“I’m afraid you were still pretty groggy when the ship set sail half an hour ago. Which means you’re on a cruise now.” Michael stepped out from behind the curtain, stopping at the foot of the bed. “And from the looks of things, you could probably use the rest.”
Handsome man, she thought. Strikingly so. Tall, a little over six feet, broad shoulders, athletic build. Dark brown hair, with eyes to match. Nice smile. But his eyes were…well, she couldn’t tell. They weren’t unfriendly, but they didn’t sparkle. “Believe me, I’ve had plenty of rest.” That was an understatement. She’d had nothing but rest since she’d quit her medical practice.
“You were trying to get off the ship, weren’t you? That’s why you were so frantic in the elevator. You weren’t going to stay and take the cruise.”
“I changed my mind. Decided I didn’t want to…” That sounded like a silly explanation, didn’t it? She’d spent thousands of dollars to book a two-week cruise, then changed her mind minutes before setting sail. It sounded silly enough that he probably thought her addle-brained.
“It could have been the hypoglycemia talking. The lower your blood sugar gets, the more that can alter your thinking. Once you’ve rested up, got a good meal in you, and your blood sugar is staying normal and not fluctuating, you’ll change your mind and start enjoying all the things we have to offer here.”
“Not necessary. I’ll be fine, um… I didn’t catch your name.”
“Sloan,” he said. “Michael Sloan.” He walked around the bed, extending a hand to her. “In case you’re wondering, I’m the one you collapsed onto in the elevator.”
She’d already guessed as much. Somehow she had recognized the hard body, even though this was the first time she’d seen his face. An amazing face. “I’m Sarah Collins,” she said, taking his hand. Nice, soft. Good touch for a doctor…for anybody. “Like I was saying, it’s not necessary for me to stay here and take up your time or your hospital space. I’m fine now. Ready to have the IV out so I can go back to my cabin, since it seems I’m taking a cruise. Or, at least, the first leg of it.”
“Well, my hospital space is your hospital space. You’re my first patient of the cruise and I think I’d like to hang onto you a little while longer just to show the ship’s captain that I’m earning my keep.” He chuckled. “And by the time we’ve reached the first port you might decide that taking a cruise isn’t such a bad idea.’
It wasn’t such a good idea either. “Well, you weren’t the one who started your cruise with such a bang the way I did, were you?” she said, her voice sagging into disappointment. It really didn’t make any difference where she was—on a cruise in the Caribbean, on a camel somewhere in Egypt, in a cyclo in Cambodia. It had all been the same lately. One place after another, and she’d hardly noticed any of it. “But thank you for doing the gallant thing and bringing me to the hospital. I suppose if I had to collapse into somebody’s arms, it was a good thing I chose a doctor’s.”
“It was either me or the lady in the purple hat.”
He smiled at her and his eyes flickered into a genuinely little sparkle. Not much, but it was there. Nice eyes, she thought. Nice sparkle, too, although very short-lived. Come and gone in an instant. “So what’s your best guess on how long I’ll be here?” she asked.
“I want to do another blood test in about ten minutes, then we’ll see.”
“Have you done a blood test since the initial one?” she asked, trying not to sound so clinical. What concerned her was that a reading of forty-two wasn’t too far from critical or even near-death in some cases. She recalled a patient at her clinic not all that long ago who’d gone into cardiac arrest at a blood sugar of thirty-five, and couldn’t be revived. Just another reason to quit medicine, she rationalized. Things that should be easily reversed weren’t always what they seemed. One small speck of melanoma should have been easy to remove, easy to treat. A little case of being overtired should have been cured by a couple days of rest.
But what should have been didn’t always happen. Or, in her case, didn’t ever happen.
“Your blood sugar’s seventy now. Good, but not good enough to be up and wandering around yet.”
“Then how about I go back to my cabin right now, go to bed and order something sweet from room service?” That was the easy way to do it, then she didn’t have to be bothered by anyone, including the doctor.
“How about you stay right where you are for another ten minutes, then we’ll decide what you’ll get to do after that?”
That worked too, she supposed. It wasn’t like she had someplace else to go, or anything else to do. And she really did want to prove that old saying wrong, that doctors made the worst patients. It wasn’t her aim to be a bad patient. Dr Sloan was only doing his job and she didn’t want to give him any grief over it. In other words, she wanted to be the kind of patient she used to like treating, so she’d stay there and take his advice. “Ten minutes,” she agreed, then shut her eyes, not so much to sleep as to simply block him out. This past year she’d stayed away from a lot of things—life, commitments, friends—and the one thing she’d assiduously avoided at all costs had been anything medical. Dr Michael Sloan, handsome as he was, standing there with his stethoscope around his neck and a chart in his hand, was definitely medical. And definitely someone to avoid.
Too bad. Something else on her list of things to avoid was becoming involved in another relationship. Two so far, and all she’d done had been to prove what a miserable failure she was. She’d had two wonderful men in her life and the best she’d done in both relationships had been to fail them. Miserably.
So what was the point of even looking, when that’s as far as she’d let it go? Honestly, buying one of those brightly colored plastic gecko lizards the tourists all seemed so thrilled over didn’t seem like such a bad idea for a relationship. At least she wouldn’t let a chunk of red, yellow and green plastic down.
Or kill it.
Well, she wasn’t sleeping. Trying hard to pretend she was, perhaps, but he knew better. In spite of her attempt to even out her breathing, her eyelids were fluttering—a dead giveaway that she was awake and faking sleep.
Michael chuckled as he returned to his office. Something big was bothering her, but he wasn’t going to guess what it was. Wasn’t even going to pry. He was a doctor whose commitment to his patients was only as long as this two-week cruise. He took care of their physical woes while they were on the ship, then said goodbye to them as he welcomed aboard a new bunch. That’s all he was here for—to treat them and leave them—which suited him just fine. So if there was something about Sarah Collins that needed figuring out other than a case of hypoglycemia, he’d leave that puzzle to someone else. Lord knew, he was the last one to figure out anybody…especially himself.
“Repeat a finger-stick in about five minutes,” he instructed Ina Edwards, one of the ship’s nurses. “And let me know what it is.”
“You OK, Mike?” she asked him. “Your leg? Can I get you something?”
Old enough to be his mother, Ina doted on him. And while she meant well, and he appreciated the concern, it annoyed him. He was fine. Perfect. Just dandy. Except people didn’t want to believe that. One war injury and a couple of years later so many pieces of his broken world still weren’t back in place. But he didn’t take it out on those who cared about him. He merely smiled his way through it. People cared. They wanted to show compassion he didn’t deserve, though, considering what he’d done.
Sighing, Michael faked a smile at Ina. “I’m fine, thanks. Just not prepared to start duty so early into the cruise. Normally they don’t start coming in until after the first round of bon-voyage parties. Hangovers and all that.”
“Well, I can go fix you a cup of tea,” she