One Night With Dr Nikolaides. Annie O'Neil
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smothering hug before pulling out a huge plate of souvlaki for them to share. Or bougatsa. Or whatever it was she had magicked up in her tiny, tiny kitchen. Miracles, usually.
She ran her finger along the infant’s face. “Look at you, little mou. So perfect. You’ve got your entire life to look forward to. No Greek bad boys breaking your heart. That’s my lesson to you. No Greeks.”
“Are you trying to brainwash the babies again, Cailey?”
Cailey looked across, surprised she hadn’t even noticed that her colleague Emily had entered the nursery. The more time she spent with the babies, the more she was getting lost in cloud cuckoo land!
“Yes.” She grinned mischievously, then turned to the baby to advise her soberly, “No Greeks. And no doctors.”
“Hey!” Emily playfully elbowed her in the ribs. “I’ve just started dating a doctor, and I won’t mind admitting it’s a very welcome step up in the world.”
Wrong answer!
“And what, exactly, is wrong with being a nurse?”
“Not a thing, little Miss Paranoid.”
Emily’s arched eyebrows and narrowed eyes made her squirm.
“Looks like someone’s had her heart broken by a doctor. A Greek doctor, to be precise.”
“Pffft.”
Emily laughed. “All the proof I needed.”
She moved to one of the cots and picked up an infant who was fussing.
“C’mon. Out with it. Who was the big, bad Greek doctor who broke our lovely Cailey’s heart?”
“No one.”
Someone.
“Liar.” Emily laughed again.
She shrugged as casually as she could. Maybe she was a liar, but leaving her small town, small island, and archaically minded country behind for the bright lights of London had been for one purpose and one purpose only—to forget a very green-eyed, chestnut-haired Adonis who would, for the purposes of this particular conversation, remain anonymous.
Cailey lifted the freshly swaddled infant, all cozy in her striped pink blanket, and nuzzled up close to her. Mmm. New baby smell.
Life as a maternity nurse was amazing, but rather than mute her urges to hold a child of her own it had only set the sirens on full blast.
Twenty-seven wasn’t that old in the greater scheme of things. And Theo wasn’t the only man in the universe. Definitely not her man. So...
“Cailey?”
The charge nurse...what was her name again? Molly? Kate...? Heidi? There had been so many new names and faces to learn since she’d started at this premier maternity hospital she’d become a bit dizzy with trying to remember them all... She ran through the names in her mind again...
High on the hill was the highest nurse... Heidi!
She squinted at her boss’s name tag.
Heidi.
Ha! Excellent. The memory games she’d been playing were paying off. She knew she’d battle her dyslexia one way or another. She’d done enough to get this far in her medical career, though it would never take the sting out of the fact that she’d most likely never become the doctor she’d always dreamt of being.
“Sorry to interrupt, love, but I think you might want to see this.”
Cailey gave the infant—Beatrice Chrysanthemum, according to her name card—a final nuzzle before settling her back into the tiny bassinet and following Heidi along to the staffroom, where a television was playing on a stand in the corner of the room.
It was a news channel. The ticker tape at the bottom of the screen was rolling with numbers...casualties? Cailey’s eyes flicked back up to the main news story. There were familiar-looking buildings—but not as she was used to seeing them.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Emily walk in, reach for the remote and turn up the volume. At first the English words and the images of a Greece she didn’t quite recognize wouldn’t register. They were a series of disconnected phrases and pictures that weren’t falling into place.
“Isn’t that the island you’re from?” Emma prompted. “Mythelios?”
Cailey nodded in slow motion as everything began falling into place.
An earthquake. Fatalities. Ongoing rescue efforts.
Her heart stopped still. The pictures of devastation had switched to a live interview being conducted outside the clinic in the fading daylight.
Of course it was him. Who else could command the world’s attention?
There, front and center, more breathtakingly gorgeous than she’d allowed herself to remember, was Dr. Theo Nikolaides, appealing for any and all medical personnel who could help to come to Greece in its time of need.
She tried not to morph his entreaty for help into an arrogant call for “the little people” to come and do the dirty work while he took the glory. This was a crisis and all hands were helping hands—not rich or poor, just hands.
She stared at her own hands...her fingers so accustomed to work...
“Cailey?” Heidi touched her arm. “Are you all right?”
She turned her hands back and forth in the afternoon light as the news sank in. People were hurt. Her mother could be hurt. Her brothers...
A flame lit in her chest. One she knew wouldn’t abate until she was on a plane home.
No matter how much she hated Theo, hated the wounds his words had etched into her psyche, she would have to go home. Islanders helped one another—no matter what.
“I’m fine. But my island isn’t. I’m afraid I’m going to need some time off.”
IT WAS ALL Cailey could do not to jump off the ferry and swim to shore. Flights to the island had been canceled because of earthquake damage to the runway, but it hadn’t put her off coming. The same way a childhood crush gone epically wrong wouldn’t stop her from helping. Not when her fellow islanders needed her. And this time she would be able to do more than help with the clean-up.
Ducking out of the wind, she pulled her mobile out of her pocket and dialed the familiar number. She wanted to hit the ground running—literally—but if her mother found out she’d come back and hadn’t checked in first it would be delicious slices of guilt pie from here on out.
“Mama?”
Static crackled through the handset. She strained to listen through the roar of the ferry’s engine’s.
“...seen Theo?” her mother asked.
Theo?
Why was her mother asking about him? She’d come back to the island to help, not answer questions about her teenage crush. Surely ten years meant she’d moved on enough in her life for people to stop asking if her heart had mended yet?
“Mama. If you’re all right...” she parsed out the words slowly “...I’ll go straight to the clinic.”
“Go...clinic... Theo...love...brothers...getting by...”
Cailey held out the handset and stared at it. She’d spoken briefly to her mum before she’d boarded her flight last night, so she knew her brothers were unhurt and, of course, already out working. As was her mother who—surprise, surprise—had already gathered a brigade of women to feed the rescue crews and survivors