The Reunion of a Lifetime

  They once had a summer of passion...

  But is it too late to walk down the aisle?

  Lauren Fuller hasn’t seen Charlie Ainsworth since he unexpectedly left Horseshoe Bay twelve years ago and burst their bubble of love. Now he’s back, and working together at her GP practice is torment—their chemistry reminds Lauren how good they were together. And when she learns the tragic truth that drove him away, can it finally reunite them forever?

  “Mr. Ainsworth.”

  “You used to call me Charlie.”

  “We’ve grown up, Charles.”

  Lauren rose gracefully, her full height bringing the top of her head level with his chin. A memory flashed of her curves resting neatly into his dips—the two of them interlocking like puzzle pieces—and how he’d always rested his chin gently on her hair, breathing in her scent. Apples. She’d always smelled of apples and he idly wondered if she still did.

  A sensation akin to peace rolled through him at the memory. Those six precious weeks with Lauren had been a haven from nine months of hell. A temporary but welcome escape from his family life until he’d made the break permanent with a move overseas.

  “I’m heading for coffee.” He nodded toward the café. “Any good? I’m clueless on Melbourne’s coffee standards. I don’t think I’ve had a cup there in eighteen months.”

  Surprise danced across her high cheekbones and her left foot hit the sand. “Really? I thought you lived there?”

  He saw the curiosity bright in her eyes and he seized on it, hoping it was an opening. “Let me buy you coffee. We can fill each other in on the last twelve years.”

  Dear Reader,

  Sometimes characters come to me and I have to dream up a story for them. Sometimes I hear about an event and I think, I must put that in a book. This novel is a combination of the two. Some would say that’s synchronicity. The mud story came first. Later, when I created Charlie and his family’s story, an author mate told me her friend had experienced a similar trauma. She generously shared her story. Both Tamara’s and Madeleine’s firsthand accounts have added authenticity to Lauren and Charlie’s story and I thank them both.

  When I was a child, my grandparents had a holiday house in Sorrento, Australia. It was a fibro shack full of love and board games. I adored it. Just a bit farther along the cliff at Portsea are some enormous houses on huge blocks with swimming pools, tennis courts and views across Port Phillip Bay. I’ve created Horseshoe Bay from my childhood memories, and I hope you enjoy spending time there.

  Lauren and Charlie met when they were on the cusp of adulthood and life intervened. Twelve years later, with differing experiences, they meet again. I hope you enjoy their story. I love hearing from my readers, and you can find me at fionalowe.com, Facebook, Instagram, Goodreads and Twitter.

  Happy reading!

  Fiona x

  THE REUNION OF A LIFETIME

  Fiona Lowe

  Books by Fiona Lowe

  Harlequin Medical Romance

  Paddington Children’s Hospital

  Forbidden to the Playboy Surgeon

  Midwives On-Call

  Unlocking Her Surgeon’s Heart

  Career Girl in the Country

  Sydney Harbor Hospital: Tom’s Redemption

  Letting Go with Dr. Rodriguez

  Newborn Baby For Christmas

  Gold Coast Angels: Bundle of Trouble

  A Daddy for Baby Zoe?

  Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles.

  Join Harlequin My Rewards today and earn a FREE ebook!

  Click here to Join Harlequin My Rewards

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  To Tamara for sharing her heartbreaking journey with Finn.

  With special thanks to Madeleine and Cate for the mud story.

  Praise for Fiona Lowe

  “Ms. Lowe has penned a fantastic read in this book where the hero and heroine had plenty of chemistry that spilled over onto the pages... They both deserve happy ever after.”

  —Harlequin Junkie on Forbidden to the Playboy Surgeon

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  EPILOGUE

  EXCERPT FROM A BRIDE TO REDEEM HIM BY CHARLOTTE HAWKES

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘IT’S RED DAY.’

  ‘Red day?’ Dr Lauren Fuller’s hand paused in mid-twist on the yellow lid of a jar of Vegemite. She was minding Shaylee—her parents’ current foster-daughter—while Sue and Ian were up in Melbourne, celebrating their thirty-third wedding anniversary.

  ‘For reading,’ Shaylee explained. ‘We wrote a real letter with a stamp and everything. Today we’re walking to a big red letterbox. Mrs Kikos says it’s really old.’

  Lauren knew the postbox. It dated back to 1890, when Horseshoe Bay had been a popular holiday destination and people sent postcards to tease the folks at home. Now everyone just texted. ‘That sounds like fun.’

  She grabbed the toast as it popped up and swung back towards the table, dodging Cadbury, her parents’ aging chocolate Labrador, who had decided he needed to lie right at her feet. After dropping the toast on a plate, she pulled the scrambled eggs off the heat seconds before they boiled. Breakfast at her own house was a much less hectic affair, consisting of fruit and yoghurt, and, if the planets aligned, a quiet online read of the paper.

  The eight-year-old girl’s gaze suddenly dropped past her new green and white checked school dress—her pride and joy—before resting on her bare feet. Shaylee mumbled something else about red.

  Lauren scooped the eggs out of the pan and dumped them over the toast she’d spread with Vegemite. Her mother had been insistent that Shaylee eat a high-protein breakfast before school to help her with her concentration. Lauren knew that wasn’t the sole purpose; it was as much about warmth, love and a full stomach as it was about concentration. Shaylee had spent far too many years going hungry when her drug-affected mother’s suppressed appetite and muddled brain hadn’t considered food a necessity. ‘Sit up and eat your brekkie and tell me what you just said.’

  Shaylee eyed Lauren carefully as she climbed up onto the breakfast stool. ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Of course it matters,’ Lauren said with a smile. She’d grown up with a parade of foster-children coming and going in the house and, as hard as that was at times to cope with, if she’d learned one thing, it was that the muttered asides usually contained the most important information.

  Shaylee shovelled eggs into her mouth and Lauren waited. The moment the girl swallowed, Lauren said, ‘Hit me with it.’

  ‘We have to wear red,’ Shaylee said quietly, her head down. ‘But it’s okay. I love my uniform.’

  Lauren’s heart rolled over. This little girl had endured so many disappointments in her short life that she automatically prepared for them now. It was odd that Lauren’s mother hadn’t made a costume for her before she’d left for Melbourne—Sue was huge on things like this. Surely the school had sent home a note about it? But that was something to sort out later. Right now, she had...she glanced at the clock and tried not to groan...half an hour to create a red costume before dropping Shaylee off at school and getting to the clinic on time. ‘You eat your eggs and I’ll go and see what I can find that’s red.�
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  Her first stop was the bathroom. At the back of the cupboard she found four cans of coloured hair spray, all of dubious age. She picked up the red one and shook it. It sounded hopeful, although she hoped it was fire-engine-red or it wouldn’t show up on Shaylee’s glossy black hair. Her second stop was the floor-to-ceiling cupboards in the playroom-cum-teenage retreat. Dragging an old hospital linen bag along the polished floorboards, she walked back into the kitchen just as Shaylee finished her last mouthful.

  ‘What’s that?’ the little girl asked, clearly intrigued.

  ‘Sue’s special bag of tricks.’ Lauren pulled open the drawstring and started pitching out items—a pink feather boa, a black ushanka fur hat with a red badge, a green fez, an old handbag, a royal-blue waistcoat... As she added more items to the pile, Lauren found herself silently chanting ‘Come on, red,’ like a roulette player.

  Meanwhile, Shaylee was twirling around the kitchen, wearing the Russian hat and a stethoscope. ‘Look, I’m a doctor just like you.’

  Lauren glanced at the bright red instrument in surprise. It must have been tangled up in some clothing, because she hadn’t seen it come out of the bag. If anyone had asked her about that piece of medical equipment, she would have said she’d binned it at the end of her first year of uni after replacing it with a utilitarian black stethoscope. Apparently not. It appeared she had abandoned it here and her mother, ever a magpie when it came to the bag of tricks, must have kept it for dress-ups. Lauren had deliberately not thought about the red stethoscope in years.

  Twelve years.

  Shut up! How do you even know that?

  It was too long ago and far too much had happened in her life for her subconscious to instantly calculate the number. Especially as the day she’d bought the replacement black stethoscope had been the day she’d moved on from Charlie Ainsworth. At least that was what she always told herself on the infrequent occasions something made her think back to that heady summer a lifetime ago.

  ‘Stethoscopes are like wands,’ Charlie had said, slinging a red one around her neck and pulling her towards him before kissing her.

  She’d gazed up at him, loving his kind and handsome face. ‘They’re magic?’

  ‘I wish,’ he’d said in a resigned tone, ‘but no. They do, however, reflect personality and you, Lauren Fuller, are the antithesis of boring old black. This one is bright and vivacious, just like you. This is the one.’

  Lauren felt herself grimace at the now tarnished memory and immediately noticed Shaylee’s smile fade. Damn. She banished the mothballed memory back where it belonged and forced a smile as she kept rummaging in the bag. ‘The stethoscope looks great on you and, ta-dah!’ With relief, she shook out a red sequined cape. ‘You can be Super Shaylee.’

  ‘Yay!’ Shaylee clapped her hands as a look of wonder crossed her face. ‘I’m gonna be dressed in red like the other kids.’

  Lauren blinked back tears. Why was it always the simple things that undid her? ‘You’ll be totally red, especially when I’ve sprayed your hair.’

  * * *

  After dropping a very excited Shaylee off at school, Lauren drove to the café nestled under the Norfolk pines on the sweet curve of Horseshoe Bay. Her usual morning routine was a run along the beach and on Tuesdays and Thursdays she added in a yoga class, but the one constant was coffee. This morning it was just coffee.

  ‘You missed a spectacular sunrise.’ Ben, the barista and café manager, greeted her with his trademark grin.

  And I missed you. Sun-bleached hair and with a surfer’s tan, Ben had moved to the Bay three months ago to run the café. Most mornings as she finished her run, he was walking up the beach with his board tucked under his arm and they always fell into easy conversation. Everything about Ben was easy. This was a new experience for Lauren, because the two men she’d thought she’d loved had turned out to be anything but easy. But that was all in the past and not worth revisiting.

  As far as Lauren was concerned, she’d wiped clean her slate of disastrous relationships when she’d returned to Horseshoe Bay two years ago. Determined to learn from her twenties, she was older, wiser and ready to live life on her own terms. The last year had been frantic, most of it spent breathing new life into a busy medical practice that had let the twenty-first century pass it by. Now, with her newly minted decree absolute declaring her officially divorced from Jeremy and with her heart encased in a protective layer of reinforced Perspex—visible but crack-proof—Lauren was finally ready for an easy, straightforward and uncomplicated man.

  Truth be told, she was ready for sex. Just recently, she’d been waking up at three a.m. hot, sweaty and aroused, and although she was adept at bringing herself to orgasm, she was ready for someone else to do it. She just didn’t want a relationship with its inevitable breakdown and crippling scar tissue as part of the deal. Ben, with his ‘live for the moment’ and ‘no regrets’ attitude, might just be the solution she was looking for.

  The stumbling block was that at thirty she’d only ever had sex as part of a committed relationship. Correction; she’d been committed—Charlie and Jeremy not so much—and she was clueless about how to bring up the topic of a no-strings-attached gig. Of course, she could just use a dating app but the two recent cases on the news where women had lost their lives from swiping right warned her she was safer with someone she knew. But in a town the size of Horseshoe Bay, her options were limited.

  ‘I was on mothering duty this morning,’ she said, pulling out her purse to pay for her latte.

  Ben did a double take. ‘I didn’t know you had a kid.’

  ‘I don’t,’ she said, checking the Perspex around her heart and not letting her mind travel to a memory that always brought a troubling combination of sadness and disappointment seasoned with an unsettling soupçon of relief. ‘I’m looking after Shaylee while my parents are whooping it up in Melbourne celebrating thirty-three years of wedded bliss.’

  ‘Crikey.’ Ben’s expression was a priceless combination of respect and horror. ‘I can’t imagine what that would be like. My brain refuses to go there.’

  ‘I know, right? They got married at twenty-three and are still going strong. It’s terrifyingly impressive.’ So much about her parents and their achievements was impressive that she was often left feeling daunted by her own choices. How did one even start to live up to their high-set bar?

  He placed the metal jug under the steam jet, frothing the milk for her brewing coffee. ‘I think I’d find marriage claustrophobic.’

  Was this her opening? Come on, be brave. Be a millennial woman like the ones you read about and take what you want. ‘Sexually or otherwise?’

  He shot her a quizzical look as if he was testing the lie of the land. ‘A bit of both, really. What about you?’

  ‘Post-divorce, I’ve had a total rethink.’ She swallowed and forced herself to look him straight in his sea-green eyes. ‘What’s your opinion of friends with benefits?’

  ‘I’m an enthusiastic supporter.’ He capped her coffee with a plastic sippy top and gave her a grin. ‘And we’ve been friends for a while now.’

  ‘We have.’ For some reason her heart was just beating away normally: lub-dub, lub-dub. Shouldn’t it be bounding wildly out of her chest at the fact that the gorgeous Ben was on board with the idea of the two of them tumbling into bed?

  He handed her the coffee and swept the coins she laid on the wooden counter into the till. ‘Call me whenever, Lauren. I’m looking forward to it.’

  ‘Great!’ She heard herself saying, sounding far more enthusiastic than she felt. For some—probably antiquated—reason, she’d assumed Ben would be the one to contact her. Yet this way he was letting her call the shots and after two disastrous relationships, wasn’t that what she wanted? Demanded even?

  Gah! Perhaps she wasn’t as twenty-first-century evolved or as ready for casual, no-strings-attached sex as she’d thought
.

  * * *

  Charles Ainsworth—‘Boss Doc’ to the islanders, Charlie to his friends and on very infrequent occasions to his family—swore as the lights in the operating theatre flickered. ‘Bert filled the generator, right?’ he asked as he slipped a ligature around a bleeding vessel.

  ‘No worries, boss.’ A dark eyed man with a bush of frizzy hair gave him the thumbs-up from the door. ‘I fill ’em up. No be in the dark this time.’

  ‘Excellent.’ Charlie might be in what travel magazines called ‘paradise’—a string of tropical, palm-dotted coral islands floating in an aquamarine sea—but from a medical perspective, he was in a developing country and a disaster zone. During the recent cyclone, he’d had to perform emergency surgery on a boy who had been pierced by a stake that had been hurled into his chest by the terrifying and mighty force of the wind. Mid-surgery, they had predictably lost power, but he hadn’t foreseen the generator running dry or him finishing the surgery with Bert and Shirley holding LED torches aloft.

  Just another tough day in paradise but at least the kid had survived and only half of the hospital had flooded. If the Red Cross managed to deliver desperately needed medical supplies today, he might be able to breathe more easily. As it was, air was skimming in and out of the tops of his lungs without going deeper and his body was coiled tight, ready to react to the next disaster. He’d been in a constant state of high alert for two weeks.

  It’s been longer than that.

  He shook away the thought. Emergency aid work was, by definition, disaster management, and he had the dubious honour of being an expert. Once the powers that be recognised someone with the skills they needed, they locked onto them and never let them go. Not that he wanted to be let go—he lived for being busy. The alternative didn’t bear thinking about.

  He stepped back from the antiquated operating table that even on its highest extension was too low for his height, stripped off his gloves and rubbed his aching back. ‘Wake him up,’ he said to his current anaesthetic nurse, a local islander who had blessedly trained in Melbourne. ‘And keep a close eye on the drainage bottle.’