An evening dancing with Joel sounded fun.
‘All right.’ She looked at him, still unable to believe that she’d just said yes. ‘But don’t blame me if I tread on your toes.’
He grinned and picked up his coffee. ‘I’ll wear metal toecaps.’
She watched him walk out of the kitchen and wondered what she’d just said yes to.
An evening of fun, that was all, she told herself firmly.
Joel was right. It was too long since she’d had fun.
CHAPTER SIX
TWO weeks later Joel had come to the conclusion that being Lucy’s friend was the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life.
He’d lost count of the number of times he’d nearly kissed her.
Foolishly, he’d taken to ambling down to her apartment once Sam was in bed and they’d share a bottle of wine and talk until late in the evening. Sometimes she invited him down at teatime and he played with Sam, gradually getting to know the boy.
Lucy was slowly relaxing and opening up to him, but that just seemed to make things worse.
The more he knew her, the more he wanted her.
But he knew she was enjoying their friendship—needed their friendship—and he had no intention of letting her down.
Which meant that he had to keep his male urges well under control.
With a groan he switched on his computer and stared at the screen, acknowledging that he was in big trouble.
He had a mountain of work to do and all he could think about was Lucy.
He’d been out with a fair number of women in his time but he couldn’t honestly remember a single one that had interfered with his concentration like Lucy did.
What was it about her?
She wasn’t the first woman in the world to have a pretty face and a gentle personality. But she was the first woman to have affected him this strongly.
And now he needed to talk to her about a patient, which meant another agonising session of trying not to kiss her.
With a sigh he rose from his desk and left his room.
He rapped on her door and came straight to the point.
‘You did mention that you were trained to do spirometry, didn’t you?’
Lucy nodded, clearly startled by his direct approach. He could hardly blame her for that. It was customary to say good morning or something similar when you first met a colleague, but he was desperately trying to keep his mind on work and not to look at her soft mouth.
‘W-why are you asking about spirometry?’
Spirometry was a method of assessing lung function and was an important tool for monitoring the progress of patients with asthma or COPD.
‘I’ve got a patient who needs it.’
Lucy nodded. ‘We have quite a few patients who were diagnosed with asthma and then developed chronic obstructive pulmonary disease—as you know, it’s hard to distinguish one from the other. Who do you want me to see?’
Joel perched himself on the edge of her desk and forced himself to concentrate on work. ‘Margaret Patterson. She’s sixty-one. She came to see me this morning with a chest infection, but when I had a chat with her she admitted that she has trouble walking as fast as she used to because she gets so breathless, and she can’t hold a conversation and walk at the same time.’
Lucy tilted her head to one side as she listened. ‘Is she a smoker?’