What kind of question was that? Who wouldn’t want to go out with her? “I’m attracted to you. You make me laugh, even if it’s because your jokes are terrible. You’re smart, and you’ve devoted your life to helping people. Those are the things I know about you so far, and it’s not enough. I want to know more.”

She wanted to say yes. He could see it in her eyes. The way her lips tipped up into a smile, and her shoulders relaxed the tiniest bit.

She sighed. “I want to. But I don’t think I should.”

Now it was his turn to ask, “Why?”

“Because I work at the cancer center. It feels…I don’t know…unethical, I guess. I don’t want anyone to think you’re getting special treatment, or get Dr. Patel in trouble.”

Andrew hadn’t considered any of that. “But you’re not in Dr. Patel’s clinic anymore, right?”

“No. But I was part of your care team at the beginning, and my name is documented in your chart. I really want to get a job there when I’m done, and I don’t want to risk doing something that might be perceived as unprofessional.”

He didn’t want to seem pushy, but she’d said she wanted to. He wanted her to. “Is there a formal policy against it?”

“There is against physicians having relationships with patients. I don’t know about the rest of us, or when it’s a patient from a different clinic.”

He wasn’t willing to give up without hard evidence. “If we don’t know for certain, can we assume there isn’t?” He leaned forward, resting his forearms on the table. “Please, let me spend more time with you.”

She looked at his hands, and he focused to keep them steady. He felt a little out of his element…he wasn’t normally this nervous. Women rarely made him work this hard when he asked them out. That wasn’t the only reason he grew uneasy, though. He didn’t think he’d ever been so invested in the outcome before.

He wanted her to say yes so badly he ached with it.

He supposed the pain could’ve been related to the lymphoma, or the chemo…but he didn’t think so.

“I don’t know.” She ran a hand along the back of her hair and circled her fingers around her ponytail, a gesture he noticed she did often. Was she nervous, too?

“What if I’d had my appointment a day later, and you’d never seen me at the cancer center? If you hadn’t run out so fast and I asked you out when you spilled coffee on me, what would you have said?”

Lauren countered with a question of her own. “Didn’t you just get out of a relationship? Someone named Caroline?”