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.
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