Marie Ferrarella - A Second Chance For The Single Dad

She was unfamiliar with the name, since she had met with only him and Rachel, the physician’s assistant who had looked so relieved that she was interviewing for the job. “Is that the office manager?”

Luke nodded. “Delia Chin,” he said, mentioning the woman’s last name as an afterthought.

About to follow the directions he’d just given her to the break room, Kayley abruptly stopped for a second. “Dr. Dolan?”

Luke looked at her over his shoulder. “Yes?”

“Thank you.”

There was that smile again, he observed. The next moment, his brow furrowed. “For telling you where the coffee machine is?”

“For hiring me. You won’t regret it,” she told him, and then hurried off to the break room to get the coffee started before everyone else began arriving.

Luke inserted his key into the lock and opened the door to his private office. “We’ll see, Ms. Quartermain,” he murmured under his breath. “We’ll see.”

* * *

Kayley could well understand why Rachel had looked so frazzled when they’d met, juggling a full schedule for not just one but two doctors. Handling the peripheral details for Dr. Dolan’s patients was challenging enough. It had been only eight hours and Kayley already felt as if she had run two 5K marathons.

She was sitting in the exam room vacated by the doctor’s last patient, reviewing what had been entered on the computer, when she felt that someone was standing in the doorway, observing her.

Looking up, Kayley expected to see the doctor with some sort of end-of-day instructions. Instead, it was Rachel.

“So how was your first day?” the other woman asked. It was obvious to Kayley that Rachel was checking in on “the new girl” before she went home.

Kayley paused briefly, wanting to choose exactly the right word. She didn’t want to seem ungrateful or to say something that could be misconstrued as a complaint. “It was educational,” she finally answered.

Rachel laughed. “Well, I’ve certainly never heard it referred to as that before. Is Dr. Dolan too much for you?” she asked knowingly. Glancing over her shoulder to make sure she wasn’t being overheard, the physician’s assistant confided in a lowered voice, “He can be a bit demanding at times.”

“Oh no, no. He wasn’t too much at all. It just takes some getting used to, that’s all. The terminology,” she explained. “The last doctor I worked for was a primary physician. Dr. Andrews started his practice long before they had computers in the office. He was a lovely man—kind of like in the mold of an old-fashioned country doctor. If his patients had anything complicated, he usually wound up referring them to other physicians. And he was very laid-back in his approach to his patients. He spent as long as he needed to talking to them—and even more important, listening to them,” she added, “so he could get to the bottom of what was bothering them and why they had come to see him.”

Kayley smiled fondly, remembering. “He was really challenged having to input everything that transpired during an exam into the computer, so I usually wound up being in the room with him, doing his typing for him. Otherwise, I think he would have seen only one patient an hour.”

Rachel nodded sympathetically. “Sounds like you miss him.”

“In a way,” Kayley admitted, turning back to the computer. “Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy working here. It’s just very different. Everything here moves so breathtakingly fast.”

“Here one day and you already have a list of suggestions?”

Startled, Kayley froze for a moment, then swiveled the stool she was sitting on around to see that Dr. Dolan was standing behind her.

“Not a list of suggestions, just observations,” she told him quickly. She noticed that Rachel had vacated the area, ducking out when Dr. Dolan had appeared. She wished the woman would have given her a warning.

“I see a lot of patients because I want to help a lot of patients. I see no need to linger and talk to them about their hobbies and what baseball team they’re rooting for. That kind of thing is just taking time away from another patient I could be helping.”

“I realize that, Doctor,” she replied. She debated just letting it go at that, but at heart, that wasn’t the kind of person she was. She wanted him to understand why she believed in what she’d said. “But taking a couple of minutes just to talk to a patient, to set his or her mind at ease, makes them feel that they’re something more than just a case file to you.”

Luke could feel his temper starting to rise, something that had begun to happen only since he’d lost Jill. It took him a second to get it under control before he spoke.

“Not that I need to justify myself to my new physician’s assistant on her first day of work,” he emphasized, “but I graduated first in my class at Johns Hopkins. I worked hard for that. People come to me not because they want good conversation, but because they want me to put them together when they feel like they’re never going to feel whole again. Some other doctor might make them feel all warm and toasty, but I’m the one who’s going to put them together, or keep working at it until I’m satisfied that I’ve done the very best that can be done. My very best. If you have a problem with that, then maybe you’d feel better working for someone else.”

She surprised him with the enthusiasm in her voice as she answered, “No, I wouldn’t.” And then she further surprised him with her offer. “I’ll take care of the feel-good stuff, and you take care of making them feel whole,” Kayley concluded.

Maybe she didn’t realize that she had come across as being critical of him. He did a swift review of the day in his mind. She had needed next to no cues from him.

“Well, you did keep things flowing smoothly,” he allowed reluctantly, “so we’ll give it another day.” There was, however, a warning note in his voice.

Kayley heard it and pretended not to. Instead, she smiled as if they were both in agreement. “Thank you, Doctor. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” he repeated, making it sound as if it represented her last chance to get things right.

* * *

When Luke stepped off the elevator the following morning, he was only moderately surprised to find Kayley waiting by the office door. Maybe she was afraid that her comment at the end of the day had put her in danger of being fired and she was trying to make up for it.

To support that theory, she had a coffee container in one hand and a large pink box that smelled of something warm and tempting in the other.

“Still attempting to outrun possible traffic?” he asked.

Instead of saying yes or no, she told him, “I hate being late.”

He unlocked the main door. “It’s an admirable quality, but don’t you spend a lot of time waiting around for other people to show up this way?”

She nodded. “But that’s still better than being late.”

Having unlocked the double doors, he opened one and stepped back to let her enter first.

“Have it your way.” And then he nodded at the box Kayley was holding. “What is that, by the way?”

“I brought doughnuts for the office,” she told him, heading for the break room.

That seemed a little excessive to him. “How many other people did you offend yesterday?”

His question caught her completely off guard. “Nobody.”

“Except for me,” Luke pointed out.

She hadn’t thought he was really offended. Clearly she’d been mistaken. She quickly rallied. “That was purely unintentional, Doctor—do you like doughnuts?” she asked hopefully.

“No, I don’t,” he answered sternly. Seeing the disappointment on her face, he relented. “But my daughter does.”