The Wife He's Been Waiting For

“Got to go… Can’t stay…”

“That’s right. We’re going to my office,” he replied, as she tucked her head against his chest. “I’m the ship’s doctor and I think I need to have a little look at you to see what’s going on.”

“Want to go…please, let me…”

“Don’t worry. I’ll get you back to your cabin once I’ve given you an exam,” he said, already deciding she might be in the throes of hypoglycemia. That happened a lot. People got excited about the cruise, then forgot to eat. The next thing that happened was their blood sugar whacking out. It wasn’t uncommon and usually very easy to fix. “When was the last time you ate something? Do you remember?” She looked particularly frail, he thought, and a good several pounds under her ideal weight. Pretty, though. Add another ten pounds and she’d be voluptuous. For a moment he envisioned her looking vibrant—her face with some color in it to better contrast with the raven black of her hair, her dark brown eyes filled with something other than anguish. The more he studied her, the more he was taken by her beauty.

Then she shifted in his arms, laid her hand on his chest and for an instant he felt a tingle, which immediately snapped his attention back to his professional assessment of her. Without a test, hypoglycemia was still his first call. That’s what he had to keep his mind on, that he was carrying a patient to his office, not a beautiful woman to his bed.

Although it had been a long time since he’d had a woman there, no matter how she got there—walking on her own, carried in his arms, or somersaulting.

“Too loud. So many people…” she mumbled, snapping him back once again. “Don’t want to—”

“Can you tell me if you have low blood sugar?” he interrupted, his voice rather stiff and husky. “Have you ever been diagnosed with a condition called hypoglycemia?”

Instead of answering, she merely sighed, then snuggled in a little more. And snaked her arm up around his neck, causing another tingle to skitter off the tips of her fingers and run down the full length of his back.

Michael cleared his throat heavily, like that would clear away the tingle. “Have you been diagnosed with…” He tried again, but her other arm went up, and now what should have been a simple hold on a patient looked more like a lover’s embrace. But only for a moment, then both her arms went limp and her hold on him vanished.

His patient had fainted again.

Sarah finally opened her eyes, squinting into the overhead exam light, before she twisted her head to the side and opened them fully. Where was she? Why was she here? “What’s that?” she asked, spotting the IV stand with its bag hanging next to the bed, not yet realizing that it was anchored into her arm.

“Sugar water,” came a voice from the other side of a blue-and-green-striped curtain. “Your blood sugar was low so we’re giving you something to bring it back up to normal.”

Curtain, hard bed… She glanced around as the surroundings started making sense to her. Medical equipment. Now it was all coming back. Panic attack, hypoglycemic episode. She’d gotten into the elevator. It had been crowded…she did remember that much. The perfume, the large woman with the purple hat. Then she’d keeled over, hadn’t she?

An involuntary moan slipped through Sarah’s lips as her recall returned in full and she remembered collapsing straight into the hard body’s arms. Now here she was in the ship’s hospital. As a patient, though. Not as a doctor.

“We did a little test,” he continued.

Well, of course he would, she thought, not too surprised by his verdict. This was the hospital and he was a medic of some sort. “How low was it? My blood sugar?”

“Forty-two when I brought you in. Normal values start at eighty, and run all the way up to one-twenty. But you were well under the norm, which was why you passed out.”

She knew all that. Her days as a practicing physician might be over, but her medical knowledge was certainly as good as ever. It had been only a little over a year since she’d quit medicine altogether, and yet she still read the journals to keep up, even though she had no intention of returning to practice again. But old habits died hard, and her love of medicine hadn’t diminished one bit.

Naturally, she wasn’t going to explain all that to the medic. No need to. As far as he was concerned, she was merely another tourist on holiday who’d gone and done something stupid, like forgetting to eat. And, actually, that’s what she was, wasn’t it? The perpetual tourist? “I don’t suppose I’ve eaten anything for a while,” she admitted, almost too embarrassed to say so since she did know better.

“How long ago?” he asked.

He had a nice voice. Soothing. Deep. The kind of voice a patient would trust. “Two or three meals, I think,” she stated, although she was pretty sure she’d skipped maybe one more than that. “I was…uh…excited about the cruise. All the arrangements, last-minute details.” Such a lie. Over this past year she’d neglected to eat as many meals as she’d eaten. Truth was, she had no appetite. She would eat occasionally, but only enough to sustain her, to keep her blood-sugar levels intact. Except this time she hadn’t even done that much, and she was mildly embarrassed for messing up that way. “As soon as the dextro…um, the sugar water is in, can I get off the ship?”

“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.”