The Surgeon’s Family Miracle Read online

  The Surgeon’s Family Miracle

  Marion Lennox

  Surgeon Ben Blaydon is called to the exotic island of Kapua to provide medical assistance. He is stunned to find the island's doctor is Lily Cyprano, the girl he loved at medical school, and that she has a seven-year-old son-his son, Benjy!

  Ben has traveled the world, always avoiding emotional ties. Now he finds himself with a ready-made family. Having rescued Lily and their son from a crisis in Kapua, Ben sends them to recover at his ranch in Australia. But will the lure of his rekindled feelings for Lily and the charm of his newfound son give him the courage to join them and claim the loving family he needs?

  Marion Lennox

  The Surgeon’s Family Miracle

  © 2006

  Dear Reader,

  I love setting my books in the farming community where I was raised, but sometimes I worry I’m in a rut. So this time I decided to write outside the square.

  The Surgeon’s Family Miracle was, therefore, supposed to be a dramatic romance set against the exotic loveliness of a Pacific island, with nary a cow in sight. And so it is-for half the book. But halfway through I got homesick, so doctors Ben and Lily ended up-you guessed it-flying back to Ben’s farm in Australia to conclude their very satisfactory romance. In the long run, they do end up on their gorgeous Pacific island, but their farming community comes with them.

  I have a fabulous time writing books of the heart, and I’m also delighted (and relieved) that you seem to love my country settings.

  My family rolls its eyes when I tell them farming’s romantic-but romance is where you find it. No?

  Just look under the next cow pat.

  Happy reading.

  Marion

  PROLOGUE

  LILY stared at the thin blue line in consternation. Her plane ticket was right beside her on the bed. In three hours she’d be flying back to Kapua, her Pacific island home, and from now on she and Ben would be nothing but friends.

  She was pregnant.

  She gazed at herself in the mirror, horror building. They’d been so careful for the past four years, but last week she’d had a tummy bug, and this week, knowing she might never see him again… Well, the only sure contraceptive was abstinence and how could she bear to be apart if this final week was all she had?

  She was having Ben’s baby.

  She needed to tell him.

  The thought made her blench. He’d hate it. She knew how much he’d hate it. Ben who held himself aloof, who backed away at the first sign of need-how could he be a father? Maybe the biggest reason he’d let himself be drawn into their relationship had been that at the end of four years he’d known she had to go home.

  She loved him with all her heart.

  She closed her eyes, overwhelmed with panic. How could she leave him, knowing she was carrying his child? How could she leave him at all?

  He wouldn’t let her leave if he knew she was pregnant. She knew that about him. He might hold himself apart; he might admit he needed no one; but her lovely Ben was an honourable man. He’d suffered a desperately lonely childhood himself, and to have a child grow up without a father… He wouldn’t do it.

  But neither could he love a child, she thought bleakly. He didn’t know what loving was. They’d been together now for almost all their medical training, and for all that time her loving had been a one-way deal.

  Oh, she couldn’t complain. Ben had been honest with her from the start. ‘Lily, I love you as much as I’ll ever love a woman, but I don’t want a permanent relationship.’ He’d spelt it out repeatedly, making sure she’d understood. ‘This time together is great, but as soon as we finish medical school I need to go and see the world.’

  But now…

  Ben would feel the same about abortion as she did, she thought, but anything else… She’d seen the flare of panic whenever she’d come close to admitting she needed him, and a child would make no difference. Or maybe it would make him decide to marry her, she thought bleakly, and that would be worse than loneliness. He’d be trapped by his own sense of decency.

  The clock ticked on. She should be packing.

  Ben didn’t need her, she told herself. He didn’t need anyone. And back home in Kapua, her fellow islanders truly did. She continued staring into the mirror, thinking of the girl she’d been ten minutes ago and the woman she’d suddenly become.

  She was a woman with obligations.

  Kapua, her island home since she was eight years old, had never had a doctor. Islanders were dying because of it. But Lily had excelled at school, and she’d been desperate to study medicine. Somehow the islanders had supported that wish. Kapua’s economy was subsistence level, which meant the islanders’ decision to fund her medical training had been huge. Her family and neighbours had gone without basic necessities to give her-and themselves-this chance.

  The further her training had progressed, the more the islanders’ anticipation had built. Their telephone calls over the last few months had been jubilant. They’d built a hospital because they knew she was coming. She was qualified. The island would have its first doctor.

  She was carrying Ben’s child.

  Appalled, she let the test strip fall and her hand dropped to her waistline. She was feeling for a pregnancy that was hardly there. This was so new. So tiny. A fragment of human life.

  Pregnancy didn’t always end in a live birth, she thought, trying not to cry. To tell Ben now…

  Impossible. He was off at the end of this week on his first mission with the armed forces. He’d react with forcefulness, she thought. He’d decide on marriage. He’d organise a date for a wedding during his first leave.

  But if she left-as she had to leave-he wouldn’t follow, she thought bleakly. She’d tried so hard to persuade him to visit her island but he’d reacted with incomprehension. The islanders were her family? How could that be? He didn’t know what a family was.

  Family… Yes, the islanders were her family. They’d love this child to bits, she thought.

  Ben would see a child as nothing more than chains.

  She was rocking back and forth now, distressed beyond measure. How could she tell him? If she told him then he’d insist on marriage, and how could she refuse him? But how could she not go home?

  ‘So tell him and go anyway,’ she told her reflection.

  ‘I’m not brave enough.’

  There were footsteps on the outside stairs. The door was flung open, and Ben was there. Her lovely Ben. Big and strong and tanned, and laughing for the sheer joy of living.

  The father of her child.

  ‘Lily, they’ve accepted me into SAS training,’ he said before she could say a word, and he was across the room, lifting her, swinging her round and round in his excitement. ‘It’s the crack army assault team-the best in the world. You’ll be off saving your little island but I’ll be seeing the world.’ He spun her round and round until she felt dizzy, and when he finally set her on her feet she had no choice but to lean against him, to feel the strength of him one last time.

  ‘Sweetheart, we’ve each achieved our dream,’ he said, and she could tell that his thoughts were already off in the exciting future where she played no part. ‘I’ll miss you like hell, my love.’

  ‘I’ll miss you,’ she managed, but only just.

  ‘Will you?’ He cupped her chin, forcing her to look at him, but his eyes were alive with excitement, and he didn’t see the change in hers.

  ‘I can’t understand how you can want to go back to such a place as Kapua,’ he said. ‘When the whole world is yours.’

  ‘The island is my world.’

  He nodded. ‘I guess,’ he said, hugging her against him. ‘I guess we’re both driven,
but in different directions. But I wish we could share.’

  ‘No, you don’t,’ she whispered, but so softly he didn’t hear. She whispered it from her heart to his. ‘You don’t wish we could share, my love. You’re my darling Ben Blayden-who walks alone.’

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘ISN’T Kapua where Lily Cyprano lives?’

  Ben was running to a tight schedule, and he sighed as Sam Hopper joined him. Sam was a skilled surgeon but he talked too much. The first Chinook was leaving in an hour. Normally the adrenalin was kicking in by now, making him move with lightning speed, but lately… Hell, what did it mean when preparation for disaster seemed routine?

  ‘What?’ he asked without looking up, and Sam poured himself coffee and hiked his frame onto the bench where Ben was sorting drugs.

  ‘Lily,’ he repeated patiently. ‘Cute as a button. Half islander, half French. We all thought she looked like Audrey Hepburn, only curvier. Sexiest thing on two legs. She went through med school, then went home to work on the little island where she’d been raised. Wasn’t that Kapua?’ He paused, sorting old memories. ‘Hey, weren’t you two an item? I was a couple of years above you but I seem to remember… I’m right, aren’t I?’

  Ben’s hands stilled. For a moment-just for a moment-a surge of remembered pain washed through him. Lily.

  Then he regrouped. ‘We’re talking about seven years ago,’ he snapped. ‘The trivia you keep in that tiny mind of yours…’

  ‘But Kapua is Lily’s island?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ben said, remembering. He’d been so caught up in the urgency of the job that until now he hadn’t thought of the link between Kapua and Lily. But, yes, Kapua was definitely the place Lily called home.

  ‘Is she still there?’

  ‘How would I know? I haven’t heard from her for years.’

  ‘It’d be a joke if she was among the insurgents.’

  ‘A great joke,’ he said dryly, starting to pack again.

  They were moving fast. News had hit that morning of an insurgent attack in Kapua. The islanders needed help, desperately.

  Kapua was the biggest of a small group of Pacific islands. Its population was an interracial mix of the original Polynesians and the Spaniards who’d decided to colonise the place centuries ago. There was little sign of that colonisation now. The Spaniards had obviously decided the Polynesian lifestyle suited them much better than their own, and the island’s laid-back lifestyle continued to this day.

  But things were changing. Ignored by the rest of the world for centuries, the island had recently been made more interesting to other countries by the discovery of oil. The island’s rulers had shown minimal interest in selling it. To sell the oil could change their lifestyle, but it would leave their descendants without resources when it was finished. The islanders had therefore decided to make the oil last maybe a hundred years or more, and so far they’d sold nothing.

  That decision seemed to suit most islanders, but greed did dreadful things. It took few brains to guess that the insurgents who’d stormed the capital would be interested in only one thing-oil money.

  ‘It’s just as well the island has big friends,’ Sam said, moving on, and Ben nodded. The call for help had been frantic. The insurgents had blasted their way into Kapua’s council compound, and there were reports of deaths and chaos across the island. This wasn’t a political take-over where oil wealth would be shared among the whole population. The opinion of those who knew was that this would be a group with outside backing-backing that could potentially cause instability in the entire Pacific region.

  With such destruction-with human loss and chaos-there was little choice for Kapua’s political allies. Troops were therefore flying in immediately. Among them would be Lieutenant Ben Blayden, M.D.

  She’s probably forgotten me, he thought grimly. What’s the bet she’ll be a fat island mama by now, with six or seven kids?

  That thought made him smile. Domesticity would have made Lily happy. All through her medical training she’d ached to be home.

  ‘My island’s family to me,’ she’d told him. ‘Come and see what it’s like.’

  Not him. He was in too much of a hurry to get where he wanted, and he wanted action. The thought of settling on a remote island and raising children made him shudder.

  But Lily…

  ‘Lily was great,’ he told Sam. ‘She was a good-looking lady.’

  ‘Look her up when you get there.’

  ‘Pop in and make a social call during the gunfire?’

  ‘Maybe it’s not as serious as reported,’ Sam said optimistically. ‘Maybe you can persuade the nasty men to put away their guns, pour margueritas for everyone and go lie on the beach.’

  ‘As if.’

  ‘You never know,’ Sam said, yawning. ‘But at least it’ll be action. See if you can find a few bodies that need sewing up. Nice interesting cases. I’ll be there in a flash.’

  ‘You want to take my place?’

  ‘After you persuade the boys to put their guns away,’ Sam said, grinning. ‘You’re the front-line doctor. Not me.’

  ‘I can’t find Benjy.’

  Lily was making her way through the crowded hospital, terror making her numb. All around her were people who needed her. The criminals who’d taken over the compound had shot indiscriminately, seeming to relish the destruction they were creating. The death count at the moment stood at twenty but there were scores of injured, scores of people Lily should be caring for right now.

  But Benjy…

  At first sign of trouble, when Kapua’s finance councillor had stumbled through Lily’s front door that morning, clutching her bloodied arm, Lily had told Benjy to run to Kira’s house.

  Kira was Lily’s great-aunt, a loving, gentle lady who was like a grandmother to Benjy. She lived well away from the town centre, in an island-style bure by the beach. Benjy would be safe there, Lily had thought as she’d worked her way through the chaos of that morning.

  Then, at midday, an elderly man had stumbled into the hospital, weeping. Kira’s neighbour.

  ‘Kira,’ the man had wept. ‘Kira.’

  Somehow Lily had finished treating an islander she’d been working on. A bullet had penetrated the man’s thigh, causing massive tissue damage. He’d need further surgery but for the moment the bleeding had been controlled. As soon as she’d been able to step away from the table she’d run, to find that Kira’s hut had been burned, to find Kira dead and to find no sign of her son.

  She’d stood on the beach and looked at the carnage and felt sick to the stomach. Dear God…

  Where was her little boy? Nowhere. By the time she returned to the hospital she was shaking so badly that her chief nurse took control, holding her arms in his broad hands and giving her a gentle shake.

  ‘What do you mean, you can’t find Benjy? Isn’t he with Kira?’

  ‘Kira’s dead. Shot in the back, Pieter. That kind, loving old lady. And Benjy’s gone. There’s no one on the beach at all.’ Her breath caught on a sob of terror. ‘Where would he have gone? Why isn’t he here?’ She was close to collapse, and the big islander pushed her into a chair, knelt before her and took both her hands in his.

  ‘Maybe he’s with Jacques.’

  ‘I don’t know where Jacques is either. Oh, God, if he’s…’ She buried her face in her hands.

  But Pieter was hauling her hands down, meeting her gaze head on. He was the island’s most senior nurse, sixty or so, big and gentle and as patient as any man she’d met. The look of fear in his eyes now made her more terrified than she’d been in her life. If Pieter was scared…

  But he had himself more together than she did. ‘So Benjy’s probably with Jacques,’ he told her. ‘Or he’ll be hiding. It’s a good sign, Lily. Benjy’s the most sensible six-year-old I know. If we look for him or for Jacques, it’ll only jeopardise us all. You were crazy to have left the hospital yourself.’

  He hesitated then, but they had to face facts. ‘I’m sorry, but you need to
block Benjy out, Lily. You’re our only doctor and we need you. Trust Jacques to take care of him. For now Benjy’s on his own and so are we.’

  It was dusk as the Chinook carrying Ben hovered over the northern beach, its searchlights illuminating the sweep of sand while they assessed whether it was safe to land.

  ‘We have the north beach secured,’ they’d been told on a shaky radio connection by a deputy head of council who’d seemed to be having trouble speaking. ‘They don’t seem to be near. And the hospital’s ours. That’s all.’

  A problem with an idyllic island existence, thought Ben grimly, was that it left everyone exposed to the nasties of this world. Life in paradise is all very well if everyone feels that way. The majority of islanders hadn’t owned guns. They’d never dreamed of needing them and it had left the way for the few to run riot.

  A burst of gunfire came from their left and the pilot swung the Chinook round so the floodlights pierced the forest.

  ‘That’s M16s,’ the sergeant sitting beside Ben told them. ‘I recognise the firing pattern. They sound too far away to be accurate. Reports are that most of these guys were already on the ground. We’re therefore acting on the assumption that they won’t have high-calibre weapons. They’ll give us trouble on the ground but if that’s all they have… I say land.’

  ‘OK, we’re going in,’ the pilot said. ‘You know your job, guys. Let’s go.’

  Pieter had personally brought another two units of plasma into the operating theatre. He was needed outside, Lily knew, but she also knew he was treating her as a patient-a patient who he needed to stay on her feet. The woman under her hands was the island’s housing councillor. The wound to her chest was deep and ugly. It was a miracle the shot had missed her heart. All Lily’s attention had to be on her, but Pieter knew that she needed at least some hope.

  He was giving it to her now.