Dianne Drake - The Wife He's Been Waiting For

“I want to see you in the morning for a finger stick,” he said. “I’ll be on duty at eight.”

She nodded, offered him a half-smile, and scooted out of the lounge to a popular song being mutilated by a short, round, bald-headed Elvis impersonator who sounded like he needed an adenoidectomy, too.

* * *

She slept in, avoiding the morning finger stick, and when, at nearly ten, she heard a knock on the cabin door, she assumed it was Michael, coming to do her blood work. But she was wrong. It was one of the ship’s medical technicians. Cheery smile, bright face, she was more than happy to poke Sarah’s finger. “It’s a little low,” Paulina Simpson said, showing the monitor to Sarah, who read the blood-sugar result at sixty-five. “You need to eat something,” Paulina continued, fishing some sort of breakfast bar out of her pocket. “Doctor Sloan told me to bring this along, that you’d probably need it.”

“Dr Sloan thinks of everything, doesn’t he?” Sarah said amiably.

“He’s a good doctor. Most of the docs come and go, work a few weeks here and there, but the cruise line likes Dr Sloan because he keeps coming back. He’s reliable. The patients trust him and he does an outstanding job.”

A bit of a crush from the med tech, too? Sarah wondered.

“And he’s received commendations from the cruise line,” the girl went on.

Well, so much praise on Michael’s account was all well and good, but that still didn’t put Sarah in the mood to deal with him. For what it was worth, she felt a little slighted, being passed off to a tech when she’d expected the doctor to come calling on her. “Well, tell Dr Sloan thank you for the breakfast bar, but that I’m doing fine on my own and I no longer require medical attention.”

Paulina arched a puzzled eyebrow, then nodded. “He said you’d say that, so he gave me this.” She handed over a slip of paper.

Sarah took a look at it, then handed it back. “Tell Dr Sloan I don’t need a diet guide, that I’m quite capable of eating what I need, when I need it. But I appreciate his concern.”

“He said you’d say that, too. So…” she pulled a small glucose monitor from her other pocket and handed it to Sarah “…he told me to give you this, so you can check yourself at any time. Although he would like to take a daily reading of his own, just to see how you’re doing.”

Apparently, there was no getting away from Dr Michael Sloan, even when he wasn’t present. If he went to all this fuss over a simple little case of hypoglycemia, she could only image how he’d react to a serious illness. Good doctor, she decided, adding her own silent praise to Paulina’s as she remembered the days when she’d been at least that persistent with her own patients. “Tell Dr Sloan thank you for the glu-cometer, and that I’ll use it. And that if he insists, I’ll allow him to do an occasional test, too.” She didn’t really need it, but who was she to interfere with a doctor doing his duty?

Too bad he was hiding away on a ship, she thought as she unwrapped the breakfast bar. The world needed good doctors like Michael. Of course, she was hiding away on a ship too, wasn’t she? And by most accounts she’d been a pretty good doctor herself.

It was turning into a long day, and the hospital was getting busy. Predictable conditions, the lot of them. Upset stomachs, seasickness, diabetic upheavals from people going wild over so much food available to them. People underestimated their stamina on a ship and he got to patch up the results. It was very different from general surgery, and sometimes he did long for the days when he’d spent his life in the operating theater.

But now… “Take two of these pills this afternoon, and two more before you go to bed. If you’re still nauseated in the morning, come back and see me and we’ll try something different.” He handed the bottle to the fifty-something woman, and watched her leave the examining room, her face a little less green than it had been when she’d come in. “And no seafood for a couple of days,” he called after her, remembering that this particular incident of gastric upset had come after a rather large consumption of lobster for lunch.

He couldn’t blame her, really. Cruises were all about overindulgence. Of course, there was Sarah, who wouldn’t indulge at all. He was willing to bet she hadn’t eaten a thing since her breakfast bar. She was a hard one to figure out. Last night, in the lounge, after she’d relaxed a little, she’d seemed like she had been enjoying his company. He’d certainly enjoyed hers. But just when things had finally slipped into a nice, casual mood, she’d upped and left him there. It wasn’t his place to ask her questions, but he was curious. He saw all kinds of people on the ship. Lonely widows and widowers, people getting over the break-up of a relationship, people pressed with tough life decisions running away for a while to think. And people who were simply on holiday. As for Sarah, well, he wasn’t sure where she fit in. Normally he was pretty good at telling, but he couldn’t get a reading on her. Other than the fact that he liked her, and something about her drew him in, he simply didn’t know.

One thing was certain, though. She didn’t want a personal relationship in her life as much as he didn’t want one in his. That alone made a shipboard friendship seem appealing. “Hello,” he said to his next patient, as he stepped into the examining room to have a look at a casualty of a volleyball game—a soft-looking fortyish man who didn’t exercise at home but who took the opportunity to start once he’d hit the high seas. “I understand you hurt your back? Maybe twisted an ankle, too?”

The man, who was sitting on the edge of the exam table with his bare, skinny legs sticking out from under the sheet draped over his lap, nodded, looking up from his bent-over position. “Guess I’m a little out of shape.” he admitted. “Haven’t played in a while.”

Michael wasn’t going to ask how long that translated into. Instead, he took a look, diagnosed a few strained and sprained muscles and sent the man off to the spa to spend the afternoon in a whirlpool. It wasn’t a precise medical therapy exactly, but why not give the man what he’d come for? Something he didn’t have in his real life.

So, after what seemed like an interminably long day of routine aches and pains, Michael signed the next watch over to the following doctor on duty, a competent general practitioner named Reese Allen, and headed for his quarters. His leg ached a little more than usual, although it shouldn’t, and it was time to get off it for a while. But as he walked down the corridor to his cabin, which was adjacent to the hospital, he changed his mind and caught the elevator up to the sundeck. He didn’t actually get outside much on these cruises, and right now he felt the urge for a little sun on his face. And he knew the perfect place. It was amidships, in a little tuck-away behind one of the bars that didn’t usually go into use until dark. There were a few deck chairs there, maybe three or four, and no one ever lounged there because there was no real view, unless you enjoyed looking at the back bar or the bottom side of the little rise holding the deck chairs with a perfect view of the pool. Good spot, he thought, heading off in that direction. Very good spot. He’d spend an hour, maybe two, go to the lounge and have Hector fix him a Cubano for supper, then…well, nothing came after that. He didn’t make plans, although the thought of a little time spent with Sarah Collins suddenly popped into his mind.

It was a wish that came true almost immediately as he rounded the corner to his little tuck-away and found her in one of the deck chairs. Just her. Nobody else was around. She was there, stretched out almost elegantly in the chair, wearing a simple, one-piece black swimsuit that exposed beautiful long legs, even though they were pale. The black of the swimsuit complemented her black hair and the milky color of her skin was a startling, sexy contrast. Sarah had on black sunglasses, through which she was reading…he couldn’t tell what, for sure. It looked like a copy of the New England Journal of Medicine , but she snapped it shut and tucked it into her big straw bag the instant she saw him. It was probably a fashion magazine, he decided as he headed toward her. Or another of the women’s specialty magazines available from the ship’s store.