The Doctor's Secret Child

by Catherine Spencer

  “I will.” She tucked the quilt more snugly around Ariel’s shoulders and dropped a kiss on her cheek. “I’ll start looking tomorrow while you’re having your lessons with Mrs. Franks. Get some sleep now, sweetheart.”

  The real estate office wasn’t her only stop the next morning. Once she’d explained her needs and received a list of potential rental properties, she drove to the little white church on the coast road.

  The huge maples dotted around the graveyard were in bud, the sky a deep blue, the air clear as crystal and full of birdsong. Some of the headstones, moss-draped and dating back over three hundred years, leaned tiredly, their inscriptions worn from centuries of winter storms. The most recent ones stood at the end farthest away from the church, where the land sloped gently down to an old apple orchard.

  Finding her father’s didn’t take long. A stone plaque with just his name, the dates of his birth and death, and a simple Rest In Peace, marked his place. Unlike so many other graves, there were no flowers at his, for with her mother incapacitated, who else would have brought any? So he lay in death no different than he’d been in life. Bleak and removed.

  Baffled to find her vision blurring, Molly blinked hard. But the tears continued to form, swelling and sparkling like diamonds along her lashes. He had been seventy-five when he died; an old man with few friends and only his wife to mourn his passing.

  It wasn’t enough. Moved by the utter loneliness of the sight, Molly dropped to her knees in the cool spring grass, and traced a finger over his name.

  He was a lovely man when we were first married, her mother had told her, that first night she’d come back to town. Big and strong…but it killed something in him when he lost his leg….

  And then, only yesterday, It broke his heart when Sara Anne took up with her fancy man… Poor John. He carried so much inside and wouldn’t let anyone get close.

  “I’d have loved you, if you’d let me,” Molly whispered brokenly, the tears splashing down her face. “All I ever wanted was a daddy who liked me. I’d have been so happy to sit on your lap and have you read to me, or tell me stories about the way things were when you were growing up. I wouldn’t have turned away from you because you were crippled. I wouldn’t have broken your heart the way your sister did. I’d have been the good girl you always wanted.”

  A slight movement to her left had her looking up in horror. She didn’t want anyone seeing her there. But it was just a squirrel watching her with bright, inquisitive eyes from his perch atop a granite slab. Beside him, a shrub of some kind was just bursting into bloom; pale pink trumpet-shaped flowers, with purple centers.

  Slowly she stood and brushed at the damp earth clinging to the knees of her wool slacks. Stepping carefully between the graves, she snapped a branch from the shrub, much to the disapproval of the squirrel which raced up the trunk of the nearest maple and heaped abusive chatter on her for vandalizing his territory.

  Returning to where her father lay, she stooped and placed the flowering stem beside his burial stone. It was the first time she’d voluntarily given him a gift. That it was such a pitiful token didn’t seem to matter compared to the knowledge that it came from her heart. She hoped that, wherever he was now, it gave him the same peace it brought to her.

  She drove back to the Inn with the windows rolled down. The breeze sent her hair flying in disarray. It needed to be cut, but finding the time to fit a visit to a salon in between her mother’s medical and physio appointments, taking Ariel to the library, keeping tabs on her business, and now house hunting, was no mean feat, besides which Dan had mentioned in passing that he liked her hair longer.

  Her mother, who made no secret of the fact that she hoped to hear wedding bells in the near future, accosted her the minute she set foot inside the suite. “You were gone a long time. Were you with Dan?”

  “No. I went to see the churchyard to make my peace with my father.”

  “Oh, Molly!” Hilda’s face crumpled.

  “I thought you’d be happy!”

  “I am, child! I prayed you’d find a way to forgive him.”

  “And forgive myself. Sometime between leaving here this morning and coming back again, I lost a lifetime of resentment. You were right, Momma. It’s time to let go of the past and move on.”

  “You’re going to marry Dan!”

  “No,” she said, smiling at her mother’s eternal optimism. “I’m going to find us a place to live. Say goodbye to Wharf Street, Mom. You’re moving up in the world.”

  She searched for a house for almost a month without success, but the frustration of not finding the right kind of place was offset by the benefits of time spent cementing her relationship with Dan.

  They learned about each other during those late April days; discovered what they shared in common and where they disagreed. He and Ariel grew closer, too, although he admitted privately to Molly that, when he confided to his parents that he had a daughter, his mother had not taken the news well.

  Sometimes, the three of them would go off for a picnic, or take a ferry ride to another part of the state. Other times, he and Molly would find an out-of-the-way place for dinner, or take long quiet walks along empty, moon-washed beaches.

  But not once in that time, despite the ever-present temptation and opportunity galore, did they make love. They stood by their agreement: no sex to cloud the issue of whether or not they could make a go of marriage.

  Then, just before the first of May, when Molly was convinced she’d never find the kind of house she was looking for, a property became available. As a child, she’d dreamed of living in just such a house, with tall stone chimneys, and wide, deep windows looking out across Harmony Lake to the rolling hills north of town.

  It was a home from another era, full of quiet corners and padded window seats. The rooms were spacious, the maple floors polished to a satin gleam, and both the kitchen and bathrooms recently renovated. Its owners, who’d been transferred to Switzerland at short notice, had left it furnished with lovely antiques and beautiful rugs. All she had to supply were personal items like sheets and towels and dishes.

  If she’d drawn up a wish list for a fairy godmother to grant, she couldn’t have improved on what she found.

  “I’ll take it,” she told the agent, and signed a six-month lease on the spot, with an option to renew or buy at the end of that time.

  “When do I get to see this palace?” Dan wanted to know when he came for dinner that night and heard Ariel’s ecstatic account of the boat dock at the foot of the garden and the swimming float about twenty yards offshore.

  In truth, Molly was reluctant to show it to him. They’d had a bit of a spat a couple of days earlier and it had all started with the question of where she’d live.

  “Let me help you find a place,” Dan said when, after hours of fruitless searching, she’d despaired of finding anything suitable. “I know people here. I have contacts. And if you’re concerned about the cost of rent, I’ll help.”

  “No,” she’d said, fearing that the more she allowed him to come between her and the obstacles facing her, the greater the temptation to weaken and accept his marriage proposal for all the wrong reasons. “Spend more time with Ariel, instead. You can always hang out in the suite, if you don’t want to risk being seen in public with her.”

  “I’m not ashamed of my daughter, Molly,” he’d said, peeved. “You’re the one who asked me not to broadcast the news that I’m her father until you decide if you’re going to make the move here permanent.”

  “And you’re the one who told me your mother was less than delighted to learn she had a granddaughter, though I suppose, if she were to be honest, she’d admit her real problem lies with me.”

  “I already told you, I’ll deal with my mother and anyone else who tries to make trouble for you.”

  She’d sighed, exasperated. “Why can’t you see that I don’t want to stay on those terms, Dan? You proved a point by taking me to Le Caveau, and I’m grateful for it. Now let me prove my
point.”

  “It being…?”

  “I will not be tolerated because of my connection to you. If I’m to make a new start here, it has to be because of who I am today, not because of who I used to be or who I’ve got lined up to go to bat for me.”

  And all of that was true. But there was something else she didn’t mention. Sticking by their decision not to give way to the physical attraction between them was driving her to distraction. She knew what would happen if she found herself alone in an empty house with him.

  “You can’t keep skirting the issue for ever, you know,” he said, reading her mind with uncanny accuracy. “Eventually you’re going to have to deal with us.”

  “I will,” she promised. “Soon.”

  If she knew him as well as she thought she did, she’d have guessed he wouldn’t settle for that. As it was, she was caught totally off guard the following Sunday when he showed up on the doorstep of her new home half an hour after she arrived with a load of supplies she’d bought the day before.

  “Housewarming gift,” he said, thrusting a flowering plant into her arms—and his foot in the front door before she could shut it in his face.

  “You’re supposed to be on call,” she said.

  “I know, Molly. That’s why pagers and cell phones are so handy. They give a guy freedom to come and go as he pleases between emergencies. So smile and say thank you, because you need a man with muscle to move all those boxes in the back of your vehicle, and I’m here to offer mine.”

  She hardly needed him to tell her he had muscle. Even if she hadn’t already seen him naked as a jaybird and discovered the fact for herself at delicious, tactile leisure, the golf shirt and jeans he wore bore out the truth of his claim.

  Oh, yes, she needed a man, all right, and not just any man. She needed him. Always had, always would. Worse yet, the frankly sensuous approval in his gaze as he took in her loose-fitting green-striped shirt, old white capri pants and ratty straw sandals, toppled the self-protective barriers she’d worked so hard to maintain and left her quivering with shameless anticipation.

  To disguise her sigh of defeat, she buried her face in the flowers and sniffed their delicate scent. “Thank you for these. They’re lovely.”

  “So are you,” he said, reducing her already sagging willpower to the consistency of melted chocolate with his slow, devastating smile. “Even dressed like that. But then, with a body like yours, you could turn combat boots and army fatigues into a fashion statement.”

  She smiled back and since it was clear he wasn’t about to leave, opened the door wider. “I suppose you’d better come in.”

  “I thought you’d never ask,” he said.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE second the front door closed, she knew she’d made a mistake. The whole setting was too intimate, what with the stairway curving suggestively up to the bedrooms on the left side of the hall, and the fat-cushioned couch beckoning from the sitting room on the right—not to mention Dan, parked squarely between the two, regarding her quizzically as though to say, Okay, Molly, now what?

  “Come see the back garden,” she said, racing him through the kitchen and out to the safety of the back porch. “There’s a huge sugar maple at the bottom of the lawn, and what looks like a small orchard on the west side of the property.”

  “That’s what it looks like, all right.”

  “Yes,” she chirped, wishing she didn’t sound so much like a deranged sparrow. “Quite a change from Wharf Street, isn’t it? By the way, I went back to the old house the other day, to collect a few more things for my mother, and ran into Cadie Boudelet. She was almost civil for a change, so I asked if she’d be interested in supplying quilts for the shop. She does very fine work, you know.”

  “No, I can’t say I do. Cadie’s talents have never piqued my curiosity.” He slid his forefinger under the open collar of her shirt and traced a beguiling path along her collarbone. “Yours, on the other hand, stir me to untold enthusiasm.”

  It was all she could do not to moan aloud with pleasure.

  Striving to preserve what remained of her self-control, she squeaked, “Did I mention I’m thinking of opening a shop here?”

  “No, Molly. You haven’t said much of anything to me lately, except ‘Mind your own business.’”

  “I’m sorry if I’ve hurt your feelings. It’s just that I’ve grown used to being independent and it’s a hard habit to break.”

  “I can handle an independent wife,” he said, trailing his hand up the side of her neck to toy with her earlobe. “In fact, that’s the kind I prefer.”

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself,” she said, with about as much authority as a titmouse staving off a hungry cat. “I haven’t yet said I’ll marry you.”

  “Not in so many words, perhaps, but the body language…” He smiled lazily. “That speaks for itself. But you were saying something about setting up business here?”

  “Right,” she said, backing away before he put her mettle to the test by continuing his explorations. “I came across a darling little place which used to be a fudge and chocolate shop, with gingerbread fretwork along the eaves and a spindled porch in front, tucked away in a corner of the main square. You probably know the place, although I don’t remember it from when I lived here before. Anyhow, Cadie seemed quite thrilled that I thought her work was good enough to sell and—good grief, Dan, what are you doing?”

  “Checking your heart rate,” he said, trapping her against the porch railing, then calmly unbuttoning her shirt and slipping it off her shoulders. “You’re babbling, and you’re hyperventilating and, as a doctor, I’m concerned.”

  “Have you gone mad? The neighbors will see!”

  “Not unless they’re spying on us through a telescope, in which case,” he said, pulling her into the circle of his arms and kissing the base of her throat, “it’d be a shame to disappoint them.”

  Her skin puckered with anticipation and delight. A tremor ran through her, so powerful her knees almost buckled. “Dan, if you keep this up, you know where it’ll lead.”

  “We both know. The difference is, I can handle it, whereas you don’t seem able to.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous! It’s a bit late in the day for me to act the nervous virgin.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But we agreed on a cooling-off period so that we could focus on shoring up other aspects of our relationship.”

  “I know. And if you want me to stop what I’m doing now, I will. But I warn you, I’m getting tired of your stalling tactics.”

  “I don’t want you to stop. That’s the whole problem,” she whispered, lifting her mouth to his. “I’ve missed you.”

  “Then what is the problem?”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “Of me?” He stared at her incredulously.

  “Not of you. Never of you! But when we make love, there’s always this little voice warning me that it takes more than sex to hold a marriage together.”

  He dropped his arms and stepped away from her, the light in his blue eyes turning flat and cold. “What you’re saying is, before we take this relationship any further, you want guarantees.”

  “I suppose I do, yes.”

  “Well, brace yourself for a news flash, sweetheart. In life there aren’t any. Some things you have to take on trust. I can tell you the advantages of our being married far outweigh the risks, that we have every reason to make it work, and that we’re as sexually compatible as any two people can ask to be. But until you believe it, I’m just spinning my wheels, and that’s beginning to irritate the hell out of me.”

  “I realize that.”

  “I don’t think you do,” he said flatly. “I’m not a man normally given to ultimatums, but I’ve got to tell you, I’m tired of being given the runaround. This past month, I’ve jumped through hoops trying to reassure you, and it’s gotten me precisely nowhere.”

  “A month isn’t much, compared to the lifetime we’re talking about.”

  �
��I agree. But let’s face it, we aren’t talking about a run-of-the-mill marriage, either.”

  There it was, out in the open at last, the one thing her rational self had known all along and refused to accept: that theirs was no idyllic love match, no matter how much she wished it were.

  She’d thought that, if she allowed enough time for their relationship to grow in areas beyond the purely sexual, he’d come to want her for herself, and not for any other reason. She’d hoarded each moment of tenderness they’d shared, every second of silent understanding and spontaneous reading of each other’s minds, and tried to make them add up to the happy-ever-after ending she’d been looking for all her life.

  It hadn’t happened. All those intimate dinners and drives in the country and quiet walks where the two of them did nothing but talk and get to know each other without any outside distractions, had been for nothing. She and Dan were chasing different dreams.

  The realization struck a killing blow. “What you’re really saying is, we wouldn’t be getting married at all if it weren’t that we have a child together,” she said, her voice thick with misery.

  “I don’t deal in ‘if’s,’ Molly,” he replied, unmoved. “And I won’t even try to speculate how you and I might have ended up if Ariel weren’t in the picture. She is, and that’s what we’re left to work with. To that end, you set out certain rules, and I’ve complied with them. Ariel and I have grown close. She’s as ready to accept me as her father as I’ve always been to acknowledge her as my daughter. But you continue to shut me out.”

  “If you construe our not having sex as me shutting you out, perhaps we’re both wasting our time trying to make this work!”

  “I’m not talking about sex, and well you know it.”

  “Then what? Give me an example.”

  “Okay.” He leaned against the railing and regarded her impassively. “Did you bother to consult me about which school Ariel should attend, come September?”