for at home. Her communing with nature usually consisted of a minute or two on the way from the car to the building or the building to the car. So now any time spent with Mother Nature was a treat.
“Wonderful,” she said to Laka, after taking a sip of passion fruit juice and finally allowing herself to relax.
“We specialize in wonderful here,” Grant said from behind her, as Laka walked away.
A huge tingle crept up Susan’s spine as a slight smile crept to her lips. “What’s disappointing is that I may have to leave here, cut short my holiday and return to work,” she replied, trying to be cautious about her galloping shivers lest she did something else to draw his attention to the goose bumps rising on her arms.
“On the mainland?” Grant stepped out from behind the hibiscus and stopped directly in front of the table. He looked fresh from the shower…wet hair glistening in the sun, shirt open a few buttons down and a bare chest with a few lingering droplets of water. She caught herself staring openly, and shifted her gaze to her glass of juice, grabbing it in both her hands just to steady herself.
“Actually, I’ll be in Honolulu for a few weeks. On business. And I may get straight to that and skip the last of my holiday. There doesn’t seem to be much point in it now.” That much was true. There didn’t seem to be reason any more. Her heart for it was gone.
“You mentioned you were an administrator—is that for a clinic or medical practice?”
She shook her head. “I…um…I work for a company in Dallas that buys struggling medical facilities and brings them back up to standard. I oversee medical operations, but more from an administrative perspective.”
“That wouldn’t be Ridgeway Medical, would it?” he snapped, his friendly expression turning into dark thunder.
She looked up at him, saw the deep frown on his face signal the change in his mood. “You’ve heard of us?”
“Heard of you? I’ve done nothing but hate you for the past six weeks. You’ve made my life pure hell ever since I knew that you existed.” His words were angry, yet his voice was controlled and quiet.
That took her aback. Kahawaii Clinic wasn’t on her current acquisitions list. She was sure of that. So what was this about? “Why? What have we ever done to you?” she asked, trying to tamp down the surge in her own temper. No need to fight him when she didn’t know what it was about.
“Other than buying the clinic—what I hoped would be my clinic—and changing everything we’re about?”
“But we’re not! Yes, we’re in the process of a nice deal on Oahu, but I know what properties we’re looking at and this isn’t one of them.” It would be an ideal place for one of their clinics, she had to admit, but the Kahawaii name wasn’t on the list.
“The hell it isn’t! Mrs Kahawaii is in negotiations now, and she’s indicated to me that she intends on signing the deal within the next couple of weeks, if I can’t come up with a way to make a deal of my own. And she’s signing with Ridgeway Medical.”
“Kahawaii Clinic?” she asked, clearly perplexed.
“Officially, it’s Hawaii North Shore Clinic, which we renamed it unofficially after its founder when he died.”
That was a name she recognized. Susan sucked in an acute breath and immediately went on the defensive. “What’s wrong with Ridgeway Medical?” she asked. “We upgrade medical care in areas where it’s inadequate, and it’s good medical care. We have excellent standards. We keep hospital doors open that would otherwise close, depriving a community of medical care, and we equip small clinics like this with the best medical technology money can buy. What’s wrong with that?”
“You run roughshod over small clinics like this, forcing on them a standard that doesn’t fit. You don’t take into consideration the individual communities, and the people living there…what they need, what they want, what they’ll accept. Your emergency doctors won’t accept a haircut from a patient who can’t pay in money but who has too much pride to take charity, and I doubt that any of your patients love their clinic so much that they’ll volunteer to paint its exterior just as a matter of pride in the facility, like the people here did last year. You run institutional medicine, we run personal medicine. That’s what’s wrong with Ridgeway.”
She really didn’t have a defense for his argument because he was correct. But what he didn’t understand was that they operated the way they did because it was the best for the majority of their patients. This was the argument she’d heard so many times, when various hospital and clinic administrators had found out their facility was being sold. People often resisted the change, didn’t embrace it in any fashion. They fought against it, even though, like Grant, the decision wasn’t theirs to make. And she truly hated the arguments, because lives were disrupted by what she and her father did. In the long run, it was for the best. But in the short term, just getting to that point, it was difficult, and that was the part of this business she hated the most. She detested being disruptive, hated putting the fear of change into people like Grant, who devoted their lives to an ideal, only to have that ideal ripped away from them. “Have you been to one of our facilities? Because if you haven’t, I’d like to invite you—”
“Invite me to your indoctrination?” he interrupted. “Show me the proper corporate facility and tell me all this can be mine if I just adjust my attitude?”
Actually, that was correct. But she wasn’t going to admit that to Grant, because that would just fuel his fire, and he had such a big fire going already that adding to it would prove nothing. The truth was, she felt bad about this. Always did, when it became personal. This time more than usual, though, because she liked this clinic, and she did see merit in it existing as it did, without change. With Ridgeway, though, change was inevitable, which made her sad for the little Kahawaii Clinic because, if she could be honest with herself, she’d pictured herself working in a setting like this. Part of that discontent she’d been feeling for a while had been that she wanted to connect to medicine in a way she wasn’t allowed in her current capacity, and here, that connection would have been so easy.
But Grant was right. Kahawaii would change. She glanced down at his feet. He would have to wear regular shoes. No more bare toes. “Look, Grant, I know this isn’t going to be easy for you. But we…Ridgeway Medical…does have its place. Small private hospitals and clinics struggle against the larger ones for a lot of reasons, and unfortunately most of those reasons are purely business. They can provide outstanding care, have an exemplary medical staff, sterling reputation, everything you want in a medical facility, but if they can’t afford the latest MRI machine, for example, the patients who need an MRI for whatever reason go somewhere else, and it doesn’t take too much of that to affect the bottom line financially. Patients who go away rarely ever come back. They find it more convenient to bundle up all their medical needs together and keep them at the one facility that can meet all their requirements. So when the bottom line takes hit after hit like that, with people leaving to find more services, the facility suffers. That’s precisely why Ridgeway Medical is so important. We can keep that patient at that smaller facility and offer them everything they need there. In Indiana, for example, we own three small hospitals. Each, in itself, can’t afford an MRI scanner, and the patient load is such that it’s not warranted at any one of these facilities. All three were suffering when we stepped in, and the very first thing we did was buy a mobile MRI. It goes from facility to facility, and serves all three on a rotating basis. We’re not losing our patients who need an MRI, and they’re allowed to stay with the medical facility of their first choice because we pooled resources.
“I
