A Miracle for the Baby Doctor

PROLOGUE

FRANCESCA LOUISE HAWTHORNE put down the phone with a sigh.

A deep sigh!

Why had she stayed in Sydney?

Why hadn’t she fled to the far ends of the earth after the divorce?

Sheer stubborn pride, probably!

She shrugged her shoulders and sighed again.

‘Trouble?’

She turned at the sound of her boss’s voice and smiled at the man who was part of the reason she hadn’t fled. Dr Andrew Flint was one of the foremost IVF specialists in Australia—the best in Sydney as far as Fran was concerned—and his, admittedly early, work into IVM could revolutionise the way couples who had difficulty conceiving could have babies.

Could bring hope...

And she knew a lot about hope...

Andy had been the first specialist in Australia to work on in vitro maturation, where immature eggs were taken from women and grown to maturity in an incubator, and this work had excited Fran so much she hadn’t considered leaving.

‘Andy?’ she said, when he’d been standing just inside the door of her office for a few moments.

This prompt was obviously not enough so she added, ‘You wanted something?’

He smiled and shook his head.

‘I did, but now I’m realising just how much I’ll miss you if you say yes to what I’ve come to ask.’

Fran shook her head. Used as she was to deciphering her rather absent-minded boss’s pronouncements, this one had her stumped.

‘Which was?’ she tried.

He was still smiling as he came closer to her.

‘I’ve been asked to lend you to someone. Have you ever run across Steve Ransome? He runs an IVF clinic in the Alexandria area. He offers couples on limited incomes from some of the inner-city areas a reduced rate but his clinic has a high success rate so he has plenty of regular fee-paying clients.’

Fran shook her head.

‘Doesn’t ring a bell,’ she said, refusing to think about high success rates and concentrating instead on where on earth this conversation might be going.

And why had he mentioned missing her?

At least trying to make sense out of Andy’s rambling was distracting her from the mother’s phone call—from the image of a smugly pregnant Clarissa that had lodged in her head...

‘Well, no matter, he’s a good bloke, and he’s asked me to lend you to him.’

‘Lend me to him?’

This was bizarre, even for Andy!

‘For his clinic in Vanuatu.’

Andy made this pronouncement as if it cleared up the whole conversation, and beamed at her as if he’d managed something wonderful.

Fran rose to her feet and walked around her desk, pulling up a chair and turning to her boss.

‘Please sit, Andy, then tell me this story from the beginning. I gather this doctor contacted you. Let’s start there.’

Looking mildly put out, Andy sat.

‘But I told you,’ he protested. ‘Vanuatu! Only for a few weeks—four, I think Steve said. I thought it would be great for you—tropical island, balmy breezes, getting out of Sydney when the weather’s so lousy. It’s work, of course, and he particularly asked if I had someone on staff who’d done some IVM work. I thought of you straight off. You’ve been looking a little peaky lately. The change will do you good. Hard to manage here without you, of course, but you’ve got all the staff trained so well, I’m sure they’ll cope.’

Sufficiently intrigued to swallow yet another sigh, Fran pieced the random bits of information together.

‘This man has a clinic in Vanuatu?’

Andy smiled again, practically applauding her grip on the situation.

‘It’s a giving-back thing, you see, or maybe paying forward—that’s what he might have said,’ he said, and although Fran didn’t see or follow the paying forward part, she pressed on.

‘And he needs an embryologist for four weeks?’

‘I think it was four, or maybe six,’ Andy said, his forehead crumpling as he tried to remember. Then he obviously gave up on that bit of irrelevant information and added, ‘I said I was pretty sure you’d go. Friend in need—doing good work—that kind of thing. Right up your alley, I thought, and a lovely holiday thrown in.’

Realising she wasn’t going to get much more from her boss, Fran changed tack.

‘Perhaps I should speak to him, find out exactly what the job entails.’

Andy shook his head.

‘Afraid not,’ he said. ‘He left yesterday. Asked me last week but I forgot and he phoned from the airport. Gave me the name of his practice manager and said she’d sort you out with flights and stuff. I’ve got the number here.’

Andy fished in his pocket, producing several screwed-up scraps of paper, uncrumpling them and glancing at each for a moment before stuffing them back into their hiding place.

‘Ah, here we go! Name’s Helen and the phone number’s there.’

He handed the scrap of paper to Fran, who surveyed it dubiously. It certainly said Helen and there was a phone number but...

‘I think he wants you soon—like yesterday,’ Andy added, standing up and heading for the door. ‘You’ll still get your pay from here, of course, and he said something about having accommodation for you. Do keep in touch.’

On which note he disappeared out the door.

Having worked with Andy since graduating ten years earlier, Fran knew that was all she’d get out of him. In fact, if she asked him anything about it later in the day, he would probably stare blankly at her, the entire conversation lost in whatever was currently holding his attention.

So Fran leaned back in her chair and wondered about serendipity.

Ten minutes earlier she’d been pondering her stupidity in letting pride keep her in Sydney after her divorce from Nigel and his subsequent marriage to Clarissa.

Well, pride, and her attachment to Andy and his work!

Now here was an invitation to escape—if only for four weeks—plumped right into her lap in the most unlikely manner.

Piecing together what little she’d gleaned from Andy, she assumed this man he’d spoken of—Steve Ransome—was running some kind of IVF programme on the island of Vanuatu and needed a embryologist—in particular one with experience in the very new field of IVM.

She knew of Vanuatu, of course. An island nation in the South Pacific, originally under French rule, if she remembered rightly.

Sun, sand, crystal-clear water, palm-tree fronds waving languidly over brilliantly coloured flowers...

She looked at the rain lashing against her window and shivered because September, which should be bringing a little warmth, and a promise of spring, had so far provided nothing but rain and more rain, with temperatures more like winter.

And Clarissa was pregnant...

Her ex-husband’s wife, Clarissa.

Her ex-husband, who’d hated every visit to the IVF clinic when Fran had been trying to get pregnant, who’d found the whole idea of IVF somehow humiliating—a slight on his manhood—and who now had a naturally pregnant wife...

And as Fran’s mother’s best friend, Joan, was Nigel’s mother, there’d no doubt be regular progress reports on the pregnancy of the wonderfully fertile Clarissa.

Doubt stabbed at her, making Fran wonder if the whole thing subtly underlined her mother’s disappointment in Fran’s failure to produce a child. Fran shook her head again.

No, her mother had been upset over the divorce, but more because of the two families’ friendship.

But the friendship had survived between her mother and Joan and although her mother was nearly always travelling these days, they were obviously still in close contact. Blame mobile phones and the internet!

Which meant Fran would doubtless get updates on the pregnancy at regular intervals, each one probing all the still sore spots in Fran’s heart and mind.

Getting away, if only for a month, was exactly what she needed.

Although...

She looked around the lab, seeing her workmates busy at their jobs.

After all the treatment she’d had, plus three unsuccessful IVF cycles, people had been surprised that she’d come back to work.

To work that was such an integral part of IVF programmes.

But here, in the big lab that dealt with so many specimens and eggs and tiny embryos to care for, she didn’t ever know which couple had success, and who had failed. She was shut off from their success or their pain.

And her own remembered pain...

Fran smoothed out the piece of paper, checked the number and phoned a stranger called Helen.

CHAPTER ONE

STEVE PARKED THE battered four-wheel drive in the short-stay area of the car park and hurried towards the arrivals hall.

When he realised he hadn’t a clue what the woman he was to meet looked like, he hurried back to the car, tore the top off a carton and hurriedly scrawled ‘Dr Hawthorne’ on it.

Okay, so the name on a card made him look like a limo driver, except that in flip-flops, shorts and a vivid print shirt he didn’t even come close to their tailored elegance.

And the limo drivers, he noticed, now he was back in the crowd outside the customs area, were holding professionally printed signs.

He should have done better. After all, this woman was doing him a huge favour, coming out here on a moment’s notice to cover for his usual embryologist.

He could at least have worn a quieter shirt.

It was the pelican’s fault!

He’d been heading for the shower when two young boys had appeared with an injured pelican—hauling it behind them in a homemade go-cart. The bird had appeared to have an injured wing but its docility had made Steve suspect it had other injuries as well.

He’d explained to the boys that they needed a vet, then realised they could hardly drag it all the way to the north of the island where the vet had his practice. Packing all three of them—and the cart—into his car and driving them out there had seemed the only solution, which had left him too late to shower and change.

So now he was late, and probably smelling of fish.

It couldn’t be helped. He was sure the woman would understand...

Passengers began to emerge, and he studied each one. The holidaymakers were obvious, already in party mode, smiling and laughing as they came through the doors, looking around eagerly for their first glimpse of the tropical paradise. Returning locals he could also pick out quite easily. Men in business suits or harassed mothers herding troops of children.

Then came a tall woman, light brown hair slicked back into some kind of neat arrangement at the back of her head, loose slacks and a blue shirt, a hard-case silver suitcase wheeling along behind her.

Elegant. Sophisticated.

Not Dr Hawthorne, he decided, as the embryologists he knew were more the absent-minded professor type, usually clad in distressed jeans and band name T-shirts beneath their lab coats.

The elegant woman paused, scanning the names held up in the crowd, passed by his and started towards someone else.

It was stupid to feel disappointed, there were plenty more passengers to come. Apart from which, she’d be a work colleague—work being the operative word.

‘Dr Ransome?’

He turned, and there was the woman, strange green eyes studying him quite intensely.

Green?

He checked—maybe blue, not green, or blue-green, hard to tell.

‘You are Dr Ransome?’ she said with an edge of impatience. ‘Helen told me you would meet me.’

‘Sorry, yes,’ Steve said, and held out his hand, realising too late that it was still holding his makeshift sign.

‘Oops,’ he said, tucking the sign under his arm.

He reached out to take the handle of her suitcase.

‘The car’s out this way,’ he said, heading for the door. ‘It was so good of you to come—so good of Andy to spare you. My usual embryologist had a skiing accident in New Zealand last month and is still in traction.’

Was he talking too much?

He usually did when he was rattled, and the cool, sophisticated woman walking beside him had rattled every bone in his body.

But why, for heaven’s sake? It wasn’t that there weren’t—or hadn’t been—other such women in his life.

He slid a sidelong glance towards her.

Composed, that’s what she was, which put him at a disadvantage as, right now, he was...well, badly dressed and almost certainly in need of a shower. The boys had been trying to feed the bird small fish.

‘Sorry about the rough sign, not to mention the clothes. There was this pelican, you see...’

She obviously didn’t see, probably wasn’t even listening.

He changed tack.

‘Do you know Vanuatu? It’s a great place—not only the islands themselves but the people. Originally settled by the French, so many people still speak that language, although they speak English as well—tourism has made sure of that.’

He reached the battered vehicle and immediately wished it was more impressive—a limo perhaps.

Because she looked like a woman who’d drive in limos rather than battered four-wheel drives?

But some demon of uncertainty had set up home in his mind, and he heard himself apologising.

‘Sorry it’s not a limo, but the budget is always tight and I’d rather spend money on the clinic.’

‘Sounds reasonable to me,’ she said coolly.

He lifted the silver case into the rear, and came around to open the door for her, but she was already climbing in. Elegantly.

He held the door while she settled herself, then held out his hand.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t even know what to call you. It’s been a strange morning.’

She offered a cool smile but did take his hand in a firm clasp.

‘Francesca,’ she said. ‘But just call me Fran.’

He forcibly withdrew his hand, which had wanted to linger in hers, and closed the door.

But not before noticing that her hair was coming just slightly loose from its restraints, a golden-brown strand curling around to touch her chin.

The sun would streak it paler still. And suddenly he pictured this woman on one of the island’s deserted beaches, a sarong wrapped around her bikini, sun streaks in the hair blowing back from her face as she walked beside him.

His body stirred and he shook his head at the fantasy. For a start she was a colleague, and just looking at her he could see she was hardly the ‘strolling on the beach in a sarong’ type, not that that stopped the stirring.

‘Have you been to the islands before?’ he asked, as he settled behind the wheel, coaxed a muted grumble from the engine, and drove towards the exit gates.

‘No, although I know many Australians holiday here.’

‘I hope you’ll like it. The climate’s great, although it can get a trifle hot at times, and the people are wonderful.’

She turned towards him, the blue-green eyes taking in his bright shirt and, no doubt, the stubble on his unshaven chin.

The pelican again...

‘Did you