The Doctor's Damsel (Men of the Capital Book 3) (7 page)

“Try it for one day,” she said, her voice almost pleading. She looked at him with such faith that he wanted, for one fleeting instant, to promise her anything, to
do
anything to keep her from being disappointed. That rush of emotion overwhelmed him. Abe was not in the habit of having
feelings,
apart from the occasional surge of anger like the one he’d had over Deonte Richmond.

“Absolutely not. I also won’t try veganism for a day, or colonic irrigation. There are certain lifestyle choices incompatible with my personality, and being—snuggly to everyone I encounter definitely belongs into that category.”

Abe watched her expectant face fall with a hint of something like satisfaction. There, he’d disappointed her, and it wasn’t so bad. He could live with that. Hell, he’d been disappointing his family for years and it hadn’t held him back. Surely he could convince this actressy little creature with her stitched-up hand and her cockeyed optimism to stop expecting greatness from him with no trouble at all.

“Okay then, let’s see if you can catch compassion.”

“Like a baseball?”

“From exposure. You’re a doctor, so you understand contagion pretty well, I’d imagine.”

“I did my residency in infectious diseases.”

“Fine. So you’re perfectly willing to see if being around me gives you a case of warmth and human feeling?”

“That makes no logical sense. I think the pickle’s gone to your head. Your system is clearly unaccustomed to preservatives and high levels of sodium, and it’s making you delirious.”

“It makes perfect sense. I think I can persuade you to live your life and conduct your profession with more kindness and caring. All it will take is prolonged exposure to the idea in action. When you stitched up my hand, you were fairly mean at first. When you saw I was really upset, you took off your gloves and talked to me for a second, and let me see your humanity. There’s a man in there who’s worth reaching.”

“Excuse me?”

“What I’m saying, I guess, is that I can save you, Abe.”

“Save me?”

“From ossifying entirely. They way you’re going, you’re headed for the intersection of Bitter and Hardened, and there’s not an on-ramp from there back to Happy.”

Abe nearly exploded from the struggle not to laugh. It was without a doubt the most ridiculous thing anyone had ever said to him, including her many comments about the dildo. And yet—her bizarre statement was unsettlingly accurate in a weird way.

“I’m not hanging out with you and trying to catch girl cooties.”

Abe felt like he was in the pressure cooker. He might as well be at dinner with his Onkle Knut, listening to a litany of his sins against the family and all his shortcomings as grandson and heir.

“Girl cooties might do you some good.”

“I’m immune. I was inoculated in medical school. It’s a biomedical impossibility that I could be infected with touchy-feeling love for humanity at large.”

“So what’s the risk in trying? You could call it research.”

“No, honey, I call it bullshit. I’m nobody’s knight in shining armor. I’m a damn good doctor, and that’s true in part because I’ve worked very hard at making sure I don’t get personally involved in the lives of my patients. Yet another reason I should have left your scarf in the exam room and never left a voice mail.”

Becca recoiled, drooping back in her seat, suitably chastened. She’d pushed too hard. She always pushed too hard. It was a character flaw, she decided. Becca took a deep breath, gathered the detritus of her meal into the basket, and dumped the trash into the waste can, stacking the plastic basket neatly on a shelf with its fellows.

“I guess we’re done, then, after all,” she said quietly. “I can give you a ride back to your bike if you want.” Becca stood near the door. Abe got to his feet, dumped his trash, and joined her.

“That was a little harsh, wasn’t it?” He asked gravely. She nodded. “I can’t afford to care too much about the patients in the ER, Becca. If you knew their stories, what their lives were mostly like, it’d drive you insane. The night I treated you? Yeah, there was a kid whose dad brought him for treatment after yanking his arm out of the socket and snapping his collarbone. I had listen to this asshole tell me a fairy tale about how his son fell down the stairs and hurt himself because he’s clumsy and doesn’t listen to his parents and stay out of trouble. I stood there and considered, literally, seriously considered hurting that man. It was all I wanted right then—just to pound my fist into his face until he was unrecognizable. It wouldn’t have fixed anything, Bec. The kid would cry for that dad. They cry for the worst parents—and I’d lose my license and go to jail and not be able to help anyone else because I gave in to my emotions.”

His voice was raw with hurt and it embarrassed him. Becca threw her arms around his neck and hugged him hard. Abe’s arms went around her and he hugged her back, feeling for just a second that things might not be as bad as they seemed.

“That has to be so hard for you,” she said, her voice warm with an agony of compassion, quick tears shining in her blue eyes. “Let’s go.”

They rode back to the bowling alley in silence. He reached across the console, took her hand in his, and squeezed it.

“Are you off tomorrow night?” Becca asked him as she pulled in beside his bike and shifted into park.

“I work until seven.”

“Let me cook you dinner.”

He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “Okay. Good night.” He slid out of the car, mounted his bike and rode away without another word.

Chapter 5

Becca worked on her audition lines in her sister’s studio and looked up recipes online. Abe had said his name was German, so she decided to impress him with some authentic food from his ancestral home. She settled on red cabbage soup and some kind of noodle thing called spaetzle. She figured she could eat the soup—there even used to be a cabbage soup diet back in the old days, so it must be reasonably healthful. He could have the leftover noodles for his lunch the next day. It made her feel positively wifely, planning a special meal to surprise him.

Becca made a grocery list, taking careful note to get things like caraway seeds and a pound of flour. She had thought you measured flour by tablespoons, but the noodle recipe called for a pound. She looked up the conversion and found out she was making enough spaetzle for fifteen people. Not a confident enough chef to halve the recipe,

Becca resigned herself to making a crapload of German egg noodles and headed for the market. She forced herself to stay away from the hummus and the kale chips—now was not the time to indulge! —and focus on the ingredients she needed to seduce Harrison Abrahemson with a good meal. She found herself wanting to take care of him, make sure he got enough wholesome food to eat and such. Becca was a nester, and he brought out all her sappiest impulses. The man had a high-stress job and he needed a break, needed to let someone help him. She knew in her heart that she was exactly the person to convince him of that.

Once she’d mixed up enough disgusting eggy dough to make approximately seventeen bajillion noodles, she started slicing them and putting them on to boil. While they were cooking, she figured she could shower and get ready. Those little German bitches boiled over and made a huge mess in Hannah’s previously unused kitchen.

Becca was trying not to gag from the sweaty-socks-stink of cooking cabbage while cleaning up the swamp of overcooked noodles, clad only in a towel. That was when Abe knocked on the door. She muttered imprecations as she made her way to the front door and turned the knob, leaving a floury smear on the door.

“Is this a bad time?” He chuckled, taking in her coils of wet hair, the towel that seemed both insufficient to its task of concealment and determined to slide off, and the wad of what might have been pasta in one hand and the roll of paper towels under her arm.

Abe stood in the doorway, a bouquet of sunflowers in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other, looking like he’d stepped out of a magazine ad. She sighed, unequal to the task of greeting him cheerily in such a mess.

“Have a seat,” she said peremptorily, and returned to the kitchen end of the room to continue wiping up.

Abe came up behind her, setting his flowers and wine on the counter and taking the paper towels.
“I can do this.”

“Really?” she asked hopefully.

“Really. Go get ready. I know it’s driving you nuts that I got here before you were ready,” he said kindly.

Becca dashed back to the bathroom and dried her hair, curled her eyelashes, and donned a yellow sundress scattered with tiny blue blossoms. It looked sweet and sunny and reminded her of the flowers he’d brought her. No one had ever given her flowers on a date. She’d gotten a few roses from the audience that time she was in “Our Town,” but that didn’t count. That was business. This was most assuredly personal.

Barefoot, she hurried back to him, her hair a riot of untamed waves streaming behind her as she dashed toward the stove to turn off the burner. The cabbage was beginning to burn.

“Cabbage is mostly water. How could it run out of water and burn?” she puzzled, dumping the smoking, stinking pan into the sink. 

Abe was rather unsuccessfully trying to clean the glutinous mess off the front of Hannah’s oven. Becca grabbed his arm and dragged him to a standing position.

“Thank you for the flowers. They’re beautiful. Now let’s have a glass of wine and decide what to order for dinner.”

Abe’s arm snaked around her hips and he dragged her up against him. Her head tipped back and their lips met. All of her sappy impulses burned away as the fire of his kiss suffused her limbs with desire. Becca no longer wanted to make him noodles—she wanted to make him moan instead.

“I was trying to make you cabbage soup and spaetzle in honor of your German ancestry,” she explained breathlessly.

“How about I order pizza in honor of your Italian ancestry?”

“I don’t eat carbs or dairy,” she reminded him sternly.

“Okay then, what should we order?”

“Thai spring rolls with ginger sauce,” she responded immediately. He laughed. “Here, I have them on speed dial.”

The order handled, Becca trimmed the sunflower stems and arranged them in a vase she found on top of the refrigerator. They were bright and gorgeous and she loved them. She fussed over them, arranging them this way and that until Abe dragged her away, insisting he was bored.

“I’m here now. Entertain me,” he demanded.

To his surprise, she bounded toward the coat closet, dragged some stuff out, and disappeared into the bathroom. When she emerged in super short cutoff jeans, a white undershirt, cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, he gaped. She was like a walking Daisy Duke fantasy in that get-up, but he had no idea what she was up to. It crossed his mind that a striptease might be in his future.

She played with her phone for a second, set it on a speaker dock, and cranked up the volume on an instrumental country track. Keeping time by slapping her hand on her hip like an invisible tambourine, she broke into song, crooning an old Patsy Cline number.

“I go out walkin’/after midnight/out in the starlight/just like we used to do.” He fished in his pocket for his phone, lit up the display and held it up like a lighter as if he were at a concert, grinning in disbelief as she wound up the song, her wistful voice vibrant with sadness and strength. Abe applauded and she bowed with flourish, tipping her cowboy hat to him.

“Never, ever ask an actress to entertain you if you don’t expect a show.” She grinned mischievously. “I may not be Hannah Largent, but I had voice lessons, too,” she said modestly. “I was in the chorus of
Evita
once. Not like the real Broadway
Evita
.
Evita
in Jersey, but still...I rocked it.”

A knock at the door heralded the arrival of their Thai food and she went to answer the door. Abe grabbed her arm and shook his head.

“You’ll give some poor Thai youth a stroke if you answer the door looking like that. Let me get it,” he teased.

Becca stepped aside, secretly thrilled that he thought her to be dangerously sexy dressed as a cowgirl singer. She got out paper plates and poured the wine into glasses for a carpet picnic. She sat down on the floor by the coffee table and started opening food containers. She slurped a spicy Thai noodle into her mouth illicitly and smiled when he caught her.

“Tell me you didn’t perform that number in a school talent show,” he scolded. “I won second place in my sorority’s Talent Night during rush week when I was eighteen.”

“You should have been stamped with a parental advisory. Were you mobbed by frat boys?”

“No. Of course not. I had a boyfriend,” she said virtuously.

“I hope he appreciated what he had.”

“He didn’t. He turned out to be more into guys than I was,” she said nostalgically. She reached for her phone and pulled up a photo to show Abe. “That’s Nick, the college boyfriend, with his husband Jim and their new baby, Adriana!” She beamed. “I’m her godmother,” she added proudly.

Abe shook his head. He had never known anyone so warm, so ready to love everyone and everything, so excited to be dumped by a guy and then go on to be godmother of his child. It was dizzying.

While Becca dunked her spring roll in ginger sauce, Abe pushed her hair aside and kissed her neck. When he looked up and met her gaze, his eyes were warm with intent. She’d meant to seduce him with German home cooking when all it took was a cowboy hat. She continued to chew her spring roll until it was gone and took a long pull off her favorite purple water bottle. Then she turned into his arms and kissed him until they were both dizzy, desperate for each other.

Becca pulled away from him.

“Wait, let me go get changed. I have this silky nightgown,” she promised. He shook his head, eyes dark with lust.

“I don’t want to wait for a costume change. This works just fine for me.” Abe’s voice was husky. “Where’s the bed in this place?” he asked, indicating the empty bed frame beneath the window.