more than professional reasons might be a mistake. She discreetly laid the frame down to cover their faces and went on.
“Okay, then I don’t know what he told you about how we’d been working. I had done some proposals and pitched other ideas with rough sketches or animations—”
“We’re starting over.” Dakan cut off her explanation as he settled behind her—which was at least better than him looming over her shoulder.
Starting over. Right. She went about finding and opening the file for the rough animation she’d first thrown together for Zahir and opened it.
“We started by talking time lines and construction methods so he could have some ideas on how long it’d take to have a fully functioning hospital with the different means of construction. There are a couple of ways to do this and I’ve prepared a sample time line for each.”
“I want the shortest time.”
Impatient. She fixed her eyes on the screen precisely because she wanted to turn around and speak to him.
“The shortest time line to get full use of the building, of course, would be to build it all and then open it. But there’s an alternative, which would allow you to start getting use out of it much sooner but at a limited capacity. Given the current need, it might be worthwhile to have a staged opening.”
“Staged?” Dakan said, and in his reflection she saw him shed his jacket and drop it on the table before leaning forward, elbows on knees. “Open different parts at different times?”
“Yes.” The animation started to play as she spoke. “In a staged opening you start with one department—and here I started the animation with the original hospital because it’s already there. But basically you build one section at a time and finish it for use before moving on to the next part of the facility. That way you can open and just keep tacking on expansions as they become available.
“They do this in smaller communities usually to make medical care available locally at the earliest possible time and start with, say, doctors’ offices. Open those and start seeing patients while they build the next section and maybe add an emergency department. Then testing facilities and outpatient surgery, then open fully with a number of beds and a children’s ward, add a proper obstetrics and surgical department, then add more beds. Like that.”
Reflected Dakan nodded as he sat back. “I like that idea. Do that. But we don’t really have the number of doctors required to staff a building of offices yet. I’d rather start with two different departments at a reduced scale that can be expanded on each side. The biggest part would be the emergency department with some very basic diagnostic equipment—X-ray and a lab—and then have a smaller area to the side where a couple of GPs could have offices in the guise of urgent care for less-than-life-threatening illnesses that still require immediate treatment.”
As the conversation and planning started, the tension she’d felt in him drained away. He definitely seemed as eager to get started as Zahir had been, and as he spoke, the irritation that had saturated his voice during the bazaar confrontation earlier ebbed away.
She could work with this man. It’d be different, but he was a doctor too. They had the same goal: get a facility up and running for the people.
“We could do two different reduced-size units. Any time you split your building efforts, construction slows. So unless the extensions are staggered from one side to the other, you’re going to slow progress to open new units. Unless you really expand the crew.”
“The size of the crew won’t be a problem. Will you be designing as we go too? Is that possible? I know it will take a long time to finish a full design, and I’d rather they break ground and get going sooner than later.”
Nira gave up looking at his reflection and spun in her chair to face him, her eyes finding his immediately. He was still leaning forward, maybe that was why it suddenly felt so intimate. Even just talking shop, their eyes instantly connected and held just a beat too long for her comfort.
Nira would never call herself shy, but this was all new terrain for her, and she didn’t want to make another mistake already. She shifted her gaze to the safety of the middle distance, a thinking point to keep her thoughts on track.
She probably should put off some of her exploring until they got the first unit under way, devote as much time to this as she could now, show Dakan that his goal was her goal. Reflecting well on her firm and gaining a happy client who might ask for her again for later construction efforts would be a great thing for her career.
Her quest could wait.
She could wait.
She’d waited twenty-six years to fill that void, and another few weeks wouldn’t kill her.
“I HADN’T CONSIDERED designing as we go,” Nira said. It seemed rude to sit with her back to him when she had no real reason to do so, aside from avoiding looking like a sex-crazed royal fan, which her reaction to him was starting to feel like.
He might be a prince, but he was a prince who had not even responded slightly to her geekery. 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,