The Doctor's Secret Child Read online

  “Uh-huh.” He wrenched his gaze away, and stared at the calendar on the wall, which he found a whole lot less distracting than her face. “You cut yourself on a glass, your first day waitressing at The Ivy Tree. I drove you to my father’s office and when he told you you’d need stitches, you just about passed out.”

  She turned her left hand palm up and stroked her right forefinger over the faded scar. Her clothes were expensive. Her gold hoop earrings and the bangle around her wrist held the subtle gleam of the real twenty-four carat stuff. Yet she wore no rings, he noticed. No diamond solitaire or wedding band to proclaim her marital status.

  “I’m surprised you remember that,” she murmured.

  So was he. He hadn’t thought of the incident in years, but having found a crack in his defenses, nostalgia streamed through him like warm honey. She’d been irresistible as sun-kissed peaches, the summer they’d met. Sweet, delectable, and ripe for the picking, even with blood dripping down her uniform, and he’d wasted no time volunteering to be her driver. “There are a lot of things I remember about that summer, Molly,” he said.

  Her face grew shuttered. “There are a lot I’d prefer to forget. I was very young at the time.”

  “Yes. A lot younger than you led me to believe.”

  “And you,” she said, “were a great deal more callous than was necessary. Telling me you’d grown tired of me was enough to get yourself off the hook. There was no need to parade my replacement under my nose to prove the point. No need to humiliate me in front of the other waitresses by letting your new girlfriend order me around as if I were her personal servant.”

  “Either memory serves me badly, or you’re confusing me with someone else. I recall no such thing.”

  “Her name,” she said, spitting out the words as if they were bullets, “was Francine. And she wrapped her legs so far around your waist when she rode pillion on your motorcycle that she looked like a boa constrictor preparing to devour her next meal.”

  How he didn’t choke on his laughter was a direct contradiction of everything he’d learned in medical school. He should have needed resuscitating! “You always had such a way with words, Molly. It’s nice to see you haven’t lost your touch.”

  But she wasn’t amused. If anything, the way she skewered him in a glare left him suspecting she’d been hurt more by his rejection than she let on at the time.

  What she couldn’t begin to guess was that he hadn’t exactly walked away heart-whole, either. But even he’d had to draw the line when he’d learned she was only seventeen and not the almost-twenty she’d claimed. He might not have amounted to much in those days, but nor had he been completely without conscience.

  “I’m sorry if I was less than sensitive.”

  “I’m not,” she said bluntly. “If anything, I’m grateful you showed yourself in your true colors. You gave me the incentive to make a fresh start somewhere else.”

  “How so?”

  She started to reply, then seemed to think better of it. The flush on her cheeks deepened and she turned to the stove, leaving him to stare at her back. “Never mind. Let’s just say I grew up in a hurry and realized I’d been miles out of my depth in thinking we could ever have lasted as a couple.”

  “So you left town, met the man of your dreams, settled down and started a family.”

  She tilted her shoulder in a small shrug. “I met the man of my dreams. Did you ever meet the woman of yours?”

  “I’m not married yet, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Why not? Haven’t found anyone with good enough bloodlines to assume the role?”

  “It so happens that I have,” he said, ignoring the taunt. “Which reminds me, I’m running late and keeping her waiting, as usual.” He tore a blank sheet from the prescription pad in his pocket and scribbled directions on it. “Here’s what your mother will need before you settle her for the night. The meds are on a tray, on the dresser in her room. If you run into any difficulties or have any concerns at all, call my service and they’ll page me. And don’t forget to make that appointment to see me tomorrow at the clinic.”

  “If I have time.” She tossed the answer over her shoulder with calculated defiance.

  “Make the time, Molly,” he warned her. “This isn’t a request, it’s an order, and if you care about your mother at all, you’ll follow it.”

  He kept her cooling her heels over half an hour when she showed up as scheduled, at eleven-thirty the next morning. Though tempted to cancel the appointment with a curt “My time’s valuable, too!” when told he’d been called to the hospital, she thought better of it and took a seat in the waiting area.

  Meeting him on neutral ground, especially one as sterile as the setting where he shared space with two other doctors, was infinitely preferable to having him drop by the house whenever the mood took him. The less personal their contact, and the less he saw of Ariel, the better.

  The shock of meeting him again, of finding him in charge of her mother’s case, was still too new. Molly felt brittle as blown glass around him—completely at the mercy of emotions as untoward as they were unanticipated.

  Such a state of fragility was dangerous. It left her susceptible to letting slip little details which could lead to his asking questions about Ariel’s father which she wasn’t prepared to answer. But avoiding him was impossible, so deal with him she must. Now that she’d had time to digest her mother’s situation, she had questions of her own—concerns which hadn’t immediately occurred to her when he’d made his house call yesterday, but which definitely needed to be addressed.

  As well, there was the issue of the fantasy life her mother had dreamed up on her behalf and which Molly felt compelled to tone down with at least a smidgen of truth, for Ariel’s sake if no one else’s.

  “Well, I had to tell people something!” Hilda had protested, when Molly had confronted her on the subject of the phantom rich husband waiting in the wings. “It was the only way to shut people up. Even though no one knew for sure the real reason you left town, it didn’t stop the gossip.”

  “But, Mom, what if someone asks Ariel about her supposed daddy—why he didn’t come with us, or what sort of work he does or why her last name’s Paget and not Smith or Brown or Jones?”

  “Why would anyone question a child her age about things like that?”

  “Your nosy neighbors—the very first chance they get, and we both know it!” Molly had shaken her head in dismay. “If you felt you had to lie, couldn’t you just have kept it simple and said I’d taken a job somewhere else? Or better yet, let them have their say and ignore them?”

  “No,” her mother had said, with more vigor than Molly would have believed possible two hours before. “Why, Alice Livingston heard you were in jail, if you can imagine! So I put a stop to things the only way I knew how and that was to spread news they didn’t want to hear. Once word got out you’d married a rich man, you became boring and people found something else to wag tongues over.”

  “I’m surprised anyone believed you in the first place!”

  Hilda’s face had broken into a smile, and she’d covered Molly’s hand with hers. “Child, even your father believed me, and I never said a word to make him think differently! I know you despise me for letting him treat you the way he did, so you might find this hard to understand, but it hurt me, Molly, to have to stand back and do nothing when he went after you. It hurt me as much as it hurt you. The only difference was, my bruises didn’t show.”

  Exhausted from the long day’s travel, Ariel was already asleep in the little room down the hall. The house was peaceful, the curtains drawn against the bitter night, and nothing but the low drone of the furnace in the cellar to compete with the budding intimacy between the two women. As far as Molly could recall, it was the first time she and her mother had ever exchanged confidences so freely. It allowed her to ask a question she’d never dared voice before.

  “Then why didn’t you leave him, Mom? Why didn’t you take me and just run
away? How could you stay married to such a brute?”

  Looking haggard suddenly, her mother had wilted against the pillows. “You said it yourself more than once, Molly. We live in a backwater here, about a hundred years behind the outside world. I was forty-three when I had you, and women of my generation didn’t walk out on their husbands, it’s as simple as that. And he wasn’t always bad. When we were first married, he was a lovely man. But the accident changed him. Losing his leg cost him his livelihood, child. He’d always been big and strong. Able to do anything. But a cripple’s no use on a fishing boat when the weather’s stirring up a storm, and it killed something in him to know he wasn’t the leader of the fleet anymore.”

  “Having only one leg didn’t hamper him too much when he was chasing me down the street in a blind rage.”

  “Because you reminded him too much of how he used to be—healthy and strong and independent. He was eaten up with anger, Molly, and it made him do and say wicked things at times.”

  “At times? There was hardly a day went by that he didn’t make me miserable! If I was wild, he did his part in driving me to it.”

  Her mother had sighed and squeezed her hand again. “Don’t let yourself fall into that trap,” she said sagely. “He passed on his looks to you, and you’re beautiful for it, but don’t take on his bitterness and make it your own. It’ll sour the rest of your life, if you do, and come to infect that sweet granddaughter of mine, as well.”

  Molly had had all night to mull over her mother’s words and much though it galled her to admit it, they made a certain sort of sense. Coming back to Harmony Cove had made her realize the extent to which John Paget still warped her thinking from beyond the grave. But only because she allowed him to. Although breaking the habit wouldn’t be easy, it was the only way she’d ever free herself from his painful influence.

  The clinic’s outer door flew open and Dan strode in, bringing a cold, fresh whiff of snow and frigid sea air with him. “Hi, Molly,” he said, breezing past and stopping at the receptionist’s desk to pick up his messages. “Have a seat in my office and I’ll be with you in a sec.”

  But it was closer to ten minutes before he followed. “Cripes,” he said, flinging himself into the beaten-up old chair behind the equally battered desk, “what a morning!”

  “Actually, it’s now the afternoon,” Molly said, glancing pointedly at the clock on the wall. “And my appointment was for eleven-thirty.”

  “Sorry about that,” he said, sounding anything but.

  “You could have fooled me!”

  He fixed her in the sort of semi-stern, semi-cajoling gaze which no doubt left most of his patients, especially the women, slobbering with delight and falling all over themselves to do his bidding. The way the laugh lines deepened at the corners of his eyes and his lashes drooped over those brilliant blue irises struck Molly as nothing less than ludicrous. Did he think he was auditioning for leading man in a soap opera or something?

  “Babies don’t always show up when they’re supposed to, Molly, you should know that,” he said. “Or was your daughter the rare exception and born exactly on schedule?”

  When Ariel was born wasn’t something she was willing to discuss with him but it was clear from the way he continued to regard her that he expected a reply. There was a layer of hidden steel under all that warm, fuzzy charm. “Not quite,” she said.

  “There you are, then!” He flashed one of his thousand megawatt grins and slapped the flat of his hand against the even flatter planes of his stomach. “Are you hungry?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said, are you—?”

  “I heard what you said. I’m just not sure I understand the reason you said it, Doctor.”

  He rolled his eyes, another in his repertoire of disarming mannerisms. “Will you for Pete’s sake give over with the ‘Doctor’ business and stop acting as if you just swallowed a lemon? I’m offering to buy you lunch, not cut out your heart.”

  It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him he’d done the latter eleven years before without benefit of medical expertise, but his ego was inflated enough. “Thank you, but no. Ariel’s sitting with my mother and I don’t want to leave her alone any longer than I have to.”

  “You can spare another half hour,” he said. “It’s going to take that long to sort out what we’re going to do about your mom anyway, and I’m talking about a quick sandwich somewhere, not a seven-course dinner at Le Caveau.”

  As if a man of his fine lineage would ever take a woman from Wharf Street to Le Caveau! The most exclusive restaurant for miles around didn’t even hire people from there, let alone welcome them as guests.

  He scooped the phone across the desk toward her. “If you’re worried about Ariel and Hilda, give Alice Livingston a call and ask her to keep an eye on them. She stops in every day around this time anyway with a bowl of soup or something for your mom.”

  “I’d rather have my teeth pulled!”

  He treated her to another grin. “Don’t tell me you’ve already locked horns with her, as well!”

  “We’ve yet to come face-to-face since I got back, but it’s a foregone conclusion that when we do, it won’t be a happy reunion. And she won’t be dropping off soup or anything else, come to that. I left Ariel with strict instructions not to open the door to anyone.”

  “So she and Hilda are waiting for you to go home and make lunch?”

  He’d handed her the perfect opening to decline his invitation, but what was the point of lying when this meeting had to take place sooner, rather than later? “No. I left sandwiches and milk in case I was delayed getting back. Ariel will make sure neither she nor my mother starves.”

  “Isn’t that child a bit young to left with so much responsibility?”

  “She’s ten—”

  “Ten?” He raised his eyebrows questioningly. “That must mean she—”

  “T…ten times more capable than girls nearly twice her age.” Shaking inside, Molly tacked on the qualifier, aghast at how close she’d come to endangering the one secret she was most committed to protect. Oh, the pitfalls of deceit! “And I always keep my cell phone turned on when I’m not home, so she knows she can get in touch any time.”

  “You make it sound as if you leave her alone often.”

  “No, I don’t! Not that it’s any of your business, but if she needs to call me from school or a friend’s house or something, and I happen to be out…” She trailed into silence, aware that she sounded far too defensive for a woman supposedly confident of her parenting skills.

  As if he’d noticed the same thing, he regarded her thoughtfully a moment and she tensed, waiting for another probing observation. But in the end, he merely rose out of the chair and said, “In that case, there’s no reason at all we can’t have lunch while we talk about your mom’s case, is there?”

  There’s every reason in the world! she thought. Time spent with you is like walking a tightrope and knowing there’s no safety net waiting to catch me if I trip and fall!

  And trip she surely would, unless she wrestled her runaway emotions under control. But he seemed determined to thwart her at every turn. “Watch your step,” he ordered, taking her arm as they approached the intersection of Fundy Street, Harmony Cove’s main road. “It’s slippery underfoot and you won’t be much use to your mom if you slip and break an ankle.”

  She wore enough clothes to keep out the cold but not, it seemed, enough to stop the warmth from his hand creeping through the layers of her sweater and coat. Or was it just proximity to the only man who’d ever touched her deepest passions that sent awareness flushing over her skin like the kiss of the summer sun?

  “I’m quite capable of crossing the street unaided,” she said.

  “Not in those boots you’re not,” he informed her cheerfully. “You need to get yourself something a bit more serviceable if you’re going to be here more than a day or two. How long are you planning to stick around, by the way?”

  “As long
as my mother needs me, of course.”

  “That could mean indefinitely, Molly. Are you really prepared to make that kind of sacrifice?”

  “Yes,” she said, too focused on the fact that he hadn’t let go of her arm, even though they were now safely across the road and walking on bare, dry pavement again, to notice the trap he’d set.

  He noticed, though, and didn’t pass up the chance to shove her face-first into it. “But what about your husband, my dear? If you were my wife, I can’t say I’d be too thrilled at being left to fend for myself while you travel to the other end of the country to play nursemaid to the mother-in-law I’ve never met.”

  “That’s one reason you’re not my husband,” she said, congratulating herself on having sidestepped his question rather neatly. “You didn’t measure up to my expectations.”

  “And the other reason of course being that I didn’t volunteer for the job.” As if he hadn’t rattled her nerves to breaking point already, he added injury to insult by marching her down a side lane and strong-arming her through the door to the one place guaranteed to unravel her completely. “In you go, sweet thing. The waitresses aren’t as fetching as some I used to know, but The Ivy Tree still makes the best club sandwiches in town.”

  It was like being thrust on stage to reprise a role she hadn’t played in years. Everything was familiar, except the script. Panic closing in on her thicker than an Atlantic fog in November, she swung around, bent only on escape, and came smack up against the unyielding wall of his chest with such force that she almost fell.

  Clawing blindly at his jacket, she struggled to maintain her balance along with her composure. Would have given ten years off her life to toss out some flippant remark that might fool him into believing this particular café was no different from any other. And could manage nothing more than a breathless, “Oops! I caught my heel in the welcome mat.”

  “I told you those boots were useless,” he said.

  Not entirely! Aimed in a kick at the right place, they could do substantial damage to a man, and the smug grin which accompanied his latest remark left Dan Cordell in grave danger of discovering that fact for himself.