Catherine Spencer - The Doctor's Secret Child

“Maybe I work harder to change public opinion than you do, Molly,” he said, propping up the wall with his altogether too impressive shoulders. “Or maybe I don’t go quite as far out of my way to offend people. You’ve been home what…an hour? Two? And already you’re squaring off with your next door neighbor. If I hadn’t shown up when I did, you’d probably have wound up decking Cadie when you should be on your knees thanking her.”

It—he!—was the last straw! Cadie Boudelet was a tiresome, ignorant woman who seldom bothered to learn the facts before she arrived at a conclusion, which rendered her opinion of Molly, or anyone else for that matter, irrelevant. But that he should have the nerve to stand there mouthing holier-than-thou platitudes, as if the mere idea that Molly might not have achieved heights of perfection comparable to his caused him intolerable pain, just about made her throw up and she wasted no time telling him so.

“You make me sick to my stomach, Dan Cordell! If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s a man who pretends he’s above reproach to the one person in the world who knows differently. And if you think sticking ‘Doctor’ in front of your name entitles you to change history, you’re even more arrogant than you are insufferable!”

“YOU don’t think much of me, do you, Molly?” he said, glad she didn’t have a kitchen knife at hand or he’d probably have been wearing it between his ribs.

“I don’t think about you at all,” she informed him loftily, “except when you force yourself to my notice. Then I find you irritating beyond words. So say whatever it is you came to say, then please leave.”

He’d thought, when he heard she was coming back, that seeing her again wouldn’t much affect him. Thought that age would have mellowed the fiery rebel he’d known briefly more years ago than he cared to count. She’d be a little plumper around the edges, both emotionally and physically; a little complacent and a lot less arrestingly gorgeous. Less inclined to fly off the handle, too. After all, she’d risen well above her impoverished beginnings, according to her mother, and had surely outgrown all those old resentments.

He’d been wrong on every count. The girl she’d been paled beside the woman she’d become. Spitting fury at him from across that sorry little kitchen, dark hair tumbling around her face, dark eyes flashing, her burgundy red skirt flinging an echoing slash of color across her magnificent cheekbones, she might have stepped out of a Russian drama, or a gypsy saga.

No wonder Cadie Boudelet had been on the verge of a stroke! Molly Paget had bloomed into much too exotic a specimen for the staid population of Harmony Cove to take in stride, and lost none of her rebelliousness in the process.

“If I’m irritating and insufferable, you’re impossible,” he said, fully aware that in firing a counterattack he left himself wide open to another verbal onslaught, but too intrigued by the challenge to let the opportunity pass. “I’m sorry if my being a doctor leaves you nauseated but the fact is, I earned the right to the title, just as you earned the right to call yourself a mother. And I fail to see what history has to do with the way things stand today.”

“Not everyone’s memory is as hazy as yours,” she said, with a lot less passion than he’d expected. “Coming back here is like taking a one-way walk into the past. I’m hardly in the door before you’re all lining up to tell me not to bother unpacking my bags.”

“You storm back into town with both barrels blazing, ready to take on all comers, and wonder why no one’s rushing to put out the welcome mat? It’s not other people’s perception of you that’s the problem, Molly, it’s that permanent chip on your shoulder.”

“I’m not the one who put it there.”

All at once, she looked defenseless, leaving him to wonder if she was quite as hard-boiled as she liked to appear. Her mouth drooped and if it weren’t that she’d always known how to use those stunning eyes to good effect, he might have been fooled into thinking they held the faint sheen of tears.

As if anyone or anything could make Molly Paget cry!

Shoving aside the preposterous urge to take her in his arms, he shifted his weight so that both feet were planted firmly on the floor, and rammed his hands in his jacket pockets, out of temptation’s way. “You are the one who chooses to keep carrying it around, though. Take a little well-meant advice from an old friend, Molly: drop the attitude and learn to give a little, and I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts you won’t have to take nearly as much flak as you seem to expect.”

“And it was for this that you wanted to speak privately with me? To dish out—?”

“No. Consider it a bonus thrown in without charge. The reason I dropped by is that I just got word the public health nurse is held up at one of the outlying farms and probably won’t make it back in time to look in on your mother. Hilda needs two different medications before she goes to sleep. If you like, I can walk you through what they entail or, if you’re not comfortable with that, I’ll come back again last thing and administer them myself.”

Her face told him she didn’t much like either option. “It depends what you mean by medication. If it involves sticking needles in her—”

“It doesn’t,” he said, unable to curb a smile. “If it did, there’d be no question but that I’d be the one to do the sticking, if for no other reason than I remember you don’t cope well with needles.”

“You do?” Her mouth formed a perfect O of surprise, reminding him of a rosebud about to unfurl.

“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.”