скачать книгу бесплатно
And what was it—if not chemistry—that had made him ignore that simple gesture from her in the first place? he asked himself. He would have shaken any other patient’s hand. But when it came to Ella Gardner there had been something about her from the instant he’d set eyes on her that had knocked him off-kilter and his instinctive response to that had been to keep his distance, to be even more formal, more remote and removed than usual.
He didn’t understand it. He hadn’t understood it when it had happened. And true to form, he’d retreated into that attitude that had gotten him through the earlier part of his life. That bad attitude from which he’d recently faced some old repercussions.
But a doctor just couldn’t have…
What exactly was it that he had for Ella Gardner? he asked himself. Stirrings? Attraction? Some kind of unaccountable infatuation?
He didn’t know what it was or what to call it.
But whatever it was that he’d had, a doctor just couldn’t have it for a patient.
And she was a patient.
Okay, yes, it could be argued that for now she wasn’t his patient. That during the course of treatment she would be Kim Schwartz’s patient, that he wouldn’t so much as examine her until after the alternative course was finished and he began the in vitro procedures. It could be argued that only then would Ella Gardner be his patient.
But he was splitting hairs and he knew it. Basically she was still a patient—or at least a patient-in-waiting. And he didn’t get personally involved with patients or with patients-in-waiting.
Hell, he didn’t get personally involved with anyone.
And that was how he liked it. How he liked his life. No personal involvements meant no complications. It meant no encumbrances. No expectations. No disappointments. Uninvolved and unattached—that was how he made sure to keep himself, focusing on his work and solely on his work. That was the way it had always been, and that was the way he wanted it to stay. The way he intended to make sure it stayed. Which was why he never let any woman get too close or stick around too long.
“So vacate the premises of my brain, Ella Gardner,” he muttered under his breath, through clenched teeth.
The sound of his voice was enough to distract Champ from the rubber duck, and she did her springy little run over to him and promptly began a tug-of-war with his big toe. Which she could barely open her mouth wide enough to accommodate.
Her pin-sharp teeth hurt some, but still her struggle made Jacob laugh. He leaned forward and picked up the pup again to take her inside.
“Patients and puppies—sometimes you’re both pains in my neck,” he told Champ.
But he still held the tiny dog to his face, rubbing his nose in the downy fur behind one of her ears.
And in spite of all his determination to put Ella Gardner firmly out of his mind, he also still found himself—entirely against his will—looking forward to having dinner with her tonight more than he should have.
And way, way more than he wanted to.
Chapter Three
“T his is Jacob Weber. I’ve had a patient emergency this afternoon and am running behind schedule. You’ll have to meet me at my office rather than at the hotel and wait for me to finish with my other appointments today. We may or may not be eating, depending on the time left before my meeting, but I’ll make sure to run you through the orientation, even if it’s on the fly. Unless, of course, you aren’t here when I finish for the day, and then I’ll assume you’ve had second thoughts about this course.”
Ella played the message a second time, shaking her head as she listened again. She was amazed by the doctor’s curt, verging-on-rude demeanor even on the telephone. Although she supposed she should give him points for making the phone call himself, for not merely having his receptionist do it.
On the other hand, as Ella played the message a third time, she thought that he might be better off having his receptionist relay his messages. At least Bev was nice.
But Ella reminded herself that Jacob Weber was the best there was when it came to infertility, so she would just have to overlook his rotten social skills to be treated by him.
It was a shame, though, she couldn’t help thinking. Because as the deep, rich tones of his voice wafted over the line for the fourth run-through of the message, the image of him spontaneously presented itself to her mind’s eye—the way it had about a million times since she’d met him. It was a shame that someone with the face of a Greek god, someone with broad shoulders and smoldering nearly purple eyes, someone who exuded a raw, steamy sexuality that he didn’t even seem aware of, had a gargoyle’s personality. Without that he would have been a powerhouse of a man, whom no woman could resist.
Then again, maybe for her own sake it was good that he was so unlikable. Because if she was playing his phone message four times just to hear his voice and thinking yet again how great looking and sexy he was, she’d better have something that tempered what otherwise might seem like an attraction to him.
But of course she wasn’t attracted to him. Continuing to think about how jaw-droppingly handsome he was was just like recalling an awesome winter sunset—it might be something to behold but only from the warm safety of a house where fierce winds blowing outside couldn’t get in.
No, there was no way she was attracted to Jacob Weber. She needed his professional services, his talents, skills and experience as a doctor and that was all. Being attracted to him amidst that—coupled with his contrary, irritable, arrogant temperament—would be very, very bad. It was the absolute last thing she needed. Or wanted.
Still, she played the message a fifth time, telling herself it was for its supercilious, overbearing tone, and the turnoff that provided. That it was not for the sound of the polished-mahogany voice that delivered it.
Then she made herself hang up the phone.
A woman would have to be crazy or masochistic to put up with a man like that in any kind of personal relationship, she asserted to herself. And she wasn’t crazy. Or masochistic. Or looking for a new relationship with any man, let alone one like Jacob Weber.
A single marriage that had demanded too long a period of suppressing her own needs and desires, a marriage in which she’d allowed herself to be controlled, was enough for her. She certainly didn’t need to top it off with someone like the unpleasant doctor.
“No, thanks,” she said out loud as she went into her bedroom to change out of her business suit.
“Just do your job and do it well, and I’ll be only too happy never to have to see you again.” She went on talking to the unseen Jacob Weber as she put on a pair of gray slacks and a white camp shirt for her second encounter with the prickly physician.
And hopefully it wouldn’t take too long to accomplish the feat of getting her pregnant, she added silently, fighting against the ever-present fear that it wouldn’t happen at all. Because the less time she had to spend with the man and tolerate his pomposity, the better.
“I’ll be glad when you’re nothing but a bad memory,” she proclaimed as she scrunched the curly explosion of her hair above the rubber band that held it at her crown and retraced her steps out of her bedroom and then out of her apartment.
And that’s all he’d be, too, she assured herself as she left the building and got into her car to drive to Jacob Weber’s office. “Nothing but a bad, bad memory,” she repeated forcefully.
Yet somewhere buried deep beneath that bravado lurked a tiny shadow of doubt.
A tiny shadow of doubt born of the fact that every time she thought about seeing the gargoyle in a Greek god’s body again she felt a twinge of excitement….
“He’s right behind me, I promise,” Marta said to Ella as the nurse came through the door from the inner office into the waiting room where Ella had been sitting for over an hour.
“Okay,” Ella answered, hoping the woman was right but unsure whether to believe it or not since Bev, the receptionist, had told her the doctor would be out after the last patient had left forty minutes ago and then repeated it when she’d left herself twenty minutes earlier.
Marta gave her a reassuring smile, said good-night, and went out.
The longer Ella sat there, the more difficult it was to avoid what she considered her pregnancy demons. The thoughts—the doubts—that crept into her mind when she wasn’t guarding against them or when she had too much time on her hands.
What if nothing worked and she never got pregnant? What if all the money, all the effort, all the pain came to naught? What if she spent her entire life childless?
The questions tortured her and, as if she’d outrun them, she stood and forced herself to focus only on the present. On the fact that Jacob Weber was keeping her waiting.
Clearly the office ran on his timetable, and he wouldn’t be rushed. For anyone. Certainly not for her.
Ella decided to take a stroll around the waiting room, pausing to look more closely at the framed prints on the walls, to straighten the magazines on the coffee table, to pluck a dead leaf from the fern and bury it in the soil around its roots. And all the while she wondered if Jacob Weber was making her cool her heels on purpose. Just to be contrary. Or as some kind of test.
Then, through the cut-out that connected the receptionist’s area with the waiting room she saw the light in the hallway that ran between the examining rooms turn off, and she felt encouraged.
At least she did until she caught sight of the man himself opening the door to what looked like a supply closet.
Without any acknowledgment of her, or any apparent awareness that she was even out there, he slipped inside the closet and closed the door behind him.
He probably put counting cotton balls ahead of meeting with her, she thought, feeling a little surly after all the time she’d been waiting.
He was only in the supply closet for a moment, though, before he emerged again. Yet he still offered her not even a glance or a word to let her know he really was on his way before he stopped at the area where the scale and other machinery were located—the area that was apparently the nurse’s work station.
Did he even know she was watching him? Ella wondered.
He didn’t seem to. Or care, if he did, because for what felt like an eternity his attention was on something.
The man really was a jerk, Ella thought, staring openly at him in hopes of at least drawing a glance.
It didn’t work. He went right on looking over some sort of paperwork, oblivious to her.
Jerk, jerk, jerk…
Good-looking jerk, though, she had to concede as she took in the sight of him in tan slacks and a tan sports coat over a darker brown dress shirt and tan tie that all seemed to set off his chestnut hair to perfect effect.
But again she reminded herself that he was a gargoyle in a Greek god’s body so as not to let that handsome appearance cloud the reality.
After another few minutes he seemed to finish what he was doing, because he tucked the paperwork into a file and brought it to the receptionist’s desk, finally gazing in Ella’s direction.
But that was as much as she got.
They were only a few feet apart, and he still didn’t bother to speak. He merely raised a cursory glance at her before lowering his eyes to the desk again to write something on a note he attached to the file.
Maybe he was just singularly dedicated, Ella told herself. But that didn’t keep his actions from seeming just plain rude.
He finally flipped off the rest of the lights in that portion of the office and—at last—headed for the door that would bring him into the waiting room.
You’d better be damn good at what you do, Ella thought as he joined her.
She had to look twice to believe what else she was seeing, however. Riding along in the side pocket of his sports coat was what appeared to be a tiny black puppy with two front paws and a soft furry head—no bigger than a plum—sticking out of the top.
The almost-too-small-to-be-real dog barked a squeaky-but-fearless bark at her that Jacob Weber ignored as, without greeting her, he said, “I’m going to have to make a stop at my place—luckily it’s just across the street. Then it looks like all we’ll have time for is a fast-food dinner before I need to make my meeting. There’s a hole-in-the-wall a few doors down that has Chicago-style hot dogs. We’ll probably have to stand and eat them at one of the counters along the wall, but that’s as good as it’s going to get.”
And all that without any reference whatsoever to the puppy in his pocket.
“Uh…okay,” Ella said. But she refused to be left in the dark about the dog and pointed to the side of the doctor’s coat. “Aren’t you going to introduce us?”
Jacob Weber looked down at the coal-black face peering with pint-size grandeur from his pocket and said, “This is Champ. Who is the cause of my need to stop at home, since I can’t take her to my meeting.”
“Champ is a girl?” Ella said, unable to suppress a smile at the tiny, wavy-haired terrier, or to hold out a finger to pet her.
“She is a female, yes,” Jacob Weber confirmed.
“Champ makes her sound like a boy.”
“She’s named Champ because that’s what she is—a little champ.” That was all the explanation he was offering because then he said, “Shall we go? We don’t have much time.”
Champ was more easily won over than her owner, because she was licking Ella’s hand and wiggling around in the coat pocket enough to let Ella know she was wagging her tail.
But Ella had no choice except to comply with the doctor’s insistent suggestion, retrieve her hand and follow him to the door.
He opened it, waited for her to step out into the hallway and then closed and locked the door behind them.
The elevator was directly across from his office, and the moment he pushed the down button the doors opened.
“Champ looks too young to be away from her mom,” Ella observed during the elevator ride that Jacob Weber would likely have left silent.
“She is. I found her in the gutter at the curb in front of my place about four weeks ago. Since she seems to be a purebred, the best guess is that her original owner was moving the litter for some reason and she somehow fell or got out of the box unnoticed. I knocked on a few doors but no one knew anything about her so I took her to a vet around the corner. He thought she was five or six days old at the time and said she wouldn’t live without special care.”
“And you decided to keep her and give that special care?” Ella asked, trying to keep the surprise out of her voice.
They’d reached the ground floor, and the doctor held open the door long enough for her to precede him out of the elevator.
“The vet was too busy to do it so I did,” he said matter-of-factly.
“What kind of special care did she need?” Ella persisted as they left the office building.
He continued in that same no-big-deal tone to outline a regimen of feeding and watering the pup every hour round the clock until recently, of caring for her day and night to pull her through, of her still needing to be looked after closely and not left unattended for long periods.
By the time they’d walked across the street to a row of brown brick town houses, Ella was amazed that the gruff Jacob Weber had gone to such lengths to save the animal.
“You’re a dog lover,” she guessed.
He shrugged as he unlocked and opened his town house door, reaching in to flip on a light, then motioning her inside. “I’ve never had a pet of any kind before this,” he said as he came in after her and closed the door behind them.
“And you still kept Champ and did all that for her?” Ella marveled.
“What was I going to do? Put her back in the gutter to die?”
That snide statement was more like what Ella expected from Jacob Weber. As was the curt “I’ll only be a minute” that came next.
But for the first time she didn’t take him or his surliness as seriously as she had before. How could she when, as he turned to go into what appeared to be the living room, he reached into his pocket and extracted the tiny dog to hold up to his face and say in a tender voice, “Okay little girl, outside to do your business and then I’ll have to put you in the crate for a while. Don’t worry, I promise it won’t be long.”
Then he lowered the puppy to hold to his chest just as they both disappeared from her view.
Maybe you’re not such a hard-nose after all, Ella thought.
Of course despite his treatment of Champ, Jacob Weber had still left her standing in the entryway rather than offering her a seat in the living room. Which would have been the polite thing to do.
But at that point Ella merely shook her head and remained where she was.
Well, almost.
It was just that the longer she stood there in the narrow entrance with nothing but a steep set of stairs rising up in front of her to study, she became curious about what his place actually looked like. And what it might say about him.
She wasn’t brave enough to do any actual snooping, but she did slide a few feet to where the entry merged with the living room, leaning enough to her left to peek into that other section of his house.
She was glad that there weren’t any signs of the doctor by then and she assumed he’d gone through the living room into the kitchen that was visible at the other end, at the rear of the town house. But given that brief opportunity, she did take stock of the living room from where she was.
Not that there was much to take stock of.
