LITMIR.BIZ

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Her shells. Her mornings on the beach. Three glorious days of paradise and now it was all over. She couldn’t go back there.

      Maybe it was time to call her father, apologize for leaving, and go back to doing what she was good at. Which wasn’t saving lives. Dr Susan Ridgeway Cantwell was nothing if not pragmatic. She knew where her true value existed, and it wasn’t languishing in a bed in an island clinic, talking on and on about nothing to the most positively gorgeous man she’d ever seen in her life.

      Susan glanced down at Grant’s toes again, of all things, and a rush of giddiness overtook her. Fatigue from emotional letdown, most likely. “Are you on duty right now?” she asked. One of her doctors would be reprimanded, or even dismissed, for dressing that way. For exposing toes.

      “Twenty-four seven, at your service,” he said, pushing himself off the window-ledge and sweeping into a courtly bow. “Like I said, we have a number of part-timers coming and going, but I’m the one and only full-time doc here.”

      “And they allow you to work dressed the way you are?”

      He bent to look down himself, as if he hadn’t been aware of the way he was dressed. Then he shrugged. “Island casual. That’s the way we are around here. Patients are comfortable with it. Much more so than they would be with something more traditional—dress slacks, white shirt, tie, white lab coat.” He faked a cringe. “What’s good for my patients is good for me, too, actually.”

      She was good with it, too. At least, here on the island. She wouldn’t have minded staying around for a while so she could watch a little more of Dr Makela’s island-casual medicine, but she couldn’t. Perhaps, in a way, that resuscitation attempt had answered some of her questions and made her decision for her. Where and how she worked now, making practical business decisions and never being called on to do CPR…maybe that’s where she belonged. Maybe all her crazy feelings lately, about wanting to leave her admin duties and try patient care, were just that. Crazy.

      “Look, I appreciate your helping me. What happened out there on the beach… Like I told you, I haven’t been involved in patient care in a very long time and it got to me. I shouldn’t have involved myself and maybe if I hadn’t, someone else… you…could have had a better outcome. But I want to thank you for helping me, and if you send your bill, I’ll sign it and write down all my contact information. Bill me there, and I’ll see to it that you’re paid immediately.”

      “No payment necessary,” he said. “We haven’t really done anything for you except give you a bed and a pill that will be here shortly, and that’s not worth very much.”

      No payment? What kind of an odd clinic was this, that they didn’t require payment for their services? “I don’t expect charity, Doctor. I may not practice medicine but I’m fully able to pay for my medical care.”

      “We don’t call it charity,” he said. “We call it medical service with no strings attached.”

      “You’ve got to have strings attached,” she argued. Strings, translated to mean money. She wasn’t opposed to charity at all, and her facilities did make arrangements for those situations. But medicine was for profit. It had to be, to operate it on the large scale on which Ridgeway Medical operated—just closing in on one hundred medical properties in total. In fact, their Hawaiian acquisition would send them over the one-hundred marker. “How else can you operate if you don’t expect your patients to pay?”

      “We do have some private funding sources, many patients do pay, some have insurance. Basically, our needs are simple here, and people are as generous as they can be. But sometimes it’s not money that constitutes generosity. And we accept that, too…generosity in other forms.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “Treatment for a minor sinus infection paid for with a good haircut if that’s all the patient can afford. Not what you’re used to as a medical administrator, I’m sure, but I happened to need a haircut that day so it worked out.”

      “You do know you’re every medical corporation’s nightmare, don’t you?” she said as she slid back into bed, finally putting her head down on the pillow. That spoken like the true corporate head she was. Bottom line, profit margin—the terms of her medical world on any given day, with the need of a good haircut not ever taken into account. They needed money in order to run all their medical facilities, to pay wages, to dispense medicine and perform surgeries, to make people better. A good haircut didn’t get any of that done, but she did admire the sentiment. Just couldn’t relate to it. Or incorporate it into her clinics and hospitals.

      “A medical corporation’s nightmare maybe,” he contended, “but every patient’s friend. That’s the part I like. It’s the way medicine should be practiced, and it isn’t done much that way any more.”

      Interesting man. Handsome like she’d never imagined in a man, and with ideals, too. She liked that. Liked it a lot.

      She liked him, too. “But is it the part your clinic’s owner likes?”

      “I’m not sure what she likes,” Grant admitted. “Especially lately. Look, why don’t I go see about those pills? You need to rest, and I need to go see a patient. I’ll catch up with you later, after you’ve had a nap.” He chuckled. “And if you’re a betting woman, maybe we could make a little wager on whether or not the prochlorperazine will make you groggy.”

      “Normally, I might take you up on that, but I’m afraid you’ll win, and I’m not a very good loser.” Thirty minutes later, after taking her pill, Susan shut her eyes and conjured up the image of her surfer Adonis while she drifted off to sleep. But just on that edge between full awareness and dream his image changed, then she was rocked gently into her bliss with the image of Dr Grant Makela fluttering around her fading consciousness.

      CHAPTER THREE

      IT HAD been an awfully long day, and not a particularly good one at that, all things considered. Death had a way of flattening out the rest of the day, no matter how many good things came after it. The death of that Harris boy had been no exception even though, technically, he hadn’t been the physician to work on him. Still felt the same, though. Still filled him with that down-to-the-bone tiredness that took a long, slow toll.

      Dragging himself through the door of his home, a tiny cottage sitting directly adjacent to the clinic, Grant kicked off his sandals and dropped down into his bed. “Call me in an hour,” he’d told the floor nurse as he’d left, even though he doubted he’d actually fall asleep. Not with images of that boy’s death so fresh. Not with images of Dr Susan Cantwell’s pain so vivid.

      But not sleeping was okay, because he was doing it outside the clinic walls, which was what he needed from time to time…to get away. Even if only a few feet away. In his life, there weren’t very many separations. Work, personal life, personal life, work…it was all pretty much the same. All of it relative to the fact that he kept his needs simple. Give him a good wave to catch once or twice a day, a great board for riding those waves, a few weeks a year to spend working with Operation Smiling Faces—a volunteer group of medics who did facial reconstruction for children living in areas where those services weren’t available—let him have an occasional plane to fly, and his medical practice. That’s all it took to make him happy.

      A year ago, he’d thought Alana was part of that mix, but he’d been wrong about that. Damn, had he been wrong! So wrong, in fact, that he’d sworn off the finer sex for the foreseeable future. She’d had a beautiful face, nice curves, big goals. But none of those goals were his. On top of that, she’d had more needs than any one person had a right to.

      A year of that and he was glad to be alone again. Still feeling the sting in a bad way, though.

      Fluffing the pillow behind his head, trying to forget about Alana, Grant pushed his ex out of his head with thoughts of Susan Cantwell. Kekoa. Brave, courageous. That would be her Hawaiian name because she was brave and courageous, even if she wasn’t feeling like it right now.

      Susan… He’d enjoyed watching her on the beach these past few mornings. Certainly, he’d never

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