The Wife He's Been Waiting For. Dianne Drake

do, that’s an intrusion.”

      He chuckled. What was it about her that he liked so much? She put up walls, and she wasn’t engagingly friendly either. Polite when interaction was forced on her but remaining at a distance. And so damned intriguing that he didn’t even care if they spent the next two hours lounging next to each other without speaking a word.

      The truth was, he liked Sarah Collins.

      While she hadn’t been looking for him, not consciously, on some unexplainable level she wasn’t displeased that he’d found her. On a limited basis, Michael Sloan was rather pleasant company. Sarah found herself wishing, just a little, that she could talk in-depth about medicine with him, though. She’d just read a brilliant article in the New England Journal on advances in medication used to treat hypertension, and she would have loved some lively discussion on that with a colleague. But she had to remind herself almost daily that she’d left medicine behind her, then content herself with the void in her life that that decision had caused.

      Unfortunately, the passion hadn’t left her, which was why she wasn’t engaging him this very moment. She stayed away from medicine because she could so easily be drawn back.

      Although, as a doctor, she had noticed his limp. She hadn’t stared, of course, especially with the way he had been trying so hard not to limp. Male ego, probably. In her experience as a doctor, the one thing she’d learned well was that men preferred to grit their teeth and bear it rather than admitting a weakness. Actually, that’s what had almost killed Cameron. He’d been tired, he’d been losing weight. He’d blamed it on working too much, even though she’d asked him to have himself checked out. And he a doctor! Well, the dreadful truth had turned out to be leukemia. The other dreadful truth was that she should have insisted on him getting checked, then kept on insisting when he’d refused. Even tied him up and dragged him to a clinic, if she’d had to. But she hadn’t. Probably because avoidance and denial had been easier.

      Luckily for Cameron, his ending turned out to be a happy one in so many ways. He’d beaten his cancer, found a perfect wife and now they had a family.

      It seemed, though, that the good doctor lying next to her right now was much the same as Cameron. Too stubborn, or too large an ego…she didn’t know which. But it was on the tip of her tongue to say something to him. To ask him what was wrong, and if he’d sought medical attention. Which was none of her business. Still, he’d shown a sufficient amount of pain to someone with a trained eye, and whether or not she was calling herself a doctor these days, she was concerned. “Do you ever get time off?” she asked, not sure how to broach the subject without seeming too medical about it.

      “Between cruises. A few days here and there.”

      “Nothing sustained, though? Maybe a few weeks where you can go and treat yourself to some real rest? On one of these tropical islands where we’re going to stop on the cruise, perhaps?”

      “Social worker,” he said.

      “What?”

      “Last night, I was trying to figure out what you do. My guess right now is social worker. You show just the right amount of concern for other people’s concerns, which would make you a very good social worker.”

      “Well, I’ll take that as a compliment because I admire anyone who has the dedication to be a social worker but, no, that’s not what I do. And I’m not a librarian either, if that was going to be your next guess.”

      “I might have. I’ve always thought librarians have a smoldering, secret sensuality about them, which fits you.”

      Sarah laughed. “Nothing smoldering in me.”

      “But there is, Sarah. It’s there, and you do a nice job of hiding it, which is why you’d make a good librarian. They have that reserved exterior, but on the inside—”

      “Let me guess,” she interrupted. “When you were young you had a secret crush on a librarian.”

      “Not so secret. Her name was Mrs Rowe, and the way she pinned up her red hair, and those tight tweed skirts she wore…” Michael faked a big shiver. “I used to check out books every day. Big books, adult books that I thought made me look intelligent and old. As many as I could get in my canvas bag, like I thought she believed I was taking them home and reading them every night. I was eight, by the way.”

      “So what brought an end to the love affair?”

      “After a couple of weeks, Mrs Rowe asked me if I wouldn’t rather have books from the children’s section, then she handed me one about a precocious monkey and told me I’d do better with that than the one on quantum physics I was attempting to check out.”

      “She was probably right, unless you were a child genius.”

      “Not even close.”

      “Then I’d say Mrs Rowe had good insight.”

      “And a good figure, too,” he commented under his breath.

      Sarah laughed. “Not to be missed, even by a boy of eight.” Which further proved her theory about men. They were not all alike, as some people said, but they were certainly similar in some ways. Even now, as he shifted in his deck chair, she saw a little grimace of pain on his face, yet, come hell or high water, he wasn’t about to admit it.

      Well, back to the original premise and she was sticking to it. It was none of her business.

      She was still concerned, though.