The Doctor's Secret Child Read online

Was Molly one of them but able, by virtue of money, to hide behind a veneer of success?

  He didn’t know. But he intended to find out.

  “…quite inexcusable, Daniel!”

  Molly had climbed into a burgundy Taurus. Waiting for a gap in the flow of traffic, she pulled out from the curb, made an illegal U-turn, and shot back along Fundy Street toward the harbor. He might just as well have been another iron lamppost with dirty snow piled around its base, for all the notice she took of him as she zoomed past.

  “And for someone like that!”

  “Hmm?” Aware that his mother had been rattling on for the last several minutes, he glanced up absently, wondering when Molly had decided to get her glorious hair cut so short. Not that the chic new styling didn’t suit her. On the contrary, it fit her present image perfectly.

  “I’m talking about your fiancée,” Yvonne snapped. “How do you suppose she’d have felt if she’d been the one to come across you arming that woman out of a coffee shop after you’d had your receptionist phone to cancel your lunch date with Summer at Pierre’s?”

  “I couldn’t spare the time for lunch at Pierre’s with Summer.”

  “But you found the time for Ms. Paget?”

  “I made the time, Yvonne. There’s a difference.”

  His mother treated him to the kind of long-suffering look which, before his retirement, she’d directed at his father whenever he’d excused himself from a social function to answer the needs of a patient. “Clearly you did. Well, it’s my birthday two weeks from this Sunday, and your father’s organizing a small dinner party at The Harmony Cove Inn for dinner. Dare I ask if you’ll make the time to join us?”

  “I’ll be there,” he said. “Gerry Clarke owes me a Sunday off. Barring some unforeseen catastrophe, I don’t anticipate being needed at the hospital.”

  “And how often have I heard that before?”

  “Many times, I don’t doubt. But you can’t have it both ways, Yvonne. You were the one bursting with maternal pride when I finally got my act together and decided to follow in Dad’s footsteps, so it’s no use moaning now about the obligations that come with the job.”

  “The ‘job,’ Daniel, never had to involve buying into a seedy clinic practice on the wrong side of town. Even your father never went to those extremes to prove his dedication to his profession.”

  “I guess not,” he said vaguely, eyes still trained on the burgundy Taurus as it hung a left and swerved into the parking lot of a strip mall at the end of the road.

  His mother let out a hiss, a sure sign she was winding up for another lecture on her favorite subject. “To find real satisfaction in his life, a man has to achieve balance, Daniel, and I fear it’s sadly lacking in yours. Summer’s a tolerant woman and will make an ideal doctor’s wife should you ever get around to setting a wedding date, but I caution you against taking her for granted. Just because she puts up a good front and hides disappointment well doesn’t mean she’s not every bit as vulnerable to hurt as the rest of us. I can only pray word doesn’t get back to her that you were seen arming another woman through the middle of town.”

  The advice sloughed off him like rain sheeting down a pane of glass. Summer, aristocratic and coolly beautiful, surveyed the world with the supreme confidence of one born to privilege. Insecurity was as foreign a concept to her as he’d once thought fear was to Molly.

  Which brought him back full circle to the question still gnawing at the back of his mind: who or what was creating the anxiety clouding the lovely Ms. Paget’s gorgeous brown eyes?

  Judging by the speed with which she came barreling out of her front door, Cadie Boudelet must have been lurking at her living-room window specifically to accost Molly the second she stepped out of the car.

  “Shameful, that’s what it is!” she brayed, scuttling down her front walkway. “Hours you’ve been gone, that I know for a fact because I saw you leave, so I come to your mother’s house to make sure the poor soul’s being properly looked after, and what do I find but the door locked in my face for the first time in years and that child of yours mouthing off at me through the mail slot, telling me I’m not needed.”

  “Good. She was following my instructions. If you’ve got a problem with that, take it up with me and leave my daughter out of it,” Molly said.

  “Everyone on Wharf Street has a problem with you, girl. Do you think showing up here at the eleventh hour in your fancy clothes and your fancy car changes who you really are underneath?”

  “Perish the thought!” Dismissing her, Molly popped open the trunk of the car and hauled out a wheelchair.

  “And what,” Cadie demanded, eyeing the thing as if it were the devil’s own handiwork, “do you propose doing with that contraption?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? Strap my mother in it, shove her down the hill and hope somebody catches her before she rolls off the end of the dock.”

  Leaving the old bat to chew on that, Molly loaded the few things she’d picked up at the supermarket into the chair and wheeled it up to the house.

  Ariel met her at the door, all smiles. “You didn’t have to hurry back, Mommy. Like I told you when you phoned, me and Grandma were okay without you.”

  “‘Grandma and I,’ sweetheart,” she said automatically, “and that’s good to know. Were you bored?”

  “No, we had the best time! After lunch, we played checkers, and I brushed Grandma’s hair and she told me stories about when you were growing up.”

  A heavily edited version, Molly was sure. “Sounds wonderful. Let me run up and let her know I’m home, then we’ll have tea and cake.”

  “She’s sleeping right now. That’s why I came downstairs. I was going to wash the dishes and surprise you, but then you got here before I could do it. Mommy, do you know what?”

  Aglow with excitement, she hopped from one foot to the other and Molly couldn’t help but wonder if there’d ever been a time, when she herself was a child, that her smile had lit up that dim hallway with such radiance. Had she ever known such unfettered happiness, such certainty that nothing could go awry with her world?

  “What, sweetheart?”

  “I’m going to be a nurse and look after sick people when I grow up. Grandma says I have magic healing hands.”

  So Ariel took after Dan in at least one respect, after all! Pressing a kiss to the satin soft skin of her daughter’s cheek, Molly said thickly, “You’re magic through and through, honey. I thought you already knew that.”

  Daylight had faded by the time Hilda woke up from her nap. “Molly, you didn’t really say that!” she exclaimed between gasps of laughter, when she heard of the episode with Cadie Boudelet.

  “Certainly I did. She was itching to attribute another failing to my already vast repertoire, and you wouldn’t have wanted me to disappoint her, would you?”

  “She’ll be organizing a lynch mob before you know it.”

  “Or burning me in effigy. Quit wheezing, Mom, it’s not good for you.”

  “Oh, but it is because it’s true what they say. Laughter is the best medicine.” Brighter-eyed than Molly would’ve thought possible the day before, her mother shuffled toward the edge of the bed. “Well, did you bring up that chair for decoration, or are we going for a spin?”

  “Those stairs are just as deadly as the hill outside, you know. Sure you trust me?”

  Molly spoke with a smile but her mother’s face turned solemn when she replied, “With my very life, child. You’re here, aren’t you, taking on the whole neighborhood to be a good daughter to a woman who hasn’t earned the right to ask it of you?”

  “Let all that go, Mom. It’s in the past.” Scooping an arm around her shoulders, Molly pulled her mother into a gentle hug before inching her toward the edge of the bed. “Let’s just concentrate instead on today and getting you mobile.”

  It shouldn’t have been difficult. Hilda was a featherweight and with Ariel there to help, Molly hadn’t anticipated a problem. But there was barely room to accommodate
a stool beside the bed, let alone anything as cumbersome as a wheelchair, and she knew from her mother’s stifled moan and the pinched pallor of her face when at last she was settled, that the transfer from bed to chair had cost her.

  Not that she’d admit it. “Give me a minute and I’ll be ready to race you down the hall,” she panted, feebly waving aside their concern.

  But Molly knew otherwise, and was so deathly afraid she might have aggravated her mother’s hip injury or, even worse, caused major damage, that before she started preparing the fish for dinner, she phoned the clinic. By then regular hours were over, but the answering service promised to pass on her message to Dan who was on call that evening.

  When the meal was ready, she and Ariel carried everything upstairs for another picnic in the bedroom: baked salmon steaks with French bread and a salad this time, followed by little fruit tarts Molly had found in a new bakery on Fundy Street where the old shoe repair shop used to be. It was after seven when they finished, and still no call from Dan.

  By then Hilda was visibly wilting, though she claimed differently. But there was no missing the effort it took for her to maintain the cheerful zest with which she’d attacked her dinner, and when the phone still hadn’t rung at eight, Molly swallowed her pride and went next door.

  “I knew you’d never manage without me,” Cadie declared smugly, when Molly explained. “Well, don’t just stand there looking like lamb on lettuce, girl! Let’s get over to your ma’s house and put things right.”

  Whatever else her failings, Cadie had the stamina of a stevedore, and muscles to match under all her flab. After eyeballing the situation for all of three seconds, she swept Hilda up in her arms and had her deposited squarely in the middle of the bed before the patient had a chance to squeak an objection.

  “There!” she announced. “Let that be a lesson to you, Hilda Paget. Maybe then you won’t be so quick to shut the door on them who’s stood by you all these years when certain others chose not to.” Then, swinging around to Molly, said, “Anything else you want me to put right while I’m here?”

  “No,” Molly said, doing her best to sound suitably chastened because she was, in all honesty, grateful. “Thank you, Mrs. Boudelet. I couldn’t have managed without you.”

  “’Course you couldn’t!” She swiped one broad palm against the other, hitched her bosom back into place, and nodded to the room at large. “I might only be next door, but it’s a sight quicker to pick up the phone the next time you want me here in a hurry, than it is to come racing over the backyard fence in them silly boots. Pity they didn’t teach you that at whatever fancy school you went to to learn how to dress like one of them women I see pasted all over the pages of magazines these days! Pity you got your hair cut, as well. Makes you look more like a lad than a woman.”

  And on that complimentary note, she swept grandly down the stairs and let the back door slam shut behind her with a resounding crash.

  At eight-thirty, the good doctor finally showed up. All set to lambaste him for taking so long, Molly changed her mind when she saw the weary slump to his shoulders and said only, “I’m sorry to be bringing you out at this hour.”

  “That’s what I’m here for. Is it Hilda?”

  “Yes. Although she won’t admit it, she’s in a lot of pain and I’m afraid it’s my fault.”

  A faint smile ghosted over his mouth. “What did you do this time, Molly?”

  “Lifted her out of bed and sat her in a wheelchair.”

  “By yourself? Are you crazy?”

  “I’m beginning to think so,” she said, awash in guilt brought on in part by her mother’s misery and in part by his. He looked so tired, so defeated, and surely could have done without having to make another house call on top of whatever else he’d had to cope with that day.

  “Did you drop her on the floor?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Oh, brother!” He wiped his hand down his face and started for the stairs. Then, realizing she was hovering in the rear, uncertain whether or not to follow, he threw a glance over his shoulder and said, “Go make a pot of coffee, Molly, and we’ll talk after I’ve examined her. And don’t look so woebegone. Hilda’s survived a lot worse than this.”

  He was with her mother nearly half an hour. When he finally joined Molly in the kitchen, she could hardly find the voice to inquire, “Well? How bad is it?”

  “Nothing a good night’s rest won’t cure.” He slumped against the counter and watched as she poured the coffee. “I’ve given her something to ease the discomfort in her hip. Otherwise, she’s in remarkably good shape which has, I suspect, less to do with being wrestled around the bed by you than it has with the fact that you’re here at all. Her spirits have made a remarkable turnaround.”

  “Thank goodness! I was so afraid—”

  “You should be,” he said, cutting short her relief. “If she’d fallen, the outcome would have been vastly different. Didn’t we have a deal that you’d wait a couple more weeks before you rushed into any major changes—and even then, only after you’d run them by me?”

  “I didn’t consider the wheelchair a major change.” She bit her lip, annoyed with herself for having so badly miscalculated matters. “I now realize I was wrong.”

  “If you’d listened to Cadie in the first place, instead of trying to shock her into swallowing her teeth by threatening—”

  “What do you know about my run-in with Cadie?”

  “Only what your mother told me.” He was the one to bite his lip this time, but a smile slipped through anyway. “You realize the whole street will have heard the story by tomorrow, don’t you? And that your name will be spattered with a fresh load of mud?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “I do.”

  He was too big for that cramped kitchen. Try though she might, there was no way she could put the safety of distance between them—and the way his voice dropped half an octave when he made his last remark left her very conscious of the danger of letting him get too close.

  “Why?” she said, a strange flutter breezing over her.

  He reached out and cupped his palm against the side of her neck. His thumb traced a path along her jaw, dipped beneath her chin to stroke lightly down her throat, and the flutter became a cyclone. “Because I’m your friend, whether or not you believe that. And right now, you need me.”

  She’d needed him for years! He was the reason she’d never found passion with another man. He was the cause of all those sleepless nights, all those secret tears. But she’d rather die than tell him so. “No, I don’t,” she said, shying away. “I’m used to coping on my own.”

  “It’s okay to ask for help, Molly,” he said softly. “There’s no rule that says you have to carry this load alone. We all need other people, some of the time.”

  She thrust a mug of coffee at him. Better he have something else to wrap his hands around than her! “Except you. You’ve never needed anyone in your life.”

  “Not true.” His chest heaved in a massive sigh as he sank onto a chair. “Nights like tonight, I’d give a lot to be going home to a blazing fire, a table set for two and a wife glad to see me.”

  She saw then what the dim light in the hall had not revealed: the bleak emptiness in his eyes and the lines of despair bracketing his mouth. Past sins and present virtues notwithstanding, he was neither devil nor god but just a man, as susceptible to pain and sorrow and failure as the next person.

  The realization caused something to break loose inside Molly, as if a huge wall of rock encasing her heart suddenly cracked and crumbled into dust. Without thought for the consequences, she leaned over him as he sat at the table and gripped his forearms. “I can’t offer you any of those, but I’m here and I’m willing to listen if you think it’ll help to talk. What went wrong tonight, Dan, that you’re so troubled?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  HE MOVED his feet apart just enough to clamp her prisoner between his knees. Though by no means an overtly sexual move, it nevert
heless conveyed a familiarity which far exceeded what she’d intended when she’d gone to him so impulsively.

  “The summer we met,” he said, staring past her as if he were gazing down a tunnel to the past, “isn’t a time I remember with any pride. If truth be told, there’s a lot of it I don’t remember at all. There was you, of course—”

  “Among others,” she cut in, unreasonably stung by his words. “Given your propensity for chasing women, I suppose I should be flattered you remember me at all. But what’s that got to do with tonight?”

  “Bear with me, Molly.” He grasped her hands and squeezed her fingers absently, leaving her with the sense that although he was there in the flesh, his mind and spirit were miles—and years—away. “That September I took off for Europe with a couple of buddies. We rented a car in Paris and started what we thought would be a two-year jaunt around the world with a tour of France. A week later, on a narrow back road just north of Grenoble, our car sideswiped a family of four out for an afternoon bike ride. The mother had a baby strapped to a seat behind her. A little girl, eighteen months old. She was killed instantly.”

  “Were you driving the car?”

  “No. But I could just as well have been.”

  “So you decided to become a doctor to ease your conscience? Isn’t that a rather convenient cliché, Dan?” She sounded cold and cynical, she knew, but it was her only defense against the horror crawling over her like tiny insect feet.

  All she could think about was Ariel at eighteen months—how plumply adorable she’d been, the way she’d run into Molly’s outstretched arms, the sound of her singing in the bath tub—and how dark and worthless life would have become without her. How did a mother ever accept such a loss? Or recover from it?

  “I didn’t rush out and enroll at the first medical school I came across, if that’s what you’re implying,” Dan said. “But yes, that’s when the seed was planted, though I didn’t necessarily recognize it at the time.” He lifted his gaze to meet hers. His eyes, normally as blue as the far depths of the ocean in August, had the bruised look of forget-me-nots carelessly crushed underfoot. “Seeing that poor mother grieving for her lost baby, and the father helpless to comfort his wife, changed me forever. I realized how much I took life and health for granted.”