About The Pavillion

by Tracy Rowan
25 pages / 4600 words
Ebook zipped file contains - html, lit, Adobe and Sony optimized pdf, prc, epub

Eliot is a doctor who knows he can't save everyone, but that doesn't keep him from letting guilt and grief shut down his life when his lover dies. He leaves everything behind, moves to a new city, and resolves to live a quiet, solitary life. He finds his way back to a medical practice after a few years, but even the satisfaction he gets from his work doesn't help heal his broken heart.

Enter Jamie, a younger man who works at the local diner and has ambitions to become a chef. He chooses Eliot as a guinea pig for his cooking, and as the object of his affection. Eliot's head tells him to send Jamie away with a polite refusal, but his heart is aching to open up to Jamie. Can an impromptu dinner in Eliot's garden be just the right prescription to get Eliot back on his feet?

Sample

Jamie was a good ten years younger than Eliot. He had the strong, sharp features and straight black hair of his Native American father, and the height, muscle and intense blue eyes that came from June's Swedish ancestors. He was soft-spoken and dryly funny, and Eliot liked him immediately.

He was also so attractive that Eliot had been utterly gobsmacked the first time they'd met, and had been something of a stammering idiot as a result. Jamie had just smiled and brought him a mug of coffee. "To hold you over until you decide what you want," he'd said, and Eliot's heart skipped a beat. Later he tried unsuccessfully to not think about Jamie naked, and ended up treating himself to a cold shower.

It wasn't possible. Eliot didn't want another relationship just then, maybe not ever again. He definitely didn't want a relationship with a younger man. It was just all surface anyway, he'd decided as he stood under the icy water that night. It was about Jaime being pretty and Eliot not having had sex in a long, long time. That's what he told himself.

Except that Jamie was everything Eliot liked in his men. He was kind, funny, smart and he had a kind of gravity that made him seem older than his twenty-seven years. Eliot very nearly stopped going to the diner, but he reasoned that he could control his impulses, that he didn't have to fall for Jamie, and anyway Jamie was straight -- Eliot had seen him one morning, kissing the girl who worked at the art gallery down the street -- so it wasn't any sort of a problem. No problem at all.

He just kept telling himself that.