Dianne Drake – A Boss Beyond Compare (страница 5)

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.