LITMIR.BIZ

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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 would 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,

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