was about. Even now. “Look, I’m sure you have other patients to see. I don’t want to keep you, so if you could have someone bring me the prochlorperazine, I’ll be out of your way within the hour.”
He smiled, showing off perfect white teeth. “It could make you groggy. Too groggy to travel.”
“Or it might not.” He was trying to be nice and she appreciated that. “And I don’t want to be taking up bed space here any longer than is necessary.” She was thinking in terms of dollars and cents again, the corporate side of her ticking away so fast she couldn’t control it. Which got to the heart of the problem she had to figure out. Did she really want to be all about corporate business? Or was there more out there for her? “It’s not efficient, especially when I’m not really ill. You might have other patients…”
“If that becomes the case, I’ll kick you out. But until then, how about you just relax? I’m getting the sense that it’s something you don’t do very often.”
He didn’t know the half of it. She never relaxed, and it appeared she didn’t even know how. “How about I’ll promise to try, and we’ll leave it at that?”
“How about you put your head on the pillow and close your eyes?”
“And when I do I’ll see that boy on the beach.”
He finally entered the room in a casual swagger, propped himself on the wide windowsill, then twisted to face her. “For what it’s worth, according to his buddy, Ryan Harris had been out drinking all night with his friends. He was hungover this morning, maybe he was even still a little intoxicated. His friends admitted that. On top of that, I seriously doubt he was all that experienced on the surfboard to begin with, seeing that he was a haole.” Meaning foreigner. “From Chicago. No surfing there. Then when the big wave hit…” Grant swallowed hard, and a look of deep pain flashed across his face for a second, then disappeared. “It happens. A malihini…tourist… comes here for a short holiday, gets the idea that all he needs is a board and a good wave and he’s a surfer.” A sad sigh crept from his lips. “People think they know what they’re doing, or overestimate their abilities, and they get careless. Add something else to the mix, like Ryan’s condition, and it turns into a tragedy that probably could be prevented in most cases, if people acted smarter. But there’s something about coming to Hawaii and losing inhibitions…”
“You deal with fatalities all the time?” The darker side of paradise, she supposed. The anguish it caused him was obvious. Dr Grant Makela was a man who cared deeply.
“Not all the time, but it happens often enough. We’re the only medical clinic on this part of the island. There’s no other help for miles, and I’m the only doctor who actually lives here, which makes me the one who gets called in most of the time. To the beach, to the hotels…” He shrugged, but it wasn’t a shrug of indifference. More of acceptance. “There’s more good than bad, though. Most of my encounters have a much better outcome than what you experienced. Like meeting you. That’s definitely good.”
To avoid his engaging smile and sensual mouth, she focused her gaze on his cheek.
Then she noticed dimples, and her quick glance froze in place. The man had honest-to-goodness dimples! And the most gorgeous onyx eyes. Grant Makela was a handsome man. Beyond handsome. Breathtaking, rugged, charismatic good looks. Natural charm. Natural ease. Not even one tiny speck of self-consciousness, she thought as she moved her stare down to his half-bare legs—nicely muscled, well bronzed like the rest of him. Her appraisal came to a stop at his sandals. Exposed toes. For some strange reason, that almost made her giggle. She’d never seen a doctor on duty with exposed toes. “I appreciate your understanding,” she said. “I’m really just here as a tourist, not a doctor.” Her shells. Her mornings on the beach. Three glorious days of paradise and now it was all over. She couldn’t go back there.
Maybe it was time to call her father, apologize for leaving, and go back to doing what she was good at. Which wasn’t saving lives. Dr Susan Ridgeway Cantwell was nothing if not pragmatic. She knew where her true value existed, and it wasn’t languishing in a bed in an island clinic, talking on and on about nothing to the most positively gorgeous man she’d ever seen in her life.
Susan glanced down at Grant’s toes again, of all things, and a rush of giddiness overtook her. Fatigue from emotional letdown, most likely. “Are you on duty right now?” she asked. One of her doctors would be reprimanded, or even dismissed, for dressing that way. For exposing toes.
“Twenty-four seven, at your service,” he said, pushing himself off the window-ledge and sweeping into a courtly bow. “Like I said, we have a number of part-timers coming and going, but I’m the one and only full-time doc here.”
“And they allow you to work dressed the way you are?”
He bent to look down himself, as if he hadn’t been aware of the way he was dressed. Then he shrugged. “Island casual. That’s the way we are around here. Patients are comfortable with it. Much more so than they would be with something more traditional—dress slacks, white shirt, tie, white lab coat.” He faked a cringe. “What’s good for my patients is good for me, too, actually.”
She was good with it, too. At least, here on the island. She wouldn’t have minded staying around for a while so she could watch a little more of Dr Makela’s island-casual medicine, but she couldn’t. Perhaps, in a way, that resuscitation attempt had answered some of her questions and made her decision for her. Where and how she worked now, making practical business decisions and never being called on to do CPR…maybe that’s where she belonged. Maybe all her crazy feelings lately, about wanting to leave her admin duties and try patient care, were just that. Crazy.
“Look, I appreciate your helping me. What happened out there on the beach… Like I told you, I haven’t been involved in patient care in a very long time and it got to me. I shouldn’t have involved myself and maybe if I hadn’t, someone else… you…could have had a better outcome. But I want to thank you for helping me, and if you send your bill, I’ll sign it and write down all my contact information. Bill me there, and I’ll see to it that you’re paid immediately.”
“No payment necessary,” he said. “We haven’t really done anything for you except give you a bed and a pill that will be here shortly, and that’s not worth very much.”
No payment? What kind of an odd clinic was this, that they didn’t require payment for their services? “I don’t expect charity, Doctor. I may not practice medicine but I’m fully able to pay for my medical care.”
“We don’t call it charity,” he said. “We call it medical service with no strings attached.”
“You’ve got to have strings attached,” she argued. Strings, translated to mean money. She wasn’t opposed to charity at all, and her facilities did make arrangements for those situations. But medicine was for profit. It had to be, to operate it on the large scale on which Ridgeway Medical operated—just closing in on one hundred medical properties in total. In fact, their Hawaiian acquisition would send them over the one-hundred marker. “How else can you operate if you don’t expect your patients to pay?”
“We do have some private funding sources, many patients do pay, some have insurance. Basically, our needs are simple here, and people are as generous as they can be. But sometimes it’s not money that constitutes generosity. And we accept that, too…generosity in other forms.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “Treatment for a minor sinus infection paid for with a good haircut if that’s all the patient can afford. Not what you’re used to as a medical administrator, I’m sure,
