Doctor's Guide To Dating In The Jungle. Tina Beckett

Stefani Wilson, the newest member of our team.’

      Everything was said in Portuguese, so she should have understood it easily, but Stevie found herself having to concentrate to make out the words through their thick accents. But they were friendly and welcoming, more than she could say for Matt. The two crew members gathered up her luggage as if it weighed no more than a couple of sacks of groceries and took off toward the ship.

      She bit her lip, her hopes of being mistaken fading. Even if the men weren’t already scampering up the gangplank, the raggedy lettering on the back of the boat spelled her fate out in no uncertain terms: Projeto Vida. This was the medical ship, for better or worse.

      ‘Home, sweet home.’ Low graveled tones slid across her senses like calloused hands moving over soft skin.

      Palpable. Dangerous.

      Shivering, she glanced up to find his attention fastened on the boat and not on her. Anything that could wring that kind of reaction out of the man couldn’t be all bad. Right?

      Maybe she should try to see the ship from his perspective. ‘So this is it, then?’

      He nodded, the warm affection in his eyes cooling as he studied her face. ‘Ready to run away yet?’

      ‘I don’t run.’

      ‘No?’

      The way he said it made her wonder if he knew more about her situation than he was letting on. But so what if he did? She had nothing to hide.

      Except for the tattered remnants of her heart. And the disciplinary note in her file.

      Her lips tightened. She wasn’t hiding those either. She’d told Tracy that her ‘friend’ had had a run-in with his hospital, but that he’d done nothing wrong. Why, then, had she hidden her identity at first? Though, after receiving her résumé, Tracy had to have realized Stevie had been talking about herself on the phone that day.

      ‘No, I’m not going to run.’ Not this time. Not even if the boat had the name ‘Typhoid Mary’ inscribed on its side.

      She slapped at a mosquito on her arm and immediately wondered if it was a carrier of some deadly ailment. Running didn’t seem like such a bad option all of a sudden.

      ‘You’ll need to wear repellent. They seem to attack newcomers more than residents. Must have sweeter blood or something.’

      ‘I bet they don’t attack you at all,’ she said, then realized how childish the words sounded.

      A muscle worked in his jaw and one hand went to the back of his neck and rubbed as if trying to ease a knot from the firm muscles. ‘Ready to get to work?’

      ‘That’s why I’m here.’ The sharp tone made her cringe. ‘Ugh, sorry. Chalk up my bad manners to jet lag, okay?’

      ‘No problem.’ He lowered his hand and rotated his neck half a turn. Stevie heard several soft pops as the vertebrae along it cracked. He gave a low groan of relief.

      ‘Do you have back problems?’ No way would she admit she’d begun her education in chiropractic before switching to traditional medicine.

      ‘Nothing serious. Just getting old.’ But even as he said it, she noticed he slightly twisted his upper body—instead of just his neck—when looking down at her, a classic sign of pain. He’d been fine in the car when glancing over at her, so it was limited to one side. Her brain worked through possible diagnoses before she stopped herself.

       It’s none of your business, Stevie. Just leave it be.

      ‘Shall we go aboard?’ she asked.

      ‘If you’re sure you’re up for it.’

      Something about the way he said it made prickles rise along the nape of her neck. Surely the inside of the boat couldn’t be in worse condition than the outside. She could understand being busy, but lack of hygiene and sterility were things she wouldn’t stand for.

      Once she stepped from the rickety dock onto the boat, her heart sank. More peeling paint and the deck’s wooden surface was gouged and pitted. ‘You see patients onboard?’

      ‘Yes, in the exam-room-slash-surgical-suite.’

      Surgical suite. Wow. And maybe they still bored holes in skulls, too. She forced her tongue to the roof of her mouth and held it there, where it couldn’t flap around and say things she would later regret.

      Their next stop was the galley. Stevie was relieved to find the food preparation area neat and tidy. ‘Where do you get your drinking water?’

      ‘The river. The filtration unit on the counter was donated by a relief agency. It’s a three-stage system that filters out particles and then zaps the water with UV rays to kill most bacteria. We can send it through an additional stage that injects a chlorine solution in areas where cholera is endemic.’ A lean finger hooked around the handle of an empty plastic bottle and lifted it. ‘Before the filter, we had to carry clean water aboard in these, which made scrubbing for surgery a complicated affair.’

      ‘I can imagine.’ She wandered over to the rectangular unit. The metal casing was spotlessly clean. She relaxed a bit. Maybe things wouldn’t be as bad as she’d feared. ‘I knew filters like this existed, but wow. It looks like something NASA would have.’

      ‘I hear the system used on the space station is similar.’

      Matt lounged against a nearby doorframe, one shoulder propped against the wooden surface, observing her. Although lean, his body filled the opening, his dark silky hair brushing the top of the frame. She swallowed, feeling trapped all of a sudden and not sure why. He wasn’t threatening in a scary kind of way.

      She rephrased that thought. He was scary, but only because he made her blood rush through her veins simply by looking at her. And that made the man doubly dangerous, since she could no longer trust herself to make wise choices when it came to the opposite sex. Meeting problems head on might work for some people, but for Stevie, avoidance was now the name of the game. And that included avoiding the six-foot-two-inch problem who stood right in front of her.

      ‘Com licença, Mateus.’ The voice came from behind him, and Matt moved into the room to let the crew members pass.

      Mateus, the Portuguese equivalent of Matthew.

      So they did go by first names, just like Matt had said. She liked that. Michael would have insisted on formality at all costs. He’d said that to get respect, you had to demand respect. She used to agree, but now she wondered. That kind of respect could be lost in the blink of an eye—or behind the closed doors of an examination room. Besides, she sensed an admiration from these men that wasn’t a result of social standing or titles, but something earned through time and trust.

      Would she ever be included in their little circle? Probably not.

      ‘We’ve put the new doctor’s bags in your room.’

      Dull color crept into Matt’s face, and Stevie sensed her scalp heating as well. They’d put her bags in his room? She hovered between saying ‘Thank you’ and squeaking out the protest that scrabbled up her throat, seeking the nearest exit. Before she could do either, Matt wrapped a hand around her upper arm. ‘I’ll show you where your things are.’

      As soon as they were through the door, she planted her heels to stop their forward motion, ignoring the way the warmth from his fingers burrowed beneath her skin. Uh-oh. There went that blood-rushing-through-the-veins sensation again.

      She tugged free of his hold, furious with herself for having any kind of reaction at all.

      ‘Why did they put my suitcases in your room? I don’t know what’s going on, but—’

      ‘Not here. Let’s get out of earshot, okay? They’ve already got enough to gossip about for the next two weeks. We all thought the new doctor was going to be … well, a man. Now you see why it’s so complicated.’

      She