How to Marry a Doctor

That was something he’d known for as long as he’d had a sense of himself as an adult. He did not want to get married. Marriage was the old ball and chain. It took something good, a relationship where two people chose to be together, and turned it into a contractual obligation. He’d witnessed it firsthand with his parents. All he could remember was the fighting, his mom leaving and his father’s profound sadness. Sadness that drove him to seek solace in the bottle. Anna knew his family history. Sure, she’d have good intentions. She’d think she was steering him toward someone who made him happy, but what was the point?

Jake vowed he’d never give a woman that much power over him.

So he said, “Before we go any farther, I have a stipulation.”

“Jake, no. If we’re going to do this and do it right, you have to play by my rules. You can’t give me a laundry list of what you want. That’s where you get into trouble with all these preconceived notions. Maybe we can talk about deal breakers, such as must not be marriage-minded or must not want kids, etcetera, but we’re not getting into the superficial. You’re just going to have to trust me.”

He poured a little milk into the eggs, a shake of salt, a grind of black pepper and began to beat them. Even though they’d spent a lot of time apart, Anna still knew him so well. A strange warmth spread through him and he whisked the eggs a little faster to work off the weird sensation.

“I wasn’t going to get superficial. In fact, my stipulation wasn’t even about me. I want to propose a double wager. Since we both need dates to the Holbrook wedding, I’ll let you fix me up, if you’ll let me fix you up.”

The daughter of Celebration Memorial Hospital’s chief executive officer Stanley Holbrook was getting married in mid-July. Jake had his eye on a promotion and attending his boss’s daughter’s wedding was one of the best ways to prove to the man he was the guy for the job. Since Holbrook was a conservative family man, Anna’s offer to fix him up with a woman of substance wasn’t a bad idea.

She was looking at him funny.

“Deal?” he said.

She opened her mouth, but then clamped it shut before saying anything. Instead, she shook her head. “No. Just...no.”

“Come on, Anna, fair is fair. I know Hal hurt you, but you’re too young to put yourself on a shelf. You want to get married again. You want to have kids. There are good guys out there, and I think I know one or two who would be worthy of you.”

She stopped chopping. “Worthy of me?” Her expression softened. “That’s the sweetest thing anyone has said to me in a very long time.”

“Case in point of why you need to get out more, my dear. Men should be saying many nice things to you.”

She made short order of chopping the peppers, scraping the tiny pieces into a bowl and then drying her hands.

“Okay, I’ll make a deal with you,” she said. “We’ll do this until Stan Holbrook’s daughter’s wedding. Between now and then, I’ll bet I can match you with your soul mate and cure you of your serial monogamy issues.”

He winced. “What? As in something permanent?”

She shrugged. “Just give me a chance.”

“Only if you’ll let me do the same for you. Do we have a deal?”

She nodded.

“So what are we betting?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t really mean it as a serious bet.”

“I think making a bet will make this more interesting. We don’t have to decide the prize right away. Let’s just agree that the first one who succeeds in making a match for the other wins.”

Anna wrinkled her nose. “Knowing you, you’ll let a good woman go just to win the challenge. You’re so competitive.”

“But if you think about it,” he said, “who will be the real winner? One will win the bet, but the other will win love.”

“That’s extremely profound for a man who has such bad taste in women.” She gave him that smile that always made him feel as if he’d come home. He paused to just take it in for a moment.

Then Jake shook her smooth, warm hand, and said, “Here’s to soul mates.”

Chapter Two

Soul mates.

Why did hearing Jake say that word make her stomach flip? Especially since she wasn’t even sure if she believed in such a thing as soul mates. After all she’d been through with Hal, she still believed in love and marriage enough to try again...someday. But soul mates? That was an entirely different subject. The sparkle had dulled from that notion when her marriage died.

“I’m done chopping.” Anna set the bowl on the granite counter next to the stove where Jake was melting butter in a frying pan. Then she deposited their empty beer bottles into the recycle bin in the garage.

“Now what can I do?” she said when she got back into the kitchen.

“Just have a seat over there.” With his elbow, he gestured toward the small kitchen table cluttered with mail and books. “Stay out of my way. Omelet-flipping is serious business. I am a trained professional. So don’t try this at home.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” she said, eyeing the mess on the table’s surface. “That’s why I have you. So you can fix me omelets. Apparently, I will repay you by setting the table for us to eat. And after I’ve excavated a space to put the plates and silverware, then I might clean the rest of your house, too. I thought you had a housekeeper. Where has she been?”

“Her name’s Angie and she’s been down with the flu. Hasn’t been available to come in for two weeks.”

Anna glanced around the room at the newspapers littering the large, plush sectional sofa in the open-plan living room. There were mugs and stacks of magazines and opened mail on the masculine, wooden coffee and end tables. Several socks and running shoes littered the dark-stained, hardwood living room floor.

“Wow. Well...” In fact, it looked as if Jake had dropped everything right where he’d stood. “God, Jake, I didn’t realize you were such a slob.”

Jake followed her gaze. “I’m not a slob,” he said. “I’m just busy. And I wasn’t expecting company.”

Obviously.

Anna thought about asking why he didn’t simply walk a few more steps into the bathroom where he could deposit his socks into the dirty clothes hamper rather than leaving them strewn all over the floor. Instead, she focused on being part of the solution rather than nagging him and adding to the problem. She quickly organized the table clutter into neat piles, revealing two placemats underneath, and set out the silverware she’d just washed and dried.

“Where are your napkins?” she asked.

He handed her a roll of paper towels.

This was the first time in the month that she’d been home that they’d cooked at his place. Really, it was just an impromptu meal, but it was just dawning on her how little she’d been over at his place since she’d been back. That was thanks in large part to Jake’s girlfriend. She wondered if Dorenda had seen the mess—or had helped create it—but before she could ask, she realized she really didn’t want to know.

“It must be a pretty serious case of the flu if Angie has been down for two weeks. Has she been to the doctor?”

Jake gave a one-shoulder shrug. “She’s fine. I ran into her at the coffee shop in downtown the other day. She looked okay to me. She’ll probably be back next week.”

Anna balked. “Why do you keep her?”

She crossed the room to straighten the newspapers and corral the socks. She couldn’t just stand there while Jake was cooking and the papers were cluttering up the place and in the back of her mind she could hear him toasting soul mates.

Even that small act of picking up would help work off some of her nervous energy.

“I don’t have time to find someone else,” he said. “Besides, it’s not that bad around here.”

She did a double take, looking back at him to see if he was kidding.

Apparently not.

But even if it looked as if Jake had simply dropped things and left them where they fell, the house wasn’t dirty. It didn’t smell bad. In fact, it smelled like him—like coffee and leather and something else that bridged the years and swept her back to a simpler time before she’d married the wrong man and Jake had become a serial monogamist. She breathed in deeper, wondering if they were still the same people or if the years and circumstances had changed them too much.

She bent to pick up a dog-eared issue of Sports Illustrated that was sprawled on the floor facedown. As she prepared to close it back to its regular shape, she nearly dropped it again when she spied the tiny, silky purple thong hidden underneath. Like a lavender spider. Only it didn’t get up and crawl away.

“Eww.” Anna grimaced. “I think Miss Texas forgot something.”

Jake gave a start as his gaze fell to where Anna pointed.

She reached over and grabbed the poker from the fireplace tool set on the hearth and used it to lift the thong off the ground.

“This is classy. How does a woman forget her underwear?”

He smiled that adorable lopsided smile that always suggested something a little bit naughty. There was no doubt why women fell for him. Heck, she’d fall for him if he weren’t her best friend.

“She carried a big purse,” Jake said. “It was like a portable closet. She probably didn’t leave here commando.” His gaze strayed back to the panties. “Then again, maybe she did.”

Anna raised the poker. The thong resembled a scanty purple flag, which she swiftly disposed of in the trash can.

“She might want that back,” Jake protested.

“Really? You think she’s going to call and ask if you found her underwear?”

They locked gazes.

“If she does—” Anna scowled at him and pointed to the garbage “—it’s right here.”

He was quiet as he pulled out the toaster and put in two slices of whole wheat bread.

Anna returned the poker to its stand.

“Jake, this is why we need to have a heart-to-heart talk about what you want in a woman. It’s no wonder you can’t seriously consider spending the rest of your life with a woman who leaves her panties on your living room floor. Even if she lived here, leaving her panties lying around in the living room wouldn’t be a good sign.”

“I leave my socks on the floor,” he said as he transferred the omelet from the frying pan onto the two plates Anna had set out.

“Yeah, and it wouldn’t take that much more effort to put them in the laundry hamper,” she said. “Do you want orange juice? I need orange juice with my eggs.”

“Sorry, I’m out. I have coffee and there’s more beer. I need to go to the grocery store. I really should go tonight because I’m not going to have time to go later with everything going on this weekend.”

She passed on the beer. Not her favorite thing to drink with eggs. Even if it was dinner. It was one of those combos that just didn’t sound appetizing. She opted for making herself a quick cup of coffee in his single-serving coffee brewer. As she pushed the button selecting the serving size, it dawned on her that even if they had been apart for a long time, she still felt at home with Jake. She could raid his K-Cups and brew herself a cup without asking. Even in the short amount of time that she’d spent here, she knew which cabinet contained the coffee, and that he stored his dinner plates in the lower cabinet to the right of the sink because they stacked better there.

“I need some groceries, too,” she said. “How about if we shop together after we do the dishes? We can talk as we shop and figure out where the happy medium is between the nice women you should be dating and the ones who leave their underwear all over town.”

Jake’s brows knit together as he set the dinner plates on the table.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Anna said as she slid into her seat at the table. “You know I’m right. If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep getting what you’re getting and you’ll keep repeating the same pattern. You need to look a little deeper than a pretty face.”

He sat down, speared some of the omelet and took a bite, watching her as he chewed. She wished he’d say something. Not with food in his mouth, of course. But that was the thing about Jake—he may be a manly guy’s guy who didn’t know how to pick up after himself, but he still had manners. He didn’t talk with his mouth full, he said please and thank-you; Jake Lennox was a gentleman.

He knew how to treat a lady. He just didn’t know how to choose the right lady.

“So what are the deal breakers, Jake?”

“Deal breakers?”

“You know, the qualities in a woman that you can’t live with.”

“Why don’t we focus on the good? The attributes that I’m attracted to?”

“Because attraction is what gets you in trouble. Attraction is what caused Miss Texas to leave her thong on your living room floor.”

Ugh. She sounded like such a harpy. She knew that even before she saw the look on his face and consciously softened her tone.

“I don’t mean to be a nag. Really, I don’t. It’s just that sometimes it helps if you work backward.”

She wasn’t going to pressure him. That was the fastest way to suck all the fun out of the bet. This was supposed to be fun, not an exercise in browbeating.

She was prepared to change the subject when he said, “Anyone I date has to be comfortable with the fact that I don’t want to get married and I don’t want kids. I don’t want anyone who thinks they can change my mind. That’s a deal breaker. It’s what started things going south with Dorenda. She was Miss Independent for the first couple of months. Then she started in with the five-year plan, which eventually turned into an ultimatum.”

Anna realized it was the first time she’d ever been on Dorenda’s side. Who could blame her for wanting more? Especially when it involved more Jake. But she wasn’t going to argue with him. This anti-marriage/anti-family stance was new. Or at least something that had developed during the time that they were apart. Probably the reason he’d been involved in his string of relationships. Jake had grown up in a single-parent household. His mom had left the family when Jake was in first grade.

One night before they left for college, when she and Jake were having one of their famous heart-to-hearts, he’d opened up about how hard it had been on him and his brothers when their mom left the family.

Yet he’d never mentioned that he didn’t want to get married.

Actually, though, when she thought about it, it was a good thing he was being so up front about everything. That’s just how Jake was. He knew himself, and he was true to himself. Maybe if Hal had been more honest with both of them, they might have avoided a world of hurt.

So yeah, considering that, Jake’s candid admission was a good thing.

Now, her mind and its deductive reasoning just had to convince her heart that was true, because she hated the thought of Jake ending up alone years down the road.

* * *

“So you want someone who is family-oriented, funny, kind, honest and smart,” Jake recapped as he pushed the shopping cart down the canned goods aisle in the grocery store. “You don’t want to date a doctor, because of Hal. So what about looks? What’s your type?”

Anna stopped to survey a row of black beans lined up like soldiers on a shelf.

“I thought we agreed that we weren’t going to concentrate on the physical. That’s where we get into trouble. We need to get past that.”

“What? Should I disqualify a guy if he is good-looking?”

She quirked a brow at him as she set two cans in the otherwise empty cart. “I’d love to hear your idea of a good-looking guy.”

He scowled back at her. “I don’t know. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say. I have no idea what makes a guy attractive to a woman.”

“I was just teasing, Jake. You know you’re my ideal. If I can’t have you, then...”

She made a tsking sound and squeezed his arm as she walked farther down the aisle to get something else on her list.

If he didn’t know her so well, he might’ve thought her harmless flirtation had started a ripple of something inside him. But that was utterly ridiculous. This was Anna, and that’s why he couldn’t put his finger on the something she’d stirred. Maybe it was pride, or actually, more like gratitude that pulled at him. He looked at her in her scrubs that were a little too big for her slight frame. Her purse, which she’d slung across her body, proved that there were curves hidden away under all that pink fabric.

He averted his gaze, because this was Anna. Dammit, he shouldn’t be looking at her as if she was something he’d ask the butcher to put on a foam tray and wrap up in cellophane. As the thought occurred to him, he realized his gaze had meandered back to where it had no business straying.

He turned his body away from her and toward the shelf of black beans Anna had just pored over. He didn’t know what the hell to do with canned black beans, but he took a couple of cans and added them to the cart as he warred with the very real realization that he didn’t want to fix her up with just anyone. Certainly not most of his buddies, who if they talked about Anna the way they talked about other women he’d have no choice but to deck.

“Excuse me.” Jake looked over to see a small, silver-haired woman holding out a piece of paper. “Your wife dropped this list.” The woman hooked her thumb in Anna’s direction at the other end of the aisle. “I’d go give it to her myself, but I’m going this way.”

My wife?

Jake smiled at the woman and started to correct her, to explain that he and Anna weren’t married, but the words seemed to stick in his throat. He found himself reaching out and accepting the paper—a grocery list—and saying, “Thanks, I’ll give it to her.”

She nodded and was on her way before Jake could say anything else.

Hmm. My wife.

He tried to see what the woman saw—Anna and him together...as a couple. But in similar fashion to not being able to look at her curves in good conscience, he couldn’t fully let his mind go there.

It wasn’t that the thought disgusted him—or anything negative like that. On the contrary. And that brought a whole host of other weirdness with it. The only way around it was to laugh it off.

“You dropped your list,” he said as he stopped the cart next to her. “The nice lady who found it thought you were my wife.”

Anna shot him a dubious look. “Oh, yeah? Did you set her straight?”

She deposited more canned goods into the basket and then took the list from his hand.

“No. I didn’t. I need bread. Which aisle is the bread in?”

She let the issue drop. He almost wished she would’ve said something snide like, That’s awkward. Or, Me? Married to you? Never in a million years. Instead, she changed the subject. “Do you want bakery bread or prepackaged? And why don’t you know where the bread is?”

He certainly didn’t dwell on it.

“I don’t know. I guess I don’t retain that kind of information. Grocery shopping isn’t my favorite sport.”

“I can tell,” she said. “And if you don’t pick up the pace, you’re going to get a penalty for delay of game. I’m almost finished. Where’s your list? Let me see if I can help move this along.”

“I don’t have a list,” he said. He knew he should make an off-the-cuff comment about her, his pretend wife, being the keeper of the list for both of them, but it didn’t feel right.

Since when had anything ever not felt right with Anna?

“I keep the list in my head,” he added.

“And of course, you’re out of everything. Here, I can help. We’ll just grab things for you as we go by them.”

She pulled the shopping cart from the front end and turned the corner into the next aisle.

“Do you want cereal?” she asked.

Before he could answer, a couple a few feet away from them broke out into an argument that silenced both Anna and him.

“Look, I’m an adult,” said the guy. “If I want to eat sugary cereal for breakfast, I will. In fact, if I want to eat a bowl of pure sugar, I will. You get what you like and I’ll get what I want.”

“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, honey.” The woman took a cereal box—the bright yellow kind with fake berries—out of the shopping cart and put it back on the shelf. “This won’t hold you. You need something with fiber and protein. If you eat this, you’ll be raiding the vending machine by ten o’clock.”

The guy took the cereal box off the shelf and put it back in the cart. “I grew up eating this stuff. You’re my wife, not the food police. So hop off.”

Anna and Jake quickened their pace as they passed the couple. They exchanged a look, which the couple obviously didn’t notice because now insults were inching their way into the exchange and tones were getting heated.

“We’ll come back for cereal,” Anna said.

Jake nodded. “When we do, are you going to mock my cereal choice?”

“Why would I do that? I’m not your wife.”

There. Good. She said it. The dreaded w word.

“Are you saying it’s a wife’s role to mock her husband’s cereal choice?”

“Of course not. I never told Hal what he could and couldn’t eat. Then again, since I was the one who cooked in that relationship, he didn’t have much say. But he was completely on his own for breakfast and lunch, free to make his own choices. And you see where that got me. Do you think we would’ve lasted if I had been more concerned?”

“No. Hal was an ass. He didn’t deserve your picking out healthy cereal for him.”

“So you’re saying the woman picking out the cereal rather than leaving him to his own devices was a good thing?”

“Well, yeah. For the record, in the couple we saw back there, the wife was right. He may have wanted that crap, but he didn’t need it. So I’ll side with her. Do you want me to go back over there and tell her I’m on her side?”

“Better not. Not if you want to keep all your teeth.”

Jake laughed but it sounded bitter—even to his own ears. “Why does that have to happen in relationships? People get married and end up hating each other over the most ridiculous things. They fight and tear each other apart and someone leaves. That marriage is in trouble over Much-n-Crunch and its artificially flavored berries. That’s exactly why I don’t want marriage.”

“So you’re saying that the guy should’ve gotten the cereal he wanted?”

“No. I already said I thought the wife was right. Junk like that will kill you. I agree with her. Healthy eating habits are good.”

As they strolled past the dairy section, Anna studied him for a minute. “I’ve just figured out who I’m fixing you up with on your first date. She’s a nutritionist. I think the two of you will have a lot in common. I can’t believe I didn’t think of her until now.”

Her response caught him off guard.

“What is she like?” he asked.

Anna raised her brows. “You’ll just have to wait and see.”

“Okay. Two can play that game,” he said. “You’ll have to be surprised on your first date, too.”

She grimaced. “Go easy on me, Jake. I’m so out of practice. You know how I am. I’m casual. I haven’t been out there in so long.”

“That’s why you need me to fix you up.”

He had no idea who he was going to pick for her first date. Who would be worthy of her? Maybe the best place for him to start would be to rule out anyone who was remotely similar to himself. Because Anna deserved so much better.

Chapter Three

“Try this one.” Anna’s sister, Emily, shoved a royal blue sundress with a white Indian motif on the front through the opening in the fitting room curtain in the Three Sisters dress shop in downtown Celebration. “It looks like the basis of a good first-date outfit.”

Anna still wasn’t sure who her date was or where they were going, but one thing she did know was they were getting together on Wednesday and she had nothing to wear. It had been so long since she’d worn anything but jeans or hospital scrubs, she didn’t have a stitch appropriate for a...date. Plus, she had a busy week ahead and this was Emily’s night off. So Anna figured she might as well seize the moment and bring her sister along to help her pick out something nice. If she felt good with what she was wearing, she might feel less nervous on the date, thereby eliminating one potential avenue of stress...or disaster.