The Bachelor Doctor's Bride

by Caro Carson

After a moment of silence, Diana looked at him out of the corner of her eye, as if she were shy. “But you do think some of the doctors might have cried when she passed away? Maybe a little?”

  “I know they did.”

  These punches were killing him. The hair on the back of his neck practically stood up, so strongly did he feel that he was seeing a glimpse of a very young child in Diana’s shy question.

  By the time she’d been old enough to ask about her mother, those who’d known her would have had years to adjust to her mother’s passing. Diana had probably been told the story in the same straightforward way she’d just told it to Quinn. All of her questions through the years must have been answered matter-of-factly.

  It must have seemed to her as if no one mourned her mother. Maybe it still seemed that way to her.

  “I guarantee you that when Leslie Diana Connor died, all the nurses wept. And when the ones who hadn’t been on duty came to work later that day, they wept, too, when they saw a new patient in her bed. Every doctor had to take a few moments to step into an office or a bathroom or a broom closet so that they could get themselves together before calling on their next patient. Your grandfather was torn up, so much so that he still found it hard to talk about years later, so he probably didn’t talk about it much at all. But everyone—every single person, Diana—everyone wished they could have saved your mother for you.”

  He couldn’t look at her. The tombstone in front of him was a wet blur, and if he looked at Diana, he would surely cry when she’d asked him not to.

  “Thank you,” she said, breathless. “That was the best story, ever.”

  He ditched the umbrella and hauled her to her feet and pulled her into his arms. She was crying, and she squeezed him back as tightly as he was hugging her.

  “Thank you,” she repeated, “thank you, thank you.”

  “Yeah,” he said, and he kissed her soft hair and her wet cheeks, then held her a little longer as he read the tombstone once more. “Happy birthday.”

  * * *

  Diana couldn’t cry anymore, not here, not in what was left of this coastal town.

  It was her birthday, and all around her, everywhere she looked, people were devastated. Their houses were gone. Their shops, their roads, their lives, all damaged. They kept coming to the medical tents, carrying their belongings in a suitcase or pillowcase, wearing clothes that were tailored or torn, signing in, asking for help.

  Diana couldn’t help.

  Blood made her faint.

  She hadn’t known this. She’d never been around blood before, or at least, not around this kind of blood. This wasn’t a scraped knee or a finger-prick kind of blood, but the kind that caked around a broken bone that poked through the skin. That made her faint.

  When she fainted, she made everyone’s jobs harder. On this birthday, she’d been labeled a fainter, and had become a burden to the hospital. Not to the town’s real hospital, with its shattered windows and the roof that had been peeled back and ripped halfway off. Not that hospital, but the one housed in white tents that had been set up in its shadow. The one Texas Rescue ran. The one where Quinn worked, and Patricia, and Karen, and everyone except Diana, because she was a fainter.

  There’s enough misery in the world without you adding yours to it.

  Diana wouldn’t cry, not when everyone had a better reason to be sad than she did.

  Patricia would show her no mercy if she cried. While Diana had been alphabetizing the medicine, a little boy had been wheeled past her as he spit blood from his broken teeth and then proudly, gleefully, viciously smiled at every adult he passed. Diana had felt light-headed for one second, and then she’d been on the floor with little plastic pill bottles raining down on her.

  The alphabetizing had begun again without her. Patricia, disgusted Patricia, had sent her to the X-ray tent to hand clipboards and paperwork to waiting patients. That had lasted less than five minutes. Diana had cracked her elbow hard on her way down during that faint, and her shirt had caught on something that pulled the right thread to cause a line of pink sequins to start falling off, one by one. She’d insisted her elbow would be okay, but still, she’d been almost grateful to be kicked out of the X-ray tent.

  So, she was spending the rest of her birthday in the parking lot, in a chair, sitting in a tent with its flaps down. She was sweltering, but no one wanted to risk having the new girl catch a glimpse of any gory injuries among the people who waited in the line for medical attention. She kept track of the walkie-talkies. Local cell-phone towers had been knocked out, so the hospital ran on battery-operated handheld devices. When someone came to change out their battery, Diana wrote down the serial number on a clipboard.

  In other words, the hospital ran just fine without her.

  Diana sat alone, hour after hour, and felt the full weight of her uselessness.

  The one touchstone in her life, her mother’s letter, seemed frivolous in the face of all this disaster. Find moments of beauty. Where? Light and reflection and sparkle meant nothing here, nothing. Ice was used for injuries, not to fill tubs of drinks for friends. Candles were used as an inferior source of light when batteries died. Dogs were used to find corpses in collapsed buildings.

  Where was the happiness?

  The flap of the tent opened behind her, and Quinn walked in.

  She turned, took one look at his face, and knew she wasn’t the only one having a bad day.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Quinn had left the main treatment tent with a mental list of things he needed. He needed to find Patricia, so that she could light a fire under someone to source more nitroglycerin. He needed the second generator fixed, because they could only keep one set of equipment charged without it. He needed better lighting, now that the sun was going down. He needed a fresh battery for his two-way radio.

  When he lifted the white flap and saw Diana with her whiskey-colored hair, every other need became secondary.

  She walked straight to him, and gave him a hug.

  Damn. It was still a little alarming, the way she did that, but it was exactly what he needed. He slid his stethoscope off his neck and tossed it on the table, then wrapped both arms securely around her. She leaned into him, so he could lean into her, too, and they stayed that way, taking some of the weight off each other.

  Quinn closed his eyes.

  In the wake of any natural disaster, an unfortunate spike in the amount of heart attacks occurred in any community. Quinn could deal with that. It was why he was here. Most MIs required stabilizing medicines and transportation to the nearest city whose hospital was still in working order. Today, two patients had needed more.

  Quinn had performed CPR on the first patient, applying the hard and deep compressions with the heels of his hands and the force of his entire upper body, while the team had scrambled to find the portable defibrillator in a room not yet completely ready. It had taken a long, long time, an eternity, and Quinn would feel the effort tomorrow in his triceps, he knew, but the patient had survived.

  It wasn’t the first time he’d had a human’s life in his hands—literally, under his hands—as he forced a heart to pump. It wouldn’t be the last. But it wasn’t a normal part of his routine; he was an interventional cardiologist, not an emergency physician.

  Diana felt so good in his tired arms.

  The second patient had died. Quinn had thought of Diana’s mother, and he’d thought about the way he was leaving too much unsaid with her daughter.

  Quinn started to let go, but Diana held him tightly. He put his arms back around her. She owned him. If she needed him, then she could have him.

  “Is this for you, for me, or for us?” he asked quietly.

  “I think we’ve both had a hard day.”

  She kept her cheek pressed against him. He brushed her hair back with his hand. “
You do know there is an ‘us,’ right?”

  She frowned, a tiny movement of her brow. “Yes, of course.”

  “In the boathouse, when I said you owned me—”

  “We’re exclusive. We’re dating.”

  “No.” He ran his thumb over her cheekbone. “No, there’s more to us than that. I love you, Diana.”

  She picked her head up and looked at him, just looked at him, for the longest moment. She was beautiful. Quinn wanted to look at her forever. He planned on looking at her, forever.

  “I can’t think of anyone who deserves to be loved more than you, Diana. I don’t think you’ve had enough of it in your life.”

  “I deserve it?” she asked. “Everyone deserves to be loved. I’m nothing special.”

  “You are extraordinary.”

  She looked down, fingering the edge of her sequined shirt, his compliment making her shy.

  “Please, let me go,” she said.

  Something was bothering her. He relaxed his hold so she could slip out, but her next words froze his heart.

  “Let me go this time, when I leave. I’m not the right woman for you.”

  She wasn’t shy. She just didn’t love him.

  Every crack he’d felt in his heart, every hint of ice, came at him at once, a barrage of freezing shards.

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, and she took a step backward.

  He worked hard to push through that first punch. This didn’t make sense. He knew this woman. He knew her. She had strong feelings about him.

  “You’re sorry for what?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry I let you talk me into staying every time I tried to leave. I shouldn’t have been your lover, not when I knew we weren’t a match.”

  “Not a match.” He recaptured her, and pulled her tightly to him, so her jean-clad legs brushed against his. “That’s a lie.”

  The tent flap opened and a man walked in. Diana pushed away from Quinn and stood at a little distance, crossing her arms over her chest.

  The man held up the battery for his radio and gestured toward the storage rack. “So, I’ll just...uh. Right.” He grabbed a new battery and left.

  The tent was stifling. Quinn didn’t know how she’d stood it all day. “Come take a walk with me.”

  He pushed aside the back flap so they’d avoid the busiest part of the tent city. The edge of the parking lot bordered a drainage ditch. It was nearly overflowing, full from the hurricane’s downfall, but the water was moving, draining, slowly returning to normal. The coming twilight promised some respite from the heat.

  Diana stepped up onto a concrete parking barrier, fidgeting rather than facing him.

  Quinn hoped she was listening. “I respect your matchmaking intuition, more than you do. Think about that very first night. The very first moment you saw me, you noticed me, didn’t you? Every instinct inside you must have sent you toward me. You wanted to be my friend. You wanted me to be happy, from the first minute we met.”

  “I try to cheer people up all the time.” She stepped off the barrier and put her hands into her front pockets. “I left you at the gala. After I found you a good match, I walked away.”

  “And I came after you.”

  “You shouldn’t have.”

  “I’ve got instincts, too, and every one told me to hold on to you. Don’t let this one go. We belong together, Diana.” He reached for her arm and ran his fingers from her elbow to her wrist, so that she removed her hand from her pocket. They faced each other, so close, but touching only those two hands.

  After a long moment, she took her other hand out of her pocket and placed it over his. “This is so hard to say, but Quinn, we have no future together. Don’t you see? You’re thinking with your heart, but I’m being realistic. I know the limits of my matchmaking skills. I’ve seen so many first loves turn sour. Do you remember Stewy’s mom? I think her new boyfriend is right for her, but I thought that six months ago, too, with a different guy, and I was wrong. The animal shelter is full of sad endings. It’s frightening, when you see someone leave with a new puppy, so very happy, and they come back in a few months or a year, convinced that it’s impossible to live with that dog one more day.”

  She was so tenderhearted, Quinn had no doubt that she felt the pain of every abandoned dog. “I’m in love with you, Diana. That’s not going to change.”

  “We’re like...we’re like a Yorkie and a rancher. It doesn’t matter how much the rancher is taken with the Yorkie. It doesn’t matter if he thinks the puppy is cute and fun. If he takes that Yorkie home, he’s still not going to have the help he needs to bring the horses in from the pasture, is he? It’s not a good match. He may keep that dog until the day he dies, just like you might keep me around, but they won’t live the happy lives they could have had, because they were paired up with the wrong partner.”

  She dropped his hand only to press her palms flat on the muscle of his chest. She rose on her toes the tiniest bit, and she kissed him gently, beautifully on the mouth.

  She stepped back. “I won’t do that to you, Quinn. Goodbye.”

  Diana tried to find the beauty in the heartbreak. She took another step back. The sunset was spectacular. The water edging the asphalt looked like a silver pond.

  Quinn MacDowell looked furious. “Don’t you ever kiss me like that again.”

  Diana started walking in the general direction of the farthest corner of the parking lot, where the Texas Rescue personnel had parked their vehicles.

  Quinn followed, his boots loud as they struck the asphalt. “You’re really going to walk away, aren’t you? You’re going to live the rest of your life as a martyr. You’re going to tell yourself you did the right thing, the noble thing, and let me go on to find someone more suitable.”

  It was exactly what she’d had in mind. She walked faster. “Don’t make this more difficult than it already is.”

  “Difficult? You want to know what difficult is? It’s being crazy in love with a woman, and hearing what a low opinion she has of herself. Your Yorkie analogy sucks.”

  Diana flinched a little at the way the word sucks ricocheted off the asphalt. The parking lot for the damaged hospital building was huge, like a shopping mall’s. They had acres to go.

  “You’re not a dog, damn it. You are a human being with the power to change, the power to affect the world around her, the power to make her life anything she wants it to be. That Yorkie crap is a cop-out. It gives you the excuse to never change. It’s easy to say, ‘This is how I was born, this is how I have to stay.’”

  She wished he would be quiet. He was ruining her moment. Her heart hurt because she had to leave him, but she couldn’t give in to the pain, because Quinn was right beside her, and he wouldn’t shut up.

  “Let’s try your analogy with humans in it. If you decided to live with the rancher, then you could become one, too. If he needed help bringing the horses in from pasture, you could learn how to do it. If you didn’t enjoy it, you could say, ‘Hey, honey, let’s hire a ranch hand to do this.’ There’s an option your Yorkie didn’t have.

  “Your little analogy doesn’t address the real problem. You’re not selfish enough. You’re so busy trying to make sure everyone else is happy, you forget to go after what you want. You give away your home and your car and your time and your talents. You would rather leave than fight for something that you want, just so someone else won’t be unhappy for even a moment.”

  And that was the last straw. Diana stopped walking and rounded on Quinn.

  “It’s good to make other people happy. It’s bad to make them miserable. That’s what my mother said.” Quinn had seen her letter at the start of this endless, horrible day, and now he was insulting it. Her mother’s letter.

  She hated the tears that pricked her eyes.

  Quinn spoke with a l
ittle less heat. “I know, and she was right. It’s noble and honorable to wish nothing but happiness for those around you, and you do. But when it comes to your happiness, you have to be greedy. This is your life, and if you want to be happy, then you might have to demand it for yourself. Start small. If your talents aren’t being used in an asinine walkie-talkie tent, then go find yourself a position you’ll enjoy.”

  “You’re asking me to throw away every philosophy I’ve built my life on.”

  “No. Your mother’s letter says it takes courage to be happy. Maybe she didn’t mean the courage to try bungee jumping or to go solo to a ball. Maybe she wanted you to have the courage to take what you want. I can love you, Diana. But you’ve got to get greedy. You’ve got to keep me for yourself.”

  Be greedy. Be selfish. And then, she’d become happy? It went against everything she knew.

  “You have choices to make,” Quinn said, and he sounded kind. “So do I. I choose not to stand here and watch you drive off into the sunset. It won’t make me happy.”

  Quinn turned and started the long trek back to the hospital. Diana watched him go.

  Then she walked slowly the rest of the way to her car, curled up in the backseat, and read her mother’s letter until it was too dark to see.

  * * *

  If the backseat of her car couldn’t hold a Saint Bernard, then Diana had been foolish to think it could hold her. By the time dawn sent rays of light through her car window, she ached in every muscle. Dragging her banana suitcase behind her, she returned to the hospital.

  Feeling a million times better after brushing her teeth and changing her clothes, she went to find Patricia in the administration tent.

  Quinn had said it would be starting small, but it felt like a big step as she faced Patricia over a collapsible conference table.

  “I need a different assignment.”

  Patricia didn’t glance up. “You’re not qualified to do anything except clerical work, and those spots are filled right now with people who do not pass out at the sight of blood.”

  Patricia’s workstation was in a tent with a generator and an air cooler, Diana noted. But Patricia worked hard, there was no denying it.