LITMIR.BIZ

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there she was, bright eyed and smiling, the woman he had hired the day before. The woman he wasn’t 100 percent certain he should have hired the day before. But he’d been without a physician’s assistant of his own since he’d rejoined the medical group, and while he had a tendency to be oblivious to certain kinds of day-to-day details, even he noticed that Rachel, the physician’s assistant he was presently sharing with one of his colleagues, looked a little worn around the edges.

      As a rule, Luke valued punctuality, but turning up at this hour went far beyond that.

      He nodded at his new PA in acknowledgment. “You’re here early,” he commented as he took out his keys and unlocked the main office doors. “I thought we agreed that you’d be here at eight.”

      Holding the doors open, he waited for her to walk in first.

      “We did,” Kayley replied, entering the office. The large reception area was almost eerily quiet. “But I didn’t want to take a chance on the morning traffic being heavy and making me late for my first day.”

      Well, he supposed that was admirable. “What time did you get here?” he asked.

      She thought of saying that she wasn’t sure, but that would be lying. So she told him the truth, even though it would probably make her seem neurotic in his eyes. “Seven.”

      Luke glanced at his watch, although he more or less knew what time it was. Seven thirty. So much for his half hour of solitude, he thought, switching the lights on for the entire floor.

      “You’re going to have to wait for the office manager to get in,” he told her. “She’s the one who knows which papers you need to fill out.”

      “That’s fine—I understand,” she said cheerfully. “I can wait. Is there anything you’d like me to do while I’m waiting?”

      Luke hadn’t a clue what she was implying, but his mind had a propensity to suggest the worst-case scenario. “Like what?”

      She thought of her old office. First thing in the morning, life had been clustered around the coffee machine.

      “If you have a coffee machine, I can get the coffee going, if you’d like,” she offered.

      Luke looked down at the container he had gotten at the coffee shop. “I brought my own,” he told her. “But I usually drink more than one cup. And I’m sure everyone else would appreciate starting their day with some hot coffee.”

      She smiled at him in response. Despite his natural inclination to keep barriers between himself and anyone he interacted with, Luke couldn’t help noticing that she had the same kind of smile his daughter had. It was the kind that seemed to light up everything around her.

      “Sounds good,” Kayley said. “Point me to the coffeemaker.”

      He paused right outside his own office, which was still closed. “Go straight down that hallway, then turn right at the first opening. The coffeemaker is in the break room. By the time you finish with it, Delia should be in.”

      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

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