“Yeah, but I can come back for it tomorrow. It might not fit?—”
“It’ll fit,” Drew says confidently, pulling over and hitting the button to pop the trunk. I unlock my bike from the rack while he folds down the backseat, and he lifts the bike easily into the trunk.
“Thanks,” I tell him as we climb back into the car. “One less thing for me to worry about tomorrow.”
“Sure,” he says. “Did Sophie call about your bloodwork?”
“Yeah, it was all fine.”
Drew nods. “Good.”
Silence falls, and I feel the need to fill it. “So, Lucy told me you’re basically the youngest person to get a neurosurgery job, ever.”
“That’s ridiculous,” he says, but there’s a faint blush creeping over his cheeks. For some reason, any sort of praise seems to embarrass this man.
“Lucy was lying to me, huh?”
He rolls his eyes. “Okay. I was pretty young.”
“She also said Toronto and Montreal tried to recruit you.”
His blush deepens, and he gives a half shrug.
“And they’re probably still trying to recruit you,” I say. “Especially now that you’re connected to the Tates.”
Another half shrug, which gives me my answer. Drew Malone is a hot commodity in the neurosurgical world.
“So it got me thinking about the meeting with Heather and Dr. McGregor,” I continue. “Dr. McGregor seemed weirdly happy that we were dating, at I didn’t understand it at the time.”
“Maybe he’d just been worried about my love life?”
“Um, no,” I say bluntly. “I doubt you have a problem there. A lot of women go for tall, dark, and cynical.”
A smile tugs at his lips. “You think so?”
“Sure,” I reply. “There’s no accounting for taste.”
Drew chuckles. “Right.”
“But back to that meeting,” I say. “When you told Dr. McGregor you needed to meet about a personal issue, he probably thought you were going to leave Somerset.”
“Nah,” he says. “He knows I’m not looking to leave.”
“Really?” I ask. “Even if another city offered you a better deal? More money for research, or a guarantee that you’d never have to go to meetings?”
“It sounds tempting, but probably not. I grew up here.”
That’s interesting. I grew up in Somerset too, but it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t consider opportunities elsewhere. “Is your family still here?”
“My sister and her family, yeah,” he says, glancing over at me.
“You’re pretty close to them, huh?”
“Close enough, sure. But you’re right that when someone requests an urgent meeting, it’s rarely to give good news. Bernie was probably expecting to hear something a lot worse than what we told him.”
He’s deliberately changing the subject, but I’ll play along. “Like what?”
“Oh, that I was sick and needed a leave of absence. Or being sued, or facing criminal charges?—”
