London's Most Eligible Doctor

“So, I guess that’s us! Just another day at En Pointe!” Cole shrugged on a wool blazer, scooped up the puppy in his basket from the sofa and gestured with his head toward the front door with a smile. “Are you ready?”

Cole took about three seconds to examine the menu before offering the waitress a smile and his order.

“I’ll have the spaghetti carbonara, a fresh salad, some garlic bread and—uh—Rover, here, will have a bit of plain chicken and some rice. In a bowl. Is that doable?”

“Not a problem.”

It was easy enough for Lina to see that anything Cole or “Rover” asked for wouldn’t be a problem for the waitress, who had plonked herself down in the spare chair between the two of them. Lina may as well have been invisible for all the attention the waitress was paying her. Not that she minded. Going along to a job interview she’d been cajoled into was one thing, but being dragged out—okay, well, being blackmailed into going out to dinner was another.

“Who’s the little puppy?” The server had on her best baby-talk voice now. “You’re the little puppy! You’re the little puppy!”

So much for the restaurant’s no-dogs policy.

The waitress had already made a puppy-exception rule, and brought the little guy a bowl of water and a couple of itty-bitty raw carrots to gnaw on in case he was teething. Right now the pup’s head was resting on the brim of the basket, lending him more supercute factor than anyone—or anything—should be allowed.

Cute factor or no, Lina was there for the sole purpose of securing the job. That was it.

“Lina?” Cole tipped his head in the waitress’s direction. It was her turn to order. She’d scanned the prices and hadn’t even bothered to look at the menu choices. One entrée was the equivalent of her weekly food budget.

“Don’t worry.” Cole reached across and covered her hand in his. “I’ll take it out of your first paycheck.”

Lina tugged her hand away and clenched it in her lap. She wasn’t comfortable accepting help … but it had been ages since she’d had a well-made restaurant meal. Gone were the days of being feted by London’s social elite.

“The gnocchi, please. And a rocket salad.” They were the least expensive items, but with the added bonus of reminding her of pierogi. Pierogi! Her mouth watered at the thought of her mother’s pierogi. One day … she’d go home one day. Lina pursed her lips and handed the waitress her menu, who gave her a cursory glance, scribbled something on her notepad, then whirled off with a smile expressly for Cole’s benefit.

Lina focused her attention on the puppy. Neutral territory. That’s what she needed. Cole’s hand on hers had been too close to feeling something—wanting something. She hadn’t realized how curative the simple touch of a hand could be.

“He doesn’t look like a Rover.”

“No?” Cole rubbed a finger along the little guy’s head. “What does he look like?”

As if by design, they both crossed their arms, leaned back and considered the puppy. He had a white muzzle that broadened into a wide stripe that led up to his forehead. Black took over from there. He had little brown arches over each eye, white paws and appeared slightly affronted at this very obvious inspection.

“Vladimir,” Lina pronounced.

“Horace,” Cole countered.

Lina shook her head. “No. He is not a Horace.”

“How do you know he’s not a Horace?”

“I just know.” Lina gave Cole her best I-just-know look, then tipped her head to the left as if it would give her a different perspective. The puppy opened his eyes wider as if in anticipation of her coming out with the right name.

“Wojciech.”

“I can’t even pronounce that.” Cole laughed. “How about Spot?”

“No!” Lina protested. “That’s lazy. And look. Where do you see spots on this guy?” She lifted him up out of the basket. His back leg was in a little splint. She wanted to ask what had happened but felt herself already getting too involved with the puppy and with Cole. They both looked at her as if she held all the answers to the question at hand.

Despite herself, she couldn’t help giving the puppy a little cuddle. It was impossible not to. She held him up again so that they were face-to-face. “What’s your name, huh? Jak masz na imię?” The puppy scrunched his face into a mess of wrinkles before yawning widely in her face. Then he sneezed. Twice.

“Maybe he doesn’t speak Polish.”

“Maybe he doesn’t speak American.” She kept her gaze on the puppy.

Cole rearranged the cutlery at his place setting with a grin. “Go on, then, Polish puppy-whisperer. What’s his name?”

Lina looked across at Cole once she had given the puppy a good long stare. “Igor.”

“Igor,” Cole repeated, as if he hadn’t heard her correctly.

“Yes. Igor.”

For the second time that day Lina’s mood lifted as that smile of his peeled apart his lips and heated her insides as if he’d unleashed a swathe of warm sunlight.

“I like it. Looks like we’ve got ourselves a puppy name.”

Lina handed Igor across to him, careful not to get his injured leg caught on anything. “No. You have yourself a puppy name. And a puppy.”

Cole cradled the dog in the crook of his arm, careful to adjust the little splinted leg so it could lie along his forearm. “Didn’t I tell you? Part of the new job is dog walking. Once his leg heals, of course. Only until I find him a new home, of course.”

“Yes, of course,” Lina replied dubiously. Then the cogs started to whirl in a direction she didn’t like. She could feel the smile on her lips press into a thin line. Part of her physio was to take regular walks. Longer and longer. She should be doing at least two or three kilometers a day by now. Cole would know that. And, having watched her walk to the restaurant, he would probably have assessed that she hadn’t been taking as many walks as she had been advised to. She’d done countless laps of her flat but going out there—out here—where everyone could see her, judge her … she just hadn’t been up to it. Igor pricked up his ears and gave her an expectant look. Her eyes shifted to Cole’s face and he looked virtually the same—minus the furry muzzle. She couldn’t help but laugh.

“Does anyone ever say no to you, Dr. Manning?”

The smile disappeared entirely from his eyes. “Oh, you’d be surprised.”

When Lina excused herself to go to the ladies’ room, Cole waited for the waitress to take away their empty plates and give a farewell coo to Igor before pulling his coat on. He was pretty sure he knew the server’s life story by now but could honestly say he would leave the restaurant being none the wiser about the private life of Lina Keminsky. Not that prying had been his intention. They’d stuck to neutral topics when their food had arrived. And as much as Cole knew about how Reception worked, which, as it had turned out, wasn’t all that much. He’d taken over the practice about a year ago from an old medical school friend who had run off to get married—a recurring theme at En Pointe—and things had been running like a well-oiled ship up until now. Not that the past hour with Lina hadn’t lent a certain softening round the edges to the day.

It was pretty easy to tell she didn’t like to talk about herself and she’d quickly sussed out the same was true for him—or perhaps she simply wasn’t interested, which made a nice change. At home, or at least back in the United States, in the town where he’d grown up everyone knew everything about him. Back home everyone knew he’d had a fiancée—had being the crucial word. At twenty-six she’d been too young to die. Far too young. And her family was never going to let him forget it. So the fact that people generally kept themselves to themselves in London suited him to a T.

If what had happened to Lina had happened back home in North Carolina? There would’ve been a line of people at the door to her apartment, hands filled with bowls of potato salad, a platter of Grandma’s best fried chicken, a warm, tea-towel-wrapped plate filled with buttery collard greens, someone’s Great-Auntie Kay’s to-die-for double-decker chocolate cake with the cherry filling people talked about so much at the church socials, and so on and so on until before you knew it the whole thing would turn into an Item of Interest in the “What’s the Buzz” column of Maple Cove’s local gazette. There was no escaping the caring embrace of a community like that one. Especially when your African-American father and Irish mother were pillars of the community. The local judge and the most sought-after doula? There was no surprise when the couple’s son became a doctor engaged to the town’s most promising lawyer! A smile twitched on his lips, then tightened.

He wasn’t part of that community anymore.

He felt his teeth dig into his lower lip. It wasn’t worth it. Opening that particular can of worms. His parents were good folk. They were just ambitious. For themselves and for him. So what if they hadn’t been a huggy-kissy family? He’d made it, hadn’t he? Decorum, status, success. They were paramount in the Manning household. And now that he was a doctor running one of Britain’s most elite specialist clinics?

Nothing. None of it mattered.

The straight As at school, the letterman’s jacket weighed down with athletic achievements, the Ivy League education, the long-awaited proposal … none of the graft he’d put in to win an approving smile or a hug had meant a bean after the accident. His parents had made that more than clear.

The flash of grief tugged his mouth downward.

So, no. He didn’t like howdy-do-and-what-about-you? chitchat. Big-city anonymity had been suiting him just fine up to now.

But when it came to Lina? There was something telling him she might be worth breaking unwritten rules for.

She’d deftly managed to unearth his dry sense of humor and, as it had turned out, she had Eastern European drollness down to a T. Her impersonation of the waitress going all googly-eyed over the puppy had had him in stitches. Not that he hadn’t tried to hide it from her. He was going to be her boss after all and there were boundaries. Not that he’d managed to wrangle a “yes” out of her. If she did take the job, he’d have to remember that would be the extent of their relationship. A working one. He didn’t do personal. And he definitely didn’t do personal at work.