by Gina Wilkins
“What do you want, Joel?” she asked, keeping her voice toneless to hide the emotions that had welled in her at the sight of him.
“There’s something I need to say to you.”
She hoped he hadn’t come to ask if they could still be friends. As much as she missed the easy friendship they’d had before their disastrous attempt at being more, she really didn’t think they could get it back now. It would be too painful—at least for her. She wished it could be different, but she knew herself too well to believe she could pretend he hadn’t broken her heart.
“What is it?”
“May I come in?”
She hesitated only a moment before stepping out of the doorway. Looking faintly relieved, Joel entered the kitchen and closed the door behind him.
Nic shoved her hands into the pockets of the flannel dorm pants she’d changed into along with a long-sleeve fleece top after arriving home from work half an hour earlier. She didn’t offer him anything to drink, didn’t even offer him a seat. She wanted this to be over quickly.
“Well?” she prodded when he didn’t immediately speak but stood silently in front of her, one hand squeezing the back of his neck.
Joel sighed. “I’m not sure how to start. First, I want to apologize. I hurt you, and that was never my intention.”
“Apology accepted. Thanks for coming by.” She reached for the door.
He shook his head, looking almost amused. “You really don’t believe in making things easier, do you? I’m not leaving yet. Not until I’ve had my say.”
“I think you said all you needed to say last time you were here.”
He shook his head again. “That wasn’t all by a long shot. I left a few things out.”
“Such as—?
“Such as the fact that I love you. That I’ve loved you for quite some time.”
Nic flinched. She tried to hide the reaction by turning away. “Please don’t.”
“Not saying it won’t make it go away, Nic. I love you. I fell in love with you even when I was convinced that I was all wrong for you.”
“Don’t you have that the wrong way around?” she couldn’t help asking with a tinge of bitterness. “Don’t you mean that I’m all wrong for you?”
“No,” he answered firmly. “That isn’t what I mean at all. I knew I would be damned lucky if you would have me. I just didn’t think I had what it took to hold you.”
She turned back to frown at him. “I don’t know what you mean.”
He raised a hand, palm upward, as if trying to grasp the right words from the air. “You date rodeo cowboys. You hang out with cops. People who don’t think twice about risking their lives in the line of duty. Your best friend is probably a certifiable psychic, despite her denials.”
“And you hang out with doctors and lawyers and professors and you date psychologists and beauty queens,” she shot back. “We’re from different circles. Isn’t that what you were trying to tell me before?”
He shook his head, looking frustrated. “You seem to believe I think of you as somehow inferior to the other people I know. You couldn’t be more wrong. I just couldn’t see you being interested in someone so completely ordinary for long. So damned cowardly.”
Though he’d shaken her, she clung to her skepticism. “I know why you wanted me to quit the force. To go back to college. You wanted me to be more like you. Like…”
She found she couldn’t say Heather’s name just then. But she knew he was aware of exactly who he meant.
“That’s exactly why I wanted you to quit. Oh, not to make you more like me—or anyone else,” he added. “But because of my own cowardice. I was afraid for you, Nic. Afraid of losing you. I’d lost someone once. I didn’t think I had the strength to go through it again.”
“Joel—”
He shook his head with a wry smile. “As far as I was concerned, that very fear made me all wrong for you. I doubt that the other guys you’ve dated spent all their time worrying about you.”
“Anyone who gets involved with a cop spends a great deal of time worrying,” she replied. “It’s part of the job and it’s the reason a lot of their relationships don’t work out. I don’t think of you as a coward because you were worried, but I can’t change who I am.”
“I’ve come to realize during the past few weeks that I don’t want you to change. Why would I? I fell in love with you exactly as you are.”
He had said it again. And it scared her just as much to hear it this time. He thought he was a coward? He had no idea how hard she was shaking inside now, so afraid that she was misunderstanding what he seemed to be telling her. “Everyone thinks I’m wrong for you. Your family. Your friends. They think you should find someone more like Heather.”
She’d found the strength to say the name this time. She’d had to, since she still felt as though the memory of Joel’s late wife was standing between them.
“My family and friends don’t know you well enough to know whether we’re right for each other or not. They’ll learn to love you once I tell them how much you mean to me. All they really want is for me to be happy, Nic. That doesn’t mean they know best how to accomplish that.”
“And you think you do know?”
“Yes.” He smiled at her then, though his eyes were very serious. “Being with you will make me happy.”
She swallowed hard. “It didn’t before,” she reminded him miserably.
“That was my fault, not yours. You’re right, I was trying too hard to ease my fears by trying to control circumstances that were out of my hands. But I’ve done a lot of thinking while we’ve been apart. And I’ve realized we aren’t so very different after all.”
She frowned. “We aren’t?”
“No. Your job involves saving lives. So does mine. Maybe no one’s shooting at me while I work, but—you know what?—it takes a hell of a lot of courage to be a physician. Parents literally put the lives of their precious children in my hands, and I accept that responsibility even though I live in dread of making a mistake or missing something that could have dire consequences for my patients.”
“Of course it takes courage. I’ve told you dozens of times that I don’t know how you do it.”
“I do it because I love my work. It defines who I am. I wouldn’t let anyone talk me into doing anything else. I think you understand that better than anyone else I know.”
“I do understand that.”
He nodded, his eyes growing a little warmer. “I know you do. And there are a lot more things we have in common. We both value our families. We’ve known what it’s like to lose someone we love. Neither of us give a flip about climbing social ladders or trying to impress anyone by wearing the right clothes or driving the right car or living in the right neighborhood. That isn’t what motivates us. It isn’t how we define success.”
“No,” she admitted. “I’ve never cared about stuff like that.”
“Neither have I. It was one of the things that exasperated Heather most about me,” he added conversationally. “Not that she was a snob or anything, but she liked being in the top social circles. She wanted me to pursue the best residencies and appointments.
“She’d hoped that I’d be named chief of staff of some prestigious hospital, which was never a serious goal of mine. She wouldn’t have been content to settle here, living in a modest house while I worked as a partner in a small-town pediatric clinic. She would have considered it her duty to push me into more, for what she considered my own best interests.”
Nic was startled by his revelation. She couldn’t see him ever being happy in some big, fiercely competitive, social-climbing setting. Had Heather really thought he would like that? Or had he changed so much during the past few years?
“Don’t get me wrong, Heather had a heart as big as the sky. She was an excellent therapist who cared a great deal about her clients. But she liked the good life and had a weakness for expensive clothes and jewelry. She’d have reveled in an exclusive country-club environment—an
d I’d have gone along to make her happy. But I’m happy here with my small clinic and my regular patients.”
“I can’t imagine you being anywhere else.”
He smiled. “That’s because you’ve come to know me very well, Nic. You wouldn’t try to change me—which makes what I tried to do to you even less forgivable.”
“I didn’t think I could compete with Heather’s memory,” she whispered.
“You never have to try. I loved Heather, but she wasn’t perfect. I don’t think she would want me to put her memory on some untouchable pedestal. That would make her less than she really was—a bright, special, unique woman with very human strengths and weaknesses.”
Nic bit her lower lip, unsure what to say next.
Joel took a step closer to her. “I spent some time recently looking at those pictures in my mother’s hallway. And I realized that too many people, including me, maybe, had gotten into the habit of thinking my whole life was captured in those photographs. They haven’t taken into account all the things I’ve accomplished during the past five and a half years since Heather died. Finishing my residency, starting the clinic, buying a house, making new friends. Building a new life for myself.
“I don’t want to spend the rest of my life alone with old memories, Nic. And I’m not looking to recreate what I once had. I’m ready for a new start. A new future. And I’d like to build that future with you, if I haven’t destroyed all chance of that by being such a jerk. Have I?”
“I’m not going to quit my job,” she warned, still half-afraid to hope. “I’ll work toward promotions and new assignments because I’ve always had ambitions in my field, but I will perform my duties as they occur, even if that occasionally puts me at risk.”
He might have paled just a little, but he nodded. “I can live with that. I’m not saying I’ll ever stop worrying about you, but I can deal with my fears as long as I know you’re taking reasonable precautions.”
“I don’t have a death wish, Joel. I’m not as reckless as you’ve implied. But maybe I’ve taken a little less care than I should have in the past. As long as it doesn’t interfere with my work, I’ll try to be a little more cautious in the future. Maybe I’ll stop tackling in flag football.”
“That’s a start,” he said with a smile. “Does this mean you’re willing to give it another try?”
“I’m not sure I have much choice,” she answered quietly. “I’m in love with you, too.”
“Nic—”
He reached for her, but she evaded him, holding up one unsteady hand. “You hurt me,” she said sternly, giving him a warning glare. “If you do it again, I’ll kick your butt all the way back to Birmingham.”
Joel laughed and tugged her into his arms. “I believe you. And if I ever find out that you’ve risked your life unnecessarily, I’ll kick yours to Tulsa.”
She wrapped her arms around his neck, beginning to smile for the first time since she had opened the door to him. “All of a sudden you’re a tough guy, huh?”
He grinned down at her. “I guess you’re corrupting me.”
She grew serious again for a moment. She had a few more admissions to make. “It wasn’t all your fault, Joel. I didn’t fight hard enough for us. I accused you of being resigned to failure, when the truth was that I never expected us to last. I let myself be too influenced by other people’s opinions. Maybe I started to believe that I wasn’t good enough for you. That I couldn’t measure up. And you weren’t the only one who was a coward. I was afraid to show you how much I cared. How much I wanted to make it work between us. I won’t let that happen again.”
“We both made mistakes, Nic. Since neither of us is perfect, I’m sure we’ll make more. But we’ll get it right this time. It turns out we’re both willing to fight for what we want when it matters this much.”
She still found it hard to believe that Joel had worried that he wasn’t good enough for her. That it was he who didn’t measure up. Maybe it would take a while for both of them to be reassured that they could really make this work. But she was willing to give it all the time they needed, she thought, lifting her mouth to Joel’s. As long as they loved each other, she couldn’t imagine any obstacle they couldn’t overcome.
They had both lived through some dark days in their lives, she thought, closing her eyes and losing herself in his embrace. But she predicted sunny days ahead.
Joel loved her and she loved him. What more could she possibly ask?
Epilogue
The telephone rang a few hours later, and Nic reached over Joel’s tired, sated body to pick up the bedside extension. “Hello?”
“Hi,” Aislinn said. “How’s it going?”
The smile in her friend’s voice made Nic suspect that Aislinn knew exactly how things were going, but she answered anyway. “Joel and I are back together.”
He smiled lazily up at her and reached up to touch her face, his hazel eyes glowing with physical satisfaction and a pure inner peace that she had never seen there before. Feeling exactly the same way, she smiled back at him.
“I’m very happy to hear that,” Aislinn said. “I’ll let you get back to…whatever you were doing.”
“What? No predictions?” Nic asked, only half teasing.
Aislinn’s voice was warm with affection when she replied, “I have a feeling it’s going to work this time. If I really were a psychic, I’m sure I would predict a lifetime of happiness for the two of you.”
Nic swallowed a lump in her throat. “Thanks, Aislinn. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”
She hung up the phone, then nestled her cheek into Joel’s shoulder. “Aislinn predicts a bright future for us.”
“I’m glad to hear that. But your friend still makes me a little nervous, Nic.”
She chuckled. “She would be amused to hear that. I wonder how she and Ethan would feel about each other?”
Joel laughed. “Oh, man, you’re really crazy if you think you could pull off that match. Let’s just concentrate on our own relationship and let Aislinn and Ethan find their own destinies, shall we?”
“You’re probably right. It was just a thought.”
Joel’s hands slid slowly down her bare back, restoking embers that she thought they’d already extinguished for one evening. “I have a few thoughts of my own,” he murmured. “I love you, Nic.”
Forgetting about Aislinn and Ethan—and anyone else except this man she loved with her whole heart—Nic covered Joel’s mouth in a joyous, eager kiss.
ISBN: 978-1-55254-763-2
THE DATE NEXT DOOR
Copyright © 2006 by Gina Wilkins
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