Well, nobody would call her buxom. She’d lost so much weight she’d left her breasts in the Sudan and now for the first time she almost missed them.
He looked away as she caught his eye and she thought of her boss, Doug, and for the first time today a small smile tugged at her mouth. The smile broadened as she got closer, read his badge and realised he was actually a bar manager. Doug had said find a cocktail waiter so she was going up in the world.
Not that she really wanted to have an affair. Being the merry widow wasn’t her style but she did need to relearn how to talk to people. How to talk to men. That was, men who weren’t relatives of women who’d died or Doug.
She’d grown up enough not to expect to find ‘romantic love’. Vander had laughed at that. Still, maybe she could practise her smiles and small talk and become a normal socially acceptable human being again.
She’d at least managed to have her cracked and broken nails attended to and her hair cut this morning at the hotel. She really would try to lighten up for a week or two as ordered because even with the twenty-four hours’ sleep she’d had she was starting to feel better.
Maybe Doug had been right and she did need to touch the other world out there.
Her immediate superior on ship, Wilhelm Hobson, had met her at the gangplank and given her a quick orientation tour. Big ship! No doubt she’d be hopelessly lost for a few more days and planned on sticking to the crew areas and the medical centre to keep her bearings.
She certainly didn’t want to flirt with Wilhelm. The last thing Tara needed was to discuss work socially, apart from the fact doctors and death went together in her mind at the moment. She didn’t want to flirt with anyone but she would like to meet people she could talk with and, heaven forbid, even laugh with after the uneven fight she’d been waging for the last two years.
She sighed and wrenched her mind away from the camp. Concentrate on the here and now, she reminded herself.
The ship’s medical centre, much larger than she’d expected, seemed almost obscenely stocked with equipment after her workplace at the camp. Apart from three consulting rooms and ten observation inpatient beds, the centre even had its own X-ray machine. And morgue. She frowned at herself.
There were ECGs, defibrillators, minor surgical equipment and orthopaedic immobilisation gear. No doubt all would be useful, along with the myriad general-practice skills that would be needed in this isolated community far from land.
It actually did promise to be interesting the more she blocked her mind from her desertion of the refugee camp. In fact, perhaps not a bad way to ease back into the general-practice headspace she’d need to revisit for the next six months. That was how long Doug had stipulated before he would even consider her return.
The dashing young South African physician in charge was sweet, and obviously a bit of a player, but if she wanted to learn people skills, she wanted light, frivolously very far from medicine, and definitely short term. Just so she could show Doug she was fine.
So here she was and she resisted the evil urge to sneak another peek at the heady masculine brew behind her. Way out of her league but maybe she could make up a drink name for him. Unfortunately the ones that popped into her head tinged on the Curacao blue side and she mentally backed away.
What had got into her?
She hadn’t expected to leap onto Doug’s idea with a vengeance. Bizarre when she hadn’t looked at a man since med school and look where that had left her. A widow in a refugee camp with shoulders full of guilt for being the one who’d survived.
She’d never even been a necessary part of her parents’ lives, and Vander had said he needed her. Actually, as a missionary he’d needed her skills, so she’d flown off with her new husband filled with the warm and fuzzy idea that he’d loved her. Reality had left her bewildered but before she’d been able to get too angry at him for not being interested in love and sex, apparently the last thing he needed after a fifteen-hour day, he’d died of cholera.
So two years down the track was that what she wanted? Sex? Would that fix her? Make her human again?
Because she certainly felt robotic with years of bounding out of bed after ten minutes’ sleep, crash Caesareans with one eye open, triplets before breakfast, and massive post-partum haemorrhages at least once a night.
She’d have to stay awake for it, of course. Sex. She’d never really had the chance to figure what all the fuss was about. But one glance behind at corded muscles and mile-wide shoulders and she was contemplating caffeine to help keep her eyes open.
Good grief. She was seriously unstable and maybe Doug had it right. She chewed her lip to stop the smile. She felt decidedly immoral just thinking about it, and as a blush stole up her neck she glanced at her watch, willing the safety lecture to get going.
Safety seemed like a good thing to dwell on. That, and removing her mind from the gutter.
A shift in air currents and a sudden blocking of light was probably what had caused her breath to catch. That or the fact the intoxicating man behind had shifted and sat down beside her. Suddenly the room was two degrees hotter and filled with a crackling tension. So there really were men out there where that pheromone antenna thing actually happened and you got goose-bumps?
‘Hello, there. You’re new here?’ Deep, skin-tingling voice that raised the hairs on the back of her neck and a whiff of some expensive cologne the price of which would probably feed a Sudanese family for a month. Pleeease. Tara fought the blush from her cheeks.
Nick had specifically told his legs no when they’d wanted to shift him forward one row and sit beside the too-thin brunette, but the force of nature was not to be reckoned with and by the time he’d settled in next to her he’d already accepted it. Just a conversation.
She raised thick brown eyebrows that disdained fashion. In fact, he smiled to himself as he thought of the women he knew and their fetish for perfect dyed and primped arches, he doubted these had ever seen a pair of tweezers. ‘Do I look that new?’
He waggled his forehead. ‘New. Lost. And very new….’
She glanced away. ‘Thanks.’
‘You’re welcome.’ She looked at him again and he grinned to show he was only kidding, but she didn’t smile back. Crashed and burned, old boy, he mocked himself. ‘And on that auspicious beginning perhaps we could introduce ourselves.’
He held out his hand and he’d have to say gingerly she put her fingers briefly in his. Maybe he should have assured her his were clean, judging by her reluctance.
‘I’m Tara McWilliams.’
‘Tara.’ The star-ar. He always rhymed names to remember. First rule of attracting women. Remember their names. Nick had never noticed hands during a handshake before. Not what you did, really, but hers…fingers, bone-slender, too cold. She looked a little anaemic, her hand so workworn that he had the bizarre impulse to rub it warm and shelter it between his palms.
Instead, he continued the conversation as if he hadn’t noticed her pull herself free quickly. ‘Nick. Bar manager for the Casablanca Bar.’
‘Appropriate.’
He scratched his head comically and shook it. ‘Don’t get it?’
‘Humphrey Bogart. Casablanca. His name was Nick in the movie.’
He grinned. ‘Actually, it was Rick. Sorry. I have four sisters who love romantic movies but will henceforth think of Bogart every time I see my name now.’
She narrowed her eyes at him but not enough to distract him from noticing the colour. Honey brown. Or toffee. Like her skin. Like her gorgeous legs and arms. Edible. And yet incredibly weary.
She folded her arms across her chest. ‘Do you always correct people?’ She was cross. And still looked good with it. Damn good.
He