Catherine Spencer - The Doctor's Secret Child

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.