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CHAPTER ONE
LIAM MILLER HAD earned his nickname, The Heart Whisperer, because his extraordinary surgical skill could coax even the most damaged patients’ hearts back to a perfect, normal sinus rhythm.
It was therefore ironic, he considered, that he’d been battling his own abnormally erratic heartbeat ever since arriving on the stunning island of St Victoria a few hours earlier. Or, more accurately, ever since his seaplane had flown over the stunning three-hundred-square-mile volcanic Caribbean island.
The views were practically spellbinding, from the emerald green of its rainforest canopy to its breath-taking turquoise waters where the light seemed to burst joyously off the coral reefs and sand.
But he would not allow himself to be bewitched.
Even on the short taxi drive from the port to the renowned Island Clinic, Liam had been captivated by the sheer colour and jubilation that pulsed around the island. It was so exuberant, so vibrant.
And it was so her.
He tried to push the thought from his head—the way he’d kept memories of her at bay for almost three years—but suddenly, now, he couldn’t seem to hold them back. Whether it was the jet-lag, or the fact that he was actually here on her homeland, Liam couldn’t be sure; all he knew was that this entire island was everything she’d once described to him. And it epitomised her flawlessly.
Talia.
The woman who had burst into his life a little over three years ago like a spectacular rainbow striking through the dark clouds that he hadn’t realised, until that point, had been so very cheerless. She hadn’t simply brought colour into his cold life but rather she had pitched it resplendently all over every single wall and surface in his hitherto bleak, grey world.
She had been the very essence of fun and laughter, and she’d breathed life into his very soul. He hadn’t realised it immediately, but that black, heavy, icy thing that had squatted so heavily on his chest his whole life had begun, bit by bit, to thaw.
She was the woman who had made him think, against everything his cruel and hateful father had drilled into him his entire life, that far from being to blame, he might actually be as much a victim of his mother’s death as his grief-stricken father had been. She was the woman who’d let him believe that perhaps he wasn’t as damaged and broken and destructive as he’d always thought. That he might just be worthy of being loved for who he was.
And then, just as abruptly as she’d surged into his life, she’d left. And with her departure every bit of that colour and joy had drained from his life. Only this time it had been even worse because he’d known what he was missing.
With a snort of irritation Liam jerked his head from the huge picture window that made up one wall of the chief of staff’s office at The Island Clinic, offering magnificent views. Instead he dropped his gaze to his electronic tablet and the patient file that stared at him from the screen as he waited for Nate Edwards to return.
It galled him that he hadn’t yet managed to banish thoughts of Talia Johnson from his head, even all these years later. But, he reminded himself irritably, he wasn’t on St Victoria to allow memories he’d tried to bury long ago to be stirred up.
He was simply here for the patients. In particular, Lucy Wells, the fifteen-year-old girl with a congenital heart problem who needed a full aortic arch recon
struction. And he didn’t really have to read the notes on his tablet again, if he was honest. He’d been living and breathing this challenging case ever since the phone call the previous week from the clinic’s chief of staff, Nate Edwards.
The way he did with every one of his cases—because they all mattered. They would be lying on his OR table, and the very least they deserved was that he knew their case inside out, upside down, and every way in between. Because every one of them could be someone’s child, someone’s husband, someone’s mother—just like his own mother had once been.
The last place she’d ever been and the first place he’d ever been.
The start of his life but the end of hers. The cruellest twist of fate for which his distraught father had never forgiven him.
Never.
Which was why he had spent his entire surgical career doggedly determined that he would save every life he possibly could.
As if saving his patients’ lives could somehow make up for his birth having been the reason for his mother losing hers.
As though there was a magic number that—when he achieved it—would suddenly, magically, absolve him. Maybe it would free him of the torment, and instantly lift all that icy numbness. The way he’d once naively imagined Talia had been starting to do.
Enough!
