Midwife On the Orient Express Read online

  Midwife On The Orient Express

  A Christmas Miracle

  Fiona McArthur

  Dedicated

  To my readers who have bought this book – thank you for your faith that you will enjoy the journey. I’m sure you will!

  To Bron Jameson, Annie Seaton, Keri Arthur, Sasha Cottman and all the author publishers out there who share their knowledge so generously – yay!

  And lastly and always, to my darling husband, Ian, who has to come on the ride for every book and is my rock. xxFi

  About Fiona…

  Fiona McArthur has written more than fifty books and shares her medical knowledge and her love of working with women, families and emergency services in her stories. In her compassionate, pacey fiction, her love of the Australian landscape meshes beautifully with warm, funny, multigenerational characters as she highlights challenges for midwives and doctors, rural and remote families, and the strength shared between women. She always champions the underdog, and the wonderful, ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Then that bit of drama thrown in because who doesn’t love a few tears, a heartfelt sigh of relief and a big happy smile at the end? Make that gorgeous man earn the right to win his beautiful and strong-willed heroine’s heart because that’s something she believes in. And, absolutely, happy endings are a must.

  * * *

  Fiona says, 'I adore romantic moments, magical places, and new babies. The strength in women, for women, shines like a light everyone should see and I love to write about that strength. I love to laugh and celebrate kindness.

  * * *

  My real hero is a kind man and has made me laugh every day since I was seventeen. All my heroes are like that. Now my five sons make me laugh as well.

  * * *

  For you, dear Reader, I wish for you to leave my books with a smile and a belief that the world is good place full of ordinary but extraordinary people. And so many beautiful places exist in the world you can escape to - if for the moment, in a book.' xxFi

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  Copyright © 2019 by Fiona McArthur

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Midwife on the Orient Express

  Originally Released as Christmas With Her Ex, 2011

  Rewritten-re-released November 2019

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  ISBN 978-0-6487181-0-9

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  1. Dedicated

  About Fiona…

  2. Dear Reader

  Prologue

  3. Kelsie

  4. Lucas

  5. Kelsie

  6. Lucas

  7. Winsome

  8. Kelsie

  9. Kelsie

  10. Lucas

  11. Kelsie

  12. Lucas

  13. Kelsie

  14. Winsome

  15. Kelsie

  16. Winsome

  17. Lucas

  18. Kelsie

  19. Lucas

  20. Kelsie

  21. Lucas

  22. Kelsie

  23. Lucas

  24. Kelsie

  25. Lucas

  26. Kelsie

  27. Lucas

  28. Kelsie

  29. Lucas

  30. Kelsie

  31. Lucas

  32. Kelsie and Lucas

  33. Kelsie

  34. Lucas

  35. Kelsie

  36. Lucas and Kelsie

  37. Kelsie

  38. Lucas

  39. Kelsie

  40. Lucas

  Epilogue

  Thanks for reading

  Also by Fiona McArthur

  The Doctor’s Gift

  Midwife In The Jungle

  Dear Reader

  Have you ever wanted to experience the romance and glitz of the world’s most glamorous train journey, the Venice Simplin Orient Express?

  A few years ago I travelled in style with my writing friend, Alison Roberts, from Venice to London on the famous Wagons Lit. What a magical journey it proved.

  We always had the idea that we would write about our experiences and my original book was called Christmas With Her Ex. How much I loved the writing, and for a long time I’ve wanted to spend more time with those characters.

  As you know, at heart I will always be a midwife, so I’m even more excited at the rebirth of this story years later with the chance to delve deeper into my midwife, Kelsie, as well as the people she meets on her adventure, to move technology and details into the present time, and to rechristen the whole fun ride, “MIDWIFE ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS.”

  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 was a journey we will never forget.

  You can ride with my heroine, Kelsie Summers, an independent midwife who has always dreamed she’d ride this train one day, and Lucas Larimar, the man she left outside the registry office fifteen years ago.

  For Lucas, offering his seat to Kelsie in Venice two days before Christmas is tough, but leaving her alone with his meddling grandmother is a hundred times worse.

  Lucas can’t believe the surge of emotion as he looks at the woman he crossed a world to get away from and who broke his heart.

  Through the night and into the next glamorous thirty-six hours our train blazes a trail across the countryside. Whoosh past the bells and flashes of light of railway crossings while some, but not all, of its occupants sleep in their little beds until dawn outside Paris.

  Join me for drama and fun as Kelsie and Lucas rediscover and then lose each other again while the train shoots through Europe.

  What else can happen to Kelsie after the tunnel to England, the white cliffs of Dover appear, and she passes keeps and stone walls and English backyards until finally she reaches the bustle of London?

  Is it a dream that didn’t materialise or is it the magic of Christmas? I wish you a happy journey and a wonderful Christmas! Xx Fi.

  Prologue

  Lucas

  The seagulls were screaming – or maybe it was Lucas.

  Twelve-year-old Lucas Larimar saw the blue-green wave hit the rockpool wall and engulf his mother before tumbling her over and over like a doll – smashed like the broken shell he’d cast earlier into the waves – until her body fell back onto the rocks outside the pool.

  Sand flew from his feet and his hands pumped at his heaving sides but it took too long to get there. His dread grew along with his gasps. He should have pleaded with her not to go back. The words had wanted to come.

  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. They both had. The last wave had made them run from the rocks. And now…

  ‘Look after your mother,’ Dad had said as he’d left that morning. ‘You be the man of the house when I’m at work.’

  But Lucas hadn’t looked after her. He’d stayed by the car as she’d told him.

  More waves... And then another...

  People were shouting, running, reaching his mother as he couldn’t. They’d get her.

  But no.

&nb
sp; A man dragged her from the water and as Lucas gasped and fell down on the sand his mother lay limp like the seaweed that curled dry and dead beside her face, and her eyes changed as the light went out of them. Her long hair trailed the sand and he reached for her face before someone pulled him back.

  Nothing would ever be the same.

  Her eyes weren’t seeing him… He knew.

  His mother lay dying and it was all his fault.

  Kelsie

  Venice. Two days before Christmas.

  * * *

  Kelsie Summers floated past St Mark’s Square nestled in her ornately carved and gilded gondola and thought of last night’s Christmas-themed mass at St Mark’s Cathedral.

  When she closed her eyes the lights and sounds seemed still to float in the air, and prickling goose-bumps made her rub elbows and upper arms as she sighed happily and leaned further back in her red cushioned seat.

  Strings of Christmas fairy lights over the Bridge of Sighs had winked last night, and now, though extinguished, hundreds of strings of sleeping bulbs decorated the canals and bridges of Venice like spiderwebs as she made her way to the station.

  The station. She couldn’t wait.

  Her suitcase lay on the bottom of the gondola packed full of nativity scenes in glass, tiny gilt trees, and Murano glass Christmas ornaments for her friends.

  Another crumbling mansion on the Venice waterways had sun-catching crystal mangers and cherubic angels in its lower windows and as she watched the last of them fade into the distance her strapping gondolier ducked under the final bridge. Two men, in the gondolier’s black hats with red ribbon, stood with their backs to the canal, in iconic stance, and behind her a tunnel of criss-crossing bridges wove over the waterways.

  The end of two weeks of magic, starting with a cruise into Venice, the trip of a lifetime, and she’d done very well on her own. She’d made this long-time dream come true. And there was more to come.

  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 and studied Venetian nonchalance.

  She’d chosen the strongest-looking gondolier for just that reason. She’d hoped he’d hop out and drag her bag up to solid ground, but she feared that was not to be.

  Her not-very-sensible shoes touched the planks of the jetty and she swayed for a minute but she’d chosen her more formal attire for a reason. In honour of the coming journey. Heels would be worth it.

  She pulled her soft overnight bag higher up her shoulder, and when she turned, her tassel-hatted hero waved cheerfully as he pushed off, abandoning her and her suitcase where it stood, one wheel jammed in the rickety planking crack a dozen feet from solid ground.

  No gentlemanly assistance then. Right.

  Kelsie carefully dislodged the caught wheel – not a good time to snap off the saving grace of mobility on her bulging monstrosity of a bag – before dragging it up the boardwalk to the concrete. Ground as solid as she could get in Venice.

  Her lifelong travel dream was coming to an end.

  Modern-day women didn’t need male help, Kelsie told herself, but the Stazione di Venezia and the Santa Lucia steps mocked her as she glanced down with a grimace and contemplated a step by step, drag and pull of her bag times twelve, while wearing high heels.

  A passing Venetian ‘gentleman’ flicked his nicotine-stained finger at the tiny alley that ran up the side of the building for those who didn’t want to hump their belongings up the mountain to the station and she smiled her thanks.

  She’d arrived in Venice in a blaze of anticipation via the front entrance to the railway station and it seemed fitting, she wasn’t sure why, to be slipping home to the real world of work and her solitary flat in Sydney, in the back way.

  Her spirits soared again.

  Once she’d dragged this bulging brick of a suitcase inside here, her train would be anything but the back way.

  The last part of her journey – the expedition she’d dreamt of since her long-ago boyfriend had mentioned that his English grandmother embarked on it nearly every year. As a small town Australian, the idea of a train journey through the Austrian Alps all the way to Paris, then on to London, had captured her imagination.

  Back then it had seemed impossible to ever make that trip. Another goal reached. Venice to London via the Orient Express – the world’s most glamorous train – and she would be one of those passengers.

  Hence the reason she wore her second-highest heels and her new cream Italian suit. Maybe not so romantic doing it by herself, she conceded, but still very glam. Kelsie straightened as she entered the cavernous world of departures through a small doorway and popped out beside a tourist shop adorned with miniature gondoliers’ hats.

  She searched the signs.

  Platform One.

  Kelsie glanced around. Remembered the inside of Saint Lucia from arrival – and yes, still it presented like any other railway station – grey concrete, cold underfoot, traveller-filled bench seats, matching-luggage families huddled together.

  She’d entered at the correct platform, arrived at the specified time, so where was the blue and gold emblazoned wagon of the Orient Express?

  Tucked in a corner she spotted a small white sign, ordinary, unostentatious, a few fully occupied seats positioned around it.

  The sign read, ‘Meeting Point for Venice Simplon Orient Express’.

  Lucas

  Lucas Larimar watched the shoulders of the smartly dressed woman sag as she peered under her dark cap of hair with the perplexed countenance of the unseasoned traveller. Her head dipped down at what must be a horrendously heavy suitcase.

  Amused, he wondered if she’d dare try and perch on top of it. He sighed and stood to offer his seat, brushing away the niggling feeling that he knew her.

  He didn’t. He was in Venice. And if he didn’t offer her his seat Gran would poke him with her silver-topped cane as if he were a kid until he did. Unfortunately, Gran knew she was his one big weakness and the only woman he loved.

  He caught his gran’s glance as she nodded approvingly and bit back a grin. Despite her age she looked like a million Euros in her pink jacket and skirt with her snow-white hair fresh from her Venetian stylist.

  The pink Kimberley diamonds at her wrist and throat glittered under the electric lights. Lord, he would miss the old minx when she was gone. Had to be the reason he was standing here in the first place.

  He had very special clients, the Wilsons, a couple he’d worked with for years, whose tenuous assisted pregnancy had been particularly challenging, and they were all on tenterhooks until Connie Wilson had this baby safely delivered.

  He’d promised her influential husband, Harry, and more importantly the nervous Connie, he’d be available twenty-four seven. He was still a helicopter ride away if needed.

  But, he should be somewhere closer to them, instead of sitting on a train for the next thirty-six hours playing nursemaid to an eighty-year-old lady who should be at home, knitting.

  Even he laughed at the idea of Gran doing anything of the sort.

  The original stickler for good manners was becoming impatient and inclined her head sideways towards the woman several times and he settled her with his nod. He’d better be quick about it.

  If Gran was going to order him around like a school boy, Lucas mused, this could prove to be a very long thirty-six hours. He stepped closer to the woman and spoke from behind her. ‘Excuse me, Madam. Would you like my seat?’

  The woman turned, their eyes met, and recognition slammed into him harder than an express train pushing a suitcase twice the size of hers.

  Good grief. Thick-lashed eyes. Snub nose. That mouth. The mouth it had taken him, admittedly in his callow youth, two years to banish from his mind. A face that seemed outlined with a dark crayon line of accent instead of the blur every other face seemed to hold.

  Fifteen years ago.

  Kelsie Summers.

&nbsp
; ‘Or perhaps you’d rather stand.’ Luckily that was under his breath because his grandmother’s eagle eye had spotted his reaction.

  Stunned blue eyes stared frozenly back at his. He saw the shudder in her fragile alabaster throat as she swallowed, and then her tongue peeped out. Yes, you damn well should lick your lips in consternation, he thought savagely, since you left me at the registry office, cooling my heels.

  He gestured to the seat beside his grandmother with all the reluctant invitation of a toddler giving away his last lollypop. Damn if he didn’t feel like sitting down again and turning his back.

  But that would be childish and he hadn’t indulged in such weakness for a long, long, time.

  But to meet her here... If he knew his grandmother, it would be the perfect diversion from the boredom that, despite her assurances, would ultimately descend on her before they reached London.

  They would meet again on the train.

  There must be a black cat filled with bad luck standing behind him. He almost turned to see.