Fiona McArthur - A Doctor, A Fling & A Wedding Ring

For the first time in a long time Tara felt like laughing but the tinge of hysteria she could feel in her throat gave her pause. Shakily she gathered her control, like grasping at the string of a kite that almost got away. ‘You’re not talking change, Doug, you’re talking a different planet.’

Tara grimaced and tried to imagine herself caring for pampered cruise-line passengers after the horrors she’d seen here in the Sudan. ‘You know how many women out of every thousand women die having babies here, Doug. How could I move to a luxury liner?’

‘It’s the quickest option I can think of. The cruise is less than two weeks long. Then they’ll drop you off in Venice, where they can replace the crew doctor and you can fly home or wherever you want. Or you could stay on and have a working holiday.’

Venice? She’d always wanted to see Venice.

She shook her head. Incomprehensible.

‘And you wouldn’t be treating the passengers as your main priority—the unfortunate guy was the junior and you’d be caring for the crew. The senior would do most of the passenger liaison.’

Still. A luxury liner? After this? ‘I don’t think so.’

Doug stared her down. Not something he would’ve been able to do a year ago. ‘It’s not a suggestion, Tara.’

‘Are you ordering me to leave?’ She raised her brows but her voice wasn’t as steady as she would have liked.

‘Yes. And if I could, I’d order you to indulge in a random dalliance with a cocktail waiter or gym instructor and really let your hair down.’ Doug had one hand on his hips and the other in the air, admonishing.

Now she did laugh and it sounded almost natural. ‘And I always thought of you as a father figure. I can’t ever imagine my father telling me to get laid.’

His finger dropped. ‘I didn’t say that.’ He smiled as he continued, ‘But maybe treating yourself to a bit of pampering, indulging yourself for a week or two, go all out on the massage and happy hour when you’re off duty. I would love to picture that when you drive away.’

‘I’ll think about it.’ Nice dream. Last thing she could imagine but she could pretend.

But Tara’s world shifted as Doug laid down the law. ‘Your driver will be here in the Jeep in four hours to take you to the airport. You fly to Rome, sleep for an extra day, and pick up the ship there. You should have enough time to pack and say goodbye.’

Tara felt the cold wash of reality, of change, and a little of the trepidation new places caused in a woman who just might have forgotten how to be a woman. And just a tiny whisper of relief. She really was getting close to the edge. ‘I can’t leave just like that.’

He looked at her kindly. ‘Can I tell you, in my experience, when you’ve invested as much as you have into this place and with these people, it’s the only way to leave?’

TWO DAYS later at eleven a.m. Tara stood on the dock in Civitavecchia, Rome’s nearby port for cruise ships. Apart from the blinding white cruise liner that dominated the dock, it wasn’t a romantic place, more a service centre with cranes and cargo ships and a semi-deserted building more reminiscent of a warehouse than a cruise-liner departure hall. Well, that was good. She wasn’t feeling in the least romantic.

The officer in white asked her business and she handed over the papers Doug had given her.

‘Welcome to the Sea Goddess , Dr McWilliams. I’ll page Dr Hobson to meet you as soon as you board. If you would move through to check in via Security, please.’

‘Thank you.’ What the heck was she doing here?

* * *

Nick Fender, temporary bar manager for the Sea Goddess, decided the hardship of holding his sister’s job for her wasn’t so bad.

The sounds and subtle shift of the moored cruise ship soaked into his smile. It had been a while since he’d done a stint on a ship, as ship’s doctor last time. It had been even longer since the early days when he’d had a year off from med school after his parents had died and worked as the cocktail waiter everyone had loved. That’s when he’d laid the foundations for the life-of-the-party persona he’d grown very comfortable with.

So here he was back behind the bar, selling cocktails and holding down Kiki’s job while she fought off pneumonia. Wilhelm, the current ship’s doctor, had thought Nick’s retro-vocation hilarious and Nick was starting to see the funny side of it too.

And then there were the women. Some men could develop an ease with the opposite sex and Nick was one of them. He loved women. No favouritism.

That was until he glimpsed the tall, fine-boned dolly bird arrive late to the briefing room, and judging by her uniform she was the ship’s new junior doctor.

An uneasy prickle of déjà vu kept his eyes on her but he’d remember if he’d seen her before. But something was there. Something about her that tweaked at all the protective instincts he hadn’t known he had, at some gut level of awareness.

Nick loved the female gender. His doting sisters probably had something to do with that, and Nick liked to dip and dally, like the seagulls he could see outside the porthole, because he wasn’t falling for the have-and-hold dream. His parents’ early deaths and the letter he could tell no one about had seen to that.

Nick laughed his way through life with like-minded friends, and there were a lot of those working cruise liners. It was all about avoiding the horror of being left with just one person for ever.

Until she walked in. What the hell was that? He dragged his eyes away and concentrated on his watch to work out when the first passengers would arrive, when the ship would sail out the harbour, and when the bar would open. He didn’t have time for some random woman to explode unexpectedly like fine champagne on his frothy beer life.

He was the good-time guy.

Tara glanced around the small room filled with chairs and smiling crew members and started towards a seat in front of the hunky guy in the back row. He had those laughing black eyes all the best pirate actors had, the ones who could crook their little fingers at buxom wenches who’d come running.

Well, nobody would call her buxom. She’d lost so much weight she’d left her breasts in the Sudan and now for the first time she almost missed them.

He looked away as she caught his eye and she thought of her boss, Doug, and for the first time today a small smile tugged at her mouth. The smile broadened as she got closer, read his badge and realised he was actually a bar manager. Doug had said find a cocktail waiter so she was going up in the world.

Not that she really wanted to have an affair. Being the merry widow wasn’t her style but she did need to relearn how to talk to people. How to talk to men. That was, men who weren’t relatives of women who’d died or Doug.

She’d grown up enough not to expect to find ‘romantic love’. Vander had laughed at that. Still, maybe she could practise her smiles and small talk and become a normal socially acceptable human being again.

She’d at least managed to have her cracked and broken nails attended to and her hair cut this morning at the hotel. She really would try to lighten up for a week or two as ordered because even with the twenty-four hours’ sleep she’d had she was starting to feel better.

Maybe Doug had been right and she did need to touch the other world out there.

Her immediate superior on ship, Wilhelm Hobson, had met her at the gangplank and given her a quick orientation tour. Big ship! No doubt she’d be hopelessly lost for a few more days and planned on sticking to the crew areas and the medical centre to keep her bearings.

She certainly didn’t want to flirt with Wilhelm. The last thing Tara needed was to discuss work socially, apart from the fact doctors and death went together in her mind at the moment. She didn’t want to flirt with anyone but she would like to meet people she could talk with and, heaven forbid, even laugh with after the uneven fight she’d been waging for the last two years.