“Please. Don’t let me keep you from what you’re doing. I know where it is.”
She swept past with a faint air of impatience, her surprisingly soft and decidedly expensive scent drifting behind her like the wake of a steamer.
Jenny headed back to her desk. She had more than enough to do for the next couple of hours, more than enough to keep herself occupied and her mind off the man and his girlfriend down the hall. Whatever was going on was none of her business, anyway.
With that pointed reminder, she stuffed the bills into their envelopes, ran them through the postage meter and answered a call to reschedule an appointment. She gave Josh Hill an extra lollipop for being so stoic when he and his mom left and pulled the files for tomorrow’s appointments. She even maintained her usual casual professionalism when Greg came in, dropped Marty’s file on her desk and headed back out without a word.
She heard him head back down the hall, his footsteps hesitating halfway before he continued on and she heard his door close.
Jenny forced her attention to the computer. Eavesdropping was not something she did. Not on purpose, anyway. Yet, even as she pulled the grant forms onto the screen, she couldn’t help overhear their muffled voices.
Normal conversation seldom carried in the clinic when doors were closed. But with no one else around, there were no other sounds to mask what she could hear filtering up the short hallway.
It didn’t help that within a minute, Elizabeth’s voice rose.
Jenny figured she and Greg must be very near his door. Thinking Elizabeth must have chosen to wait for him at the little conference table rather than his desk, Jenny diligently tried to ignore what she heard and concentrate on the charts on her screen.
“…why can’t I have an agent start looking for a house now?” came the woman’s faintly exasperated voice. “You’ll be through here in a few months. It could easily take that long to find the home we want.”
“The home you want” was Greg’s reply. “We can’t afford that kind of house. And if we do decide to buy a place together, we can look after I move back to Cambridge.”
Elizabeth apparently chose to ignore the “if” part.
“We can afford anything we want,” she insisted. “I have money. My father has money. You have money if you’d just use it.”
“Lower your voice.”
She ignored that, too. “You don’t even know how much that estate is worth,” she accused. “I know you needed to prove to your father that you could make it on your own. You’ve already done that by putting yourself through school and with your stint in this…this…deplorably equipped place,” she apparently decided to call it. “You could end your commitment here and return to Cambridge that much sooner if you’d just let go of your pride and use some of your inheritance to pay off your loans.”
The drop in temperature felt almost perceptible.
“Elizabeth,” Greg grated, his tone careful and dangerously tight, “you’ve known all along that making my own way is important to me. I don’t want your money. I most definitely don’t want your father’s. And even if it were available to me right now, which it is not,” he said tersely, “I’m not touching what my father left me. I’ll pay my own debts, and if you can’t wait for me to finish the commitment I made here before deciding the housing issue, then we have bigger problems than a difference of opinion over real estate.”
Jenny had never understood how silence could be deafening.
Until now.
For several long moments she heard nothing. Not so much as a whisper came up the hall. She didn’t know if they were staring each other down, backing away from each other, or if one of them, specifically Elizabeth, had reached out to make amends.
The thought of Elizabeth reaching out to him, touching his face, had Jenny yanking her attention back to the screen and praying that something on it would make sense. She needed to focus on work.
The effort was futile.
“…why you’re doing it, isn’t it? You’re staying here to avoid a commitment to me.”
Greg’s voice fairly dripped exasperation. “My staying here has nothing to do with our relationship. I’m staying because I have a commitment to these people until my contract expires. I’m not backing out on that.”
“What about a commitment to our relationship?” she returned. “It’s just a house, Greg. If you can’t even commit to just looking for one, then I don’t see how we have anywhere else to go.”
Tension fairly crackled in the sudden silence filling the hallway.
That silenced lengthened, stretching Jenny’s nerves right along with it. But it wasn’t until she realized she was holding her breath that she finally heard something other than the beat of her own pulse pounding in her ear.
She had no idea what Greg had said. Or if he’d said anything at all. She had no idea, either, who had opened the door. She suspected Elizabeth might have opened it herself, though. Within seconds the quick tap of heels sounded on the tiles. Seconds later the female physician slipped past the front office doorway in a blur of hurt and indignation.
The waiting room door opened. Without bothering to close it, Elizabeth moved straight to the front door. The way she rushed out, the bell tinkling madly, made Jenny think she would have left that one open, too, had the mechanism at the top not eased it closed for her.
Greg’s approach sounded far less agitated, far more deliberate.
He seemed to be heading for the waiting room door. Not to follow Elizabeth, but to close it. Threading his fingers through his hair as he passed the front office doorway, he suddenly drew to a halt.
Jenny watched his hand fall as he looked toward her.
Embarrassed to have witnessed something so private, her eyes widened as she ducked her head.
It seemed like forever before he quietly asked, “Who else is here?”
She cleared her throat, glanced back toward him. The carved lines of his face betrayed nothing beyond the tension that radiated from him like radio waves from a signal tower.
“No one. It’s just me.”
The tightness in his jaw remained. “How much did you hear?”
Far more than she ever intended, she thought. “Probably pretty much all of it.”
She had no idea what he saw as the cool gray of his eyes moved over her face. She wasn’t even sure what she felt beneath that quiet, unnerving scrutiny. She knew only that her heart was beating a little too fast in the long moments before he stepped inside.
Reaching for the other secretarial chair near the computer desk, he turned the back toward her and sat down, straddling it.
“Tell me,” he said, his voice deep, his eyes searching. “When you first realized that your life was totally screwed up, what did you do?”
She didn’t know which threw her more, the question or that he was coming to her for advice. “I went for a very long walk,” she admitted, hating to think he felt as lost as she had. “I figured that was safer than getting behind the wheel of my car, as upset as I was.”
“Did it help?”
Not really, she thought. “As much as anything could at that point.”
The breath he drew pulled her glance to his broad chest. A moment later, that view slid to the buckle of his belt and the zipper below as he rose like a monolith rising from the sea.
Her anxious glance jerked up as he shrugged off his lab coat.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
Worry washed her features, naked, unguarded. Seeing her unashamed concern, Greg felt that quiet caring reach deep inside him. There was a place in his soul that felt as if it were dying, a dark, hungry place that he usually managed to ignore. She’d touched him there before, given him a taste of comfort that had seemed terribly foreign and more necessary than he wanted to admit.
He knew she understood how it felt when a person hit rock bottom, and she was clearly afraid he felt that way now. Yet, he didn’t feel much of anything at all. It seemed to him that he should. The woman he’
d once planned to spend his personal and professional future with had just broken up with him, but all he felt was a sense of relief and a vague uncertainty about where he was going to work after he left Maple Mountain. The Cambridge practice obviously was no longer an option. And the doctor who would replace him had already been hired and was counting on the job he’d been promised.
All that mattered just then was that he didn’t deserve Jenny’s guileless concern.
“I’m fine,” he assured her, hanging his lab coat on an arm of the coatrack inside the doorway. “What just happened with Elizabeth was a long time coming. I can’t change for her, and she’s not willing to accept me as I am.” Certainty settled solid and deep. “It’s really best for us both.”
He looked from where Jenny sat quietly watching him to what was on the computer screen. When he glanced back to her again, she looked as if she didn’t quite know what to say. Or maybe she wasn’t sure if she should say anything at all.
“Don’t work too late tonight,” he murmured. “We need to get that application in, but I know you haven’t been feeling all that great lately. Get some rest. Okay?’
He barely heard her softly say that she would. As he turned to leave the room and the clinic, his sole focus was on working off the restlessness he never could seem to shake.
It was after eight o’clock that night when he returned to finish the work he hadn’t stuck around to finish before. Thinking to go for a run rather than a walk, he’d changed into sweat shorts and a T-shirt. The jolts to his sore shoulder had ended the idea of jogging after the first half-dozen steps. He’d settled instead for walking the winding woodland paths until dark had settled in, then he’d worked through a couple of sets with his lightest weights to strengthen the healing muscles in his back, arm and shoulder.
The aching joint hadn’t helped his mood the past couple of weeks. Neither had the inconvenience of not being able to use both arms. The tenderness was almost gone now and after four weeks of his own therapy, he would be as good as new. In the meantime, being free of the sling felt like a gift in itself.
If he could just get rid of the responsibility his father had dumped on him, he’d been home free.
Wondering how much Jenny had overheard about that, he sank into the old leather chair behind his desk. As he did, he noticed a white clinic stationery envelope centered on his blotter.
It had his name on it.
“Greg.” Not “Dr. Reid.”
The writing was Jenny’s. He would have recognized her open and looping script anywhere.
Paper rustled as he slit open the envelope and pulled out the plain sheet of paper.
There was another thing I did. I bought a bag of Oreos. The kind with chocolate filling. The store is closed by now, so you’re welcome to the stash I’m saving for emergencies. You listened to me, so if you need someone to unload on—someone who won’t offer unsolicited advice and can keep whatever she hears to herself—I’m here.
She’d signed it simply “J.”
He sank back in his chair. Read the note again.
He could feel himself smiling as he folded the note and slipped it into his pocket. Her concern felt like a balm to him, quiet and comforting in that same odd way he’d felt with her before. But he wasn’t going to show up at her house. He’d make miserable company tonight. Even if he had been tempted, the thought of someone seeing his car—Charlie’s truck—out there so late, would have stopped him. Joe had already questioned him about sitting with her on her porch a couple of weeks ago. The eagle-eyed deputy had dropped his teasing when Greg told him that he’d gone there to offer her a job. But he had no practical excuse tonight, and he knew it took next to nothing for rumors to get started around there.
As he opened a file he needed to research a diagnosis, it just felt good to him to know that Jenny was there.
He told her that, too, when he walked into the break room the next morning and found her making coffee.
Jenny stood at the sink of the small, utilitarian room filling the carafe from the coffeemaker with water. She must have just arrived herself. The front office lights weren’t yet on, the shades were still drawn in the waiting room and she hadn’t yet pulled on her camouflaging blue scrub jacket. The color of the pale-pink shirt that met the waist of her black slacks reminded him of cotton candy. The fit of it over her gently rounded breasts threatened thoughts less innocent in the moments before she turned off the faucet and glanced up.
“Thanks for the note.”
With a soft smile, she poured the water into the machine. “You’re welcome. I just wanted you to know my Oreos are available anytime.”
As he’d done other mornings when he’d come in and found Rhonda or Bess or, now, Jenny going through the ritual of preparing coffee, he did his part to get the process underway. His basic sense of fairness dictated that if he drank it, he could help fix it.
He reached for the box of filters from the cupboard above Jenny as she reached for the can of coffee.
Taking out a filter, he held it while she scooped in the richly scented grounds. As always she added an extra scoop for the first pot, but instead of dropping the scoop back in, she glanced up. “Should I add more? For the extra caffeine,” she explained, searching his face before she quickly glanced away. “In case you didn’t sleep well last night.”
He’d spent half the night tossing and turning. The other half he’d spent in his dark room, developing some of the pictures he’d taken at the town’s parade last Fourth of July. He toyed around with his photography mostly in the winter when the long days of summer were gone and the long nights demanded something to fill the lonely hours.
Last night had felt like winter to him.
“Sure,” he murmured.
“I know what you said…about it being for the best,” she reminded him, adding another scoop, “but I’m still sorry about what happened with you and…what was she? Your fiancée?”
“We were never engaged.”
She dropped the filled filter into the basket. As she did, he picked up the plastic lid for the coffee can, snapped it into place. “That was part of our problem,” he admitted. “She wanted marriage. I didn’t.” Picking up the package of filters, he slid it and the coffee back onto the shelf and quietly closed the cabinet door. “I’d gotten the feeling she looked at buying a house together as a way to ease me into the idea. In a way, she was doing to me what Brent did to you.”
Jenny’s fingers paused above the switch. A knowing look passed through her eyes a moment before she turned back and flipped it on. “Manipulating you,” she concluded.
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry.”
He started to shrug off what had happened, found that he couldn’t. He’d been manipulated before, so it wasn’t as if he hadn’t had experience with someone trying to control him or bend him to their will. The difference between his father and Elizabeth, though, was that he had respected her, her passion, her dedication. He just hadn’t realized until she’d started pushing him for a commitment in their relationship that she hadn’t respected him. She’d heard nothing he’d said to explain why he felt as he did. Or, if she had heard, his feelings hadn’t mattered to her.
“May I ask you something?” Caution entered Jenny’s voice. “About your girlfriend. Ex, I mean.”
“What’s that?”
“You said you didn’t want marriage. Did you mean just to her, or to anyone?”
Greg hesitated. Part of him, the part that kept the invisible wall between him and his heart, started to tell her that marriage simply wasn’t something he could see for himself and let it go at that. He wasn’t accustomed to letting anyone into his past. There were things even Elizabeth hadn’t known. But Jenny, the woman he’d practically badgered into confiding in him wasn’t after anything from him, and he knew from the shadows in her lovely eyes that she would understand what so many others might not.
“Not to anyone,” he finally admitted. “My father had just divorced his fo
urth wife before he died. My grandfather had divorced three. My mom walked out before I could remember much about her, so I have no personal experience at all with how a good family works. In all honesty,” he said, because she’d been so honest with him, “what some people call love looks an awful lot to me like a license to use, abuse or—”
“Manipulate.”
He knew she’d understand. “Exactly.”
Jenny had caught a trace of his usually well-masked cynicism the day he’d told her how he’d wound up in Maple Mountain. She heard it again in his unexpected admissions. It was difficult, though, seeing that hard certainty glitter in his eyes.
It was like seeing inside herself.
Looking away, she carefully wiped up the dry grounds that had scattered over the beige Formica. There had been a time when she would have insisted his conclusion was terribly wrong. In her naive little heart, she’d felt that there was nothing love couldn’t conquer, that knights in shining armor did exist and that happily ever after didn’t just apply to fairy tales. She hadn’t expected romantic perfection. And she certainly hadn’t expected her prince to be perfect, because she was so far from it herself. But she had very much wanted the home, the family and the future that Brent had dangled like bait.
She had learned the hard way that what she’d thought was love had been nothing more than a blinding emotion Brent had used to pull her strings. As sobering as it had been, and as revealing, she had also come to realize that it hadn’t been Brent she had loved after all. What she had loved so completely was the illusion he had presented.
It still hurt to know she had been so thoroughly deceived. Yet, she had the feeling from what Greg had just told her that his heart had been abused in far more profound ways. She had merely been used. He had grown up without a mother. And his male role models had gone through women like some men did clean shirts.
“It would be hard to want something you’d only seen as a failure,” she murmured. “Having three stepmoms come and go would be difficult, too.” A hint of hope slipped into her eyes. “Did you stay close with any of them?”
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