of every day.
For years Tak had shielded his younger siblings from his father’s absences as much as possible. Listening to their mother offer up one convincing excuse after another, praising his father’s work as a doctor so they wouldn’t realise what a derelict father and cruel husband he was.
The kind of man Tak never wanted to be like.
Hetti might think it was because he was more interested in his career than in having a family, but she’d be wrong. At least she would only be partly right. Forging a career as the kind of neurosurgeon capable of performing a vast array of brain surgeries on awake patients automatically made him the worst kind of unreliable boyfriend. And he was happy with that.
Even so, his career wasn’t the whole of it. The whole of it was that he feared being the kind of man whose selfish, self-centred actions hurt any wife, any child, the way his father had hurt them. Time and again. And the truth was that he would be that kind of man. However much he abhorred the thought, it was unavoidable. Inexorable. It was in his blood.
Just as it was in Rafi’s blood.
Much as he loved his younger brother, Tak wasn’t blind to the fact that Rafi was their father all over again. And Tak hated that. Yet here he was. Staring at this doctor as though he’d never seen anyone, anything quite like her before.
It made no sense.
There was something about her which snagged his attention and made him think she possessed a unique quality, even if he couldn’t put his finger on what that was. He told himself that he certainly wasn’t following the long, impossibly elegant line of her neck, or wondering what that glorious hair might look like free of its rigid net cage, or imagining what lay beneath that less than flattering orange suit.
Still he didn’t move.
Once Effie was done with her notes she’d be back to the heli and to her base, ready for the next shout. Which was a good thing. A great thing. It meant he could get past this crazy moment and back to real life.
A life that didn’t include his baby sister interfering in his life and picking out potential dates for him, he reminded himself firmly. Least of all dates with a woman like Effie.
Except hadn’t Hetti told him that it wouldn’t be a date? Not in any real sense of the word, anyway. What had she called them...the perfect foil for each other? Each of them using the other to keep the world off their back?
It should sound ludicrous. It did sound ludicrous. But in between women taking his single status as evidence that of course he must be yearning for the perfect wife, and his mother becoming relentless in her desire to see all of her children settled down, even against their will, ludicrous might just work.
It wasn’t as though he could simply turn around and tell Mama to stay out of his personal life, much as he might want to. She would always be too fragile, too weak to handle it—their father had made sure of that. And she might not have been the perfect mother, but at least she’d always been there.
Hetti was right. He needed a foil. A distraction. Effie.
Tak turned back to eye the new air ambulance doctor again just as she was finishing up her notes.
As if it was meant to be. Effie. Dr Effie Robinson. He remembered her name now, from Douglas Jacobs’s notes. He narrowed his eyes for a moment.
‘Dr Robinson, I wonder if we could have a word? In private.’
‘LET ME GET this straight—you’re asking me out on a date?’
Effie was infinitely proud of the way she’d kept any shake out of her quiet voice. The same could not be said for her stentorian heart.
‘No. I’m asking you out on a fake date.’
‘I don’t know whether to be amused or insulted.’ Her eyebrows felt as if they were somewhere up in the vicinity of her hairline. ‘Is this some kind of practical joke? Hazing the new member of staff? Because I can tell you right now—’
He made no attempt to conceal his irritation as he cut her off. ‘It isn’t. I don’t have time for stupid pranks, and I hardly think this would be a particularly funny one even if I did. I need a date for the ball and you fit the bill.’
‘There are probably a hundred women in this hospital alone who would jump at your oh-so-romantic offer.’ Effie felt she’d injected just the right amount of sarcasm into her tone. ‘But I am not one of them.’
She wasn’t some green doctor, about to go giddy because the gorgeous Tak Basu was talking to her. She’d refused to do that six weeks ago, when one of her first ever air ambulance cases had thrown her a hillside rescue and a man, Douglas Jacobs, suffering from expressive aphasia.
Tak had been the neurological consultant on call. He’d threatened to steal her breath away on sight. But she’d been determined not to let him.
Tall, with archetypal brooding dark looks, he wasn’t exactly a playboy, but rumour had it that he had dated some high-profile stunning women in his time.
Well, good for him. But good-looking, arrogant males held little interest for her. Hadn’t she been there, done that, and ended up at just turned eighteen years old, heading to Oxford University with a newborn infant in tow?
For the past thirteen years Nell had been her life. She hadn’t wanted anything—even her longed-for medical career—as much as she’d wanted to take care of her daughter. But something about this man sent her body’s warning system into motion, into an internal flurry, like ants who had just had dirt knocked into their nest.
‘I don’t think you are remotely one of them. Which is precisely why I’m asking you. No jokes, no hazing—just a mutually beneficial arrangement.’
She opened her mouth to reply but no words came.
A fake date, indeed. It should sound insane. Nonsensical. Yet his rich, even tone and neutral expression made it sound utterly plausible. Normal, even. As if a fake date was a completely run-of-the-mill daily event.
Perhaps it was in his world.
Tak Basu—one of the hospital’s brightest stars. Talk about an eligible bachelor. His reputation for medical excellence preceded him only slightly more than his brooding good looks and an immorally stunning Adonis physique that would make even the most pious woman ache to sin.
Yet now she realised that not even the most fevered description could accurately convey just how devastating he was in the flesh, or just how paralysing his sheer magnetism truly was.
Every hair on her body felt as though it was standing to attention. Ready to do his bidding—eager, even. It was like nothing she’d ever experienced in the whole of her life.
Then there were the smaller things. Like his big hands, strong forearms, the way he stood as though he owned the world. Or the shock of thick black hair, longer on top than she might have expected, which only added to his already six foot three height.
