The Pregnancy Project

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.

By the time they’d walked across the street to a row of brown brick town houses, Ella was amazed that the gruff Jacob Weber had gone to such lengths to save the animal.

“You’re a dog lover,” she guessed.

He shrugged as he unlocked and opened his town house door, reaching in to flip on a light, then motioning her inside. “I’ve never had a pet of any kind before this,” he said as he came in after her and closed the door behind them.

“And you still kept Champ and did all that for her?” Ella marveled.

“What was I going to do? Put her back in the gutter to die?”

That snide statement was more like what Ella expected from Jacob Weber. As was the curt “I’ll only be a minute” that came next.

But for the first time she didn’t take him or his surliness as seriously as she had before. How could she when, as he turned to go into what appeared to be the living room, he reached into his pocket and extracted the tiny dog to hold up to his face and say in a tender voice, “Okay little girl, outside to do your business and then I’ll have to put you in the crate for a while. Don’t worry, I promise it won’t be long.”

Then he lowered the puppy to hold to his chest just as they both disappeared from her view.

Maybe you’re not such a hard-nose after all, Ella thought.

Of course despite his treatment of Champ, Jacob Weber had still left her standing in the entryway rather than offering her a seat in the living room. Which would have been the polite thing to do.

But at that point Ella merely shook her head and remained where she was.

Well, almost.

It was just that the longer she stood there in the narrow entrance with nothing but a steep set of stairs rising up in front of her to study, she became curious about what his place actually looked like. And what it might say about him.

She wasn’t brave enough to do any actual snooping, but she did slide a few feet to where the entry merged with the living room, leaning enough to her left to peek into that other section of his house.

She was glad that there weren’t any signs of the doctor by then and she assumed he’d gone through the living room into the kitchen that was visible at the other end, at the rear of the town house. But given that brief opportunity, she did take stock of the living room from where she was.

Not that there was much to take stock of.