Enticed by Her Island Billionaire Read online

  He set the tank upright again and watched Gabby make a show of resting her bare pink toes on it to keep it in place. Ketut threw him a look from behind the wheel, and Sebastian took a seat as far away from her as he could.

  Was Dr Ricci running from the horrors of war and looking for peace, like he had been? But he’d been running from the media explosion after starring in the TV show and from the guilt that had racked him over what had happened to Klara. Hardly the same thing.

  Sebastian realised he was scowling at the horizon, thinking about Klara again.

  He couldn’t have known what would happen after filming started. No one could have anticipated so many photographs, so many camera lenses zooming in on his every move, in and out of surgery. All those headlines and sub-headlines...the crazy stories people had sold or made up about them just to get their clicks in.

  Letting cameras into his surgery had invited the whole damn media circus in—which had squeezed every last remaining shred of joy out of his relationship with Klara.

  All she had ever wanted to do was be with the kids at her kindergarten school and live a simple happy life with him. She had been so broken by the invasion of her privacy, and everything people had said about them both as a couple, that at the end she’d left without saying goodbye.

  He put a hand down to the ocean spray and let his thoughts about her go—like he did every time he went diving. Diving was a workout for his brain...a place to switch off from other thoughts. It was only when he was on the surface that the memories came back.

  He knew Klara wasn’t in Chicago any more. She’d already got married—someone she’d met in Nepal. He didn’t know where she was now, but he was happy for her. Sometimes.

  Right now he would much rather be living here, somewhere beautiful, fixing Trevor Nolans and kids with burns the size of basketballs on their cheeks, than go back to having camera flashes and the paparazzi’s car tyres screeching in his wake, and performing endless boob jobs in Chicago. Although he wished he could see his family more often—especially his brother Jared and Charlie... He smiled thinking of his nephew.

  The tourist boat slowed. A line of excited people craned their necks from the roof to the turquoise shallows. Everyone was in awe of the colour of the water here.

  A slender woman in a bright red sundress had her hand on her brown hair, trying her best to tame it, and a memory flickered across his mind.

  He lifted his sunglasses and squinted to see better.

  She was leaning on the railings now, elbows out. Her sundress was catching her ankles in the wind. He gripped the side of the boat even as Gabby tickled his calf with her toes. It looked exactly like her. Must be six or seven years ago now... A British woman dancing drunken pirouettes on the sand, back when he’d been here for the first time—long before he’d even had the idea to build the MAC.

  What was she doing back here?

  * * *

  Mila’s eyes followed the diver right until his boat rocked out of sight. His abs were like a digitally enhanced ad for a diving school. She’d seen men like that at military hospitals, trained for fighting but battered and blue. Never this colour. The diver’s skin was a warm shade of caramel—as if he’d earned that tan with a life outdoors over a long, long time.

  Her boat bobbed in the shallows as people leapt from the sides onto the sand. Mila followed, taking the ladder down. She hoisted her sundress further up her legs as an eager Indonesian boy no older than eight or nine helped her down into an inch of crystal-clear water.

  ‘Terima kasih!’ she told him. She’d already mastered a few basics.

  The warmth of the sand rose to meet her toes in her flip-flops and she breathed in the scent of the air. Flowers...maybe jasmine...or was that an incense stick? The local market on a dusty path ahead told her she wasn’t exactly in Robinson Crusoe territory.

  Mila stood still. When was the last time she’d stood in the ocean? Probably back in Cornwall, about twenty years ago. She’d been with her mum and Annabel, and they’d bought Cornish pasties and prodded jellyfish in the sand. That had been a good day.

  ‘Can I help you, miss? You need room?’

  The kid in front of her now looked about seventeen, and he seemed to want to deny her the pleasurable personal moment of feeling her feet in the ocean for the first time in twenty years. He waded over purposefully and helped drag her case away from the shore.

  She studied his tattooed wrists as he flashed a ring binder at her, showing coloured photographs of accommodation options. ‘Oh, no, thank you. I have a hotel for tonight.’

  ‘I have better one!’ He flicked to a page with a photo of a shack on it. It looked basic, to say the least.

  ‘Tomorrow I move to the MAC,’ she explained, wading onto the beach. Tiny bits of coral prodded at her heels and toes.

  Mila took her case back quickly. She had probably divulged too much information already. It was never good to trust strangers on a first encounter unless in a medical situation. Besides, she already knew Dr Sebastian Becker kept a low profile.

  He encouraged his staff to do the same.

  For protection, when it comes to our clients’ anonymity.

  He’d written that in a welcome email.

  ‘Taxi?’ she said in vain as a horse and cart trotted past her on the dusty street.

  ‘Watch out!’

  The teenager was back. He caught her elbow and yanked her to the side of the path just as another horse and cart rattled past at full speed. It almost struck her.

  ‘Thank you, I’m fine.’

  She picked up her fallen sunglasses. She wanted to tell him she could take care of herself but she refrained. He was only being chivalrous and she had been caught off-guard. She hadn’t slept in almost two days.

  Frazzled and sweating, she wheeled all her worldly belongings along the thick, dusty, potholed concrete that constituted a street.

  Street food vendors were mixing noodles and jabbing straws into coconuts. Girls were swigging beer, pedalling bicycles in bikinis. The salty air was already clinging to her forehead. No one else offered to help her but that was OK. She’d done this before, in worse places. She just hadn’t imagined the island would be this crowded...

  Through the jet lag she remembered that she’d come in on a tourist boat, to the tourist side of Gili Indah. The MAC was on the west side. That part of the island was exclusive territory—just for patients and staff. She couldn’t wait to dive into a swimming pool. She just had to wait until tomorrow...

  Mila was about to hail the approaching horse and cart when a noise from the shore made her stop in her tracks. A shriek. Someone thrashing in the waves.

  Squinting through the throng, her eyes fell on a girl a few metres behind the speedboat. She saw the yellow dive boat she’d seen before, from the water. Something must have happened.

  * * *

  ‘Snake!’ Gabby screamed. ‘It bit me! Ow, it hurts! Sebastian, help!’

  ‘OK...it’s OK. Let’s get you back to shore.’

  Sebastian looped an arm around her waist, turning his head in all directions, looking at the shallows. Where was the snake?

  One minute Gabby had been heading back from the boat right next to him, after their second dive, the next she’d been toppling over in her half-undone wetsuit.

  He made a grab for her mask and fins before they were swept out of reach, and threw them to another guy in their group.

  ‘There it is!’ Gabby sounded horrified.

  He followed her pointing finger to the thin, yellow and black stripy body of a sea snake. It wriggled past him, heading for the deep beyond the reef.

  Sebastian tried to wade faster. Gabby’s face had turned pale. She wasn’t making this up.

  ‘Where did it bite you?’ He kept his voice controlled, not wanting to panic her. Her head was heavier every time it landed on his shoulder.

&nb
sp; ‘On my foot...my foot!’ She was sobbing now, barely able to breathe.

  ‘Ketut!’ he yelled.

  Gabby’s legs seemed to crumple underneath her on the sand. He caught her before she could fall and lowered her gently to her back on the sand. She was whimpering now, trying to clutch at his arm. Her face was almost white.

  A frenzy of people crowded around. Some were even snapping the scene with their cameras.

  ‘Get back,’ he ordered gruffly, as the familiar surge of contempt for this kind of privacy invasion consumed him. ‘Ketut!’ he called again.

  But someone else was already sprinting over.

  ‘I’m a doctor—how can I help?’

  The lady in red from the boat. The British tourist. It was definitely her...the woman from a few years ago. Speechless, he watched as she dropped to her knees.

  ‘Snake bite,’ she noted out loud, before he could explain. She put a hand to Gabby’s ankle.

  ‘Yeow!’ Gabby clamped her hand around his wrist in a death grip.

  Easing her fingers away, he helped his new partner adjust the bitten leg and support it on an upturned rock.

  ‘We need pressure immobilisation,’ she told him—as if he didn’t know.

  She started pulling things from her bag. Her sunglasses were pushed high on her head, sweeping back the kind of thick honey-brown hair he’d bet smelled good wet, right after she showered...

  He caught himself, racking his brain for her name.

  They hadn’t done more than flirt a little back then. If his memory served him right there had been no chemistry between them whatsoever. She’d been a drinker, he hadn’t, and she’d been intent on partying every night until she dropped.

  But he never forgot a face. Had she really forgotten his?

  ‘Do you know what to do?’ she asked him.

  Her wide-set eyes were a vivid blue in the sun, over high, freckled cheekbones.

  ‘There’s anti-venom at the clinic,’ he said.

  ‘At the Medical Arts Centre?’

  He lost his voice for a second. Up close, he smelled the coconut waft of her sunscreen.

  ‘No, the other one—the Blue Ray Medical Clinic on the strip.’

  Didn’t she recognise him at all? Was it even her? But, yes, it had to be. Her eyes, her face...they were all so familiar. He just couldn’t remember her name.

  ‘What will you do to me?’ Gabby cried out.

  ‘You need to keep as still as you can,’ he said. ‘Stop the venom circulating.’

  The Brit...what was her name?...raised an eyebrow. Her blue eyes gave his body a swift appraisal in his wetsuit.

  ‘You’re a doctor?’

  ‘You could say that.’ He watched her pull an elastic bandage from her bag. ‘The clinic’s next to the Villa Sunset Hotel. It wasn’t here before.’

  ‘Before...?’

  Her hands worked quickly, wrapping the elastic bandage around Gabby’s leg with deft efficiency, starting from her toes, moving swiftly up to her thigh.

  He sprinted to the restaurant right by the harbour. Their fence was made up of pieces of piled-up driftwood—just the right size for a splint.

  ‘Use this,’ he said, dropping back down next to her.

  ‘Perfect—thanks.’

  She was impressively fast. She looked like the girl he’d met before, but she sure as hell wasn’t acting like her. Her red dress was catching dirt but she didn’t look as if she cared or even noticed as they loaded a sobbing Gabby into the back of a cart. His eyes lingered on the curve of her shoulder as one strap fell down to her arm. She caught his eye and yanked the strap up.

  ‘Come with me, please,’ Gabby begged him.

  The Brit answered instead. ‘I’ll go with you. We need to take the pressure off your leg as much as possible in this cart, though. Can you work with me on that?’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘I’ll help you.’

  She was good with her patient. Sebastian helped her arrange the leg, waiting for any hint that she might remember him.

  ‘The driver knows where to go,’ he told her. ‘I’ll follow on my bike. Tell them I sent you.’

  ‘And your name is...?’

  ‘Sebastian Becker?’ He said it like a question as he slid the lock shut at the back of the cart.

  Her blue eyes grew wide in shock. ‘Dr... Becker?’

  Finally. He opened his mouth to say something about the coincidence of another encounter all these years later. But he couldn’t exactly admit to her that he’d forgotten her name.

  It was only after she’d disappeared in a cloud of dust that he finally remembered it.

  Annabel.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘SHE NEEDS ANTI-VENOM,’ Mila called out, hurrying through the doors of the Blue Ray Clinic.

  She flashed her security card at a man in the small, busy lobby. The bearded Indonesian man in his mid to late fifties sprang into action. The name badge on his white coat read Agung.

  In a white room off the hallway, the tiled floor squeaked under her flip-flops. ‘Sea snake,’ she told Agung. He was already observing the bandage. ‘She needs anti-venom. Dr Becker will be here any second. I’m Dr Mila Ricci—I’m new at the MAC. I just met him at the harbour.’

  That scuba diving poster model in a wetsuit—that doctor—was the surgeon she’d soon be working with.

  She was still in shock.

  She closed the door behind them, noting the fresh paint on the cream walls and the Indonesian art hanging by the window. A palm leaf tapped at the glass from outside.

  They helped the still dripping girl to a bed and onto fading sheets. Her breathing was laboured—probably due to her writhing around, not to the venom spreading too much. But then, she hadn’t stayed very still in the jostling cart, even with Mila’s assistance.

  A rush of air-conditioning blasted her face as the door swung open to admit Dr Becker. ‘Agung, how’s she doing?’

  He was pulling on a white coat, arm by long, bulked-up arm, and striding towards the bed in black sports sandals. He was every bit as striking in the white coat as he was in a wetsuit.

  He made to pass her, then stopped, placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘Thank you for what you just did.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  The words came out smoothly, calmly, as she’d intended, but she didn’t feel calm. The look he was giving her now had suspicion all over it.

  ‘Put this on,’ he told her, throwing her a white coat from a hook on the wall. ‘Nurse Viv is with another patient, so I hope you won’t mind staying a bit longer. I need you to cut the suit,’ he said, motioning to the pair of scissors on the tray.

  Mila snipped carefully at the girl’s wetsuit and discarded the flimsy material. She was following commands when she’d usually be giving them, but that was OK. She wasn’t a hundred miles away from base in Ghazni. No one had been blasted by shrapnel from a rocket-propelled grenade, There were no wounded soldiers crying out for attention. There was only this one girl...right here, right now.

  She put a gentle hand to Gabby’s leg and soothed her as Dr Becker administered the anti-venom and the meds kicked in.

  Agung’s pager made a sound. ‘Excuse me, Dr Becker... Dr Mila,’ he said.

  He left the room and instantly the air grew thicker. Sebastian was appraising her again.

  ‘Mila?’ he said in a surprised voice, as soon as it was only the two of them. He stepped towards her.

  ‘She looks much better,’ she told him, looking up to see his eyes narrow. ‘I think we got to the bite just in time. She just needs to rest now.’

  He folded his arms, towering over her. He must be at least six foot two inches to her five foot three.

  ‘Why Mila? I thought your name was Annabel?’

  All the breath left her body.

 
‘I couldn’t remember at first...back there. It was at least six or seven years ago, right? Before this clinic or the MAC existed,’ he said. ‘You were late to our snorkelling party—you’d had too much to drink, remember?’

  He grinned, laughing at a memory that wasn’t hers.

  Tears stung her eyes. She could have wrestled him to the ground when he reached for her wrists, but his long, tanned fingers ran gently over her scars and she felt bolted to the floor.

  He was turning her arms in the harsh overhead light, studying the faint silvery lines as if they were clues to a mystery game. ‘You didn’t have these before,’ he said, frowning. ‘What happened to you?’

  She bit her cheeks as the tears threatened to spill over. He’d met Annabel. This must be the guy her sister had come back talking about all those years ago. Bas. Sebastian. It made sense now. Dr Sebastian Becker was Bas. And she had to work with him?

  She had to set him straight. This was unbearable.

  ‘I’m not...not who you think I am,’ she managed. The room felt suddenly way too small. She took a step back, pulling her arms away. ‘Dr Becker, I’m Dr Mila Ricci. I’ve come to work at the MAC for a while and learn your techniques. I would have met you earlier, but I missed my transfer. I apologise for the confusion.’

  She watched him rake a hand through his hair as she struggled for composure.

  He paced the room, then stopped. ‘Am I going crazy here? I did meet you before, didn’t I? Did you change your name?’

  ‘I’m not Annabel,’ she said through a tight throat. ‘Annabel was my twin sister. She’s dead, Dr Becker. She died three years ago. It was her you met—not me.’

  * * *

  The cat padded her way across the bar towards them, its black shiny fur glowing pink under the LED lights. Sebastian ran a hand along her soft back. ‘I’m so sorry about the mix-up this morning,’ he said to the woman in front of him, his newest albeit temporary employee.

  He’d been thinking about her all day. He’d sent Mila to her hotel to get some sleep and had somehow kept things on schedule back at the MAC, even though his mind had been whirring. He’d even checked in quickly on Gabby, back at the Blue Ray, who was fine. She’d found the strength to ask for his number, but he had no intention of entertaining her now. He just wanted to clear things up with Mila.