Italian Surgeon to the Stars

CHAPTER TWO

I COULD SMELL the lemon and spice of his aftershave as I led the way to the dormitories on the second floor. It was a subtle scent, redolent of warm summer afternoons in a lemon grove. I thought of that brief time in Paris—the way we’d met by accident when I’d run into him as I was coming out of a shop late on a Saturday afternoon. He steadied me with his hands and I looked up into his face and my heart all but stopped.

I’m the last person who would ever believe in love at first sight, but something happened at that moment I still can’t explain. I felt something shift inside me as his dark brown eyes met mine. He spoke to me in fluent French, so that might have explained it. It made me fall all the faster. And then he was so gallant, bending down to help me pick up the tote bag that had slipped off my shoulder, spilling its contents all over the cobblestones.

When he handed me my wand of lip gloss our fingers touched. I felt a fizzing sensation that travelled all the way up my arm and somehow ended in a molten pool between my legs.

He led me to a quiet table in the shade of a leafy tree outside a café on the Rue de Seine and ordered sparkling mineral water for me and an espresso for himself. We talked for two hours but it felt like two minutes.

He told me how he had grown up in Sicily but had studied and trained in London, and was spending that year working at Paris’s top cardiac centre to complete his PhD before heading back to London. Most surgeons found the specialty hard enough, but he’d taken on even more study.

He fascinated me. I was spellbound by his warm, intelligent brown eyes and his long-fingered hands that had so briefly touched mine. I thought of those hands, how they performed intricate surgery and saved countless lives. I sat there aching for him to touch me again. I must have communicated it silently, for he suddenly reached across the table and took my hand in his, stroking his thumb over the back of it as his eyes meshed with mine.

He didn’t have to say a word. I could see it in his gaze. I knew it was the same in mine. There was a connection between us that transcended the primal attraction of two healthy consenting adults. I had never felt a surge of lust so overpowering, and yet I could feel something else as well, which was less easily defined.

Looking back, I suspect I recognised some quality in him that spoke to the lonely outsider in me, which I prided myself on keeping well hidden. My mother would say it was fate, or kismet, or the planets aligning or something. My father would say it had something to do with our chakras being balanced. Whatever it was, the world seemed to carry on without us as we sat there gazing into each other’s eyes.

I gave myself a mental slap and pushed open the first dormitory door. ‘We sleep the Key Stage One and Two girls two to a room to encourage close friendship,’ I said. ‘The older girls can request single rooms, but we encourage sharing to maintain a sense of family.’

Alessandro gave the dormitory a cursory look before meeting my gaze. I wondered if he could see any trace of the nostalgia that had momentarily sideswiped me. His eyes moved back and forth between each of mine as if searching for something.

‘Are you happy, ma petite?’

I felt my knees weaken at the French endearment. I covered it quickly by pasting a poised and professional look on my face. I could not allow myself to be lured back into his sensual orbit. His voice, no matter what language he spoke—French, Italian, English or a combination of all three—made a frisson of delight shimmy down my spine.

I wondered if my voice had the same effect on him. Not flipping likely. I might have smoothed over my Yorkshire vowels after years of living in London, but even so there was no way anyone would want to listen to me reading the phone directory.

‘What’s wrong with Claudia’s mother?’ I asked, to steer the conversation away from my emotional health.

An impenetrable sheen came over his eyes and he turned away to look at the dormitory, with its two neatly made beds and the waist-high bookshelf that doubled as a bedside table between. There were two teddy bears in pink and purple tutus sitting side by side on the top. It might have been any bedroom in the suburbs except for the sound of schoolchildren playing in the playground outside.

‘She’s receiving treatment for a protracted illness,’ he said after a long moment.

Something in my stomach slipped. ‘Terminal?’

‘I hope not.’

I bit my lip as I thought of six-year-old Claudia losing her mother. My mother—both my parents, actually—drove me nuts, but I couldn’t imagine not having her around any more.

What would it do to a little girl so young to have no one but her uncle to watch out for her? Who would help her with the issues of growing up? Who would tell her about the birds and the bees, not to mention the blowflies who could destroy her innocence in …? Well, I’m not going to go there. Who would she turn to when the world seemed to be against her? Or when she got her heart broken for the first time? Who would hold her and tell her they loved her more than life itself?

‘What about Claudia’s father?’ I asked.

Alessandro’s top lip developed an unmistakable curl of disdain. ‘He’s not in the picture. Never has been. Claudia has never met him.’

‘What about grandparents?’

The line of his mouth tightened until it was almost flat. ‘There are none on either side.’

None? Or none he wanted to acknowledge? I wondered. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you had a sister five years ago?’ I said.

He drew in a deep breath and slowly released it. I watched as his broad shoulders went down on the long exhale and what looked like a tiny flicker of pain passed over his features.

‘We weren’t in contact at that point.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s complicated.’

‘It sounds it.’

He gave me a level look. ‘It’s important to me that Claudia settles in as quickly and seamlessly as possible.’

‘What have you told her about her mother’s illness?’

He held my gaze for a moment before he looked away again. He let out another long breath. ‘Not much. I didn’t want her overburdened with worry about things she can’t change. She’s a sensitive child.’

‘Then she’ll join the dots for herself but probably come up with the wrong picture,’ I said. ‘You should be honest with her. Kids are much more resilient than you realise.’

His eyes collided again with mine, one of his brows going up in an arc. ‘Are they?’

It was a pointed question that hung suspended in the air.

I found myself going back in time to my own childhood, thinking of all the times when a bit of resilience would have come in handy. My parents’ hippie lifestyle was fine for them, but it hadn’t been fine for me or for my younger sister Bertie. So many times I’d had to take on a parenting role for Bertie’s sake because our parents were missing in action, so to speak.

It’s not that they weren’t loving parents—if anything they were too indulgent. We didn’t have any proper boundaries—not just to keep us in line, but also to give others a clear message that someone was watching out for us. Mum and Dad were dreamers—drifters who never stayed in one place long enough to put down roots—which meant Bertie and I had little stability during our childhood. We would no sooner make friends at one place before we’d be shuffled on to another location where some visionary guru was setting up a new lifestyle commune our parents were keen to join.

I was always watching out for Bertie, who got bullied a lot. I did too, until I learned to stand up for myself. I had to pretend to be tougher than I really was in order to survive. It’s a good skill to have, but it has its downside. After all those years of playing tough it’s hard to find my soft centre. It’s been bricked in, like a vault cemented into a wall. I don’t know if you can call that resilience or not.

I stopped thinking about my childhood and started speculating on Alessandro’s. Was that why he had posed the question? Was there something about his childhood that made him sceptical of a child’s ability to cope with what life dished up? I had always seen him as a strong, invincible sort of person. He had brushed off his ‘orphan’ status with a casual it-happened-a-long-time-ago-and-I’m-over-it shrug. But what had made him pretend to be alone in the world?

I didn’t think it had been to garner sympathy. He was too self-reliant to want or need anyone else’s comfort. That was what I’d found so attractive about him. He didn’t care what people thought of him other than in a professional sense. He’d told me he wasn’t out to win a popularity contest but to save lives. He got on with his life as if other people’s opinions were irrelevant.

I secretly envied him as I’d spent so much of my life trying to fit in. I’d learned to morph into whatever I needed to be in order to belong. My chameleon-like behaviour had turned me into someone I didn’t always like, but I wasn’t sure how to go back to being the warm and friendly and open girl I had once been. To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t sure if I even wanted to be that girl any more. That girl had got herself into trouble, and the last thing I wanted to attract was trouble.

Alessandro might have been in any sort of career and I would still have been attracted to him. I had been totally swept away by him—charmed and captivated by his take-charge, can-do attitude, which was so at odds with the way I had been raised. He was goal-orientated and disciplined. He didn’t dream or drift aimlessly, or wait for someone else to tell him what he should do. He made plans and set about fulfilling them. He hadn’t let his background or lack of family money stop him from becoming one of London’s top heart specialists. He had laid down a career path as a young boy and got on with making it happen.

His intelligence was the biggest turn-on for me. I don’t mean his doctor status, because that sort of thing doesn’t impress me. I loved it that he was well read and well informed on topics I had barely even thought of before. But it was the physical intensity between us that took me completely by surprise. I had never considered myself a sensual person. The event I refuse to talk about put paid to that when I was thirteen. I wasn’t the touchy-feely sort. I didn’t hug or kiss. I didn’t seek affection and I didn’t give it—unless there was no avoiding it, like at Christmas and on birthdays.

But with Alessandro I embraced my sexuality. I celebrated my womanhood with every cell of my body. I bloomed and burned and blazed under his touch. I discovered things about my body I had no idea it was capable of—wickedly delightful things that left my skin tingling for hours afterwards. I loved exploring the hard contours of Alessandro’s body. I just about crawled into his skin once I lost my first flutter of fear.

I had never seen a man more beautifully made. Although I’m not a doctor like my sister Bertie, who sees naked men all the time, I’ve seen a few. My parents went through a naturalist stage when I was in my early teens, so the male form is no stranger to me. Talk about embarrassing … Most of those men had the sort of bodies one would think they would be desperate to cover up with clothes—layers and layers of them. But, no, it was all out on show. However, none of the men I had seen in their birthday suits had looked anywhere as perfect as Alessandro. He wasn’t gym-obsessed perfect, but rather healthy and virile and in-his-prime perfect.

I had to give myself another mental slap to keep my mind on the conversation. Images of his naked body were flooding my brain to such a degree I could feel warmth blooming in my cheeks. I rarely blush. I lost my innocence a long time ago. But something about Alessandro’s penetrating gaze made me feel as if he could see exactly where my mind was taking me.

I realised then with a little jolt that the intimacy we’d shared would always be between us. We had ‘A History’. It wasn’t as if I could wipe it away, like I do the day’s lesson from the whiteboard in the classroom. There was a permanent record of it in my flesh.

I was tattooed with his touch, indelibly marked, so that when any other man touched me I automatically compared it to Alessandro’s and found it sadly lacking. It’s basically why I haven’t bothered dating. I don’t see the point. Quite frankly, I could do without being reminded I’m basically dead from the waist down with anyone else.

‘I’ll … erm … show you the bathrooms,’ I said, and made to turn away.

But his hand stalled me again. I had folded my arms across my body, which meant his hand was tantalisingly close to my breasts. I felt the stirring tingle of my flesh, as if my breasts had picked up his proximity like some sort of finely tuned radar.

My breath stalled somewhere in the middle of my throat. I brought my gaze up to his. His eyes were so dark it was impossible to make out his pupils. A girl could get lost in those eyes. Disappear and never be found again.

My gaze went to his mouth as if of its own volition. My stomach did a rollercoaster loop and drop as I recalled how his lips had felt against mine. The taste of him, the feel of him, the sensual power of him had made everything so tight and bound up inside me unwind. His lips were evenly shaped—neither too thick or too thin. He had shaved that morning, but even so I could see the urgent pinpricks of stubble surrounding his mouth and on his lean jaw.