Chapter Six
“Why what?” Andrew stared at her. “Why do I want to go out with you?”
She nodded.
What kind of question was that? Who wouldn’t want to go out with her? “I’m attracted to you. You make me laugh, even if it’s because your jokes are terrible. You’re smart, and you’ve devoted your life to helping people. Those are the things I know about you so far, and it’s not enough. I want to know more.”
She wanted to say yes. He could see it in her eyes. The way her lips tipped up into a smile, and her shoulders relaxed the tiniest bit.
She sighed. “I want to. But I don’t think I should.”
Now it was his turn to ask, “Why?”
“Because I work at the cancer center. It feels…I don’t know…unethical, I guess. I don’t want anyone to think you’re getting special treatment, or get Dr. Patel in trouble.”
Andrew hadn’t considered any of that. “But you’re not in Dr. Patel’s clinic anymore, right?”
“No. But I was part of your care team at the beginning, and my name is documented in your chart. I really want to get a job there when I’m done, and I don’t want to risk doing something that might be perceived as unprofessional.”
He didn’t want to seem pushy, but she’d said she wanted to. He wanted her to. “Is there a formal policy against it?”
“There is against physicians having relationships with patients. I don’t know about the rest of us, or when it’s a patient from a different clinic.”
He wasn’t willing to give up without hard evidence. “If we don’t know for certain, can we assume there isn’t?” He leaned forward, resting his forearms on the table. “Please, let me spend more time with you.”
She looked at his hands, and he focused to keep them steady. He felt a little out of his element…he wasn’t normally this nervous. Women rarely made him work this hard when he asked them out. That wasn’t the only reason he grew uneasy, though. He didn’t think he’d ever been so invested in the outcome before.
He wanted her to say yes so badly he ached with it.
He supposed the pain could’ve been related to the lymphoma, or the chemo…but he didn’t think so.
“I don’t know.” She ran a hand along the back of her hair and circled her fingers around her ponytail, a gesture he noticed she did often. Was she nervous, too?
“What if I’d had my appointment a day later, and you’d never seen me at the cancer center? If you hadn’t run out so fast and I asked you out when you spilled coffee on me, what would you have said?”
Lauren countered with a question of her own. “Didn’t you just get out of a relationship? Someone named Caroline?”
Andrew was surprised she remembered Caroline’s name. Caroline had been mentioned in front of her what, once? Nearly a month ago? “It’s been almost two months. I’m not looking for a rebound, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Was your sister right? Did she end it because of your diagnosis?” Anger flashed in her eyes, and he bit back a grin. His sisters’ overprotective natures got tiresome, but Lauren feeling defensive on his behalf was strangely satisfying.
“Not exactly,” he hedged.
Lauren lowered her eyes and shook her head. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I asked that. It’s none of my business.”
He didn’t want to talk about Caroline, so he said nothing more. He watched her for a moment, unsure what else he could say to convince her. Or if he even should try to convince her. He wasn’t into forcing a woman to do something.
Then again, she said she wanted to…she was just worried about her job.
Suddenly, another thought struck him. “Are you dating someone?”
Her reply was immediate. “No.”
But he knew she had agreed to a date with Logan tomorrow night. She didn’t know Logan and Andrew knew each other, or that Andrew had been the one to end up with her phone number. His immediate goal that night at McNellie’s had been to prevent Logan from pursuing her, but later that evening he’d considered the possibilities. For himself.
After starting and deleting several texts over the course of the past two weeks, the events of this morning had finally prompted him to action. When he’d seen Lauren standing just a few feet from what appeared to be an unstable, inebriated patient, the instinct to protect her had overwhelmed him.
And then during his chemo treatment in the afternoon, he’d watched the door for her, hoping she’d pass by. When she didn’t, the disappointment that had washed through him had been considerable. He realized how deeply interested he was in her, and as a cancer patient, time wasn’t a guarantee he had the luxury of having.