Joanna Neil - Hawaiian Sunset, Dream Proposal

Amber scrunched the letter into a ball and pulled in a shuddery breath. All her dreams were gone in the blink of an eye. She was devastated.

She had worked hard throughout her training to become a doctor, and her one ambition was to specialise in accident and emergency medicine. Now that opportunity had been denied her, and she was to all intents and purposes going to be out of work within a few weeks. It was too late to pursue any other job offer because all the specialist applications were closed.

She wandered around the apartment, seeing nothing, struggling to take in the news. There was no point in ringing James to confide in him, and seek to find consolation together. If he had cared enough, he would have phoned her by now to ask how she was getting on, and she could only guess that he probably had other things on his mind.

Instead, she rang her mother. She, at least, would want to know the result of all her efforts, and Amber had already found a voice message on her answering machine asking her to get in touch.

‘Oh, Amber,’ her mother said, ‘I never dreamed that they would turn you down…Well, they haven’t, have they? It’s all down to administration errors. Is there anything you can do now? Will there be other jobs you can apply for?’

‘I doubt it,’ Amber said in a resigned tone. ‘It’s too late now to sort anything out. All the specialist positions that would have interested me will have been filled by now. The most I can hope for is that I can apply for a locum post. I might be able to fill in when people are sick. It means going from one hospital to another, where I’m needed, perhaps, or working for short stints on contract—a few months at a time, maybe.’

‘It might not be so bad as you imagine,’ her mother commented. ‘Perhaps something will turn up.’

‘Let’s hope so,’ Amber murmured.

They chatted for a little while, about her mother’s work as a graphic artist, and Amber enquired after her father, who worked as a general practitioner at the local health centre.

‘He’s out on call, at the moment,’ her mother said. ‘There seems to be a spate of people going down with flu. I think he’s overworked and stressed just now—one of the doctors is off sick, and another is away on leave, so the practice is under a bit of a strain. He’s had to take on a good share of his workload, as well as his own. We’re both under a good deal of pressure at the moment and things are a bit tense between us at times. I have deadlines to meet, and nothing quite goes the way I want it. I told him what we both need is a good holiday.’

Amber could see how that prospect would be tempting. She could do with a break herself. She had a picture in her mind of boats tethered on a gently sloping beach, while waves lapped desultorily at the shore, leaving white ribbons of foam to fringe the golden sand. Exotic birds would fly from one palm tree to another…and there, in the forefront, gazing at the vista before him, stood a tall, bronzed figure, his blue eyes half-closed against the glare of the sun.

She pulled herself together with a jolt, frowning as she said goodbye to her mother. Why on earth would an image of Ethan Brookes come into her mind that way? Didn’t she have enough problems to deal with, without him popping into her mind every other minute?

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