My Doctor Without Borders Read online

  Table of Contents

  Also by Lucy Johanson

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Afterword

  My Daredevil on the Mount

  My Doctor Without Borders

  Lucy Johanson

  Copyright © 2017 Lucy Johnson

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  www.lovelucyjohanson.com

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  www.lovelucyjohanson.com/newsletter

  Contents

  Also by Lucy Johanson

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Afterword

  My Daredevil on the Mount

  Also by Lucy Johanson

  Also by Lucy Johanson

  My Doctor Without Borders

  My Daredevil on the Mount

  My Stuntman on the Edge (released August 2017)

  1

  I looked at him again and, like every other time I’d allowed my eyes to stray down to his perfect abs, a tingle of excitement hit me and I made a conscious effort not to lick my lips. “Is that your real name, or is ‘Logan’ just what the surfer girls call you?”

  Embarrassed at my instinctive comment, I nearly apologized on the spot. It had been so long since I flirted with a gorgeous guy that I’d forgotten the subtle difference between being confidently cocky and just sounding arrogant.

  The blond surfer in front of me flashed me a smile, and I relaxed slightly as I realized I had not offended him to the point of chasing him away. “Logan is my real name, and as for the surfer girls, you mentioned … I don’t have much time for that kind of thing.”

  “Why not? Are you scared of girls in bikinis?” Slightly better, although still a bit passive aggressive, perhaps giving away that I’d grown so frustrated I was close to screaming out loud.

  “So are you gonna tell me your name, or are you gonna keep jabbing at me with that razor-sharp tongue?” His warm smile made me feel like his flirtatious advances would easily melt through the ice I’d allowed to settle around my heart if I gave him half a chance.

  “Jenny … Jenny Brady,” I said and held out a firm hand for him to shake, wondering if I sounded too formal by adding my surname.

  If only I could’ve stopped second-guessing myself, I might have enjoyed my first encounter with Logan Summers there on the golden beach of Arugam Bay, were I not so tangled up and with myself and out of sorts to enjoy the experience. Too rusty at this kind of thing to fully control the situation.

  As I stood there gawking at the blond hunk with the long, white surfboard under his arm, I fleetingly thought of the way it used to be before Tom. Which was part of the problem.

  I could classify my personal life as either before or after Tom, as the history of the world gets measured as before or after Christ. Before Tom (BT), I was a relatively happy, bright young girl with long, blonde hair and green eyes full of hope. After Tom (AT), I found myself hoping rather than living, chasing his approval—I even cut my hair short and dyed it brown so I could look more “like the kind of girl who would go out with a successful surgeon,” as Tom had so delicately put it.

  But I was way past Tom Delaney’s bullshit as I stood there, trying to regain some of my powers of seduction. I’d grown my hair long again and grown it out to its natural golden color, streaked through now with a dash of deeply unnatural red. I still wasn’t certain about the red addition, but if the stares and smiles I’d regularly been receiving since my arrival in Arugam Bay, Sri Lanka were anything to go by, my appearance must have been relatively easy on the eye.

  “You look like your mind is a million miles away,” Logan, said and I finally flashed him a smile.

  “Just thinking of some stuff,” I replied.

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “The kind that belongs in a giant trashcan.” This time, I couldn’t care if I came across bitchy.

  “Was he that much of a bastard?” Logan laughed, and a crazy little tingle shot down my spine again; he’d almost read my mind to realize what I was saying without me having to spell it out.

  Tom could wave his scalpel a couple of times and splendidly rearrange someone’s wrinkled face, but dear Lord, was he ever slow. You had to explain things to him all the time. Things every man should know, like the fact foreplay does not consist of dropping your trousers and saying, “How about it?”

  “You don’t want to know.” I decided to change the subject before I started sounding like one of those bitter females who forever judge each new man in her life for the sins of those who came before him.

  No pun intended.

  This was my opportunity of starting over and, if I have to be honest, the whole experience with Tom eventually helped me to grow up a little.

  I used to be something of a spoiled brat, a la Paris Hilton’s public persona, and now looked beyond myself and my need for fulfillment. After our engagement’s ugly end, I quit as a nurse at the plush hospital where Tom and I worked, signed up to realize an ambition Tom decried as “childish hipster nonsense.”

  But working for the Non-Governmental Organization called Doctors Without Borders was anything but childish. And as for hipster—well, I guess his imagination is his own business.

  Known throughout the world as Médicins Sans Frontières, the NGO offers large-scale medical assistance to disaster areas and places without sufficient facilities. My particular branch flocked to the survivors of the horrific 2004 tsunami disaster in the Pacific, and this rather noble pursuit had brought me to Arugam Bay on Sri Lanka’s east coast. Even though I worked for a fraction of my previous salary, for the first time in my life, I was making a positive difference in the world.

  The one thing I’d made crystal clear to my parents was that I wanted to stand on my own feet and not live off their financial gifts while I resided in Sri Lanka; living off a local wage made it real and guaranteed I wouldn’t succumb and turn it into some paid vacation. My dad understood fully, while my mother kept “accidentally” loading a thousand dollars here and two thousand dollars there into my personal bank account.

  “What brings you to this part of the world?” I asked, and immediately thought how stupid I must have sounded—a bit like some guy asking a pretty girl in a bar if she came there often.

  Before Logan could answer, some classical music struck up nearby, as if a hidden orchestra decided to juxtapose our conversation with some Mozart. I looked down and realized the
orchestral sounds were emanating from Logan’s swimming trunks, and before the surreal nature of it could totally overwhelm me, he reached into the side pocket and produced the waterproof cell phone case which blared the Mozart ringtone.

  I found myself admiring how he held on to his surfboard with one hand while answering his cellphone with the other.

  “Logan here … Absolutely. I’ll be there in five minutes.” He looked at me apologetically, his expression turned deeply serious, which made him, oddly, more attractive. “I’m sorry, I have to go … I’m sure we will see each other again.”

  About to make a witty remark regarding how some guys jump ten feet high whenever their wives phone and order them home, my brain was not as fast as Logan’s exit. Before I knew it, he’d turned around and departed. I didn’t manage to see where he disappeared to; I only glimpsed his heels as he made his way to the car park. For an insane second, I considered running after him and asking for his number, but caught myself before I could act like a lovesick puppy.

  Okay, I didn’t stop myself from running after him. I stood standing there like a zombie mutilated with a sawn-off shotgun. It could’ve been the sudden impact of his departure, or perhaps his easy conversation that sucked me into a semi-dream state. Whatever the cause, I felt as if I’d lost something urgent and I couldn’t move.

  2

  “Get a hold of yourself, girl. He’s nothing,” I told myself. “A surfer whose mommy called him home for lunch.”

  I finally moved from the spot where Logan first walked into my life. I looked around at my two friends, who I’d forgotten were with me. They were happily chatting away with some rather dapper-looking men in business suits, and I decided not to join them as they spent the remainder of the afternoon chatting up men at the Galaxy Lounge, Arugam Bay’s trendy beach bar. Brenda and Isabella were making good progress from the look of things, and I didn’t want to move in on their action.

  I waved at Isabella—or Bella, as we all called her—a lovely Spanish girl with dark, sensual looks, always in the company of Brenda, a redheaded English lassie from Manchester. Both flashed me bright smiles. The way they carried on, I sometimes wondered if the two of them had joined Médecins Sans Frontières just to find husbands. Why they thought Sri Lanka, specifically, would be the best place for this venture, I hadn’t quite figured out yet. Admittedly, I went out with them occasionally, and it always proved to be fun. Their carefree outlook on life proved a partial antidote to my Tom-hangover.

  I started walking back to the hotel, my home since arriving in Arugam Bay three months ago. It was a Saturday afternoon, and I wasn’t on duty, so I had the last of the day to myself. I considered walking over to Stacy’s room to hear of her plans for the evening, but I remembered she’d been rostered to work till late, a common last-minute change to the rota. Ours was a prefab hospital building, constructed on the fly by UN Peacekeepers a month after the wave smashed the previous one to splinters, tragically killing more than half the staff and three-quarters of the patients that day. We staffed it as best we could, trained new nurses and doctors, and worked long hours as required.

  Stacy became my new best friend soon after I arrived. She’s been in country a month longer than me, and it was no understatement to say she was the best thing that could have happened to me at this stage. Fun verging on crazy, and so incredibly voluptuous and sensual, I felt completely safe when I went out with her. She severed as a lightning rod that caught all the attention, deflecting the drunken affections of locals and rubber-necking disaster tourists when it got late. Perhaps Stacy shone a bit too brightly for Brenda and Bella’s liking, though, and for this reason, they did not often stick around when I hung out with Stacy.

  Ultimately, Stacy didn’t seem affected by men and their crap, at least not the way I used to be, and some of her joy must finally be rubbing off on me.

  Walking toward the hotel, I thought about some of the things Tom had said to me while we were together and suddenly discovered I was comparing him to Logan and my short conversation with the blond surfer boy. I consciously decided to banish all thoughts of the man and his abs (and pecs, and how his hair appeared salon-crafted as he strode, glistening, out of the ocean) from my mind forever. Better to start over and build a steady foundation before I ever got involved with a man again.

  Tom had never physically abused me, but he had a subtle way of making me believe I wasn’t quite good enough for the life he tried to lead, and probably never would be. “Do you like the way you look in that dress?” or “Why did you say something that silly at dinner?” After a while, I lost the ability to act spontaneously and found myself carefully censuring every thought and sentence before saying a word in Tom’s presence. It never struck me that Tom was a boring old fart so intimidated by his peers that he sweated his ass off trying to please them in every way possible, including the manner in which his date acted.

  The last straw came when Tom got drunk at the year-end Christmas party and kissed one of the new nurses in the hospital lobby. It wasn’t so much that him kissing her that got to me; God knows he’d done it so often before that I’d already memorized his standard explanation and promise: “Heat of the moment, darling. I’m under so much stress I just forgot myself.” And he’d follow it with the evergreen classic of teenagers-who-never-grew-up the world over: “It won’t happen again, I swear.”

  It was her long, blonde hair that snapped for me. Tom had found her attractive, despite her lacking the boring brown haircut “like the kind of girl who would go out with a successful surgeon.” It struck me like a sledgehammer that Tom Delaney had been breaking me down and destroying my sparkle so I could be more like him—dull, gray and boring.

  “I would prefer it if you calmed down and discussed this with me like a grown woman,” Tom had said as I took off his engagement ring and flung it through the open window.

  “And I’d prefer it, my dear Doctor Delaney if you would go eat some shit and cheerfully choke on it!” I shouted and marched out of the Christmas party while Tom’s shocked colleagues watched in stunned silence.

  I got into my car and drove off at pace, window down, my practical brown hair flapping all around, filled with a sense of heading to a place infinitely brighter and lighter than my penthouse flat in Manhattan. I was a prisoner set free again after four long years of subtle caging at the hands of a so-called brilliant doctor who barely acknowledged women could also experience orgasms.

  We still saw each other, of course. Tom acted all dismissive when he heard I planned to join Doctors Without Borders—a parent waving off the notions of a child’s invisible friend. Another nurse told me later he’d remarked, “A spoiled rich girl like Jenny won’t last a week in that godforsaken place.”

  That settled it for me. I would go, come hell or high water … then chided myself for such an insensitive thought. For what was a tsunami but hell through high water? And my decision was not just down to Tom. I wanted to help those who needed it most.

  My hotel—temporary accommodation for many nurses in the town—required a short trek up a steep embankment which separated it from the beach. A five-minute walk from the hospital itself, I’d almost come to think of it as “home.”

  Compared to the impressive private hospital where I’d worked in New York, the hospital was a humble building. But something in the way the doctors and other nurses there treated me made me feel good, like they fully accepted me despite being clearly overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the task at hand.

  I went up to my room and took out a romance novel to read for the evening. I quite enjoyed the new reading habit I’d developed since my arrival here and flipped open the book to the place I’d bookmarked with a birthday card my mother had recently sent me. The card featured a picture of a muscular hunk on the front; his sexy, naked bottom pointed at the face of whoever was lucky enough to open the card. You couldn’t see the naked guy’s face, but with a body like that, it didn’t matter. I smiled and shook my head at how naughty and playful my m
other still behaved for a woman her age and secretly hoped I would always remain as young at heart as she had for all these years.

  3

  The foyer of the hospital descended into a screaming frenzy of injured children and panicked adults. A makeshift school, constructed since the tsunami crushed most of Sri Lanka’s east coast educational infrastructure, had collapsed in the middle of a class, and several children had sustained mild injuries. An objective bystander might comment that everyone overreacted to what happened, as the children were not seriously injured. But this was only seven months after the tsunami hit and any sign of natural or human-made disaster amplified the incident in the minds of the locals, who were still suffering the mental aftermath of the killer wave which changed their lives forever.

  “Nurse, can you please get me another roll of bandages from the store room?” the assigned doctor asked, and squeezed my hand briefly to stress the urgency of the situation.

  “Sure, I’ll be right back.” I rushed off to the store room at the end of the corridor. I found what I was looking for and grabbed several rolls of sanitized bandages to take to the doctor in the foyer.

  As I walked briskly back along the corridor, I brushed against a tall, blond male nurse, and for a fleeting moment, he looked exactly like Logan, the surfer I’d met on the beach.

  I have to stop thinking about that guy.

  I walked straight ahead without looking back at the male nurse, and the doctor gratefully accepted the bandages and started wrapping some of them around the leg of a young boy, the patient crying and screaming at the top of his little voice. The painkillers the staff administered were unable to help him with the sheer panic of believing his world caved in around him. Again.