How to Marry a Doctor

Something intense flared inside him. It made him flinch. His instinct was to mentally shake it off. When that didn’t work he decided to ignore it, pushing it back into the recesses of his brain where he kept all unwelcome thoughts and memories and other distractions that might trip him up or cause him to feel things that were unpleasant.

It was mind over matter.

Right now, what mattered was him getting his head on straight so that they could get to dinner and the jazz festival.

“You look fine,” he said. “Besides, it’s just me.”

“Yeah, you and the hundreds of other people that will be at the jazz festival. You don’t want them looking at you and wondering, Who’s that homely woman with Jake Lennox?”

Homely? How could she see herself that way? It didn’t make sense.

“Darlin’, you are a lot of things, but homely isn’t one of them.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “Okay. Okay. You don’t have to lay it on so thick. Let me get my sandals and we can go.”

When she turned around to walk back into the bedroom, his eyes dropped to her backside which swayed gently beneath the fabric of her dress.

What was wrong with him?

Nothing.

Just because Anna was his friend and it had never really registered in his brain that she was an attractive woman, didn’t mean she wasn’t or that he couldn’t appreciate her...from afar.

From very far away. If he knew what was good for him.

But why now?

Why, in the wake of this bet, did it feel as if he was seeing her for the very first time?

Chapter Four (#u270aa968-b905-56b8-bdcb-ee52c9a954e2)

One of the things Anna loved most about Jake was his ability to surprise her. Like tonight, for example. When she’d gotten home from work, she thought she would try on her new dresses, figure out which one she wanted to wear on her date with Joseph, then put on her sweats, make a light dinner and settle in with a good book and a cup of tea.

The last thing she thought she’d be doing was sitting on a red plaid blanket in the middle of downtown Celebration at a jazz festival waving at people she knew, talking to others who stopped by.

But here she was.

And she was enjoying herself.

Who knew?

It was a nice night to be outside. As evening settled over the town, a nice breeze mellowed the heat of the late June day, leaving the air a luxuriously perfect temperature.

Leave it to Jake to completely turn her plans upside down—and she meant that in the best possible way. He was her constant and her variable. He was her rock and the one who challenged her to leap off the high dive when she didn’t even want to leave her house. Like with these dates they were fixing each other up on. The prospect of spending the evening with blind dates felt like a huge leap into the unknown. Without the assurance of a safety net. Yet somehow she knew Jake wouldn’t steer her wrong.

She trusted him implicitly.

That’s probably why spending the evening with him and his five-o’clock shadow at an event like this—which could actually be quite romantic with the right guy—seemed more appealing than being here with...another guy.

They’d staked out a great place on the lawn in downtown Celebration’s Central Park—close enough to the gazebo that they could see the members of the various bands that would be performing tonight, but not so close that they wouldn’t be able to talk. Jake had purchased tickets for the VIP area that allowed for the best viewing of the concerts. Leave it to him to do it first-class.

The area was packed with people of all ages: couples, families, groups of friends. All around them, people were talking and laughing and enjoying picnic suppers. There was a happy buzz in the air that was contagious. Suddenly, Anna knew she didn’t want to be anywhere else tonight except right here in the middle of this crowd, holding down the fort while Jake went to get them a bottle of wine and their own picnic supper from Celebrations Inc. Catering Company, which had set up a tent at the back of the park.

She’d almost forgotten what it was like to feel like part of a community. Living in San Antonio with Hal had been completely different. Houston was a thriving metropolis; Hal had been kind of a stick-in-the-mud, actually. Picnics and jazz festivals weren’t his gig. He was more the type to enjoy eighteen rounds on the golf course, dinner at the club with his stuffy doctor friends and their wives. If the men weren’t playing golf, they were talking about it or some scholarly study they’d read about in a medical journal. Anna had tried to join in their conversation once when they were discussing risk factors for major obstetric hemorrhage—after all, she was an OB nurse—but they’d acted as if she’d wanted to discuss the merits of Lucky Charms with and without marshmallows.

Later, Hal had been furious with her. He’d claimed she had embarrassed him and asked her to just do her part and entertain the wives. Never mind that she had zero in common with any of them. She worked, they lunched. She didn’t know the difference between Gucci and The Gap—and frankly, she didn’t care. Still, she was forced to sit there and listen to them prattle on about who had offended whom on the country-club tennis team and who was the outcast this week because she was sleeping with someone else’s husband.

Of course, Anna made the appropriate noises in all the right places. She’d become an expert at smiling and nodding and sleeping with her eyes open as the women went on and on and on about utter nonsense. Funny thing was, it didn’t seem to matter that she had nothing to contribute. They were so busy talking and not listening—too busy formulating what they were going to say next while trying to get a foot in on the conversation—that it didn’t even matter that Anna sat there in silence.

Until the last dinner. Anna had sensed the shift in the air even before they sat down to order. The women were unusually interested in her. Their eyes glinted as they asked her about her job, the hours she worked. Did she ever work weekends? Nights? How long had she and Hal been married now? How on earth did they make their two-career marriage work?

It reminded her of those days back in elementary school when one kid was chosen to be the student of the week and all the bits and pieces of their lives were put on display for all to see. Of course, the elementary school spotlight was kinder and gentler. The interest was sincere, even if the others really didn’t have a burning desire to know.

This sudden interest in her personal life was downright creepy. And she’d left the club that night with the unshakable feeling that something was up. Something was different. They knew something, and like a pride of lionesses, they were going to play with their prey—get maximum enjoyment from the game before the kill.

On the way home Anna had tried to talk to Hal about it, but as usual he wasn’t interested.

Exactly one week to the day later—after the niggling feeling that something was different grew into a gut-wrenching knowledge that something was very wrong, something that everyone but her seemed to know about—she’d checked Hal’s email and everything was spelled out right there. Sexy messages from his office manager. Plans for hookups and out-of-town getaways. The jackass had been so smug in his cozy little affair that he’d left it all right there for her. All she had to do to learn what was really going on was type in his email password, which was the month, day and year of their wedding anniversary.

And Hal had had the nerve to accuse her of being more than just friends—or wanting to be more than just friends—with Jake.

Anna’s gaze automatically picked out Jake in the midst of the crowd. As he walked toward her carrying a large white bag in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other, she shoved aside the bad memories of Hal, refusing to let him ruin this night.

She watched Jake as he approached. He was such a good-looking man—tall and broad-shouldered, with dark hair that contrasted with blue-blue eyes. But what mattered even more was that he was a good man, an honest man. He might be a serial monogamist, but he broke up with a woman before he began something with someone else. That was more than she could say for her ex-husband.

It hit her that she was luckier than any of Jake’s past girlfriends. They had a connection that went deeper than most lovers. As far as she was concerned, she would do whatever it took to keep their relationship constant.

“They had this incredible-looking bow-tie pasta with rosemary chicken, mushrooms and asparagus,” Jake said as he lowered himself onto the blanket. “I got an order of that and they had another type with a red sauce. I picked up a couple of salads and some flatbread. And they had tiramisu. So save room for dessert. Unless you don’t want yours. I’ll eat it.”