“I’ll be living out of a suitcase again,” she said. “Putting in a lot of long hours.”
“I know all about long hours.” He laid his hands on the top of her shoulders and gave them a squeeze. “It’s not impossible.”
“Don’t.”
“I know it won’t be easy.”
“Let’s not kid ourselves. It wouldn’t work. You know that.”
“I don’t know that.” His irate voice was filled with frustration. “You don’t know that either.”
She glanced at her phone and Sam Senior’s journals. When was there ever a right time and right place? She looked up. “I haven’t changed, Brett. I’m still that girl you despised in high school.”
“Jesus Christ, can you not get past that?”
“I’m not different. Sure, maybe, I’m good at photography because I enjoy it. And, yeah, I was successful when I was hell-bent on self-destruction and willing to take the chances no one else wanted to take.”
She moved away from him. “But I’m still Natalie Layton, your dingbat lab partner, who hated science class and those icky experiments almost as much as algebra, which I failed. I’m still a dreamer with meager ambitions,” she said. “Don’t you see? Some things don’t change. I’ll only become a disappointment to you. I’ll never measure up, Brett.”
He let out a groan and rubbed his forehead. “Shit.”
“You’ve always had a special place in my heart.” She decided she might as well bare her soul. “I do love you and I want the best for you. But I don’t trust you.”
“What the hell does that mean?” His frown deepened, aging him.
“I don’t trust you to love someone like me.” She put it as simply as possible. “I never have.”
He stared at the floor as he stood with his hands in the pockets of his trousers. “I need to go.” He lifted his chin. Determination had settled in his eyes. “We’re not having this talk here.”
“I don’t have anything else left to say.”
“I do.” His phone buzzed, and he retrieved it from his pocket. He cleared his throat. “Doctor Harris.”
She turned back to the window as he spoke, “I want to get an activated clotting time stat. H and H stat. Demerol twenty-five IV for pain and vital signs every fifteen minutes. Pelvic ultrasound. And get direct pressure on that puncture site and mark the bruising for comparison checks. No. I’m on my way now.”
He walked out of the room without another word.
By eight o’clock that evening, all the guests were gone, and the event-planning service had taken care of the cleanup. Natalie’s new outfit lay on the bed. She had changed into jeans and a big sweatshirt Clara had given her with a Santa on the front.
For the past couple of hours, she had been on her laptop, working on the photographs she had taken at Eldora’s bakery. She printed out the photograph of Eldora’s father and Sam Senior and closed the laptop.
On her way downstairs, she ran into Pharaoh, who was free and full of catnip. He swirled around on the second-floor landing. “Look at you,” she said. “A ballet dancer.”
“Naw,” he answered as he snaked between her legs. Then he took off in a running leap down the staircase and vanished into the parlor.
She found her father, her grandmother, and Aunt Clara at the oak table in the breakfast room, having hot cocoa. Her father had a large slice of Clara’s bourbon pecan pie. Natalie walked up to the table, and Clara told her how cute she looked in the sweatshirt. Anna managed a smile.
“Dad.” She bent and gave him a kiss on the forehead. She always liked him best in the quiet moments when he had no audience, when it was just him, relaxed and in good spirits.
She laid the photograph on the table. As he looked at it, she saw Anna give her a sharp glance. Then Anna’s lips lifted into a wide smile, and she gave Natalie a nod, silently communicating her agreement and support.
“That’s Granddad,” Ted said as he looked at the photograph. “I don’t know the other man.”
“Edward Bingham,” Anna said. “He was a friend of Sam Senior’s. He opened a bakery, and his family still runs it.”
Natalie pointed out the writing at the bottom of the photograph. “Sam Senior once gave Mr. Bingham that advice. I think it’s good advice. I’ve decided to make it my motto.”
She faced a curious look from her father as she took his hand. “I’m sorry, Dad. I’m not going to Washington.”
Chapter 22
“Doctor Harris.” Brett was greeted by the social services director, Elaine Gray, as he boarded the elevator at the hospital. Elaine, the bearer of holiday cheer, wore a Santa hat over her gray hair, and she held a box of candy canes. She offered him one. “Happy holidays.”
“No, thanks.” He declined the candy cane. He pushed the button for the seventh floor and stood in the corner with his arms folded.
The social services director didn’t say anything else. She seemed to sense he was not in a happy holiday mood. She got off on the next floor, but he didn’t have the elevator to himself long. The doors opened on the next floor, and a respiratory therapist, pushing an oxygen cart, got aboard.
“Hey, Doc,” he said. “Working late on Saturday night?”
“Yeah.” He hadn’t thought about it being Saturday night. He had been in a void since yesterday afternoon.
As the doors opened on the next floor, the respiratory therapist said, “Merry Christmas, Doc,” before he pushed the oxygen cart off the elevator.
I will be so damn glad when this holiday shit is over, Brett thought as the doors closed.
On the top floor, he entered his office. At the desk, he picked up the brass nameplate with CHIEF OF CARDIOLOGY inscribed below his name. He ran his fingers over the words. He had worked relentlessly for years to get to where he was standing now.
He set the nameplate on the desk upside down because that’s how he felt.
Upside down. Inside out. Guts splattered and heart wrecked. From the moment the guy at the White House had started talking, the world as Brett knew it had started to shatter. By the conclusion of the conversation, all of his plans had splintered into a dozen pieces.
He had wanted to take her to Hawaii. He wanted to marry her on the beach and make her part of his life forever. It had been hard to have his hopes flattened within minutes.
He’d gone through the motions at the reception. Occasionally, he had watched Natalie and her father work the crowd, side by side. Natalie had her father’s smile, and although she was not as overwhelming as the senator was, she had an allure about her that drew second looks from the guests, just the way she’d always drawn second looks from him. He knew she would get the job at the White House, and she’d be great at it. She would move in important circles, and she’d probably win the Pulitzer someday.
As he had stood in the ballroom, he’d looked at the Christmas tree that the two of them had decorated, and he thought of the smaller tree she had put up for him and how special that had made him feel. He wasn’t going to give up on their relationship, and he wasn’t going to let distance be an issue. He was going to be the wind beneath her wings.
Or so he thought.
Until she burst that bubble for him.
I don’t trust you to love someone like me. Her words haunted him. I’ll only be a disappointment to you. I’ll never measure up. Some things don’t change.
Yeah, they do.
Sitting at his desk, he clicked his mouse and opened his email account. He received emails all the time from physician recruitment agencies with openings for interventional cardiologists. He responded to a couple of the emails, saying he was interested in the Washington, DC, area.
One of the recruiters responded immediately, assuring Brett that he would email him on Monday with offer details, including sign-on bonuses, as well as relocation reimbursement. He could also help with housing. The world no longer moved slowly.
He closed his email and clicked on Natalie’s old website. He looked at twenty-year-old Natalie, art
school student, with her husband, Aidan, book bags in tow. Riding bikes together. Attempting to ice-skate. Waltzing in front of a castle. She had trusted Aidan to love someone like her. Brett clicked the mouse, exiting the website.
The trust boat had sailed without him.
Or had it? Maybe it had sailed without her. He reached for his phone. He’d had no contact with her since the reception. With the senator home, she and her family were probably doing whatever it was that families did, and he had needed some time to himself after their dustup. But he was back in the game now, and he always played to win.
He sent her a text message: I need you to meet me tomorrow around two at my uncle’s old house. It’s important.
After a couple of minutes, she responded: Okay.
It’s about three miles down Trinity Road. On the right. There’s a garage beside the house. You can’t miss it.
I know where it is. But I don’t see the point, Brett.
Annoyed, he shot back. Be there tomorrow. I’m not taking no for an answer.
All right. Then another message followed. Hey, have you seen my Miss Piggy doll?
He frowned at his phone. Here he was about to give up everything he had for her and she was concerned about a doll? He replied with WTF?
I can’t find her.
I’ll look at the house. He wondered if she was planning to take Miss Piggy to Washington with her.
Thanks. She added three grateful emojis.
Don’t mention it.
An hour later, he found Miss Piggy at his house. She was sitting in an armchair in the great room, partially covered by his UT throw blanket. “Well, there you are.” He held up the pig with flowing blond hair and purple dress. “Do you want to sleep with a lonely guy tonight?”
* * *
Behind the wheel of the yellow Jeep, Natalie headed for Trinity Road. The December sky was clear and the sun bright. By all accounts, it was a beautiful day, with no hint of the freezing rain that would be moving in at nightfall. Winter was on its way.
Before lunch, she had said good-bye to her father, who had headed back to Washington without her. It had been an emotional moment. Certainly not what she had expected after she had walked away from the White House position.
She knew she had disappointed him, although he had accepted her decision with grace. There had been a moment when she sensed he saw it as his own failure. Maybe that was how it was when you were a parent and a child failed to meet your expectations. Maybe you looked at yourself and wondered if you couldn’t have done better.
Thankfully, Anna had been her champion. Her grandmother and her father had gone out for coffee together. Mother and son time, demanded by Anna.
Obviously, Anna had done some lecturing because when they returned, Ted had offered Natalie his acceptance of her new endeavors and even encouragement.
They had talked about their family, looked at Sam Senior’s journals, and spent a few hours in the attic together. They found items that had belonged to her mother and spent some time exchanging reminiscences about Susan Layton. Ted still remembered Susan’s favorite cologne had been White Linen and that she liked pink roses best. That she was a Beatles fan and had taken ballroom dance lessons.
It had been a strange thing to be sitting in an attic surrounded by old stuff when you realized your father had loved your mother and that he still missed her. For the first time, it had felt as if the two of them had forged a real father-daughter bond. And when Natalie had told her dad she was looking forward to spending Christmas with him, she had meant it.
She turned the Jeep into the gravel driveway at the frame house where Brett grew up. She let out a wistful sigh when she saw the red Camaro beside the old garage. Brett was driving Cathy. She parked her Jeep behind the Camaro and took a deep breath as she stepped out of the safety of Jesse’s warm interior.
Now, it was one thing to tell her father that she didn’t want to be a White House photographer and proclaim herself a slacker. Her father was her father. A parent-child bond endured the worst of things.
Brett was an entirely different situation. She knew he would think less of her. He would never have turned down the opportunity of a lifetime. He would have been all about working with the most significant people in the world, and that might have been the right choice for most people, but not her.
Not at this point in time. She wore the same outfit that she’d been wearing the first day at the hospital when she and Brett had shared the elevator: a short burgundy jacket with embroidery on the lapels, jeans, and her brown suede boots. But this time she had on a rose-colored turtleneck and the necklace he’d given her.
She saw that the back door to the house was open, so she went inside. “Hello?”
“In here,” he called.
She found him standing by the window in a small bedroom. Like her, he was dressed warmly in a parka over his jeans and pullover. Sunlight poured through the double-hung window and spilled across an old, scarred hardwood floor, covered in a coat of dust that was graveyard gray.
“Hi.” She stood in the doorway. She wanted to shed all her reservations and rush into his arms. Surrender her common sense.
Brett looked out the cloudy glass window. After a silence, he gestured toward the small, bleak room with one tiny closet. “I grew up in this house. This was my bedroom,” he said. “When I was a kid, I used to slip out this window at night and go to the roadhouses.”
“When you were a kid?”
“Yeah. When you don’t have any parents, you can get by with a lot of stuff.”
He shifted from the window. “You said you didn’t trust me. You said you loved me, but you didn’t trust me to love you.” He looked into her eyes as if he were searching for the truth. “Tell me, how am I supposed to trust you? How am I supposed to trust someone like you to love someone like me?”
Surprised by the question, she had no immediate answer.
“I’m still Brett Harris, your asshole lab partner. I’m still that overachiever who wants to be on top because I was born on the bottom. I had to prove myself every day just to feel I was worth something. Maybe worth loving.
“I spent most of my childhood afraid Uncle Mark would regret keeping me and that he’d give me away. He was proud that I was smart, and I worked extra hard to make him proud. I helped him in the garage when he didn’t expect it of me. I did everything I could to be a success because I figured out early that people liked it if you did well, and I needed that approval.
“When you get right down to it, I’m a bastard. Literally. On my birth certificate, my father is listed as unknown,” he said. “I’ve got no pedigree. No family portraits hanging on the wall or an attic filled with my ancestor’s memories. I’m nobody. How could you love someone like me?”
She looked up, shaken by his admission. “You’ve never been a nobody. Don’t say that. What’s wrong with you?” She liked him better when he was a Type A asshole.
“I just need you to see things from my perspective. There’s always the other side of the fence,” he said. “I need you to understand where I’m coming from, but I’m not making excuses for myself. If I hadn’t been such a prick years ago, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.”
He gave her an apologetic gaze. “A man doesn’t make himself more by making someone else less. I will never make you feel less again.”
With her hands pressed together, she tapped her fingers against her lips. What was she going to do with him?
He glanced out the window at the barren backyard. “I’m glad you married a good man.” His words brought a hitch to her chest as he spoke of her husband. “I’m glad you found someone who built you up instead of tearing you down. A man who was wise enough to be the wind beneath your wings.”
“Brett—” Her voice trembled.
He turned and met her anxious gaze. “Aidan was the man I should have been.”
His words jarred her heart like an earthquake, causing it to crumble. He was so wrong and there was such
sorrow and frustration overwhelming her that she bolted from the room.
Outside, her lungs expanded as she sucked in a deep breath of cold air and steadied her frayed nerves. Brett stood on the porch, arms folded. “It’s the truth, Natalie.”
She cut her eyes toward him and shook her head. “No it’s not.”
She swallowed hard. “You’re the man you should be. Don’t say you should have been someone else because that’s not how it works. You don’t get to say that. You don’t even get to think such a thing.
“We can only be who we are. That’s the crux. Yes, I married a good guy, and I lost him in the worst way possible. There are bits and pieces of my soul scattered from Bosnia to Somalia. But I don’t get to be anyone else but who I am. Who I’ve always been.”
She glanced at Jesse, the little yellow Jeep that symbolized the future she wanted. “I’m moving on with my life. It’s not about the past anymore. It’s not about high school, losing Aidan, or even losing my face. It’s about the future.”
“Okay. Let’s talk about the future.” He stepped off the porch. “I can’t let you go to Washington without me. I’ve already been in contact with a recruiter who works with physician placement about relocating in DC. There’ll be things I’ll have to do. Like get a license to practice medicine there.”
“What?” Surely, she hadn’t heard him correctly.
“I’m going to resign from the hospital staff here.”
“Resign?” she repeated in shock. He had lost his mind. “You can’t resign! You’re in charge of the cardiology department now.” Exasperated, she confronted him. “You said that position meant everything to you. What is wrong with you?”
“You mean everything to me.”
She stood there, silent as she processed that. This is so not happening.
“I love you and I don’t want a long-distance relationship. I know the position at the White House is a big deal, and it’ll require a lot from you. It’s a huge career opportunity, and I want to be there for you. Be the guy who’s got your back.”
Everything His Heart Desires Page 24
