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.
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,
