Rita Cruz was coming along fine and didn’t require much extra attention, so while she gave him an exhaustive report on the last weekend’s fiesta feast she and her sisters had cooked up, Mitch could wash up from his exam letting his mind drift back to his ex-wife, waiting only a few feet away. Just thinking about her made his adrenalin surge and his heart beat a little faster. He’d felt that way about her from the first and the months apart had only made him crazier about her. If he could just get her in his bed one more time, he might have a chance…
But that was where he was really crazy, and he knew it. The problems between them had never had anything to do with their lovemaking. Life style choices, jealousies, relatives—those were what had driven them apart. And the one big one—the fact that he had an overpowering need to do the kind of work he’d trained all his life for, and to do it in places like this—that was what stood between them like an iron gate with a missing key. If he could just find a way to make her love it here like he did—if he could just find that key.
“So everything’s okay?” Rita asked him.
“That little boy is good as gold,” Mitch told her. “Come on out into my office once you’re dressed and I’ll go over some nutrition information for you.”
“You bet,” she said, looking pleased. “Did I tell you? We gonna name him after you. We gonna name him Mitch.”
“Rita!” He placed his hand over his heart, truly touched. “I’m honored.”
She nodded happily. “You gonna be his godfather, huh? You’ll be like one of the family.”
Mitch laughed. He’d known that was coming. And he also knew he was facing a lifetime of expectations for cash in an envelope at every birthday and lots of other miscellaneous holidays. But he didn’t mind. That was what it was like being the doctor in a place like this. And this was how he became a part of the community. It all came together like a big island quilt.
But his smile faded. Somehow he didn’t think he could get Heather to see it that way. She’d never been into quilting. And she didn’t seem ready to start learning how now.
Chapter Two
Heather left the examining room and sank down on the low couch in the waiting room, her mind racing but going nowhere. How had she let this happen? She felt as though she’d been mowed down by something very large and enervating. Her bones had turned to rubber and she didn’t trust her brain at all. Was her confusion caused only by the horrible muggy heat of this place, or did Mitch have something to do with it?
She stared down at her feet, annoyed with herself. She’d left her shoes, as well as her large traveling purse, in the examining room. She was a prisoner here, waiting for Mitch to decide what to do with her. She’d been defeated before she’d even had a chance to put up a real fight. The situation was impossible!
“Well, well, what have we here?” said a deep masculine voice.
Slowly, as though still in shock, she turned to see who was filling the sunny doorway. The man was tall and slender with the athletic build of a long-distance runner, but she couldn’t make out the features of his face because of the sun that sprayed around him.
“Just passing through,” she muttered with undisguised displeasure.
He walked into the room and raised his eyebrows at her unshod feet. “Barefooted? Are you on a pilgrimage or what?”
She could see him plainly now. He was good looking in a rakish manner, and he was staring at her in much the same way the wolf must have gazed at Little Red Riding Hood when he first met her in the woods.
“You might call it that.” Suddenly she saw the humor in her situation. “A journey of penance is more like it.”
He was grinning down at her, and she found herself smiling back. His hair was the brown of autumn leaves, cut short and neat. He wore a light cotton shirt and linen slacks, but he had the look of a man in starched oxford collars, and she felt herself warming to him.
“Did you come to see the good doctor?” she asked, trying to keep any trace of sarcasm from her voice.
He laughed softly. “I am the good doctor. Did you come to see me?”
He sounded very hopeful, but she frowned. “But Mitch...”
“Mitch and I are partners in this clinic,” he told her suavely. “Partners in exile.” His hazel eyes began a detailed exploration of her person, and she watched with interest, surprised by his revelation.
“Somehow you don’t look like the average beachcomber we get washed up on these shores,” he said musingly. “A traveling saleswoman, perhaps? Hawking the latest in clinical analyzers? Forced-air heating furnaces? Frozen dinners for tropic climes?”
She grinned. “Wrong. I’m merely a visitor.”
He cocked his head curiously. “Visiting my good buddy, are you?”
She nodded. “I have some business with Mitch.”
“Business.” He nodded wisely, his eyes gleaming. “My name is Kevin Meeks.” He held out a hand and shook the one she offered. “Don’t tell me, let me guess. Susan? Allison?”
“No.” She laughed. “Heather.”
He nodded as though satisfied. “A name that belongs in cooler climes than these hot trades.” He looked at her speculatively. “Let me buy you a drink, Heather. You must need something bracing by now.”
The prospect was enticing. Something cool in a tall glass that clinked with ice cubes.
“Where does one find a drink on this island?” she asked hopefully. Even something wet without ice cubes would do at this point.
“The Coconut Club. Only a few hundred yards away. Ragonai’s finest.” He grimaced. “Not to mention only.”
“I can’t go.” Ruefully she wiggled her naked pink-tipped toes. “I don’t have my shoes.”
He cleared his throat tactfully. “I didn’t want to bring it up again if the subject was painful to you... but just what did happen to those essential items of your wardrobe?”
She gestured toward the closed door. “I left them in the examining room. Mitch was patching up my knee and a pregnant woman—maybe you know her, Rita Cruz?— came in, and I left in kind of a hurry, and—“
“Say no more.” He held up a hand to stop her. “I understand perfectly. Mitch always does manage to knock the socks off members of the female population.”
She meant to gasp with indignation, but it turned into a gurgle of laughter instead. “You’re an impossible person,” she told him with mock severity. “But then, you know that, don’t you?”
He bowed to her with a flourish. “I do my best.”
She sighed. “I only wish I could join you at the Coconut Club. But without shoes...”
Before she knew what was happening, he had one arm under her knees and another at her back and was lifting her free of the couch.
“Never fear,” he told her stoutly. “I don’t even charge for the carrying service.”
She held on for her life. “But I can’t go into a bar barefoot!”
“I’ll get you past the guard. And the health inspector hasn’t been by for a decade or so. I think we can risk it.”
The adventure was irresistible and the temptation of a cool drink overwhelming. Besides, she would do just about anything to avoid having Mitch walk into the room to find her awaiting his next command.
“Let’s go,” she told Kevin gaily.
Once out on the coral road she felt like a fool, but there was no one around to witness this strange march, and she soon forgot to be embarrassed. For the first time she had the leisure to take a look at the island.
Godforsaken, she had called it earlier. Unpaved roads, houses made of tin and scraps of wood, yellow dogs skulking about: It had all of that.
But it also had palm trees bending gracefully from the tropic winds. It had turquoise lagoons and white water reefs, lush green foliage and white sand beaches. Paradise, some might have called it. Those who liked this sort of thing.
“I really could walk,” she murmured to Kevin.
“And trust those little feet to the sharp coral rocks?” he scoffed.
“Not on your life.”
His hold on her was just right: tight enough to make her feel secure, casual enough so that she didn’t feel threatened. She could smell his minty after-shave, but he took no seductive liberties.
He began to mount a set of wooden steps, and she turned to look at the building they were entering. The Coconut Club was the most substantial structure she’d seen on the island. A two-story plantation house, it had a wide veranda ideal for lazy afternoons and tall frosty drinks.
“Here we are.” He set her down beside a rattan table on the porch.
“Ah, Mele,” he said as a plump middle-aged woman dressed in a muumuu with a large flower pattern came out through swinging double doors to greet them. “Meet Heather, a thirsty newcomer to our cozy little island.”
Mele grinned while Heather self-consciously tried to hide her bare feet under the flimsy table. “You must have come in on that plane a while ago,” Mele said, nodding cordially. She was a tall woman, and her black hair was streaked with silver and pulled back in a tight bun at her neck. A long necklace of shells hung low across her bosom and clattered like a flock of tiny silica birds.
“I know you can’t be thirsty, Dr. Meeks,” she said in the tone of a stern mother hen, “since you already been over here twice since lunch. But I’ll get you something, Heather. Just name it.”
“Mele is from Hawaii,” Kevin continued, disregarding the woman’s dig. “She knows how to concoct every tropic brew you ever heard of. You throw out a name and she’ll whip it up in her magic blender.”
“Iced tea?” Heather asked hopefully, then bit her lip as they both glared at her.
“Give her your passion fruit cocktail.” Kevin growled.
“With iced tea on the side,” Heather called out after Mele, who turned to march back into her bar. “No sugar, please. Just a twist of lemon.”
Kevin threw Heather a look of pure disgust, then settled his long lean body back in his chair. “So what are you doing on Ragonai, Heather?” he asked curiously.
There was no point in beating around the bush. “Trying to get a plane out of here,” she returned firmly. Let him think what he would.
To her surprise, he laughed. “You and me both. But planes and boats are hard to find when you live at the primitive edge of the Pacific.”
“There must be something.” She leaned forward eagerly. “I have money with me. That Gary Smith, who flew me in this afternoon, was supposed to wait and take me back to the Marianas, but he got another load while my back was turned and took off without me.”
Kevin nodded, grinning. “Sounds like our boy. Quite a sense of greed, if not of morality. Greed characterizes a lot of us out here in the islands.”
It sounds like a great place, she thought with a touch of sarcasm. She could hardly wait to take off and see it below her, a lovely crescent of black volcanics, pink coral, and green jungle, just as it had appeared when she’d landed a few hours ago. It had been beautiful then, but it was fast losing its appeal.
“You must know someone else with a plane.”
He shook his head. “Not anyone who likes to make the run all the way out here. You see, Ragonai lies between the Marianas and the Palauan islands. It’s not on anyone’s beaten path. That’s what makes it such a good detention colony.”
She looked at him blankly. “Detention colony?” she repeated.
“You’ve heard of Elba? Alcatraz? Ragonai should join that list. It’s a prison, too.” His easy chuckle belied the bitterness of his words. “Only figuratively. But it does seem that once one is exiled here, it’s damn hard to get away.”
Exiled. Was that what Mitch considered it? He’d left Arizona for Ragonai of his own free will, but hadn’t he gone because he couldn’t make it in the States, because he wouldn’t conform? And if that was the case, would he ever be able to leave?
“Why did you come if you hate it?” she asked Kevin bluntly.
“You gotta be kiddin’,” Mele said heartily as she burst through the swinging doors and placed drinks before them. Heather noticed that Kevin’s was a Scotch on the rocks without him having said a word, while she was handed one stark serving of iced tea and a parfait glass of a frosted fruit drink enhanced by two colorful straws and a thick slice of pineapple.
“This guy,” Mele informed her dramatically, “wore out his welcome in every other port in the world. He’s got no place else to go.”
Heather smiled in response to her good-natured teasing. “And what happens when he wears out his welcome here?”
Mele’s black eyes sparkled. “Don’t you know, honey? No one gets thrown out of Ragonai. We’ll take in the dregs of the Pacific. We already have.”
She walked off chuckling while Kevin stared morosely after her. Heather took a sip of the passion fruit cocktail.
It was good in its way, but very foreign to her taste. She reached for the iced tea to quench her thirst.
The music drifting out of the bar was solidly country western. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen your sweet, purty face...”
“The jukebox,” Kevin informed her as he noted her interest, “has a selection of twelve country songs. The same twelve country songs it’s had for every one of the fifteen months I’ve been here. For all I know, the selection hasn’t been changed since the Marines wrenched control of the island from the Japanese in 1945.”
She smiled. “Is that what attracts you to this place? Old music?”
The groan came from deep in his chest. “Heather dear, there is no place else to go on this entire island. This is it.”
“Is this the only village?”
“Oh, no. There are seven villages scattered all around the island. But this is the main one, Ragonai Village, the island capital. This is where everyone congregates on long hot evenings. This is where we all get together to gossip and fight and make life as miserable as we can for each other.”
“Who is ‘everyone’?” she asked idly, not really interested but willing to let him talk. After all, she would be leaving soon. The ins and outs of Ragonai society would have little bearing on her life.
She watched him as he told her about the beachcombers, local natives, retired businessmen from Peoria, homesick Peace Corps workers, and would-be entrepreneurs who inhabited the island and showed up to mix and mingle every night at Mele’s Coconut Club. He made each character come alive for her: he made her laugh. But most vivid of all was the personality of the man beside her. His interest in everyone he spoke about impressed her. She decided she liked him very much.
“Half of us are victims of tropic languor,” he told her, “and the other half are dying from civilization starvation.”
She shook her head. “If it’s so horrible, why don’t you just leave?”
His hazel eyes looked at her long and hard, as though he were trying to decide whether or not to confide in her. At last he leaned toward her across the bamboo table.
“What Mele said was apochryphal, but it had a certain kernel of truth. I’m not here by choice. I got kicked out of three medical schools before I completed my studies, and my father had to buy me an internship. Even then I made some bad mistakes, did a bit too much fast living.” He shrugged. “Ragonai has trouble keeping medical support. My father has contacts in the Trust Territory and he heard they were desperate here.” He chuckled. “Must have been really desperate to take me on. But they didn’t have anyone else. Once a week a doctor flew in from the Carolines for a few hours, that was all. I worked my tail off at first. Then Mitch showed up. I was never so glad to see someone in my life.”
“Did he apply through the Trust Territory, too?”
“No, not Mitch. He doesn’t do anything through channels.”
Heather nodded, knowing only too well Mitch’s maddening nonconformist nature.
“Mitch arrived on Gary Smith’s seaplane with Dede Sablan when she came back home. I welcomed him with open arms, and he got right to work. The powers that be grumbled a bit, but they finally smoothed things over
and put him on the payroll.”
Heather shook her head wonderingly. “What would he have done if they hadn’t?”
Kevin shrugged. “Worked for free, I guess. Or found himself some other island. I can’t imagine him working in a normal hospital environment, can you? He doesn’t have the patience for it.” He grimaced at his pun, then went on reflectively. “This place is pretty much my last chance. I’d like to be able to go back to Boston and show my father that I’d actually succeeded at something for a change, that all he’s done for me hasn’t been so much chaff in the wind.”
Heather was touched by the earnest light in his hazel eyes. Without thinking, she reached out and covered his large hand with her own. “You’re doing just that, aren’t you?” she asked. “If you’ve been here for fifteen months...”
He took her hand in both of his, but when she looked into his eyes, she found them haunted with anxiety. “I could’ve done better,” he said gruffly, and she leaned toward him in sympathy.
“We can only do our best in any case,” she began, but whatever bracing little speech she’d been prepared to deliver never left her lips. Mitch appeared suddenly carrying her shoes and purse.
“I see you’ve met my partner.” He’d walked up without either of them noticing, and Heather jumped at the sound of his rich low voice. He dropped her things on the floor beside her chair. “I’m glad you two get along so well.”
His hard black gaze didn’t indicate pleasure at all, but Heather clung to Kevin’s hands in defiance.
“Yes,” she said, smiling sweetly, “we’ve really hit it off.”
Kevin looked curiously from one to the other, then slowly disentangled himself from her grip as Mitch took a chair on the opposite side of the table.
Mitch had removed his white coat, and the sky blue shirt he wore was crisp cotton open at the neck. Heather noted how tan he looked against the misty light color, how very fit and smooth. Had the black hair on his arms always stood so stiffly from his mahogany skin? She wanted to reach out and smooth it down, but she clenched her fingers into fists and suppressed the urge.
Charmed By You ((Destiny Bay Romances-The Islanders 5)) Page 3
