Yet now, only three days later, and watching the woman agitatedly shift her weight from one foot to the other before finally taking her leave from the other women, he realised that his intentions towards Flávia Maura were far from strictly professional.
This he admitted as he strode forward and cut a slick path through the crowd to Isabella Sanchez—the woman running the gala evening’s slick operation.
* * *
Three more nights, Flávia Maura chanted silently to herself as she took her leave from her colleagues, Doctors Krysta Simpson and Amy Woodell, and edged her way through the crowded ballroom with something approaching relief.
Three more nights of awkward social hospital events and then she could be out of the city and back to the rainforest, where she felt most at home.
It wasn’t that she didn’t like Krysta or Amy—far from it. She admired both women, who were incredibly accomplished in their careers and who seemed as kind as they were successful. She’d simply never been very good with crowds.
Animals were fine, but people...? Not so much. In fact, not only had her six-and nine-year-old nieces spent the previous weekend trying to give her a crash course in superficial conversation, but their mother—her own sister—had spent two hours this afternoon primping and preening her like some fun pet project.
Typical bossy Maria, Flávia thought fondly even as she anxiously tried to keep her balance in the unfamiliar skyscraper heels, and smoothed down her long gown. Her sister had practically bullied her into this dress tonight, and although it would undoubtedly look sleek and sophisticated on any other woman, it was all such a far cry from her usual uniform of trusty hiking boots and sensible, light grey cargo pants with a black tee that she felt like she might as well have been wearing little more than a scantily clad, samba carnival dancer.
Either that or like a little girl trying on her mother’s clothes and high heels and lipstick, as her nieces had taken to doing with Maria’s clothes. Flávia grinned to herself at the image of them playing princesses, even as an uncharacteristically melancholic pang shot through her. She loved the two little girls with all her heart, but sometimes—just occasionally—their lives reminded her of all that she and Maria had missed in their own childhoods. Not least the fact that their own mother had never stuck around long enough to give the sisters time to grow up and start to play dress-up in her clothes.
No. Their beloved papai, Eduardo, had raised them single-handedly, usually under the canopy of the Amazon or Atlantic rainforests, with explorer clothes instead of princess gowns, and animals for company rather than people. And Flávia had never regretted a moment of it.
Except when it came to taking life lessons from her nieces and then walking in on her sister stuffing condoms into her purse just before the taxi had arrived this evening, with an encoura
ging, If you meet a cute doctor, why not try having a little fun for once in your life, Livvy?
But she didn’t want to have a little fun. She was here because her boss demanded it, not because she had any desire to be; the sooner the night was over, the better.
She’d take a deadly bushmaster viper, a Brazilian wandering spider or a poison dart frog over trying to make conversation with a normal human being any day of the week. So between the hospital’s packed social calendars, it was proving to be a particularly tense week.
Still moving—or rather, teetering—Flávia desperately scanned the ballroom, telling herself that she didn’t need an escape route but searching for one all the same. Before her eyes alighted on the doors at the far end and a sense of consolation poured through her.
The botanical gardens were quite busy during the day, but at this time of evening they would probably be closed. If she could sneak in, it would give her a much-needed chance to regroup, and to quell the unfamiliar sensation of champagne bubbles up her nose from the glass she’d been trying to drink for the past hour.
She turned direction sharply, almost straight into one of her least favourite surgeons.
‘The hospital should be more careful of their reputation,’ the condescending tones of Dr Silvio Delgado—clearly pitched to be heard by as many luminaries as possible, as though by denigrating everyone else he somehow elevated himself—reached her ears. ‘First they hire the crazy selvagem woman, then the gigolo, and to add insult to injury, they then bring some frump in to lecture. This one looks like a street person.’
A better person, a stronger person, would have carried on walking, not letting that interminably pompous man get under their skin. But Flávia froze, shame momentarily rendering her immobile before eventually allowing her to twist herself around uncomfortably, a scowl pulling her features taut despite her best efforts not to react.
Selvagem—jungle woman.
It wasn’t the term itself—she’d been called selvagem plenty of times and it didn’t usually bother her—so much as the utter contempt in this particular man’s tone. The pejorative way he spat out the word—selvagem—as if she was as feral as the animals found in the rainforest. Or was that just because Delgado had said as much to her face, many times in the past?
Perhaps that was why Flávia tried telling herself it was the fact that he was also insulting a new colleague—a visitor to Paulista’s—which rattled her most.
Frump.
As though what Krysta wore mattered more than the fact that the woman was a focused, driven individual, already a leader in the combined fields of otolaryngology and facial reconstruction.
Flávia felt as though she ought to say something. She wished she could. Then again, what was to be gained from drawing attention to something half the crowd mercifully hadn’t understood, anyway, given that Delgado had spoken in Portuguese? Anyway, he’d only laugh her off, and she would probably let him.
All the more reason to get to the gardens and be alone.
Flávia gritted her teeth and gingerly lifted her foot, hoping she wasn’t about to do something as stupid as catching the heel in the hem.
‘Is that guy always such an abhorrent boor?’
Perhaps it was the clear-cut English accent which gave away the fact that the speaker was Dr Jacob Cooper. Or it could have been the rich, utterly masculine timbre, suggesting a barely restrained dynamism. Or maybe it was the fact that she remembered that voice only too well. It had featured in her pitiful dreams several times over the past eight months—and in those it wasn’t just asking that one question after her lecture.
Whatever the truth, sensations skittered this way and that, like interlopers, inside Flávia’s chest. The mere sound of his voice ignited every inch of her nerve endings, leaving her feeling as though her entire body was...itching. On fire.