Tyler’s charisma never ceased to make Lauren smile. “Tell me what?”

“The hot guy came back.”

Lauren played dumb, despite the fact that every time she walked through the door she thought of Andrew.

Pre-patient Andrew.

She’d also gone back to her routine beverage and hadn’t ordered a self-serve coffee since that morning, lest she repeat her clumsiness with some other hotter-than-sin man who might be in the vicinity.

“Hot guy?” she asked.

Tyler lifted his eyebrow like it was his job. “Don’t pull that with me. You know exactly who I’m talking about, and he was in here yesterday.”

“I don’t know why you’re telling me,” Lauren said. Patient privacy laws prevented her from telling Tyler about Andrew showing up at the cancer center, so she had no out other than pretending to be uninterested.

“Damn, you’re infuriating.” Tyler stood. “Fine, I’ll act like I didn’t notice you checking him out the other day, before and after you spilled coffee on him. And I’ll pretend I didn’t notice him doing the same thing.”

That got her attention.

“He did?”

A smug grin settled across Tyler’s features as he nodded.

Lauren filed that tidbit away to think about later. For now, she said, “Well, be that as it may, I don’t know the guy, and I’m sure he’s not interested in me. No matchmaking, okay?”

Tyler snorted and turned away.

Lauren jolted up and grabbed his arm. “Tyler, I mean it. Promise me.”

Tyler held up three fingers before he left, and Lauren giggled at the image of him as a pre-teen in a Boy Scout uniform.

She stayed for another hour before starting her commute home.

When she’d first started pharmacy school at UMKC College of Pharmacy, she’d lived in an apartment nearby and could have walked home from here. But halfway through the four-year program she’d decided to rent a house farther south in Waldo. Living near downtown had been fun at first, but she preferred something quieter. Now, her drive was twenty or thirty minutes, depending on traffic, but the charming ranch-style home she’d found, built in the 1940s, was worth it. With a soft gray-blue exterior, white shutters, and a yard full of mature trees, the twelve-hundred-square-foot home was the first place she’d ever called her own.

She realized as she checked her mailbox—empty, as usual—and pulled into the partially shaded driveway that she’d lived in this house nearly four years now, with almost nine between the states of Missouri and Kansas, if she counted undergrad at KU.