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Mother to five sons, FIONA McARTHUR is an Australian midwife who loves to write. Medical Romance™ gives Fiona the scope to write about all the wonderful aspects of adventure, romance, medicine and midwifery that she feels so passionate about—as well as an excuse to travel! Now that her boys are older, Fiona and her husband, Ian, are off to meet new people, see new places, and have wonderful adventures. Fiona’s website is at www.fionamcarthur.com
Christmas
with Her Ex
Fiona McArthur
Dear Reader
Who can resist the romance and glitz of the world’s most glamorous train journey? Certainly not Alison Roberts and I. So we travelled in olde world style from Venice to London on the famous Orient Express, always with the idea that we would write these books.
And what a magical journey it was. From the canals of Venice to the soaring Italian Dolomites, crossing snow-covered valleys and burrowing through the mountains of the Austrian Alps, with men in tuxedos and women in sequins… It’s a journey we will never forget.
I’d love you to share the journey with my heroine, Kelsie Summers, an independent midwife who has always dreamed she’d ride this train one day, and Connor Black, the man she left outside the register office fifteen years ago.
Offering his seat to Kelsie in Venice two days before Christmas is bad, but leaving her alone with his meddling grandmother is a hundred times worse. Connor can’t believe his bad luck, or the surge of emotion as he looks at the woman he crossed a world to get away from after she broke his heart.
Through the next thirty-six hours and into the night the train blazes a trail across the countryside, past the bells of railway crossings and the flashes of light, while its occupants sleep in their little beds until dawn outside Paris. Such fabulous fun as Kelsie and Connor rediscover and then lose each other again while the train shoots through the tunnel to England and the white cliffs of Dover, past keeps and stone walls and English backyards, until it reaches the bustle of London and the magic of Christmas.
I wish you a happy journey!
Fiona xxx
To my darling husband,
who watched our travels via internet banking,
with words of caution and judicious injections of funds,
and the fuzzy but fabulous use of Skype.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Epilogue
THE SEAGULLS WERE screaming—or maybe it was him. Twelve-year-old Connor saw the wave lift his mother and tumble her over and over.
He was running but it was too late.
He should have told her not to go back. The words had been on his lips.
He should never have held them back.
‘A quick look for Daddy’s ring,’ she’d said. ‘I must have dropped it in the rock pool.’
But he’d known the tide was coming in. The last wave had made them run from the rocks. And now…
‘Look after your mother,’ Dad had said, and he hadn’t. He should have said, No! Dont go. The waves are too big. They’ll sweep you out. You don’t have time.
The wave… And then another…
And then there were people—shouting, helping. Reaching his mother as he couldn’t. They’d get her.
But, no. A man was carrying his mother towards the sand, and his mother was limp like the seaweed that washed this way and that in the waves.
Her long hair was touching the sand as they came closer. He saw her face—and he knew nothing would ever be the same.
He knew he should have stopped her. He knew it. He knew it. Now… the way she was lying… .he knew something awful had happened.
He’d disobeyed his father. His mother was dying and he knew it was his fault.
AS KELSIE SUMMERS floated in her gondola past St Mark’s Square she thought of last night’s Christmas-themed mass at St Mark’s Cathedral and she rubbed the goose-bumps on her arms at the memory it evoked. The strings of Christmas fairy lights over the Bridge of Sighs had winked last night and now, though extinguished, they still decorated the canals and bridges of Venice on her way to the station.
Her bag was full of nativity scenes in glass and gorgeous Christmas-tree globes for her friends.
Even the crumbling mansions on the Venice waterways had gorgeous glass mangers and angels in their lower windows and she watched the last of them fade into the distance as her gondolier ducked under the final bridge.
The end of two weeks of magic and her trip of a lifetime—and so what if she’d originally planned to share it with someone long gone, she’d still made it happen.
The bow of the long black boat kissed the wharf and the gondolier swung Kelsie’s bag up onto the narrow boardwalk the same way as he held the craft steady, with little effort. She’d chosen the strongest-looking gondolier for just that reason.
She stepped out, in not very sensible shoes but she was a little more dressed up than usual in honour of the coming journey, and then her tasselled-hatted hero abandoned her cheerfully as he pushed off.
Kelsie dragged her bag up the planking to solid ground, or as solid as she could get in Venice, and sniffed away the idea of tears.
Surely she wasn’t weepy just because of the lack of gentlemen to help her move this huge bag! It was because she was leaving Venice. Because her lifelong