by Dianne Drake
Michael cringed visibly, and this time the smile that spread to his face was genuine. “You can see why there aren’t so many people around here.”
The moment was gone. It was too late to try and discover something she had no right to discover. “Well, I think earplugs are a good remedy,” she said lightly, shaking off the building intensity and finally relaxing into the moment between them a little more. His motives seemed innocent enough, and she did understand how this was a good place to come if you were seeking solitude on a crowded ship—nice, dim room, secluded entryway making it easy to overlook, perfect low-key ambiance, comfortable booths arranged intimately so they gave the seeming appearance of aloneness. This one in particular, tucked in behind a column, was especially private, which was why she’d chosen it. For a moment it crossed her mind that this might be Dr Sloan’s regular booth for all the same reasons she had taken to it. “Or maybe he could do with an adenoidectomy.” Meaning the removal of the little piece of tissue located where the throat connected with the nasal passage. Often adenoids were the cause of nasal congestion, thick breathing or, in some cases, a nasal-sounding voice.
Michael shot her a curious look. “You know what an adenoidectomy is? I wouldn’t think that’s too common a term.”
Her comment had been too medical, especially when she was trying to hide from everything that connected her to medicine in any way. But sometimes it just slipped out. Natural instincts coming back to haunt her. Well, that was a mistake she wouldn’t repeat. “I don’t suppose it is common but a friend of mine had it done,” she lied. It had been a patient of hers, so in the longest stretch of the word maybe that hadn’t been a lie after all. “Opened up her nasal passages quite nicely, helped her stop talking through her nose, breathing easier….” Too medical again. “You know. Whatever goes along with that kind of surgery.” Sarah watched, out of the corner of her eye, to see if he believed her, which apparently he did because he turned his attention to the waitress who was on her way over to the table with a soda and a sandwich. She placed them on the table in front of him, bending much too close for anything other than what she had in mind, which had nothing to do with serving him food, practically slathering him with a come-hither smile. Of which he took no notice.
Most men, having it flaunted in their faces that way, would at least look, but Michael Sloan did not, which made Sarah wonder all the more about him.
Michael and the waitress chatted for a another moment about someone who worked in the business office—she still showing the same interest in him while he showed none in her—then when the waitress had decided that she was wasting her time she scampered away to wait on a another customer. That’s when Michael returned his attention to Sarah. “It’s like a little city here. Everybody knows everybody else’s business.”
Like the waitress who knew what Michael wanted even though he didn’t have to order it? Briefly, Sarah wondered how much business the waitress and Michael knew about each other, and if his lack of a show of interest in her had been for appearances only. She was young, blonde, built the way every good plastic surgeon wanted his surgical enhancements to turn out. Of course, he’d already denied involvements or, as he called them, complications. Still, a man like Michael…good-looking, smart… She wondered. “The same way it is in a hospital,” she said, trying to sound noncommittal.
“Do you work in a hospital?”
Damn. She’d slipped again, when she’d promised herself she’d be more careful. Twice inside two minutes. Something about him eased the tension right out of her, made her feel almost normal again, and she was going to have to be very careful around him. “No, but I like to watch those hospital shows on television. They’re very…realistic. Make you feel like you’re really there.” Ah, the lie of it all, but the look of mild amusement on his face told her he’d bought her rather impaired explanation.
He chuckled. “Real life wrapped up in an hour, minus time out for commercials, once a week. Everybody gets cured or killed at the end, don’t they? Or falls in love and lives happily ever after. Well, you are right about one thing. Gossip prevails in the hospital, too. Sometimes it can get so bad it’s like it takes on an existence of its own.”
“Which you can’t live without?” she asked.
“That might be putting it too strongly. Personally, I can live without it quite nicely, like I can live without a good cup of strong, black coffee if one’s not available to me. But for some people a little good gossip can start the day off with a bang, the way a good cup of coffee can.”
“If you indulge,” she said. Somehow, she didn’t see him as the type.
“Which I don’t. In the gossip, anyway. Can’t say that I’d turn down a good cup of coffee, though.”
She was glad he’d redeemed himself with that one because she didn’t want to picture Michael Sloan as petty in any way, and gossip could be so petty. Being the brunt of it herself over her break-up with Cameron Enderlein, she knew. “So why did you choose a cruise ship?” she asked, knowing she probably shouldn’t get that involved. But it seemed right to her. The mood between them was pleasant enough, his company nice. And she desperately missed companionship, not only in a personal way but in a medical one. It had been such a long time since she’d talked medicine with anybody, and while this wasn’t going to go into any medical depth, it seemed harmless enough on a superficial level. An encounter with someone from her own profession was stimulating. Then, after tonight, she’d get lost in the ship’s crowd, and he’d get busy in the ship’s hospital, and that would be that. So it didn’t matter. “Rather than a hospital or a clinic somewhere, why here?”
“It’s a good job,” he said, this time his voice the guarded one she’d already heard bits of before. “The facilities are excellent, patients are usually pretty nice, and I like the tropical islands. Oh, and the food is great.” He picked up his sandwich and took a bite of something that looked to be a huge Cubano—pork, vegetables, and a whole lot of other ingredients that added up to one large meal between two pieces of bread.
And one large avoidance, too, she thought as she picked at her salad, finally spearing a grape tomato. But what was it to her? If he didn’t want to tell her, she didn’t care. They weren’t friends, after all. They were barely acquaintances.
“So what kind of job do you do?” he asked, after he’d swallowed and taken a drink of his diet cola. “Wait…let me guess.” He leaned back in his seat, folded his arms across his chest and studied her for a moment.
Studied her so hard she blushed under his scrutiny. Good thing the lights in here were dim and he couldn’t see her reaction.
“I don’t take you to be a lady of leisure,” he said. “You’ve too much purpose in your eyes.”
If only he knew how wrong he was. She’d been nothing but a lady of leisure for the past year, and there was absolutely no purpose in her eyes. Maybe once, but not any more.
“Am I right?” he asked, when she didn’t respond to his first guess.
Rather than answering, she played his game and busied herself with her soup. If he could indulge himself in a little avoidance, so could she.
“So the lady isn’t going to answer. Which means I’ll have to take a wild guess. You’re too short to be a fashion model, you don’t eat with enough passion to be a chef, this is October, which is the middle of the school year so you’re not a schoolteacher, and you’re too pale to be a professional golfer.”
“A golfer?” She laughed over that one. “Where did you come up with that?”
“I’m a doctor. I saw your muscles when I examined you. Very nice, but not overly developed. I can picture you swinging a golf club.”
“I’ll just bet you can,” she said. “Sorry to disappoint you but I don’t have a golf swing and I don’t play golf. Never have.”
“Well, that narrows the field down, doesn’t it?”
“That ends the field, Doctor,” she said, scooting toward the other side of the booth. This was entirely too enjoyable, and it wo
uld have been easy to spend another hour or two here, chatting about nothing and enjoying everything about it. Which was why she had to leave.
“Call me Michael, please,” he said, not trying to stop her from leaving.
That surprised her a little. She’d expected a small protest from him, or maybe even an offer to walk her back to her cabin, which she might have taken him up on. But as she climbed out of her seat, he stood and offered a polite hand to her, then turned and signaled the waitress back over to refill his glass—both with the same insouciant effort. All casual, all impersonal, as was his goodnight to her.
“I want to see you in the morning for a finger stick,” he said. “I’ll be on duty at eight.”
She nodded, offered him a half-smile, and scooted out of the lounge to a popular song being mutilated by a short, round, bald-headed Elvis impersonator who sounded like he needed an adenoidectomy, too.
* * *
She slept in, avoiding the morning finger stick, and when, at nearly ten, she heard a knock on the cabin door, she assumed it was Michael, coming to do her blood work. But she was wrong. It was one of the ship’s medical technicians. Cheery smile, bright face, she was more than happy to poke Sarah’s finger. “It’s a little low,” Paulina Simpson said, showing the monitor to Sarah, who read the blood-sugar result at sixty-five. “You need to eat something,” Paulina continued, fishing some sort of breakfast bar out of her pocket. “Doctor Sloan told me to bring this along, that you’d probably need it.”
“Dr Sloan thinks of everything, doesn’t he?” Sarah said amiably.
“He’s a good doctor. Most of the docs come and go, work a few weeks here and there, but the cruise line likes Dr Sloan because he keeps coming back. He’s reliable. The patients trust him and he does an outstanding job.”
A bit of a crush from the med tech, too? Sarah wondered.
“And he’s received commendations from the cruise line,” the girl went on.
Well, so much praise on Michael’s account was all well and good, but that still didn’t put Sarah in the mood to deal with him. For what it was worth, she felt a little slighted, being passed off to a tech when she’d expected the doctor to come calling on her. “Well, tell Dr Sloan thank you for the breakfast bar, but that I’m doing fine on my own and I no longer require medical attention.”
Paulina arched a puzzled eyebrow, then nodded. “He said you’d say that, so he gave me this.” She handed over a slip of paper.
Sarah took a look at it, then handed it back. “Tell Dr Sloan I don’t need a diet guide, that I’m quite capable of eating what I need, when I need it. But I appreciate his concern.”
“He said you’d say that, too. So…” she pulled a small glucose monitor from her other pocket and handed it to Sarah “…he told me to give you this, so you can check yourself at any time. Although he would like to take a daily reading of his own, just to see how you’re doing.”
Apparently, there was no getting away from Dr Michael Sloan, even when he wasn’t present. If he went to all this fuss over a simple little case of hypoglycemia, she could only image how he’d react to a serious illness. Good doctor, she decided, adding her own silent praise to Paulina’s as she remembered the days when she’d been at least that persistent with her own patients. “Tell Dr Sloan thank you for the glu-cometer, and that I’ll use it. And that if he insists, I’ll allow him to do an occasional test, too.” She didn’t really need it, but who was she to interfere with a doctor doing his duty?
Too bad he was hiding away on a ship, she thought as she unwrapped the breakfast bar. The world needed good doctors like Michael. Of course, she was hiding away on a ship too, wasn’t she? And by most accounts she’d been a pretty good doctor herself.
It was turning into a long day, and the hospital was getting busy. Predictable conditions, the lot of them. Upset stomachs, seasickness, diabetic upheavals from people going wild over so much food available to them. People underestimated their stamina on a ship and he got to patch up the results. It was very different from general surgery, and sometimes he did long for the days when he’d spent his life in the operating theater.
But now… “Take two of these pills this afternoon, and two more before you go to bed. If you’re still nauseated in the morning, come back and see me and we’ll try something different.” He handed the bottle to the fifty-something woman, and watched her leave the examining room, her face a little less green than it had been when she’d come in. “And no seafood for a couple of days,” he called after her, remembering that this particular incident of gastric upset had come after a rather large consumption of lobster for lunch.
He couldn’t blame her, really. Cruises were all about overindulgence. Of course, there was Sarah, who wouldn’t indulge at all. He was willing to bet she hadn’t eaten a thing since her breakfast bar. She was a hard one to figure out. Last night, in the lounge, after she’d relaxed a little, she’d seemed like she had been enjoying his company. He’d certainly enjoyed hers. But just when things had finally slipped into a nice, casual mood, she’d upped and left him there. It wasn’t his place to ask her questions, but he was curious. He saw all kinds of people on the ship. Lonely widows and widowers, people getting over the break-up of a relationship, people pressed with tough life decisions running away for a while to think. And people who were simply on holiday. As for Sarah, well, he wasn’t sure where she fit in. Normally he was pretty good at telling, but he couldn’t get a reading on her. Other than the fact that he liked her, and something about her drew him in, he simply didn’t know.
One thing was certain, though. She didn’t want a personal relationship in her life as much as he didn’t want one in his. That alone made a shipboard friendship seem appealing. “Hello,” he said to his next patient, as he stepped into the examining room to have a look at a casualty of a volleyball game—a soft-looking fortyish man who didn’t exercise at home but who took the opportunity to start once he’d hit the high seas. “I understand you hurt your back? Maybe twisted an ankle, too?”
The man, who was sitting on the edge of the exam table with his bare, skinny legs sticking out from under the sheet draped over his lap, nodded, looking up from his bent-over position. “Guess I’m a little out of shape.” he admitted. “Haven’t played in a while.”
Michael wasn’t going to ask how long that translated into. Instead, he took a look, diagnosed a few strained and sprained muscles and sent the man off to the spa to spend the afternoon in a whirlpool. It wasn’t a precise medical therapy exactly, but why not give the man what he’d come for? Something he didn’t have in his real life.
So, after what seemed like an interminably long day of routine aches and pains, Michael signed the next watch over to the following doctor on duty, a competent general practitioner named Reese Allen, and headed for his quarters. His leg ached a little more than usual, although it shouldn’t, and it was time to get off it for a while. But as he walked down the corridor to his cabin, which was adjacent to the hospital, he changed his mind and caught the elevator up to the sundeck. He didn’t actually get outside much on these cruises, and right now he felt the urge for a little sun on his face. And he knew the perfect place. It was amidships, in a little tuck-away behind one of the bars that didn’t usually go into use until dark. There were a few deck chairs there, maybe three or four, and no one ever lounged there because there was no real view, unless you enjoyed looking at the back bar or the bottom side of the little rise holding the deck chairs with a perfect view of the pool. Good spot, he thought, heading off in that direction. Very good spot. He’d spend an hour, maybe two, go to the lounge and have Hector fix him a Cubano for supper, then…well, nothing came after that. He didn’t make plans, although the thought of a little time spent with Sarah Collins suddenly popped into his mind.
It was a wish that came true almost immediately as he rounded the corner to his little tuck-away and found her in one of the deck chairs. Just her. Nobody else was around. She was there, stretched out almost elegantly
in the chair, wearing a simple, one-piece black swimsuit that exposed beautiful long legs, even though they were pale. The black of the swimsuit complemented her black hair and the milky color of her skin was a startling, sexy contrast. Sarah had on black sunglasses, through which she was reading…he couldn’t tell what, for sure. It looked like a copy of the New England Journal of Medicine, but she snapped it shut and tucked it into her big straw bag the instant she saw him. It was probably a fashion magazine, he decided as he headed toward her. Or another of the women’s specialty magazines available from the ship’s store.
She tilted her head down and gave him a long, cool glance up and over the top of her dark glasses before she finally spoke. “So, you are spying on me.”
“I admitted it once, and I’m sticking to it.”
“Have you come to do a blood test? You’re so dedicated that you’ll chase your patients down no matter where they’re hiding?”
“I’d like to say yes but, unfortunately, I don’t have my medical equipment with me. I’m afraid I’m off duty right now, too.”
“Somehow, I doubt that you’re ever really off duty,” she said, that cool stare of hers continuing. It was cool, but not unfriendly. More like wary. “You strike me as one of those doctors who lives and breathes his work. Dedicated beyond reason. Otherwise why would you become a ship’s doctor? I don’t imagine you can ever really get away from it here, can you?”
