A Boss Beyond Compare

“I can’t say that I blame you. But you’re not in any shape to drive yet, and unless you want to go back to the beach and rest there for a while, you’re going to have to stay here, in the room I offered. I’d be remiss in my duties here if I allowed you to do anything else.” He gave her a straight-on, provocative stare. “And I’m never remiss.”

He was a little more insistent this time, his voice taking on a little harder edge. Forceful words, yet kind. Sexy eyes staring right through her. He was right about it, of course. She was in no shape to drive and she knew that. Her hands were shaking so hard she doubted she could even insert the key into the ignition. Just look at her! One failed resuscitation and she was a total wreck. Did he wonder about her emotional stability? Did it seem odd to him that a doctor would go to pieces the way she was doing? He’d been there, working on the resuscitation, too, yet he was the picture of tranquility, the antithesis of what she was. But he worked with patients, practiced medicine in its purest form, while she performed administrative duties and hadn’t seen a patient, other than in passing on a stroll down one of her hospital’s halls, since she’d left her residency.

Such a vast difference in the same profession. Part of her longing, and her need of late to rediscover her medical roots.

Suddenly, redeeming herself in this man’s eyes seemed important. She didn’t want him thinking of her as a total washout, even though that’s how she felt. “I, um…I don’t practice medicine,” she said. “I guess that’s why this hit me so hard. I don’t do patient care at all. Just administrative work.”

“Well, I do practice patient care, and death always hits me the same way. Especially when it’s so senseless. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about here, Doctor. And nothing to explain. I think the doctors who don’t feel anything are the ones who should explain.”

She gave him a weak smile. “Maybe I should go lie down for a little while, just to compose myself.” The truth was, her initial reaction was to run away and hide, but now that she’d felt a little of his compassion seep into her, she didn’t want to walk away from it yet. “After I sign the death certificate.”

“I was there, too. If you’d prefer, I can sign it.”

Susan nodded. “Thank you,” she said. “And I’m sorry about being so…”

He held up his hand to stop her apologizing. “Nothing to be sorry about. You did a good job out there, Susan. Fought hard to save him. You have a right to whatever it is you’re feeling.”

Maybe she had the right to what she was feeling, but that didn’t make her feel any better about it. She appreciated his support though. More than anybody could know.

The room Grant offered her was small and basic. One bed, one television, one telephone and little else. But it was clean, and the bed, as Susan gave in to the urge to lie down, was comfortable enough.

“Need anything?” Grant asked from the doorway. He seemed a little hesitant to enter.

“Maybe prochlorperazine. My stomach’s a little upset.”

“I’ll have it sent right up,” he said, still lingering there, not making a move one way or another. She watched him with a mixture of mild interest and wariness, waiting for him to leave, yet glad he didn’t. He simply stood there…stood long enough for her to finally have a good look at him. Definitely tall—much more so than she’d thought at first, when she’d all but collapsed in his arms. Broad shoulders. Gorgeous bronze skin, black hair. He wore khaki shorts that hung to his knees and a loose-fitting flowered shirt, typical of what just about all the native islanders wore—and as far as she could tell he was a native islander.

“I know you’re a doctor, but what kind? Family practitioner? A local, from the area here?” Strained, inept question, but she wanted to make conversation with this man. She wasn’t sure why, though. Could it have had something to do with his good looks, and the fact that she didn’t often have time to make idle chat with the opposite sex any more, and there was something about him that made her want to? Or just to keep him there just a bit longer?

He nodded. “Yep, a very local family doctor, born and raised right here. General family medicine is about all the clinic is set up to handle, unless it’s an emergency, then we have a small emergency department. Nothing fancy there, though. We send the big cases to Honolulu.”

“So, do you own the clinic?”

“No. I just run it.”

“But you have a full-time staff? Other doctors, nurses…?” she asked, stopping short of requesting a full profile from him. My, wasn’t she just the queen of useless chatter today?

“I’m the only full-time doctor but, yes, we’re full service here, and we do have others coming and going. All the usual staff needed to run a forty-bed clinic,” he said, looking mildly amused.

The next questions on the tip of her tongue were about the size of his average patient load, then about the profitability margins here. But she succeeded in stopping herself before she got them out, remembering this was not an interview to ascertain medical feasibility in the likelihood of a buyout. She was a temporary patient here, and he was her temporary doctor. It wasn’t at all about business but, it seemed, that’s all she 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, but I happened to need a haircut that day so it worked out.”

“You do know you’re every medical corporation’s nightmare, don’t you?” she said as she slid back into bed, finally putting her head down on the pillow. That spoken like the true corporate head she was. Bottom line, profit margin—the terms of her medical world on any given day, with the need of a good haircut not ever taken into account. They needed money in order to run all their medical facilities, to pay wages, to dispense medicine and perform surgeries, to make people better. A good haircut didn’t get any of that done, but she did admire the sentiment. Just couldn’t relate to it. Or incorporate it into her clinics and hospitals.

“A medical corporation’s nightmare maybe,” he contended, “but every patient’s friend. That’s the part I like. It’s the way medicine should be practiced, and it isn’t done much that way any more.”

Interesting man. Handsome like she’d never imagined in a man, and with ideals, too. She liked that. Liked it a lot.

She liked him, too. “But is it the part your clinic’s owner likes?”

“I’m not sure what she likes,” Grant admitted. “Especially lately. Look, why don’t I go see about those pills? You need to rest, and I need to go see a patient. I’ll catch up with you later, after you’ve had a nap.” He chuckled. “And if you’re a betting woman, maybe we could make a little wager on whether or not the prochlorperazine will make you groggy.”

“Normally, I might take you up on that, but I’m afraid you’ll win, and I’m not a very good loser.” Thirty minutes later, after taking her pill, Susan shut her eyes and conjured up the image of her surfer Adonis while she drifted off to sleep. But just on that edge between full awareness and dream his image changed, then she was rocked gently into her bliss with the image of Dr Grant Makela fluttering around her fading consciousness.

CHAPTER THREE

IT HAD been an awfully long day, and not a particularly good one at that, all things considered. Death had a way of flattening out the rest of the day, no matter how many good things came after it. The death of that Harris boy had been no exception even though, technically, he hadn’t been the physician to work on him. Still felt the same, though. Still filled him with that down-to-the-bone tiredness that took a long, slow toll.

Dragging himself through the door of his home, a tiny cottage sitting directly adjacent to the clinic, Grant kicked off his sandals and dropped down into his bed. “Call me in an hour,” he’d told the floor nurse as he’d left, even though he doubted he’d actually fall asleep. Not with images of that boy’s death so fresh. Not with images of Dr Susan Cantwell’s pain so vivid.

But not sleeping was okay, because he was doing it outside the clinic walls, which was what he needed from time to time…to get away. Even if only a few feet away. In his life, there weren’t very many separations. Work, personal life, personal life, work…it was all pretty much the same. All of it relative to the fact that he kept his needs simple. Give him a good wave to catch once or twice a day, a great board for riding those waves, a few weeks a year to spend working with Operation Smiling Faces—a volunteer group of medics who did facial reconstruction for children living in areas where those services weren’t available—let him have an occasional plane to fly, and his medical practice. That’s all it took to make him happy.

A year ago, he’d thought Alana was part of that mix, but he’d been wrong about that. Damn, had he been wrong! So wrong, in fact, that he’d sworn off the finer sex for the foreseeable future. She’d had a beautiful face, nice curves, big goals. But none of those goals were his. On top of that, she’d had more needs than any one person had a right to.

A year of that and he was glad to be alone again. Still feeling the sting in a bad way, though.

Fluffing the pillow behind his head, trying to forget about Alana, Grant pushed his ex out of his head with thoughts of Susan Cantwell. Kekoa. Brave, courageous. That would be her Hawaiian name because she was brave and courageous, even if she wasn’t feeling like it right now.

Susan… He’d enjoyed watching her on the beach these past few mornings. Certainly, he’d never expected that she was a doctor. A good one, judging by the way she’d worked so hard to save that boy when the inevitable had been obvious. That was dedication above and beyond the call of duty. And showed a refreshing passion.

Of course, he’d had his fair share of death to deal with here on the island, which had shaken him to the core each and every time. Some were catastrophic, some natural, but none ever nice. So he knew how she was feeling—knew that emptiness, that sense of loss, the feeling that you weren’t good enough.

Yet the way she’d gone at the CPR—with such a vengeance. Definitely kekoa. Too bad she wouldn’t be here long enough for him to help her understand that. But she was impatient. Someone who lived a complicated life. He could see, right off, that her mind was clicking away on a faster track than she showed on the outside. It was apparent in her eyes, in the way she’d looked at him, yet, at the same time, had looked far past him to something else that pulled in her deepest attention.

Once she felt steady enough, she’d be gone. Back to whatever kind of stressful life she lived. People like that came here all the time—came to relax, to get away from their tensions and look for something slower. They spent fifty weeks a year in a nerve-fraying lifestyle then figured that two laid-back Hawaiian weeks would cure everything. That was something he saw here every day, saw those people stretching out on the beach with their cell phone in one hand, popping antacids with the other, thinking that was unwinding. They got away from their life, yet they didn’t.

Yes, that was Susan, or his first impression of her, anyway. And he usually trusted his first impressions. After all, he’d watched her wrestle with that damned floppy hat for three days now, always fighting the urge to do something more than merely take the holiday she’d planned for herself. It had been obvious, even from afar, that she wasn’t the type to spend leisure time on the beach. She ached for more, lived and breathed a frenzied life. And now that he was up close…well, if he were a betting man, she’d be a sure thing. But his preference was the ones who fooled him, the ones who put that cell phone away and tossed their antacids into the trash. They were the long shots, but he’d take a long shot for the best results any day.

Unfortunately, he didn’t see Susan as a long shot. Too bad because she needed to loosen up more than anybody he’d seen in quite a while. She wouldn’t return to the beach, wouldn’t wrestle with that hideous hat any more. And unless he missed his guess, she was already thinking about going right back to whatever she’d been trying to get away from.

Already, he missed that part of his morning where she watched him from afar as he watched her. Well, that was a stupid thing to do, anyway, so maybe it was for the best that it was over. Getting attached to Susan on any level was a mistake. Getting attached to any woman was a mistake. Just look what the last woman in his life had cost him!

Stupid or not, though, Grant drifted off to sleep wondering what it would be like to work with Susan, to have her stay there at Kahawaii for a few days.

She felt rested this morning, which was hard to believe, having spent the night in the rather small hospital bed. She struggled to keep her eyes shut against the light streaming in through the window. She didn’t want to look yet. Didn’t want to wake up, or see the activities of all the early beach-goers off in the distance, swimming, relaxing, collecting shells…

Surfing.

There was no amount of rest sufficient for that, so she just wouldn’t look. Out of sight, out of mind. Amazingly, as Susan indulged herself in avoidance for the next few moments, keeping her eyes shut to the world, the face of the young man on the beach she feared would pop into her mind didn’t. Neither did the face of her surfer Adonis, even though she’d never seen his face…only fantasized it. But Grant Makela’s face was there, as plain as if he were standing over her.

Grant Makela? Now, that shocked her. Why him?

Because he was kind to me, she reasoned almost immediately. Because he was her doctor, and people got attached to their doctors. Because he was the first person she’d really gotten to know, if only a little, here in Hawaii. She had her list of reasons, as anything else imitated interest, and if there was one thing Susan was not, it was truly interested in a man. From a distance, fine, but not up close, and absolutely not personal. Once was enough, a lesson she’d learnt sufficiently with that brief and, oh, so boring marriage.

At the time she’d gotten involved it had seemed like the right thing to do. She had been approaching thirty, the clutch of not being married and a ticking biological clock getting to her, so she’d said I do to a nice man in a not too well thought-out decision. He was reasonably handsome, very successful with a fair amount of wealth in his own right. But bland… Good lord, the man’s personality was like lumpy oatmeal, and the lumps were the only interesting part.

So she’d ho-hummed herself through six long months of bland with Ronald Cantwell before they’d come to a mutual understanding that they didn’t work for each other. It had been one of those things that had seemed like a good idea at the time because there had been nothing at all offensive about him, although nothing about him had totally bowled her over either. Which, in retrospect, had been her first mistake, not being head over heels in love with the man with whom she’d intended spending the rest of her life.

One of life’s little foibles was what she called it now. She and Ronald had gone their separate ways on reasonably good terms for a divorcing couple, and as a souvenir of her brief folly, she kept a name that wasn’t her father’s. That was actually a brilliant idea, keeping the Cantwell name, as working under her father’s name did have certain disadvantages as in everyone’s assumption, like father like daughter. Susan definitely wasn’t like her father. Not in any aspect. So she’d hung on to her married name, promising herself that next time she married… Actually, there would be no next time, so the promise to choose herself a man who made her pulse race and her nerves tingle didn’t mean anything. She wanted goose bumps, too. But there would be no man, so no racing pulse, no tingling.

And no goose bumps. That had such a sorry feeling to it.

Stretching, and finally giving in to the sunlight tempting her to take a look outside, Susan opened her eyes and glanced out the window, studying the people out there hurrying around. All of them had a sense of purpose, the way they were coming and going, it seemed. Or maybe that’s just what she wanted to see since her own sense of purpose felt like it was slipping these days. “What to do with my life…” she whispered, turning away from the window.