Steve stood in the doorway. Okay, so he’d assumed she’d be a very attractive woman with her hair waving softly around her face, but this attractive? She was smiling, saying something, but all he could do was stand and gawp.
Fortunately for his peace of mind she disappeared back into her room, returning seconds later with her hair neatly restrained, though this time more casually in a low ponytail at the base of her skull, one tail of the scarf that held it dangling forward over her white shirt, drawing his attention to—
No, his attention wasn’t going there.
‘I’ll show you our set-up,’ he said, aware his voice sounded rough. And why wouldn’t it because his mouth, for surely the first time in his life, had gone dry.
But his pride in the little clinic diverted his mind away from Fran as a very attractive woman—or almost diverted it—while he showed her around the rooms.
‘It’s very well set out, and far more complex than I’d imagined. You spoke about the couple who came to you in Sydney for IVF, and wanting to have something here, but this is impressive—it’s got everything you need, just on a smaller scale.’
‘I wanted to set up a place where couples can come and have their infertility investigated right from the start,’ he explained. ‘I can’t help feeling people are sometimes prey to exploitation. As you know, the most common cause of women not ovulating is PCO, and polycystic ovary syndrome can be treated with drugs. I believe, before IVF is even mentioned, ethical specialists must determine the underlying cause of the problem, and if possible treat it.’
Fran gave a little shake of her head. These were thoughts she’d had herself. Not that any of the specialists she’d seen had been unethical, but it had often seemed to her that they rushed towards IVF as an answer without considering alternatives.
‘I imagine drugs like clomiphene are a case in point,’ she said, seeing the way his mind worked. ‘With very little in the way of side-effects they can encourage the production of follicle-stimulating hormone, so the ovaries are better able to produce follicles. That in itself can lead to a previously infertile couple conceiving.’
‘Or, unfortunately, it could sometimes lead to cysts in the ovaries, which means the patient needs to be checked regularly. That’s why we employ a full-time O and G specialist who works at the hospital as well as here at the clinic. We want to be able to take a patient right through any treatment available, even Fallopian tube repairs, before resorting to IVF.’
‘So you need a specialist on the ground, so to speak?’ Fran said, following the conversation with increasing interest.
‘Exactly! He does regular obstetric and gynae work at the hospital but he’s also available for all the preliminary IVF checks and organises the counselling all couples need, as well as supervising the weeks of injections for any woman who will be using IVF.’
‘Wow!’ Fran muttered, unable to believe so much was happening from this small, run-down-looking building.
She looked again at the scruffily dressed man, and shook her head.
‘Did you achieve all of this on your own?’ she asked, and he smiled at her.
The smile surprised her. She’d seen versions of it before and thought it a nice smile, but this one set his whole face alight, shining in his dark eyes and wrinkling his cheeks with the width of his grin.
‘Not quite,’ he admitted. ‘The partners back at my clinic in Sydney have given a lot in that they cover for me two or three times a year when I’m over here, and various patients I’ve had have talked to me about what they’d like in a clinic.’
She nodded, knowing exactly what she’d have liked in the places she’d seen so much of, but Steve was still talking.
‘Then there are the people here. They are laid-back, casual and very family-oriented so something like an inability to have a child can cause them tremendous pain. I knew I had to set things up to make it as relaxed as possible for them. After all, they are the prime concern.’
‘And you fund it all yourself?’
The question was out before she realised how rude it was.
Not that it appeared to bother him—he just ignored it.
‘And here’s the laboratory, such as it is,’ Steve announced,
He’d left it until last, hoping she’d want to stay on and have a look around, check out where things were kept and see from the case notes, both written and on the computer, how things were done. Then he could go back to their quarters and, no, he refused to consider the cliché of a cold shower, but he could get away from her for a while and regroup.
Work out why this unlikely attraction was happening.
Attraction should be something that grew as you got to know someone—grew out of liking and respect...
Forget attraction, getting rid of the fish smell and doing something about the stubble on his chin were far more important issues right now.
Oh, and catching up with Alex to find out whether their new equipment had arrived...
But still he looked at Fran, bent over the boxes of coloured tags she’d pulled from one of the cupboards. She poked around in the contents for a while, then glanced up at him and smiled.
So much for his thoughts on attraction...
‘You’ll probably laugh at me,’ she was saying, ‘but I brought a whole heap of these things with me in my luggage, thinking maybe you wouldn’t have the ones I’ve always used, but someone whose mind runs along the same lines as mine does has set up a basic identification system.’
‘That someone was me.’
She looked surprised, and, probably because he was already off balance with the attraction business, he spoke more sharply than he need have.
‘Lab staff aren’t the only ones afraid of making a mistake, of giving a woman someone else’s embryo. It’s always in the back of my mind, even in the clinic back home where everything is computerised to the nth degree and ID is made with bar codes.’
Now she was taken aback, frowning at him.
‘Of course you must worry, it’s everyone’s biggest concern, but usually it’s left to the lab staff to make sure mistakes don’t happen.’ She grinned at him, defusing his mild annoyance but aggravating the attraction. ‘It’s certainly the lab staff who get blamed when things go wrong.’
She lifted a red wristband, a red marking pen, a roll of red plastic tape and a card of small red spots.
‘How many patients are you expecting? I know you said earlier, but I can’t recall the number,’ she said. ‘I’ll make up packs of what we need for each of them—that way I won’t be fishing in boxes later and will be less likely to make a mistake.’
She was here to work and she was making that abundantly clear, which was good as he could forget all the weirdness he’d been experiencing and get on with his job.
‘Five, or maybe six,’ he told her. ‘I’ve just heard that there’s one couple we’re not sure about. Apparently it took longer than expected to shut down her ovaries and then to begin the stimulation so she may not be ovulating yet.’
‘But surely she would be before we leave?’ Francesca asked, the slight frown he was beginning to recognise as one of concern puckering her forehead.
‘Yes, and although I do have other volunteers come out here to work, we like to have the same team on hand for the whole cycle of taking the eggs through to implantation, then confirmation of pregnancy.’
‘Or confirmation that it didn’t work that time,’ Fran said, remembering her three thwarted attempts.
‘That too,’ Steve said, his voice sombre. ‘It’s