Healing the Doctor's Heart

by Carolyne Aarsen

  “I’m just saying,” Emma said with a shrug and an innocent look. “Maybe you should ask him to the wedding? Then you don’t have to come alone.”

  “Maybe Shannon should ask who to the wedding?” Carter was asking.

  Shannon turned around in time to see her cousin and the very man Emma had been talking about, walking toward them.

  “Oh, just girl talk,” Emma said with a light wave of her hand.

  As Shannon looked over at Ben, however, she couldn’t stop a self-conscious blush creeping up her face.

  Had he heard?

  She looked away, choosing to pretend that he hadn’t.

  “Thanks for dinner, Emma,” she said. “Call me when you want help picking up the candles and decorations.”

  “Will do,” Emma said with a bright voice.

  Shannon shot Ben a quick glance. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to get back to town before my grandmother comes home.”

  “Sure thing,” Ben said. Instead of letting her get into the truck by herself, he was right at her side opening the door, putting his hand under her arm and helping her into the cab.

  At the touch of his warm hand on her bare arm, she flushed again. This was getting ridiculous and she laid the blame for her “flustration” around Ben fully at Emma’s feet.

  As Ben said his thanks and goodbyes, Shannon caught Emma’s not-so-discreet smirk.

  She shook her head, then turned ahead just as Ben walked around the front of the truck.

  She hoped he hadn’t heard what Emma had been talking about. She didn’t want him to think she had any designs on him. And there was no way she was asking him to escort her to the wedding.

  Chapter Five

  As Ben started up the truck, Shannon leaned her head back against the seat, wishing her brain would shut down. Though she had tried to dismiss Emma’s comments about Ben, they swirled through Shannon’s head.

  She knew he was good-looking and she also knew, in spite of her resistance, she had felt those few frissons of attraction.

  Emma’s comments made her even more self-conscious of those feelings and had succeeded in making her more aware of the man sitting beside her.

  She shot him a quick glance, thankful to see he was frowning at the road ahead, concentrating on his driving.

  His dark hair and eyes granted Ben a rugged appeal completely at odds with his brother’s fair looks.

  Arthur of the smiling charm and blond and boyish appeal was a bright contrast to his oh-so-serious brother, who seemed to have a perpetual frown.

  She thought of the first time she had met Ben. He had come to Calgary for a medical conference so she and Arthur had driven up from Hartley Creek so that Shannon could meet the brother Arthur spoke so often about.

  Ben had appeared distracted and abrupt when they went out for lunch and Shannon had been convinced he didn’t approve of her. On the drive home she’d discovered Ben was in the middle of a nasty divorce. His wife, Saskia, had been cheating on him and had served Ben with the papers before he had left for Calgary.

  The next time she’d seen Ben was when he came to her apartment to tell her Arthur didn’t want to marry her, also not his best moment.

  “I really enjoyed dinner,” Ben was saying as he made the turn onto the main road leading back to Hartley Creek. “You have a great family.”

  “They’re good people,” she said, glancing over at Ben as she replied. But he was looking ahead at the road, one hand on the steering wheel, the other resting on his leg. “I’m thankful for them and all the good times we’ve had together. I spent a lot of time on that ranch.”

  “I understand Carter and Garret lived on the ranch with your grandparents?” he asked.

  “They grew up there. Auntie Noelle was expecting them when she moved back to the ranch with Nana and Grandpa Beck,” Shannon said. “She was a single mom.”

  “Is she still around?”

  “Auntie Noelle died when they were about ten.”

  “So was she your mom or dad’s sister?”

  “Auntie Noelle was my mom’s sister. My mom moved back to Hartley Creek after my dad divorced her.”

  Ben turned at that and caught her gaze. “I’m sorry to hear that. Divorce is hard on every member of the family.”

  Their eyes held, but Shannon was the first to look away, suddenly self-conscious. “It was a while ago,” Shannon said with a shrug, touching the gold nugget she wore around her neck. The nugget her nana said she’d given her as a reminder to make better choices than her mother had.

  Well, so far Shannon wasn’t doing a lot better than her mother. Shannon’s father had left her mother after they got married. Arthur had left Shannon before. Just a matter of timing.

  “I’m sure it was hard for you, though,” Ben continued.

  Shannon thought back to that horrible morning when she’d watched her father drive away. Hailey had been downstairs and had come up, crying, telling Shannon that their father was leaving.

  He hadn’t even said goodbye.

  Shannon vividly remembered how she had wanted to cry but hadn’t dared because her mother told her she needed Shannon to be strong. To help her with Naomi and Hailey because they were still little.

  So Shannon had become the big sister and had helped her mother. When they moved to Hartley Creek, the role expanded as their mother started spending more time away from them.

  The bright spots in Shannon’s life were her visits to the ranch, where Nana would be in charge and Nana would take control. Neither she nor her sisters ever heard from their father after he left.

  Oh, the men in her life, Shannon thought, fingering the gold nugget.

  “I can’t help but notice your necklace,” Ben was saying as trees and hills flowed past the window. “It’s quite unusual. Was I imagining things, or do your sister and Emma have the same one?”

  Shannon smiled and looked down at the gold nugget. “We got the necklaces from Nana. She gave them to Carter, Hailey and me. Carter gave his to Emma when they got engaged.”

  “Is there some meaning behind them?”

  “I got mine after my nana’s heart attack,” Shannon said. “She had the necklace made up for me and one each for my other cousins, hoping they would all come back to Hartley Creek to claim them.”

  “Have they?” Ben asked.

  “Carter has. Hailey has. My sister Naomi is making plans to. I don’t know about Garret. He was always the one who did whatever he wanted.”

  “Does the nugget have any significance?”

  Shannon smiled as she thought of the legacy the nugget represented. “At one time the five nuggets were charms on a bracelet my nana wore all the time. She got the bracelet from my grandpa, who got the nuggets from his parents, who got them from my great-great-grandfather August Klauer.”

  “I’m guessing there’s a story here,” Ben said in an amused tone.

  “Yes. There is. All part of our history,” Shannon said, smiling at the memory. “My great-great-grandfather August Klauer had traveled across the country from the Maritimes looking for gold. But while he was exploring, he met my great-great-grandmother Kamiskahk. She was from the Kootenay tribe. He fell in love with her and made plans to stay and marry her. Then he discovered she had a pouch of gold nuggets she had received from her father. Her father had told her not to tell any white person about the gold because they would be overcome with greed and would want to know where they came from.”

  “He was a wise man,” Ben said quietly. “I understand there’s been a few gold rushes in the area, not particularly helpful to the locals.”

  “Nor have they been profitable. There’s not much gold in the area. At least not right around here.” Shannon glanced sidelong at the mountains edging the river. This f
ar past the ranch the valley narrowed; the mountains stood closer to the river as if to guard its secrets. “There’s not much gold, but there is coal. Not as shiny or as appealing, but it has been more profitable in the long run.”

  “So what happened to August?” Ben asked.

  “He saw the nuggets and was hit with a bad case of gold fever and even though Kamiskahk pleaded with him to stay and wouldn’t tell him where the gold came from, he was determined to find out for himself. So he went out looking. The story goes that after months of fruitless searching, one day he was panning and he felt cold, wet and miserable. He also missed Kamiskahk more than he wanted to look for gold. And he knew he had left a greater treasure behind.” Shannon gave Ben an apologetic look. “At least that’s the way my nana has always told it. Anyhow, he left his gold pans behind, returned to Kamiskahk and asked if she would take him back. Thankfully for the continuation of the Beck family, she did. The nuggets were passed down through the family and my grandfather was the one who had them made into a bracelet for my nana. And she, in turn, made them into necklaces. She gave one to each of us who have come back, along with a Bible. She said the necklace was to show us where we came from and the Bible was to show us where we should go.”

  “Does it?”

  Shannon shot him a quick frown. “Does what?”

  “Does the Bible show you where you should go?”

  His bitter tone jarred and surprised her and she thought of the anger in his voice when she’d asked him if he was returning to work in the hospital in Ottawa. She wondered if that had anything to do with his divorce from his wife. She wondered if he felt as abandoned as she had when Arthur had left her.

  “I wish sometimes it would be more clear,” Shannon admitted with a light sigh. “But I know that when I read my Bible regularly I receive strength and comfort for my daily life. I feel as if God is talking to me through the pages and then I don’t feel so alone.”

  Silence followed this remark and again she looked over at Ben to gauge what he was thinking.

  His expression looked melancholy.

  “I’m a bit jealous of that,” he said, his voice quiet. “God and I haven’t exactly been on speaking terms the past few years.”

  The bleak note in his voice hooked into her heart and gave her courage to ask, “Is that because of your divorce?”

  Ben drew in a long breath, his fingers drumming the steering wheel of his truck, his frown deepening. “Saskia was part of it all.”

  “How long were you married?”

  “Two years.”

  “Any children?”

  “Thankfully, no.” He let go a short laugh, but it held no humor. “Saskia didn’t want kids.”

  Once again she chanced a glance his way, and once again their eyes met, but he quickly returned them to the winding road they drove down.

  Yet in that brief instant Shannon felt it again. The brush of something deeper than attraction. She felt an unclenching deep in her soul. A slow release of a fist that had held a tight rein on her emotions, and before she could stop herself, she suppressed her concerns and asked the next question.

  “How did you feel about that?”

  His shrug, the universal body language of dismissal, was at odds with the pained look on his face. He waited a moment and Shannon fought the urge to fill the silence.

  Then finally… “Looking back it was a good thing we went with what she wanted.”

  That didn’t really answer her question, but she wasn’t surprised.

  Arthur would have told her even before she asked. Her ex-fiancé had always told her he wasn’t the secretive type. That his life was an open book.

  Trouble was, his book had few pages.

  Ben, on the other hand, held as much back as he could. She felt he released each piece of information with great deliberation and reluctance, which made anything he gave her more valuable.

  “What do you mean by that?” she asked, pressing on, curious to hear his answer.

  Ben pressed his lips together, then emitted a sigh. “When I met Saskia I was taken in by her looks. She was one of those vibrant, exuberant people who was so different than me. Blonde, blue-eyed, laughing all the time. That old saying about opposites attracting? That was me and Saskia.”

  As he spoke Shannon felt a thrum of sympathy deep in her soul, keeping time with his words. It was as if he was talking about her and Arthur.

  “Is that why you married her?”

  “She was the one that proposed, actually,” Ben said with an embarrassed laugh. “I should never have gone through with it. Saskia was more in love with the idea that I was a doctor than the reality of what my work required. She thought I would go off to work each morning and come home each night and we’d go out for dinner every weekend.” He sent her an oblique look accompanied with a dry laugh. “Which, as you know, didn’t happen.”

  “Dr. Henneson has a cottage on Lake Koocanusa that he’s been to about five times in ten years,” Shannon said with a sardonic smile. “Occupational hazard.”

  “Unfortunately Saskia didn’t understand that. Created a huge amount of pressure our marriage couldn’t withstand. When I found out she was seeing someone else, I knew it was over.” He chanced another look her way. “Say what you want about Arthur, but at least he saved you the heartbreak of a broken marriage.”

  Shannon held his words in her mind, examining them more closely, and she realized he was right. Hard as it had been to be the woman left on her way to the altar, being the woman who was left after marriage would have caused more sorrow.

  She had seen that firsthand with her mother. After their father left, Denise Deacon had been rootless, shifting from job to job even after they moved to Hartley Creek. When Hailey was old enough to be on her own, Denise had moved again, this time to Calgary. Neither Shannon nor her sisters heard a lot from her, though she had said she was coming to Carter’s wedding.

  Shannon was sure much of her mother’s restlessness had to do with the humiliation of being left behind. And for the first time in many years, Shannon felt an inkling of sympathy for her mother.

  “I think you’re right,” she said quietly.

  She looked his way and as their gazes meshed it was as if the distance between them vanished.

  His eyes flicked ahead, then back to her, lingering for a moment, but when his gaze returned to the road, Shannon felt as if something between them stayed connected. With every beat of her heart she became increasingly aware of the man beside her. She tried to banish the feelings. Tried to put them in perspective, but it seemed every time they got together another barrier between them blurred.

  Please, Lord, she prayed. I can’t let myself be pulled into these emotions. I have plans and I can’t let a man hold my heart in his hands again.

  She drew in a long, slow breath, as if to settle her heart and draw a curtain of protection around it. Her life had finally found equilibrium and she couldn’t let Ben Brouwer upset that.

  Then the road made a sharp turn and as she forced her attention back to the road, she felt her lips ease into a smile. The tunnel lay ahead and as they drove toward it Shannon leaned forward, waiting. The light was still good. It should be visible.

  “What are you looking at?” Ben asked.

  “When my grandfather would bring us back to Hartley Creek from the ranch, my sisters and I would have a contest to see who would be the first person to see the Shadow Woman once we got out of the tunnel.”

  “The what?”

  “Just wait. I’ll show you.” Though she had ridden down this valley countless times, she still felt that little lift of anticipation as they entered the tunnel.

  For a second the darkness blinded her and Ben slowed the truck down. Then a few moments later they emerged into the light again.

 
; The road ahead of them straightened and stretched out, following the hillside down toward the valley that held Hartley Creek.

  And there she was.

  “There’s a pullout just ahead,” Shannon said, pointing it out to Ben. “Stop there and I’ll show you what I mean.”

  Ben did as she said and when the truck came to a halt, she got out, wincing again as her foot hit the pavement. She had to do something about that knee. But she caught her balance, then limped around the front of the truck, glancing at the rock face overlooking the town.

  A faint breeze coming up from the river below them teased her hair as the cool of the evening drifted into the valley.

  “There she is,” Shannon said, smiling as the contours and shadows on the cliff face came into view between the hills ahead of them.

  “I don’t see it,” Ben said.

  “Those two caves are her eyes and below them a rock jutting out. That’s her nose.”

  Ben frowned, leaning forward as if to see her better, but he shook his head slowly. “I see the caves, but I don’t see the face yet.”

  Shannon moved closer, pointing out the contours. “There’s a long shadow that makes her hair and below that, that kind of square shadow, that’s her dress. According to my grandmother there’s a man also involved in the Shadow Woman legend and that’s the dress he bought her.”

  Ben tilted his head as if to see it from another angle. Shannon glanced his way just as a smile spread over his mouth. “Okay. I see it now. She looks like she’s leaning ahead a bit.”

  “Waiting for the man to return.”

  “Kind of like your Kamiskahk,” Ben said.

  “Yeah. Kind of like that. Though my nana had always insisted Kamiskahk wasn’t the kind of person to sit around and pine for her lost love. She probably kept herself busy.”

  “You think so?”

  Shannon pushed her hair away from her face and shrugged. “In spite of what Nana said I’m sure part of her waited. Watched the hill he’d walked over when he left, wondering if that flicker in the shadows of the trees was him coming back.”