Bottom Line: Callaghan Brothers, Book 8

by Abbie Zanders

  “He likes you,” Andrew murmured, as if it made no sense.

  “That surprises you, doesn’t it?”

  “Hell, yes, it does. Took Max six months before he’d let me pet him like that, and animals usually love me.”

  “But Max doesn’t know he’s a dog, does he?” Aidan said, scratching a particularly good spot under Max’s neck that had his right hind leg thumping.

  Andrew grunted, but Aidan saw a hint of reluctant approval in the other man’s eyes.

  “So, are you going to tell me where Mary is and why you’re babysitting Max?”

  “No.” Andrew devoured half a piece of pizza in one bite. “Not yet.”

  Aidan exhaled slowly, sizing up Mary’s business partner. It was something he’d become particularly adept at over the years. Being able to read a man and anticipate his reactions to various strategies went a long way in his business. Brute force probably wouldn’t work on this guy, and offering him a wad of cash would probably just piss him off.

  “Okay,” Aidan said, swallowing his pride. He wouldn’t do this for anyone but Mary. “What can you tell me now?”

  Andrew finished off his first slice, took a long drink from his beer, and pulled a second piece out of the box. “Mary and I are business partners, but we’re a lot more than that. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for her.”

  Aidan met his stare head-on. “Good to know.”

  “So. You wanted to know about Cam, right?”

  Did he? He wasn’t so sure anymore. Maybe he should take a page out of Mary’s book and just trust her to tell him on her own terms and in her own time. But he found himself nodding anyway.

  “Cameron O’Rourke was a good man. Born and raised right here in Birch Falls. We went to school together. He was the quarterback on our high-school football team. Hell of a shortstop, too. He was also class valedictorian, and prom king.”

  Aidan disliked him already.

  “Mary transferred to Birch Falls sophomore year with her mom after her dad died. She was on the quiet side, but smart and funny, and Cam acted like an idiot trying to get her to notice him.”

  Aidan knew just how he felt.

  “She didn’t want anything to do with him at first, but Cam was persistent when it came to things he wanted. And he decided he wanted Mary pretty early on.”

  Andrew frowned a little, wiping his finger along the moisture beading on the ice-cold beer. “He found out she liked flowers, so he gave her one every day. Corny, I know, but effective. He hung around her locker, offered her rides to and home from school. Cam made it clear to everyone that he wanted her, and nobody wanted to get on Cam’s bad side, so we all backed off and made sure he had a clear playing field. Eventually, Mary gave in and went out with him.”

  Knowing that there hadn’t been an instant connection - at least on Mary’s side – made Aidan feel slightly better.

  “It didn’t take long for them to become a couple. And Mary seemed happy enough. Cam treated her good. He worshipped the ground she walked on, really. I don’t think any of us realized just how much until we graduated. We were a year ahead of Mary, and Cam refused to go away to college without her. He said he’d work for a year to save up some money while she finished school, then they could go together.”

  “I don’t think Mary liked that idea too much. Smart as she was, she really had no interest in college. She had a part-time job at a local greenhouse and decided her dream was to have her own someday, to open up a little shop here in town.”

  Andrew went silent, absently pulling the crust from his pizza and feeding it to Max.

  “What happened?” Aidan prompted. “Did she open up her own place after graduation?”

  Andrew looked at him as if he had sprouted horns. “Christ, you are rich, aren’t you? No. Nobody has that kind of capital right out of high school. Cam had been working though, saving what he could. Mary got a full-time job after graduation, and they put everything they could aside.”

  “Then Mary’s mom decided she’d had enough of Birch Falls. She’s a piece of work, that one. Decided there weren’t enough eligible men for her tastes, so one day she tells Mary they’re selling the house and moving to Florida.”

  “Mary didn’t want to leave. Unlike her mother, she actually liked it here. But Cat Murphy wouldn’t hear of it. I think at that point Mary had just had enough of her mother’s crap. She never actually said so, but I got the impression that Mary was more the adult in that family than Cat was. It was my uncle’s greenhouse she worked at, and we got to be pretty close. Sometimes she’d talk about her dad, and that’s how I learned that she’d been the one taking care of him while he was sick and her mother was out... doing other stuff.” A frown creased Andrew’s brow.

  “Cam wasn’t about to let her go, either. The two of them disappeared for a couple of days, and when they came back, they were married. It shocked the shit out of all of us – biggest news to hit Birch Falls in years. Cat was so pissed she just up and left right away, leaving Mary with the mortgage and a shitload of unpaid local tabs. Luckily, Cam’s dad was the manager of the bank that held the mortgage and they worked something out. It wiped out all their savings, though.”

  “Then Cam got sick. He came home from their impromptu wedding/honeymoon feeling like crap. A month later he was in chemo.”

  “He had cancer?”

  “Yeah. It was some nasty stuff, too. All the chemo and radiation took him downhill, fast. They’d burn or cut it out of one spot, only to have it come back in another. He held on longer than anyone thought he would, though. The docs said he wouldn’t last a year. He lasted five. Folks said he just couldn’t bear to leave Mary.”

  “And Mary? How did she take it?”

  Andrew looked across the table. “Mary might look all soft and fluffy, but she’s the strongest person I know. She took care of Cam without a single complaint, but it was hard on her, you know? She’d never say so, but I think Cam’s passing was a huge relief. She loved him, and took great care of him, but I think if the situation had been different, things might not have played out the way they did.”

  Before Aidan could ask what he meant by that, Andrew continued. “After Cam’s death, I ran into Mary at O’Leary’s. We got to talking, and she told me she was still interested in owning a flower shop. As it turned out, I was looking to put my MBA to some real life use, and the rest, as they say, is history. With my flair for business and her magic touch, we created our own little success story.”

  “It hasn’t been easy, though. Folks around here still think of her as Cam’s. Been five years, but it’s like Cam’s ghost is keeping everyone away. Then you came along, and I saw a sparkle in Mary’s eyes I haven’t seen in ages, and Christ if it wasn’t good to see. Didn’t last long though. These last couple of weeks she’s looked worse than I’ve ever seen her. What the hell happened?”

  Aidan didn’t think he could feel any worse than he already did, but he was wrong. “I fucked up. I didn’t know...” He ran his hand over his face. There was no point in going into the details. “But I should have. I should have trusted her.”

  “Yeah,” Andrew agreed. “Guess you millionaire-types put more faith in your bank statements than in the love of a good woman, huh?” The words were sharp, but his tone was resigned. “Is that why you didn’t tell her who you really were? You were afraid she’d care more for your assets than you?”

  Aidan gave him a rueful smile. “It’s been known to happen.”

  Andrew snorted. “Wouldn’t know about that, would I? The most important thing, though, is that you realize Mary’s not like that.”

  “Yeah, I get that. So. Are you going to tell me where she is?”

  Andrew’s eyes met his for several long seconds, and Aidan knew he was deciding whether or not to tell him. Finally, Andrew blinked and exhaled. “She’s in the hospital over in Pine Ridge.”

  Aidan abruptly straightened in his seat. “Hospital? Why is she in the hospital?”

  Another long pause. “A few w
eeks ago she was diagnosed with breast cancer. They did the surgery today.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Mary decided she definitely liked being the one providing care a lot better than the one receiving it as she lay there in her semi-private room, fighting another wave of nausea. The last thing she needed was another round of the dry heaves; the contents of her stomach had been fully purged hours ago. Her throat felt raw from the tube they’d inserted while she was under anesthesia, and it felt like someone had taken a cleaver to her chest.

  She checked again, reaffirming that they hadn’t completely removed her breasts and uttered a sigh of relief. Vanity wasn’t exactly her thing, but if she had a choice between keeping her parts or not, she preferred to keep them.

  Operable masses, they’d called them. Not one, but several. In both breasts. Probably benign. Lucky her.

  As it turned out, the callback for a repeat mammogram hadn’t been because of blurry images or a poor angle. It had been to confirm the results of the first one. When that showed the same results, she was scheduled for a higher-resolution test. Then ultrasounds. Then needle biopsies. More people had touched her breasts in the last few weeks than in the rest of her thirty-one years combined.

  Everyone said she was handling it so well. Maybe she was. When Cam was sick, she’d come in contact with a lot of people who’d been diagnosed with cancer, male and female, rich and poor, young and old. Their reactions were as varied and different as the people themselves. Some cried. Some went right into fighting mode. Others, like her, took the news with calm stoicism, displaying neither hysterics nor histrionics.

  She’d seen enough of the disease to be intimately familiar with it and what it would mean. Not just with Cam, either. Ever since she began fully developing in her mid-teens she’d been cursed with exceptionally dense tissue and a predilection for cysts. A particularly outspoken mammo tech once told her point-blank that she was just naturally “lumpy”.

  It was no excuse. Ignorance was not bliss, not when it landed her here, like this.

  But it did explain why she wasn’t as diligent with her self-breast exams as she should have been. Each month she’d invariably find one or more masses, and each time she would worry herself sick until her next cycle came and they shrank or moved, and then new ones appeared.

  After the first couple of scares that turned out to be nothing, the docs told her to “just keep an eye on things” and call if one got bigger or lasted more than three months. There was a point in her life when she was sure one of them would turn out to be something more than hormonal in nature.

  Cam had been her rock then, listening to her calmly and patiently whenever she got herself worked up. No matter what happened, he’d said, he would always be there for her. How ironic was it that Cam was the one diagnosed with the cancer before he even turned twenty one?

  They’d been so naïve. Thinking that if they did everything right, listened to all of the so-called experts and battled through the treatments - which were sometimes more horrific than the disease itself - that everything would be alright.

  What a crock of shit. She wondered what Cam would have to say about all that now.

  It didn’t matter, not really. Mary had already made up her mind. She’d agreed to the surgery, but that was it. There would be no chemo, no radiation, no anything other than a follow-up mammogram in a few months. She would not go through what Cam did. If this didn’t work, she’d already decided she’d rather the disease take her quickly.

  Mary shifted uncomfortably. Between the I.V. in her arm, the moans of the poor elderly woman on the other side of the semi-private room, and the constant beeps and whirs and alarms up and down the unit, it was impossible to get any rest. The one time she’d managed to drop off for a few minutes, the nurse woke her up to take her vitals.

  They should have released her hours ago. She would be so much better off in her own bed, with her soft cotton sheets and her down pillow and nothing but Max’s rhythmic snoring to lull her into sleep. But hospital policy precluded them from releasing her until she could successfully hold down some fluids. That meant she’d had to call Andrew to go over and take care of Max. And boy, had he been pissed. Not because she’d asked him to doggie sit, but because she hadn’t told him why she’d taken the day off in the first place.

  Well, she said to herself, abandoning all hope of sleep as she flicked the remote toward the small suspended television above her. Come tomorrow morning she was signing herself out no matter what.

  “Take this out or I’ll do it myself,” Mary said when the shift nurse came by the next morning. Mary knew she was being a total bitch, but she was beyond caring at that point. Undergoing surgery, throwing up for hours on end afterward, and not getting a wink of sleep tended to make her cranky. But being treated like a witless child had been the last straw.

  “I can’t do that. The doctor will be making rounds soon,” the nurse told her stiffly.

  “You’ve been saying that for hours. I’m not waiting any longer. I want to go home now.”

  “That’s not possible,” the nurse said, lifting her nose slightly higher into the air. If it got much higher, Mary thought, she’d drown in a rainstorm. “You haven’t been discharged yet.”

  “Don’t need a discharge order if I’m signing myself out, do I? So, is that a ‘no’ on the I.V.?”

  The nurse pressed her already paper-thin lips together even harder. “Ms. O’Rourke, you cannot - ”

  Mary was tired of listening. She pulled off the tape and then extracted the tiny catheter in one smooth move. She grabbed a tissue and pressed it against the small hole as the nurse gaped at her and rushed to turn off the I.V. pump that was now sounding a very unpleasant alarm.

  “Is there a problem here, nurse?” said a deep, masculine voice.

  The nurse’s eyes grew huge. “This patient just removed her own I.V., Doctor.”

  Rather than seem upset, the gorgeous doc lifted a perfect brow and pinned Mary with a set of the most amazing blue eyes she’d ever seen. “Is that true, Mary?”

  She didn’t have time to wonder how he knew her name. “Yes. I want to go home. You can’t keep me here against my will.”

  “You see what I mean, Doctor? She refuses to listen to - ”

  But Dr. Blue Eyes apparently didn’t care to listen to Nurse Arrogance. He held up his hand to stop the flow of information. Amazingly enough, it worked. “Thanks, Nancy. I’ll take it from here.”

  Nurse Nancy (Arrogance was a lot more fitting, Mary thought) hesitated for a moment and looked as though she wanted to say something, but apparently decided it would not be in her best interest. Mary couldn’t blame her, really. Dr. Blue Eyes had some serious authority vibes going on there.

  “Do I know you?” Mary asked suspiciously. “You look vaguely familiar.”

  “I’m Michael Callaghan,” Blue Eyes said. “I’ve never had the pleasure, but I believe you met my brother Ian a few weeks ago.”

  Ah, right. Come to think of it, he did have the same blue-black hair and chiseled features as Lexi’s husband.

  “Of course. What are you doing here? Are you covering for Dr. Whitney this morning?”

  “Not exactly.” Michael looked down at the chart he had in his hands, scanning each page in a matter of seconds. “I understand you had several small masses removed from your breasts yesterday. They kept you overnight because you had a bad reaction to the anesthesia. Is that correct?”

  “Yes, but I’m fine now. I’m not staying here any longer.”

  Michael’s eyes lit with amusement. “You and my wife would get along very well,” he said with the trace of a smile. “She hates anything to do with hospitals, too.”

  “Sucks for you then, huh?”

  Michael chuckled. “Fortunately for me, she made an exception in my case. How are you feeling?”

  “Fine,” she lied.

  “Were you able to hold down your breakfast this morning?”

  Mary lied without batting an eyelash. “
Yep.” In truth, she managed to trade her roommate’s empty tray for her own. The old lady didn’t notice; she was so confused she probably didn’t even realize she’d gotten two breakfasts.

  “And how’s your pain level on a scale from one to ten?”

  Nine, she thought. All but the shallowest breaths hurt like hell. “One,” she said defiantly.

  Michael chuckled again. “You’re almost as bad at lying as my wife.”

  “I just want to go home,” she said, her voice softer.

  Michael studied at her for several long moments. “How about letting me give you a quick once over? If everything looks okay, I’ll wheel you down myself.”

  It was the best offer she’d had all morning. “I guess that would be alright,” she conceded.

  She allowed him to check her pulse, listen to her heart, take her temperature and blood pressure. He had a very gentle touch – much nicer than Nurse Nancy’s. A little too nice, in fact. Mary felt the color rising in her cheeks when he checked her incisions. Thankfully, either he didn’t notice or he was too polite to say anything. She figured it was probably the latter. Any doc that looked like that had to be used to eliciting all kinds of involuntary responses from his female patients.

  “Okay, Mary. Your incisions look good, but I’m going to give you some antibiotic cream to apply several times a day, alright? No showers for three days, but it’s okay to sit waist deep in a tub and use a sponge carefully.”

  “You’re letting me go?”

  “Yep,” he said, reaching into his pocket. He tossed the small packet of saltines on the bed tray. Then he reached into the other pocket and pulled out a small container of apple juice. “As soon as you eat those crackers and drink that juice.”

  Mary narrowed her eyes at him. “If I throw up, I’m aiming right at you.”

  “Duly noted.” He laughed. Mary found it was a lot harder to cop an attitude with him than with any of the others.

  Thankfully, Mary managed to hold down the crackers and the juice. Michael went to grab the necessary papers while she got dressed. By the time he returned, she was feeling a little better.