Challenging The Doctor Sheikh. Amalie Berlin

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Being attracted to him—while entirely understandable—would be a really stupid idea to entertain.

      Keeping her goals in mind? Much more sensible than some overdeveloped Cinderella story. One-sided attraction should always be ignored, especially when the other side was a freaking prince. Stupid. Understandable, but stupid.

      There were other aspects of her heritage to explore without adding “Explore Arabic sensuality” to her list. Besides, Mum had already done that, with disastrous effects.

      Focus.

      “I suppose I could design in stages to an extent, but I’d need to block out the entire footprint first. You know—the general layout, decide the square footage of each department and the best flow of one department to another before I got started. But otherwise I don’t see why we couldn’t go in stages with the proper planning. It’ll be trickier, but designs are always done with specifications and constraints, so not that much trickier.”

      And by doing it in stages, she’d actually get to be here for part of the construction! She’d get to see the first building rise that truly came from her ideas. It made the whole job even more exciting for her.

      He gestured to a writing tablet lying at her side and Nira slid it over to him with a pen. “Okay, then, you’ll start with the split building we talked about. I’ll get someone else working on selecting good equipment so you’ll have equipment dimensions to work with in your plans.”

      Nira leaned slightly to get a glimpse of his writing. Not the chicken scratch she’d expected. “Did you take drafting classes?”

      “Drafting?” He stopped, an odd lift to his brows. “That’s not part of a medical curriculum.”

      “You write like you’ve done hours of board lettering.”

      Silence hung after her words, and suddenly Nira was reminded of the elevator. She’d said something wrong again. It wasn’t a stupid question—lots of people took drafting classes in secondary school. Probably. If they wanted to...draw things.

      Light crinkles appeared in the corners of his eyes just before he chuckled. “I have no idea what that means. Board lettering sounds like writing on wood.” Her shoulders relaxed when he laughed, and a dimple appeared in his left cheek that completely wiped the notion of royalty from his persona.

      “It’s a way of writing, back to Ye Olde Days of drafting when they tried to make everyone’s writing standardized so it would be universally legible. Most computers have a hackneyed font called Draft-something-or-other now approximating the style. I just meant your writing is very neat and uniform. I thought doctors were all scribblers.”

      “My first education was to write from right to left. When I learned English, it was hard to remember at first, so I learned to take care with my...lettering, was it? I want to be understood.”

      “Of course. I didn’t think about that. I should’ve, though. My attempts at writing anything in Arabic have been laughable. I drag my hand in the ink and smear it, or I drag my hand on the pencil and smear it. We won’t even talk about calligraphy nibs...” She shrugged and gestured back to the tablet. Stop derailing things. The man might be a doctor when he’s not prince-ing, but right now he was her client, and clients deserved not to be interrupted by nervous women trying not to notice how their dimple contrasts delightfully with their square jaw.

      “I need to know patient volumes we’re designing for. Do you want to start small until you get people used to the idea of the hospital?”

      He took the redirection with ease, not commenting on her failure not to smear her practice writing. Thank God.

      “No. I want to go big. Big enough it’s impossible for people to ignore it. Big and shiny enough to draw attention and bring people in. Starting small just means staying small. It will get the use it needs if we make it important by making it big.”

      That was a new tactic. Her career experience wasn’t yet expansive, but everyone she’d worked with had worked within a budget. But when your client ruled a country, he could probably do whatever he wanted with the budget.

      “I still need a target number of patients, because my idea of big and yours might be two different things. And I hate to ask this since I know how fast you want me to get started, but it would really be beneficial to me to see what sort of facilities people are currently using.”

      He laid the pen down and leaned back in his chair. “You want to go to the hospital? It’s barely functional. I’m not sure what you could get from going there besides tetanus. Though, on the upside, as far as hospital infections go, I doubt you could get MRSA.”

      “I’d like to avoid tetanus, so I won’t touch anything. I don’t know what MRSA is, so I’ll just be glad I can’t get it.”

      “Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. It’s like staph on steroids, resistant to most antibiotics, really hard to get rid of. But since antibiotics so rarely make it to Mamlakat Almas, anyone who has it would likely have caught it from someone coming into the country. So, probably right before they died, or healed it themselves.”

      “Right. I’d like to avoid that.”

      Maybe going to the current treacherous hospital wasn’t the best idea. Except...

      “But we’re leaving the current building and adding on? Blending the old and new?”

      That was why Zahir had hired her specifically, even without a CV loaded with practical experience. Also it was why the animation had started with the old building.

      Dakan scribbled a few more notes on the pad, then leaned back again. “No. It’s on a large piece of land. As we’re going to do it staged, we’ll leave the old hospital up and functioning—such as it is—and begin construction for the new facility in another area of the property. Maybe right beside it, then tear down the old when the new is up and running.”

      Definitely not blending the old with the new that way, not that the current hospital was exactly old—it had been built in the twentieth century if the old blueprints were accurate. He was probably exaggerating. Still, she could work with that. And who wouldn’t want a shiny new facility? But she had a point about visiting the hospital besides seeing what she was adding to.

      “It’s nothing to me if the old building is razed after the first unit is completed, but I still need to see the facility or visit a healing center. Zahir—I mean Prince Zahir—said there were a few bigger healing centers within the country. I need to see how the waiting and reception areas function, see what people expect so I can make sure the building feels familiar enough to be welcoming.”

      He fixed his gaze on her, and for a moment she thought he might finally yell at her, as she’d been expecting him to do in the lobby. But instead he paused for a considered moment and said calmly, “I know blending the old and the new is what you and Zahir discussed, but I really have no interest in that, Miss Hathaway.”

      With her not knowing what to call him, every time he said her name it made her a little more aware of their different positions. She’d address that first. “Please call me Nira. I don’t mind.”

      “All right, Nira. I’ve inherited the hospital project, and since I’ve had a few more days to think about it, I’ve decided to go a different route from Zahir’s old plans. I want a thoroughly modern hospital. None of that modern on the outside and quaint and nostalgic on the inside СКАЧАТЬ