Designs on the Doctor Read online

  Yet, Ally’s stomach knotted up anyway.

  And she put jealousy on the list of emotions this man was inspiring in her. The list that included the fact that she couldn’t get him off her mind. That just knowing she was going to see him tonight had made her feel as excited as she had for her first school dance. And how she’d relived the kisses of the two previous nights at least a million times. And that she felt as obsessed as a teenager with having him kiss her again.

  But odd or not, the last thing she wanted to see was him in any kind of clench with another woman.

  He let go of Nina a moment later and they both turned to the sideboard for hors d’oeuvres.

  Ally felt slightly better. But only slightly.

  What exactly was between Jake and Nina Hanson? she couldn’t help wondering.

  They were friends—that was the party line.

  But why weren’t they more than that?

  Nina was beautiful, sweet, kind, a little sassy.

  There was no question that Jake was tremendously handsome and charismatic and interesting. And that he could kiss like no one Ally had ever kissed before.

  So why hadn’t they gotten together romantically? They would have made the perfect twosome. Had they always only been friends or had they been more than that at some point?

  Ally didn’t want to be eaten alive as much by curiosity as by jealousy, but she was. It just didn’t make sense to her that these two people who seemed so right for each other, who were obviously close and cared about each other, hadn’t hooked up with each other…

  Or had they hooked up and it just hadn’t worked out?

  Had he ever kissed Nina the way he’d kissed her?

  If he had and Nina’s husband had any idea, Ally doubted Jake would be welcome in their home. So maybe they were only friends.

  Not that it was any of her business. And it shouldn’t have mattered to her one way or another.

  But it did.

  And the longer she went on looking at Jake from this distance, the less Ally could believe something more intimate hadn’t existed between them. Or didn’t. After all, how could Nina not have wanted him?

  He was dressed in dark gray slacks that were almost the color of his eyes, and a dove-gray dress shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows. His dark hair was carelessly swept away from his sculpted face just so. He gave the impression of strength—physical strength and strength of character. When he laughed or smiled, sexy little lines gathered at the corners of his eyes.

  And Ally wanted him so much it made her ache.

  I have to stop this, she told herself.

  It was the same thing she’d been telling herself all day. This was not the time or place to be getting involved with anyone. And he was not the man she should be getting involved with. They were just passing through each other’s lives and would soon be going their separate ways, as if they’d met on a tropical vacation.

  Except this wasn’t a tropical vacation. And this didn’t provide the sort of anonymity, the sort of suspension of reality, that a tropical vacation would. This was the kind of situation where feelings could be bruised. Where grudges could be held. Where the future of her mother’s friendships could be damaged.

  And I could get hurt.

  Because she liked Jake Fox too much, she finally admitted. And every moment she spent with him, every look they shared, every touch, every kiss, only made her like him more.

  But it didn’t change the fact that when everything was settled with her mother, they would both go on with their separate lives. She’d be left hearing about him through her mother—what he was doing, who he was seeing, who he was involved with.

  And as bad as she ached for him, Ally knew it would be so much worse to get in any deeper with Jake now, and then be a distant, removed observer of his life evolving without her.

  So much worse that it made her feel awful just imagining it.

  Awful enough to convince her that she really, really needed to leave last night’s kiss finally behind her and not repeat it.

  Because that was the only solution she could come up with to keep this from going any further than it already had.

  Chapter Ten

  As Jake had driven Ally and Estelle home, Ally had been determined that she would say good-night and not end up alone with him again.

  But as they’d pulled into the driveway, Estelle had announced that she was going straight to bed, asking Jake if she would see him the following morning for their walk. Jake had promised that she would and complained that he’d missed Monday morning’s excursion. Estelle had suggested that he and Ally make up for that by taking a walk right then. And since Estelle’s behavior was increasingly less erratic now that she was taking her medication and she could be trusted to stay safely in her bed once she got there, Ally hadn’t had much of an excuse.

  Which was how she had ended up alone with Jake after all.

  “Have you made any decisions about Estelle’s living arrangements?” he asked as they headed for the neighborhood park.

  “No,” Ally admitted. “And I need to. I need to get back to L.A., to work. Trying to get things done long-distance is a pain. I was on the phone a dozen times today and did what I could on my laptop, but decorating is a visual thing—even though my assistant sent me scans of fabric samples, it isn’t the same as seeing the actual sample. I didn’t dare make my choices that way, and work is piling up.”

  “But that didn’t convince you to do anything about the housing stuff?”

  “I thought about it—” When she hadn’t been thinking about him. “I even tried to hint at it with Mother.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “I pointed out the downside of home ownership, asked if she ever thought of living in an apartment.”

  “And?”

  “She thought I was talking about taking her with me to California again and even on her thyroid medicine she bit my head off. After that I didn’t have the courage to bring up assisted living. Especially when I didn’t feel as if I could say anything really great about it, knowing what she’d have to give up to move.”

  They reached the well-lit park and began to stroll along the path that circled it.

  Assisted living was an upsetting topic for Ally and she didn’t want to talk more about it. So she decided instead to use their walk to find out more about his friendship with Nina.

  “So,” she said. “Nina. I like her.”

  “She likes you, too. She told me before dinner, when you were stuck looking at Bubby’s photographs.”

  There was laughter in his voice and Ally knew he’d found it funny that she’d been trapped for so long with family albums of people she didn’t even know.

  “Yeah, thanks for that,” Ally said, laughing. “I kept waiting to be saved and all the two of you did was stay away so you didn’t have to look at the pictures.”

  “Guilty as charged,” he confessed. “But in our defense, we’ve both seen them a trillion times.”

  “I saw you and Nina in the dining room,” Ally said then. “Are you sure you’re just friends?” she added in a teasing tone.

  “Yep, just friends.”

  “How long have you known each other?”

  “We met working our first jobs in a grocery store as teenagers. We’ve been friends ever since.”

  “But even then you didn’t date or like each other as more than that?”

  “Nope.”

  “How come? Does Nina know something about you that I should know?”

  He laughed. “What is all this about, Ally?”

  “I was just thinking—watching the two of you in the dining room—that you would make an ideal couple. And yet you’re not together…”

  “Is that what you were thinking?” he said, sounding as if he knew better.

  “You don’t agree?”

  He shrugged. “I guess that depends on what ideal means.”

  “You look good together. You seem to have similar tastes and senses of humor a
nd—”

  “Except for the looking-good-together part, isn’t the rest of that what causes people to be friends?”

  Ally sighed. He was enjoying making this difficult.

  Jake ran a hand through his hair. “Look, when I met Nina I had a lot to contend with—it was my first week in a group home, I was on probation, I wasn’t sure if I was going to get to finish high school or if I was going to have to get a G.E.D., I was having court-mandated therapy—basically I’d screwed up royally and was paying the price for it. Girls weren’t an option for me. But I was working side by side with Nina, we’d talk, and we became friends.”

  “She didn’t want to be more than that either?”

  Jake nudged her with his shoulder. “Can’t believe it, huh?”

  Ally had to smile at his egotism. “Only asking,” she demurred.

  “I was quite a catch with my police record, bad skin, and clothes that had come from the freebie bin at Social Services. But Nina was dating someone else—the guy she ended up marrying and having two kids with by the time she was twenty-two. We were both on our own separate rocky paths. What we offered each other was that unconditional support that teenagers give other teenagers, and that’s just how it’s always been with us.”

  “And you never—”

  “Never,” he said definitively. “I love her like a sister. I think she’d say she loves me like a brother. In a lot of ways, Nina—and Bubby by association—are the only family I’ve ever known.”

  As they passed the halfway point on the path, Ally’s curiosity only grew.

  “So if not Nina, why not someone else?” she asked.

  “As a teenager? I told you—”

  “No, not as a teenager. You are old enough to have moved on to adult relationships, you know. Have you ever been married?”

  “Never.”

  “Hmm,” Ally mused. “I would have thought that marrying and making a family of your own would have been a goal.”

  He shrugged. “It’s not something I’m willing to do just for the sake of doing it. I want a family, but I sure as hell don’t want a marriage that doesn’t work out and leaves me losing the family I start.”

  That was a good point.

  “Have you ever gotten close to marrying?” Ally persisted.

  “Recently, as a matter of fact. A little over a year ago.”

  “Really…”

  “Really. I was engaged to a woman named Claudia. She was an investment banker.”

  “Why didn’t it work out between you?”

  “Looking for more flaws in me?” he joked.

  Looking for any flaws in him was more like it.

  “Yes,” she confessed, but in a tone that made it sound as if she was teasing him.

  “Sorry, but it was me who opted out, not her. We just reached a point where I realized that while she seemed perfect for me in most ways, I couldn’t handle her view of family.”

  “She didn’t want one?”

  “It wasn’t that. We talked about having kids—she saw that for herself. But it was the way she treated the family she already had that got to me.”

  “Did she already have kids?”

  “No. I mean her parents, her sister, her aunt. I believed her when she said she wanted to spend more time with them but was just too busy with work, with me.”

  “Only that wasn’t the case?”

  “She was busy,” he allowed. “But she also didn’t really want to be bothered with her family. They all lived nearby, but they might as well have been in another country. Her only contact with them most of the time was through periodic phone calls that she complained about having to make. But I was still buying the busy-excuse until she found out her dad was dying.”

  “What happened then?” Ally asked.

  “Dying or not, Claudia wasn’t going to alter her own routine or let it interrupt her life. Her dad was in hospice for two weeks and she saw him three times—all three of those times I had to make her go or she wouldn’t have gone even then.”

  “Maybe it was just too hard for her emotionally. Maybe keeping her distance was how she protected herself.”

  “Who was it easy for? For her mother or her sister or her aunt who were having to deal with everything while Claudia went on about her business? That isn’t easy for anybody and no one gets a free pass just because it’s hard. But with Claudia it wasn’t even that. She didn’t want to get her hands dirty. Even the day we got word that her father was hours away from dying, I met her at the hospice, she stayed a few minutes and then said there was nothing she could do anyway, she was going back to work. I ended up staying with her family until her dad passed—with instructions from her to call and let her know when it was over. That was when I decided she wasn’t for me.”

  “So you broke it off.”

  “Not at the funeral or anything. But soon after that. Then I cried on Nina’s shoulder just like she’d cried on mine when her first marriage broke up. Because we’re friends,” he said, goading Ally a little.

  They’d come full circle on the park path, so they crossed the street to go home.

  “Okay, I get it,” Ally said with a show of exasperation, “you and Nina are just friends.”

  “But it’s so much fun that you’re jealous.”

  “In your dreams, Dr. Fox,” she said. Convincingly, she thought.

  They’d reached her house and went around to the backyard. They were climbing the stairs to her apartment when he put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her to his side in a much more suggestive way than the headlock she’d witnessed him putting on Nina.

  “You are in my dreams,” he said into her ear.

  “Liar,” she accused as they stepped onto the landing. She unlocked the door and opened it, flipping on the light inside. But she didn’t make any move to go in.

  “Absolute truth,” he swore. “You’ve taken over my conscious and my unconscious.”

  It was very satisfying to have his arm around her in a way that wasn’t merely playful and to hear that she was on his mind as much as he was on hers. Maybe too satisfying, because she lost her grip on some of that earlier determination to keep him at bay and turned in the circle of his arm to face him.

  “That sounds very distracting,” she said as if she could hardly imagine it.

  “Very,” he agreed with a sexy smile.

  She tipped her chin upward, meeting his charcoal-colored eyes with hers, basking in the heat of his gaze as his mouth met hers.

  Ally felt Jake’s arms twine around her and every thought of refusing him evaporated as lips parted and that kiss went from sweet to sensual just that quick.

  His mouth opened wider and his tongue came to meet hers. Ally wasn’t shy, either, not when she was so glad to be back in his arms.

  Jake pulled her close with a hand flat to her back, his fingers a gentle but firm undulation there that lured her another step away from reason.

  Heat crept through her body as she reacted to his touch, and she tried to ignore it, but with every inching of that kiss into more intimate territory, every press of his fingers into her back, her body just seemed to scream for attention.

  Her hand slinked its way under his shirtsleeve. And while there was nothing overtly seductive about it, it somehow seemed a little forbidden.

  Maybe to Jake, too, because it prompted him to pull her closer still, enough for her breasts to come up against his chest.

  Not that that calmed what her body was crying out for. It didn’t. Somehow she thought he could sense that because his kiss became even deeper, even more hungry, even more intense.

  He kept her clasped tight to his body as he spun them both into the open door and around so that Ally was pinned between him and the wall. That hand at her waist slipped under the hem of her shirt, leaving nothing between her body and that big, strong, adept hand coursing slowly, slowly up to breasts that were nearly heaving with need.

  Then he reached one straining globe and her breath caught in her throat at that
first touch that sent a chill of delight quivering through her.

  Her shoulders drew back and her spine arched. And the meeting of their mouths became hardly a kiss at all but something more raw, more sexual, to accompany that hand that was kneading her flesh, encasing her, encompassing her, gently tugging her nipple, teasing it, twirling fingertips around it, and altogether turning her to mush inside.

  He was up against her, the length of his body running the length of hers, and Ally hated every thread of the clothing that came between them.

  She tore his shirttails from his waistband and plunged both of her arms underneath with such vigor she was surprised that the buttons didn’t fly. Not that she would have cared if they had. All she cared about was laying her palms to the breadth of his bare back.

  The bed was only a few feet away—that thought came as a yearning for even more began to stir in her.

  She could click off the light.

  She could reach over and close the door.

  But you weren’t even supposed to kiss him tonight.

  Why she remembered that at that moment she didn’t know. But once she had, it wouldn’t let her ignore it.

  There were reasons she’d come to that conclusion, she told herself. And if she shouldn’t even kiss him, she definitely shouldn’t be doing anything else.

  Ally slowly pulled her arms out from under Jake’s shirt and pushed slightly away from him.

  “I wasn’t even supposed to kiss you tonight,” she told him when she’d broken off the kiss, too, saying out loud what had been going through her head for the last few minutes.

  “Why not?” he asked, nibbling the side of her neck and more firmly caressing her breast.

  Firmly enough to make her less inclined to stop this at all…

  “I’m not sure,” she answered, “but I told myself not to.” Reluctantly he let go, taking his hand out from under her shirts, putting it back on her waist.

  “Okay. Whatever you say,” he conceded amiably. Then he placed a soft kiss to the top of her ear and whispered, “But you know, not everything I do has a geriatric twist to it.”