“This isn’t going to end well, is it?”
And there it was, despite everything, that same kindness and understanding that had seen her through her entire childhood, that made her eyes sting even now. “His ex popped back into his life. And right into the bastard’s bed, apparently. Turns out he’d never really gotten over her. Our virtually living in each other’s pockets notwithstanding. Although...” She twisted to lean one elbow on the railing, looking at Ryder. “He did offer to make me a partner. In his restaurant,” she added at Ryder’s quick frown.
“After...?”
“Oh, as in, right on the heels of. Consolation prize, yay,” she said, then hmmphed. “Guess he figured that was the least he could do. Considering it was my mad cooking skills that’d made the place as successful as it was.”
A hint of a smile played across Ryder’s mouth. “And you walked.”
“As fast as these cute little feet could carry me.”
“Good for you.”
“In theory, sure. In practical terms, not so much. Oh, I’ve managed, working for caterers off and on, but nothing’s come along that even begins to compare. I really, really loved that job. Made me stretch as a chef, try new things. And the partnership would’ve been an incredible opportunity. If I’d had a heart made of stone.”
“How long ago was this?”
“A few months,” she said, even though the date was indelibly, and regrettably, forever etched in her brain. “Dammit, Ry—I never saw it coming. Neither did Quinn. And it was especially hard on her since my mother died last year. She and Quinn were extremely close, as you can imagine.”
“Damn, honey. I’m sorry.”
Mel nodded, then said, “Quinn’s just now getting over it, I think. Hope. The breakup, I mean. She doesn’t mention it, in any case.”
“And you?” he said gently.
“I alternate between numb and mad-as-hell. Although I’m at least through the eating anything that isn’t nailed down stage.” She sighed. “But now that we’re once again in daddyless mode, yeah, Quinn’s started asking about her father. Not a subject I’m wild about discussing when I’m not wishing bad things on half the human population. Best I could come up with was telling her he vanished before she was born, he didn’t know she was coming, that I have no idea where he is. How to find him.”
“You lied?”
She snorted a humorless laugh. “How do you tell a child her father really didn’t want her? That his parents paid me off to never contact him, or show my face in St. Mary’s, ever again? And how in God’s name...” She swallowed. “How do I explain that her mother was every bit as complicit in this little scheme as the people who’ve been paying her hush money since before she was born?”
“Mel, for God’s sake—you were sixteen.”
“Seventeen, by the time she arrived. But yeah. Even so, I can’t pretend I didn’t know what I was doing. That I’d more or less sold my soul—or at least, my integrity—in order to provide for my child. And it’s eating me up, living this lie.”
Expelling a harsh sigh, Ryder grasped the railing, not looking at her. “Not any more than it’s eating me up, that when you get right down to it, this is all my fault.”
“And how on earth do you figure that?”
“So you didn’t hook up with Jeremy to get back at me?”
It was funny, really, if you thought about it: years of experience had taught Mel that few human males seemed ready, or able, to accept responsibility for anything. At least, the human males in her experience. To the point where she’d forgotten that Ryder had probably been the most responsible human being she’d ever met. Except, because Ryder had been stalwart and noble and honorable as all hell, in a convoluted way he had a point.
“Didn’t say that,” she said at last. “But it’s ridiculous to blame you for my actions. No matter what I might have told myself at the time.” She paused, then breathed out, “Please don’t hate me, Ryder. Since I still hate myself plenty enough for both of us.”
* * *
Ryder’s chest constricted at the self-deprecation trying so damn hard to undermine Mel’s tough bunny persona. He looked away, giving her the space she clearly wanted. And he needed. Because he had no idea how to bind up her wounds when his own were still so fresh.
Even as the old compulsion reared its head, refusing to be ignored.
“How could I possibly hate you when I’m the one who botched things so badly—”
“What you did was save me from making an idiot of myself.” Her mouth twisted. “At least, that night.”
Acid flared in his gut. “Still. I could’ve handled the situation with a bit more...grace. And afterwards...I should have called. Emailed, something. To check on you, make sure you were okay. I mean, I owed you that much.”
“Owed me?” Mel gave him a puzzled look. “You didn’t—don’t—owe me anything—”
“You were grieving, Mel. Whatever else might have been going on, you came to me for comfort, and instead of figuring out how to give you what you really needed I pushed you away. Harshly, if memory serves. So you can’t possibly be beating yourself up more than I am. On that score, I figure we’re probably about even—”
Her sharp laugh caught him up short. “Did you really think my actions that night were solely motivated by grief? Yeah, that might’ve short-circuited my inhibitors, but I wanted you because I wanted you.” She looked away. “Because I was sick to death of being treated like a little sister. Stupid, huh?”
Ryder looked up into the navy sky before saying, very quietly, “Then you have no idea how much of a struggle it was to turn you down.”
He felt her eyes on the side of his face for several beats before a soft, startled laugh fell out of her mouth. “Holy crap. Are you serious?”
“Yep. And you can stop laughing,” he said, even as chagrin pushed at the corners of his own mouth. Then he sighed. “All our lives, I thought of myself as your protector. A role I took very seriously—”
“Tell me about it.”
“—and you were a kid. Legally, anyway. And what I’d begun to feel for you...inappropriate doesn’t even begin to cover it. No way on God’s earth was I going to act on what I was feeling, but damn, it scared me. That everything our relationship was predicated on...” He scrubbed the heel of his hand across his jaw, then banged it against the railing. “What you wanted that night—hell, what I wanted—redefined wrong. You’d always trusted me. And I refused to violate that trust. Even though it nearly killed me.”
She took a deep breath. “So you freaked.”
“To put it mildly. No matter what I did, I was going to hurt you. Worse than you already were. And afterward, when I went back to school...” His gaze touched hers. “I had no idea how to fix it.”
Yanking her sweatshirt hood up over her head, Mel faced the moonlight-stippled currents for some time before finally saying, “It took a while, but eventually I got over the rejection. Once the hormone fog cleared. Because, like you said, what else could you have done? Your silence, though... That devastated me, Ry. Not gonna lie.”
His gut twisted. “So you got even.”
“Not on purpose,” she said after a moment. “I mean, I didn’t set my sights on your brother. Small consolation though that might be.”
Ryder frowned. “He came on to you?”
“Not blatantly, no. Not at first, anyway. He just suddenly seemed, I don’t know. Interested. Like he cared. And I was hurt, Ryder. Hurt, and confused, and adrift...” One side of her mouth ticked up. “And, okay, mad. At you, for basically walking out of my life. At myself, for being an idiot. For ruining the one good thing in it.”
She paused. “I made a terrible mistake, Ryder. Not that I don’t love Quinn with every fiber of my being, but the rest of it?” Her head wagged. “I disappointed everyone, especially my
mother. Who adored Quinn, don’t get me wrong, but I know she never quite got over how badly everything ended. Then there was Nana, who never spoke to me again—”
“This being the same woman who cut herself off from her own daughter, right? For reasons known only to herself? You’re not responsible for other people’s grudges, Mel. And as far as that agreement goes—legally it’s worth bupkiss.”
“Yeah, well, it’s amazing, how strong a motivator fear is. You want to talk freaked?” She pointed to herself. “Poster child. And if I’m being completely honest, at least it got me out of St. Mary’s. Me, and my mother, even if she never quite saw it that way. Got both of us away from...everything.”
“Meaning my family.”
Several beats passed before she said, “In all fairness it’s not as if they treated my parents badly—and I always did have a soft spot for your father. At heart he’s a good man. In fact, I gathered he was behind the generous financial considerations. And as far as Jeremy and I went—we used each other,” she said flatly. “And we both knew it. So there was never any ohmigod, you can’t separate us we’re in loooove thing going on. If the dude couldn’t be bothered to acknowledge his own kid, I could live with that. I hated him for it, but I could live with it. For your parents, though, to turn their backs on their first grandchild...” She gave her head a sharp shake. “For your mother to go so far as to demand that I take care of the ‘problem’—that was a lot harder to handle.”
Of course it was. Because while he may have detected a glimmer of regret in his mother’s eyes, he doubted it was any match for the stubborn pride that motivated every action and decision Lorraine Caldwell had ever made. And hearing Mel echo his mother’s earlier admission...
Ryder shut his eyes, wrestling to control his breathing before saying, “I want to make things up to you.”
“Forget it, Ry. What’s done is done.”
“Even if I say I’d like to get to know Quinn? Why not?” he said when her gaze slammed into his. “Just because my brother had his head up his ass—”
Mel pushed herself away from the railing and started back down the boardwalk. “Not gonna happen.”
“She’s still my niece.”
“Which I can’t tell her, brainiac.”
“They can’t legally—”
“Legal has nothing to do with it!” she said, stopping short, the wind whipping strands of hair that had escaped the hood across her face. “I know what my rights are, okay? I know what I could do. I also know what I can’t do. And won’t do. And that’s anything that could potentially hurt my kid—”
“So you’re tarring me with the same brush? When I knew nothing about it?”
“You weren’t there, Ryder!” she said, tears shining in her eyes. “Weren’t there when your mother called me a little tramp in front of my humilated mother, who’d been loyal as hell to yours for more than twenty years! Weren’t there when she accused me of trying to worm my way into the family, saying that since clearly my plan to snag you hadn’t worked, I’d gone after Jeremy, or when she made me do a DNA test before Quinn was born to verify that Jeremy was really the father!”
Ryder’s stomach plummeted. “Dammit—I had no idea—”
“No, you didn’t. Don’t. So believe me, I want less to do with your parents than they want to do with me. And if you get involved with Quinn...” She jerked away. “It won’t work, Ryder. Because the past...it doesn’t go poof simply because you want it to. But here’s the weird thing...”
Suddenly calmer, as though the storm had blown over, she started walking again. “Now that I’m a mother, too? In a way I get where your mother was coming from. About how you do anything to protect your kid. I didn’t—don’t—agree with her methods, but I understand her motivation.”
Mel’s mouth pulled flat, exactly the way she used to as a child, when she’d made up her mind, by golly, and nothing and no one was going to change it. “Quinn’s already hurting, from her grandmother’s death, from my breakup. At least one of those things I had some control over, and I blew it. Forgot, when I went and hitched my wagon to a rainbow, there was someone else involved. So you better believe I learned my lesson. Meaning I’d hack off a limb before I’d let Quinn anywhere near the people who wrote her off.”
Even in the dark, the pain in her eyes, her voice...
“And you thought I’d written you off, too.” When she shrugged, he said, over the guilt dammed up at the back of his throat, “I swear, things would’ve been different if I’d known.”
“Right. What on earth would you have done?”
“I don’t know. Something. Married you, if nothing else—”
“Oh, yeah,” Mel said on a high-pitched laugh, “your parents would’ve been totally on board with that idea. Do you really think they would have let you jeopardize your education, your career, when they wouldn’t let Jeremy jeopardize his? And Quinn wasn’t even yours! Not to mention, what makes you think I would have let you do that?”
“You can honestly say you wouldn’t have even considered it? Especially given—”
“That I had the mother of all crushes on you?”
“A crush I had a damn hard time not reciprocating!”
She blinked, then released another laugh, this one softer. Sadder. “And marriage would’ve made it all okay? Au contraire, my friend. It would’ve ruined everything.”
“Except I did that anyway, didn’t I?”
On a cross between a groan and a growl, Mel clamped her hands to her head, tromping down off the boardwalk to the parking lot. “God, why are we even talking about this? Like we can somehow change what happened? It’s done, it’s over, and the second this business with Nana’s house is straightened out, I’m outta here. So you tell your mother she has absolutely nothing to worry about, the last thing I want to do is make waves.”
Nearly to the car, Ryder grabbed Mel’s hand. If she was shocked, she didn’t let on. Instead she calmly met his gaze, her brows slightly raised.
“I know I can’t even begin to fix what my family broke. Or even what I broke. But to at least honor what we had—”
“What we had doesn’t exist anymore,” Mel said softly, reclaiming her hand. “And it hasn’t for a long, long time. We’re not those two kids anymore, Ry.” She smirked. “Can’t go back, no way to go forward. So. Think this is what they call a non-starter—”
At the sound of some ridiculous ringtone, she dug her phone out of her pocket. “Huh. It’s April...” She put the phone to her ear. “Yeah?” Ryder saw her brows crash, then she yanked open the car door. “We’ll be right there.”
“Everything okay?” he asked after getting in beside her, barely getting his seat belt fastened before she zoomed out of the sandy, unpaved lot and back onto the street.
“I didn’t quite get it all, April wasn’t making total sense, but apparently Quinn sliced her hand open on a nail or something.” At Ryder’s silence, she let out a sigh. “I suppose logically I should let you take a look, huh?”
“Up to you. But the nearest E.R.’s a good half hour away. And I have my bag in my car.”
“Of course you do,” she muttered as they flew into the weed-cracked driveway and she cut the engine. But before he could get out, she snagged his wrist. “Not one word—”
“Can I at least tell her we were friends? She’s going to wonder why we were together,” he said when she opened her mouth to protest. “She knows you lived here before, right? So we happened to run into each other—”
“Fine, fine, whatever.” She shooed him toward the door. “Just get in there before my kid bleeds to death.”
Ryder slammed shut the car door and trudged up the porch steps behind Mel, thinking he’d never been so angry, at so many people, for so many reasons, in his life.
With his own sorry hide easily taking first place.
Chapter Three
Mel was grateful to see that her cousin—who as a teenager would scream like a banshee if she nicked herself shaving—had either overcome her heebie-jeebies at the sight of blood or was doing a damn good job of hiding it from Quinn, seated on the counter and looking a little woozy herself. April had hidden the boo-boo, as well, wrapping it tightly in a paper towel and holding Quinn’s arm up over her head.
“Oh, sweetie...” Mel rushed to her blood-smeared daughter—yeah, that top was history—forking her fingers through Quinn’s curls as April, bless her heart, beat a hasty retreat. “What happened?”
“There’s a dumb nail sticking out of the back door, I didn’t see it,” Quinn mumbled, then squinted at Ryder, who’d plunked his coat and bag on the kitchen table and was now rooting around inside it. “Who’re you?”
“An old friend of your mother’s,” Ryder said with a kind—and yet, still killer, go figure—smile for the kid as he carted a bottle of antiseptic and assorted packets over to lay beside Quinn on the counter. One hand propped on the edge of the worn laminate, he hooked the other on his hip. “I’m also a doctor. Convenient, huh?”
Quinn shrugged. “I guess.”
On a soft chuckle, Ryder washed his hands and dried them on a paper towel, then ripped open a package of latex gloves, snapped them on. “Mind if I take a peek?”
“April said to keep my hand up ’cause of the bleeding.”
“Lots of blood, huh?”
“Like you would not believe.”
“Then April did good. But I think it’s okay to lower it now.” When she did, he carefully removed the blood-soaked towel. Aiyiyi. Mel told herself it would be very uncool to throw up, even if the sink was right there. “It seems to have pretty much stopped now, so that’s good. You’ll be back to playing the violin in no time.”
The Doctor's Do-Over Page 4
