Читать книгу The Pregnancy Project - Victoria Pade - Страница 10

“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.

What little furniture decorated the space appeared expensive and tasteful but there was definitely not much of it. An elaborate oak entertainment center on one wall sported a big-screen plasma television and an impressive stereo system. Directly across from that sat an exquisite overstuffed black leather sofa with a floor lamp to one side and an oak coffee table in front. And that was it. There were no pictures on the walls, no plants to warm up the place, and no other seating. And while the sofa was large enough for more than one person, the room still seemed to be a one-man setup that didn’t welcome company.

It made Ella wonder if that was Jacob Weber’s own goal—to keep himself removed—or if his off-putting disposition had simply forced him into the role of loner.

The doctor had apparently gone out the back door with the dog because just then Ella heard it open, and the sound of him saying something she couldn’t make out gave her fair warning of his return.

She hurriedly straightened up again and sidled to her original position.

He came as far as the living room where she could again hear what he said as he informed Champ that she had her pillow, blanket, bear and monkey to keep her company, instructing her to nap while he was gone and promising treats when he got back.

It was sweet. Maybe more sweet because it was coming from a man who otherwise appeared to be tough as nails, but sweet enough nonetheless to raise Ella’s curiosity once again, this time over what exactly lurked behind the man’s brusque exterior.

More sounds let her know that he was putting Champ in her crate and within moments of that Jacob Weber was back in the entry with her.

“Is Champ all tucked in for the night?” she asked, pretending she hadn’t been privy to any of the doctor’s exchange with his pet.

“Not for the night, no. But for the time being, anyway.” He raised a big, thick wrist to check the paper-thin watch there and added, “We need to get going.”

Ella nodded her agreement, realizing that while Champ may have somehow wormed her way into the doctor’s affections and weakened his defenses, talking about Champ didn’t soften his demeanor at all.

Maybe nothing did, Ella thought as they left the town house.

Well, fine. If he wanted to keep things purely professional, she’d stop trying to make it anything else and wait for him to begin her orientation.

Which was actually what he did as they set off in the balmy early-September evening to walk down the street toward the shops that lined the next block.

“The study begins Monday evening,” he said without preamble. “Although I won’t be there—”

“You won’t?” Ella heard herself ask before she’d considered the wisdom—or lack of wisdom—in it. And before she’d had any idea that it would come out in a tone of voice that had a slightly disappointed ring to it. To go along with the disappointed feeling she also discovered in herself…much to her own amazement.

“I’ll be there the rest of the time,” he was quick to assure her, obviously having caught the tone.

Desperate for damage control, Ella said, “It’s just that… I don’t know… I guess I thought that since it’s your study and your office—”

“It is my study and my office but in essence it will be Dr. Schwartz treating you during this initial phase. My being there at all is really just a courtesy. But I will be there. Every night after Monday night.”

Ella thought she’d successfully made him believe she’d merely had a moment of patient insecurity, because he continued with what he’d been explaining, only now his voice had a more comforting note to it. “Even though I won’t be there Monday night, Marta will be. She’ll introduce you to everyone. And Kim Schwartz is not intimidating at all—she’s not even five feet tall, weighs about eighty pounds and is very soft-spoken. Very cordial and friendly.”

“Good,” Ella said, trying to encourage his impression while tamping down on what was really going on with her. Whatever that was…

They left the row of town houses and stopped at the corner. As he watched for a break in the cars coming through the intersection, Ella looked ahead at what awaited them on the other side.

They were in an older area of Boston that had been remodeled and updated to attract new residents and businesses. It had been a success because the town houses on either side of the doctor’s were occupied and so were all of the storefronts on the next block.

Ella could see a bakery, a bicycle repair shop, a coffee shop, a bookstore, a pizza parlor, a costume shop, and several other small establishments, including their destination at the opposite corner where a neon sign jutting out from the building announced Chicago-Style Hot Dogs.

When they could finally cross, Jacob Weber picked up where he’d left off.

“Marta will be taking some routine, baseline readings on my behalf—blood pressure, pulse, temperature. She’ll also take blood and urine so we have labs on you all. Kim—Dr. Schwartz, but she doesn’t mind if you call her by her first name—”

“What about you?” For the second time Ella’s mouth ran away with her—not something that usually happened.

“What do you want to call me?” he asked, as if challenging her.

Accepting the challenge—and because first names might act as the equalizer she needed with this man, she said, “Jacob. I’ll call you Jacob.”

Ella had the impression that he considered taking issue with that. But in the end he surprised her by simply conceding, though not without sarcasm.

“Okay. Well, Ella, Kim will also be there Monday night,” he continued. “She’ll have a lot of questions for you—she needs histories as extensive as any other doctor. She’ll take your pulse, too, but not for the same purpose that Western medicine does. In Chinese medicine the pulse is taken for the strength and quality of the blood flow. The belief is that it tells something about your chi—your energy. Many practitioners of Chinese medicine base their treatments on that. Kim says she can tell when there are disturbances in the body just from the pulse. She’ll also ask to look at your tongue.”

Ella glanced over at him, finding his profile as strikingly handsome as the frontal view of his face but trying not to register that fact. “She’ll ask to look at my tongue?”

He actually did crack a smile at her reaction. Only a half smile, but a smile nonetheless that softened his features and gave him a whole new appeal as he looked at her, too. “It’s a diagnostic tool in Chinese medicine. She’s shown me what she looks for and given me the textbook she learned from. I’ve been using it myself—asking to look at my patients’ tongues to see if what I’m finding or suspecting in their physical condition really might be reflected in the way their tongues look. I’ve found some merit to it. I’ve also found that after Kim has treated a couple of my patients who went to her on their own—and helped them—that there are changes in the appearance of their tongues. It’s actually what prompted this study.”

They’d reached the hot-dog stand and although dusk was just beginning to fall, light spilled from the windows in front of it to provide plenty of illumination. Enough so that he said, “I’d rather have better light but let me see yours, anyway.”

“You want to examine my tongue out here on the street?”

She couldn’t be sure if he was kidding or not. Especially since there was an amused expression on his face.

He glanced around and then said, “Nobody’s looking.”

The man was too mercurial for her not to worry about refusing him. But they were in the open, with several other people milling around them, and Ella knew she would feel like an idiot standing there sticking her tongue out at him. Plus, mercurial or not, there was only so far she was willing to go.

“I will not stick out my tongue,” she said firmly.

“You’ll have to do it for Kim,” he warned gruffly.

“I will do it for her. But I won’t do it for you. Especially not out here.”

A passerby looked askance at her just then and Ella realized there might have been some sexual undertones to what she said. Apparently Jacob noticed the same thing, and it obviously amused him because a glint came into his eyes. A very attractive glint that almost seemed to add a certain charm to the man.

But a moment later he glanced away and it was gone.

He opened the door to the hot-dog stand then, once more waiting for her to go in ahead of him.

Ella was only too glad to do it, using the opportunity to tell herself she was out of her mind if she thought this man was capable of being engaging in any way.

He did, however, insist on paying for her hot dog and just as they turned from the register a very small café table in the corner opened up.

“Looks like we get to sit after all,” he said, leading her there.

Slathered in mustard, the hot dog tasted great, and as they ate Jacob laid out the course of treatment that would begin on Tuesday evening—when he would be in the office, he made sure to remind her.

He reached the end of his orientation at the same time they finished their hot dogs, but he no longer seemed in such a hurry to get this over with. In fact, after pushing away the remnants of his meal, he sat back as if he were surveying her and said, “So how did you become a federal prosecutor? A driving need to put away the bad guys?”

After a moment to register the switched gears and the fact that he was actually making conversation with her, Ella answered him. “Yes, as a matter of fact. That, plus I discovered in law school that I was a good trial attorney. I spent a year in a private firm but after one too many cases defending someone I really believed was guilty—in particular a woman I was reasonably sure had extorted money from an elderly man who had been left penniless as a result—I changed to the other side of the courtroom.”

“And your conviction rate?”

“It’s high. But it isn’t about the numbers for me. If that becomes the priority, then bad things can happen. Innocent people can go to jail. I don’t want that on my conscience. It isn’t just a game to me—a competition that my ego has to win—”

“It’s about right and wrong. And punishing the evildoers.”

“That probably sounds corny to you but yes, that’s what it’s about to me. If someone does something awful to you or to someone close to you, you want to know they aren’t going to get away with it, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

“But at the same time, what if something happens to point a finger at you for something? For something you didn’t do? Do you want to spend years locked up because, as a prosecutor, I refused to look at everything from all sides just to keep my conviction rate up?”

“So, you care.”

“Yes, I care.”

He nodded, his deep, dark-purple eyes staying on her as if he were seeing past the surface. And maybe even as if he liked what he saw. And heard. Although Ella was wary of going that far.

“What about you?” She wanted to interrupt his study of her. “You must have become a doctor to help people.”

“To tell you the truth, no.”

“No?” she said with a small laugh, surprised by his answer.

“It was the science I loved. I went into medicine planning to do research, not work with patients.”

“How did you end up with patients, then?”

“I didn’t at first. I finished medical school and spent a year in research—like your year defending evildoers rather than putting them away,” he said with another of those half smiles she was a little afraid she could get hooked on.

“And you didn’t like it as much as you thought you would?” she asked, to urge him on.

“I liked it all right. It was just that during that year I discovered that impregnating mice and rats, and making charts and lists of statistics to write papers from got tedious day after day. I wanted to continue some of the research—like this study in alternative medicine—but I wanted to do it in the real world, with people.”

“Where you could see genuine results and not just compile data and end up with paperwork as your final product,” Ella guessed.

“Exactly.”

“And has it been better for you? Have you enjoyed working with people more than working with rats and mice?”

This time she got a full smile and it doubled the effect. “Don’t sound as if you can hardly believe it,” he said.

“Did I?” Ella asked, because she honestly hadn’t thought it had come out that way.

He only answered her previous question. “Yes, it’s been better for me to work with people. I think I’ve done some good for a lot of them, and if I had spent the last few years in research I’d probably still be doing the same project I started when I graduated from med school.”

“I know that from what I’ve heard and read about you, you’ve definitely done some good for a lot of people,” Ella confirmed. “That’s why I came to see you.”

That seemed to remind him of something—maybe that this wasn’t a social occasion or that their being together was a professional association—because his smile dissolved, he sat up straighter, and took another look at his watch.

“I’d better get going or I’ll be late for this meeting,” he said.

Despite the fact that a certain amount of formality had reappeared in him, Ella thought his tone was tinged with what almost sounded like regret to put an end to this.

Still, they both stood and gathered the papers and remnants of their dinners, depositing it all in the trash before leaving the hole-in-the-wall restaurant.

“I appreciate you taking the time to do this for me tonight,” Ella said as they headed back up the street. “And dinner was good, too.”

That addition made him smile another more-reserved smile, which she caught out of the corner of her eye. “I don’t think a hot dog and a bottle of water count as dinner. Don’t tell Kim Schwartz that’s what I fed you or she’ll think I’m sabotaging the study. She’s all about balanced everything—a balanced life, a balanced diet, a balanced body.”

“She’ll probably see it in my tongue on Monday night whether I tell her or not,” Ella joked, eliciting a slight chuckle from the imposing doctor and feeling far too pleased with herself that she’d accomplished it.

As they neared his town house and the building directly across from it where his office was, he pointed his chin in the direction of the office building and said, “I can never find a spot to park in front of my place so I use the office lot. Is that where your car is?”

“It is,” Ella confirmed.

They crossed the street together and went into the lot where few other cars kept company with the silver Porsche he said was his and the more economical, compact sedan she pointed out as hers.

“I’ll walk you to your car,” he said, following her to it and waiting for her to unlock the driver’s side door.

“Thanks again for the orientation dinner,” Ella said, looking up at him from over her open door.

“I’ll see you Tuesday night.”

“I’ll be there,” she assured him.

For a moment he just went on standing there, those intense eyes of his staying on her the way they might have had this been the conclusion of a date he didn’t particularly want to end.

But then he took a step backward and said, “Drive safely.”

“You, too.”

He raised his chin to acknowledge that and pivoted on his heels to head for the Porsche.

And as Ella got behind the wheel of her own car and closed the door, she suddenly began to wonder what it might have been like if this had been the end of a date. Would he have tried to kiss her?

Kiss her?

Jacob Weber?

That was just too weird to even think about, she told herself as she started the engine.

Too, too weird…

But weird or not, she still couldn’t get the idea out of her mind the whole way home.

She also couldn’t get out of her mind the lingering and purely baseless thought that it just might have been nice if he had kissed her.