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CHAPTER ONE
THIS WOMAN WAS surely going to be his undoing.
The premonition walloped into Jake Cooper as he stared across the throng of well-heeled guests attending the welcome gala dinner for the summer programme at Brazil’s renowned Hospital Universitário Paulista.
He knew it, and still he stared. And despite the colleagues jostling to talk to him, he found he couldn’t draw his gaze from one agitated figure.
Flávia Maura. Or, as she was more colloquially known, the selvagem woman.
Wild. Savage. The jungle woman.
And there was no doubt in Jake’s mind that she posed a setback to his own sanity.
She was standing in a trio of women; yet, for him, the other two had blurred into muted shades of grey around Flávia. Just as everyone else in the vast, elegant room had done, the moment he’d laid eyes on this one woman. He might have thought that there was something abruptly wrong with his vision, but for the fact that he was so focused on the image of her, in glorious high definition.
He was supposed to be here for the training programme. A summer of top medical experts from around the world all meeting in one place both to learn, and also to teach, new cutting-edge skills to each other. Not least demonstrating the clinical trial he himself was part of, where he was using a scorpion-venom-based toxin to highlight cancer cells—effectively showing up as a fluorescent tumour paint when put under near-infrared light, within a patient on the operating table.
And Flávia Maura had been one of the researchers who had worked on the toxin he was using for his particular trial.
Only, it wasn’t her professional skills which currently had his eyes devouring every inch of her, from the top of her rich, glossy hair right down to the sexy high heels in which she appeared to be trying to balance, and everything in between. Not least the long, figure-hugging metallic gown in some deep green, which seemed to shimmer to black as she moved. Everything about it teased him. The way it clung so lovingly to her body, but the shimmers tricked the eye; the way the neckline offered a mouthwatering taste—but no more—of sexy cleavage; the way the side slit, which tantalised glimpses of endlessly long legs, but never once veered into dangerous territory.
Like the merest whisper of a promise of something more.
It was ridiculous that he—who had known plenty of beautiful women during his assuredly bachelor life—should be so easily ensnared. Yet here he was, like a fish dangling helplessly from a fisherman’s hook.
She looked sophisticated yet sexy. Elegant yet slightly devilish. And utterly, and completely, terrified. It wasn’t just the way her eyes were darting about the room however hard she kept trying to look her colleagues in the eye. It wasn’t simply how her hands kept toying with her dress, her earrings, her shoes, as if she felt completely out of her comfort zone. It wasn’t even her confident smile, which froze in place just once or twice.
It was the way she kept subconsciously edging behind the shoulder of one of the other two women, as though they could somehow provide a barrier between her and the colleagues who were clearly edging to talk to her—the woman whose work as a naturalist and researcher were helping to change the face of contemporary cancer treatment.
It should have acted as a warning that he could read her—a relative stranger—so well.
It should have worried him even more that it didn’t.
But then, it wasn’t the first warning he’d had, was it? He’d known it three days ago, in the middle of an operation, with the guy who’d been the closest thing to a best mate for the better part of a decade.
The memory played out in his head, as if reliving that conversation could somehow help to steel him against the pull of the woman standing no more than thirty metres from him right now.
As if it could help him resist this odd lure of striding across the room and claiming her for his own all night.
Like some kind of Neanderthal that he’d never been before. Like the guy he’d sworn only three days ago that he wasn’t.
‘So,’ his mate and neurosurgeon colleague had demanded good-naturedly partway through their joint operation. ‘Who did you sleep with in order to get on to this year’s summer teaching programme at Paulista’s?’
‘Funny, Oz.’ He’d grinned but he hadn’t even bothered looking up from the surgery.
His eyes had been trained on the brain of his patient as his colleague, neurosurgeon Oscar Wright, had worked to reveal a tumour. They’d made the first incision and had been drilling the bone flap as close to the tumour site as possible.
Once they were ready to start the resection, they would wake the patient and begin brain mapping. Normally, Jake wasn’t in on these operations, his area of expertise being vascular oncology, but the tumour paint was his clinical trial. Added to that was the fact that the particular young lad in question had always been particularly jumpy and Jake had been working with him long enough to have built up a rapport that would help during the awake part of the surgery.
But in that moment, the lad was still anaesthetised and the banter he and Oz shared often made critical operations like those seem easier.
‘Besides, that’s more your style than mine, isn’t it?’
‘You think I didn’t try?’ Oz had shaken his head. ‘I pulled out all the stops last year when they were choosing surgeons to go to Brazil, lot of good that did me. Not that it was a hardship, you understand.’
‘I bet it wasn’t,’ Jake had retorted dryly. ‘Though I imagine that high-profile case you have coming might have something to do with it.’
