She wore jeans that hugged her slim legs and a black Patagonia fleece. Her hair was pulled back into a loose ponytail, but a few pieces had escaped and rested along the creamy skin of her neck. He cleared his throat and looked through the windshield. “Long time, no see.”

She laughed once. “It’s been a week.”

“A week and two days,” he corrected, and immediately felt embarrassed. He didn’t need to be quite so obvious about his infatuation or how much he’d missed seeing her.

“How was your appointment yesterday? And chemo?”

“Good. They said my white count was a little low—”

“What was it?” she interrupted.

“I have no idea.”

“Do you have the cancer center’s app on your phone? Where you can check your test results?”

“Yeah, but it’s not a big deal. They said it was still okay for me to get chemo.”

“With Hodgkin’s we’ll treat with incredibly low white blood cell counts.” She stopped at a red light and looked over at him. “I’m not taking you to the hospital where you could be exposed to all sorts of weird infections until I know what your number was. Look it up or I’ll call Emma and find out myself.”

Andrew shifted in his seat, partially because her demanding tone was a little arousing, but also because he didn’t want Lauren to call Dr. Patel’s physician assistant and tell her they were together right now. Yesterday at his pre-chemo appointment, he let it slip that Lauren had spent Thanksgiving with his family. He hadn’t meant to, but Emma asked how his holiday was and it just kind of came out. The look of shock on Emma’s face, followed by one of suspicion, had concerned him. Worried he was going to get Lauren in trouble, he’d quickly tried to clean up his mess by explaining that Lauren and his sister had become friends, and Jeni had invited her. Then he asked some stupid question about chemo to move the conversation in another direction.

“Okay, woman,” he said in a teasing voice. “Calm down, I’ll look.”

The light turned green and she drove forward as he pulled out his phone. He logged into the system and pulled up the lab results from yesterday.

“Which one do you want to know?”

“What’s the white blood cell count?”

“One thousand eight hundred.”

“What about the absolute neutrophil count?”

“I like it when you talk science to me.”

She shook her head, appearing amused. “Just tell me the value, man.”

“Man?”

“You called me ‘woman.’”

Yes, he supposed he had.

“Okay…absolute neuro-whatever is one thousand and twenty.”

Lauren pursed her pink lips together, and Andrew fisted his free hand. Damn, he wanted to kiss her.

“It would be best if your neutrophils were above fifteen hundred, but I’m okay with above one thousand.”