team after staying away for so long? So you could hand deliver these?’

She felt two spots of colour rise in her face and stain her cheeks. He made it sound so calculating. She shook her head and swallowed the lump in her throat. She would not be shamed by him. ‘You’re surely not surprised by them?’

‘Well, actually, I am. I thought we were getting things back on track. For God’s sake, you’ve rarely been out of my bed.’

‘I came to try one last time, Gill. But we’ve resolved nothing.’

‘I love you, Harry. I don’t want a divorce. I didn’t want a separation. Look me in the eye and tell me you don’t love me.’

‘This isn’t about love, Gill, and you know it. We want different things.’

‘A baby.’ He sighed. They’d had this conversation about a thousand times in the year before Harriet had walked out.

‘Yes, Gill, a baby.’

Gill couldn’t think of anything worse if he tried. Except not being married to Harry. They had a great life. They were free to work where they wanted, live where they wanted, travel where they wanted. All with a backpack and a minute’s notice. They could make love all night and sleep in till lunchtime. Was there something so wrong with that?

He didn’t know a lot about babies but he did know that their lifestyle would have to change drastically. And they’d been having fun, hadn’t they? Travelling around the world with the charity organisation MedSurg Aid Abroad, living rough, working hard, changing lives, making a difference.

Seeing places and people and things, both good and bad, that few people ever got to experience in their lives. Touring the world while fulfilling their deep humanitarian beliefs. It was the ultimate lonely planet lifestyle and he didn’t want to give that up for nappies and 2 a.m. feeds.

But with the divorce papers in his hands, the reality of the situation was difficult to ignore. Did he really want to lose her over this? Maybe if he compromised?

‘Look, I’m not saying I don’t ever want a baby…maybe one day I’ll feel differently.’

‘I’m 35, Gill. I don’t have time to wait for you.’

Harriet could be very stubborn. She didn’t sugar-coat anything. If she felt it, she said it. ‘Are you sure? You’ve had a year, Harry. I don’t see you pregnant yet.’

He heard her swiftly indrawn breath and wished he could withdraw the words.

‘You think I could go off with someone else and have a baby while I’m still married to you? You don’t know me at all. Do you?’

So, he had made her angry—well, join the club. Her changing her mind about what she wanted from life had pissed him off, too. ‘Well, I thought I used to but, no, these days I don’t know you at all. What the hell happened to “No, Gill, I don’t want a baby, never, absolutely not, no way. Too many kids in this over-populated world anyway, Gill.” What happened to that? So don’t blame me if this sudden desire to have a baby makes me think that you’ll stoop to anything!’

‘You know damn well why the suddenness, Guillaume Remy!’ said Harriet, her voice a vicious whisper.

‘Because of Rose? Your little sister has a baby and suddenly your clock is ticking louder than a home-made bomb?’

‘Don’t be so bloody obtuse,’ she said through clenched teeth. ‘Yes, Rose started it—how could you not want a baby when you look into Tom’s beautiful chubby face? But if you can’t understand why discovering that I only have one ovary and Fallopian tube could knock me for six, maybe I don’t know you either. I’m sorry I changed the plot on you, but when a gynaecologist tells me I might have trouble conceiving, it comes as a bit of a shock. Surely you can see that?’

No, he couldn’t. He was a man. And not just that but a man who didn’t have a paternal bone in his body. Sure, babies were cute—Tom was very cute. But their appeal had more to do with being grateful he could hand them back than any pleasure he took from holding them.

He’d had a close call as a med student that had scared the hell out of him. There had been no feelings of joy or expectancy, just a horrible sinking feeling that his life was over. He’d carried that experience with him always and in his head babies always equalled the end of your life.

As a doctor he had a great deal of empathy for the plight of the world’s poor and starving children and those working like dogs from dusk to dawn and those torn apart by diseases, war and poverty. He admired their strength and resilience and he’d spent many years patching them up when they were hurt or wounded, caught up in adult wars, but he’d never had the desire to adopt any of them or, God forbid, have one of his own.

He had such a strong sense of social responsibility. There was so much he could offer this world. Having kids would just be a distraction from that purpose. His grandfather, who had fought with the French resistance before migrating to Australia after the war, had raised him to think of the plight of others and Gill had always felt immensely proud of the work he did.

But. He was holding his divorce papers in his hand. Before him stood the woman he loved. Who loved him. And she was asking him for something. Was prepared to never see him again, to cut all ties. Was he that strong? Did his career mean more to him than her? Did the world’s children mean more to him than the one she so desperately craved?