She had deserved better last night, but it was too late for him to undo the damage. The only thing he could do now was to follow her lead and hope for the best.
* * *
Maybe somewhere in the world there were women who waltzed into affairs armed with a change of clothes, toothbrush, and blow-dryer, but Ellen wasn’t one of them. Standing there in Hall’s bathroom, wrapped in a dark green towel that barely covered the essentials, she found herself looking at the reflection of a woman in trouble.
She looked too needy. The expression in her eyes was too open, too vulnerable, too everything. She looked the way she had looked the summer she was fourteen when her entire world turned upside down.
There wasn’t a soul in town who wouldn’t know what she had been up to when they saw her driving down Harbor Road toward home wearing the same clothes she had worn to the Butlers’ christening party. And, to make matters worse, her car had spent the night in Hall’s driveway. She might as well have hung a flag from his bedroom window with the words “Dr. Markowitz Slept Here” embroidered across it in big scarlet letters.
Back home this wouldn’t have registered on the radar screen. A private life was possible in Manhattan, something she hadn’t given much thought to before moving up to Maine. You could order in Chinese every night for a month or send a lover home each dawn and the only one who could tell the tale was your doorman, and if you tipped him well enough each Christmas, he would take your secret to the grave. Her friends loved the anonymity that provided them, but Ellen had always yearned for something more. She wanted to feel as if she was part of a community, a neighborhood. What she lacked in family ties, she longed to make up for in friendship. When one of the doctors she worked with in the big impersonal clinic they euphemistically called the Family Care Center told her about a position that was opening up in Maine, she was ready. Jack and his family summered each year at Shelter Rock Cove, and he had spent some time fishing with Hall and had come to both like and respect the older doctor.
“It’s pretty rural,” he had warned Ellen the day she left for her interview. “Big change for a city girl.”
But that city girl had been ready for the change, and when she first saw Hall Talbot, her fate had been sealed. He was tall and golden, one of those lucky few who were blessed with good looks and a good heart to match. They talked through the afternoon on topics ranging from prenatal care to geriatric gynecology and they found themselves to be in perfect harmony. Later, as the sun began to set over the harbor, the talk veered toward the personal, and she found herself telling him about the life she had planned with Bryan and how it had all fallen away without warning.
He listened the way a woman wanted a man to listen to her. His eyes, so warm and so blue, never left hers. He leaned across the glass-topped table as if every word she uttered was of vital importance. And yet there was nothing false about it, nothing calculated. He listened because he cared about what she was saying and that caring had been a revelation to her.
The last of her doubts vanished as the moon rose high above the harbor.
They must have sat out on Cappy’s patio and talked until ten or eleven o’clock. He ordered a bowl of chowder for each of them and some lobster rolls, and she found herself devouring the simple food with a lumberjack’s appetite. He told her that he had a checkered past when it came to love and marriage. “You might as well hear it from me,” he had said as he signaled for another iced tea, “because you’ll certainly hear it from someone else before long.” After all, there were no secrets in small towns.
Four daughters. Three failed marriages. She tried not to show her shock, but he must have seen something in her face because he’d smiled and leaned back in his chair. “It’s okay,” he said. “I can’t believe it, either.” He never told her about Annie Galloway Butler, but then he wouldn’t. He wasn’t that kind of man. By the time she had been a resident of Shelter Rock Cove for six months, she had heard at least twelve different variations on the story. The details might have differed but the plot was always the same: Hall loved Annie and Annie loved someone else.
A smarter woman might have learned something from that revelation. She would have ignored the way her heart leaped into overdrive every time he walked into the room. She would have learned to stop noticing the way his skin always smelled faintly of lime and sunshine, even in the dead of a New England winter. And a smarter woman would definitely have stayed out of his bed, no matter how much champagne had passed her lips.
But Ellen had never claimed to be a genius when it came to romance, and the fact that it was Monday morning and she was standing almost naked in Hall Talbot’s bathroom wondering how she would get home without alerting the whole town to the fact that she’d spent the night with the town’s most eligible—and most often married—bachelor was proof of that fact.
* * *
Hall tugged on a pair of faded jeans and his favorite cotton sweater and went down to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee. He had a few jelly doughnuts in a bag on the counter. They were probably pretty stale by now, but maybe he could freshen them up in the microwave. He could always go out to Dee Dee’s for a fresh batch, but that would be like waving a red flag in the face of the town bull. The news would be all over town before he walked back through his front door.
He settled for nuking the doughnuts he had and pulling some bagels from the freezer. He was pretty sure he’d seen a tub of cream cheese hiding behind a quart of milk. The thing was to keep it simple. Don’t ratchet things up to the point where they were both any more uncomfortable than they had to be.
He paced the kitchen while the sound of running water filtered down from the second-floor bathroom. How could one woman take so long to get ready? It wasn’t as if she was trying to decide what to wear. He was beginning to wonder if she’d slipped out the bathroom window and headed for home, but her car was still in the driveway.
He drank some juice, popped a handful of vitamins, poured himself a cup of coffee. The sun was rising over the ocean, bathing his yard in the pastel lemons and pinks of early morning, burning away the wispy fog that carpeted the grass. He considered going back upstairs and knocking on the bathroom door, but that seemed poor form. She couldn’t stay up there forever, no matter how much she wanted to. She was closing on her first house that afternoon and had a walk-through scheduled for eleven.
Of course that meant, if the mood struck her, she could stay holed up in his bathroom until after he had left for the hospital and still have plenty of time to make her appointment.
Was that her plan? To outwait him and avoid confrontation? He had to admit he could see the appeal, but there was nothing to be gained by postponing the inevitable. They needed to see each other face-to-face. They needed to talk. And they needed to do both of those things without any prying eyes or ears.
That did it. He would pour her a glass of juice and take it upstairs to her. Maybe she needed some more towels or soap or a hair dryer and was quietly trying to make do without bothering him. Whatever was going on, they had to talk and they needed to do it before any more time passed.
He was reaching for a glass when he heard footsteps on the stairs and then the sound of his front door opening.
“Ellen.” He put the glass down on the counter and made for the hall. “Wait!”
She was halfway out the door, looking fresh-scrubbed and extremely uncomfortable in yesterday’s clothes and sky-high heels.
“Ellen!”
She stopped on the top step and turned around, and he saw in her face all the things he had prayed wouldn’t be there. Hurt. Confusion. Embarrassment. And something else, something he hadn’t expected: a yearning so sweet and clear it almost brought him to his knees.
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper. They both knew how easily sound carried on the early morning breeze.
“I made coffee,” he said, gesturing toward the kitchen. “At least let me give you some caffeine before you go.”
> “I shouldn’t. I have to get home and—” She glanced down at her clothes. “I don’t think Claudia Galloway would appreciate seeing me in this outfit again, do you?”
He didn’t respond. They both knew Annie’s former mother-in-law would figure it out in a nanosecond.
“You have time for coffee.”
“I’ll pick some up at the drive-through.”
“They’re not open yet.”
“You’re making this harder than it needs to be, Hall.”
“That’s not my intention.”
“You should be getting ready,” she said. “You have McIntyre at eight, don’t you?”
“You’re changing the subject.”
She met his eyes. “There is no subject. I’m going home. That’s all.”
“Ellen, I—”
“Let it go,” she said, fumbling in her bag for her car keys. Her damp curls danced around her face and tumbled over her shoulders. He wondered if she still smelled of carnations, that sweetly spicy scent that suited her so well.
“I want you to know—”
“Don’t.” There was no mistaking her tone of voice. “If you really want to make things better, you won’t say another word about it.”
“If that’s what you want.”
“It’s very much what I want.”
She turned again and he stopped her. “Your dress,” he said. “You didn’t finish buttoning the back.”
Her huge blue eyes suddenly filled with tears, and it took all the restraint he possessed to keep from pulling her into his arms and holding her close while she cried. She would hate it if he did that, and, even worse, she would hate him for seeing her in a weak moment. You didn’t work with a woman every day for over three years and not learn a little something about what made her tick.
She reached back and fumbled around, too distracted to be able to handle the simple task. It was clear she couldn’t wait to be out of there.
“Let me,” he said.
He stepped behind her, and, lifting her heavy, damp hair off her neck with one hand, he quickly fastened the buttons with the other.
“You’re good at that,” she said. He tried not to read anything into her tone.
“Practice,” he said. “I have daughters.”
She made to leave, but he placed his hand on her bare shoulder. “Believe it or not, you were the only woman in that bed last night, Ellen.”
“Nice try,” she said and left without a backward glance.
Chapter Two
It seemed to Ellen that everyone in town watched her make the two-mile drive from Hall’s house to her condo. She felt like a float in last week’s Memorial Day parade, rolling slowly down the main street clad in nothing but one of Hall’s dark green bath towels. Since when did the entire town hit the street by six-thirty in the morning anyway? Ceil, the checker at Yankee Shopper, looked up from the ATM at the corner of Harbor Road and Shore Drive. Fred Custis from the hardware store nodded as he popped out of Dee Dee’s Donuts with a sack and a cup of coffee. The Fontaines and their Bernese mountain dog named Lola actually stopped dead in their tracks and watched while she waited for the town’s one traffic light to turn green.
Sweeney, head of the Artists’ Co-op, waved at her from the back of her motorcycle, then roared by en route to her daily swim at the beach near the lighthouse, and Ellen was sure she saw her fishing buddy flash a thumbs-up as she disappeared around the curve.
It wasn’t as if she had broken a local ordinance or violated any zoning rules. All she had done was sleep with her boss, then leave her car (the only fire-engine red PT Cruiser in Shelter Rock Cove) in his driveway overnight. Fortunately, stupidity wasn’t punishable by law, even if it should be.
She wasn’t sure what had happened between the bathroom and the hallway, but the moment she saw him standing there with that glass of orange juice in his hand, she had wanted to deck him. Before that she had been hurt but calm about the whole thing, embarrassed but not even the slightest bit angry. And then she saw his face and a wild surge of anger almost knocked her off her feet.
A few moments before she had been worried only about her dignity. Standing there in his foyer while he buttoned her dress, she had been worried about getting out of there without causing him bodily harm.
Up until last night his unavailability had been one of his most attractive assets. What could be better? A warm, witty, accomplished man with more baggage than LAX the day before Thanksgiving. The kind of man you could watch, observe, commiserate with, and lust over and never have to worry about it going anywhere at all.
In other words, her perfect man.
Nothing like a night spent in the arms of harsh, cold reality to show a woman the error of her ways. It was easy to fool yourself when you were home alone with a bag of Oreos and When Harry Met Sally in the DVD player, but let’s see how good you were when the man you’d been dreaming about was dreaming about someone else.
It was time to say so long to those elaborate fantasies of showing up at the hospital one day to find her office awash in red roses or waking up to the sound of Hall serenading her from the parking lot of her condo. Oh, she was an expert at conjuring up scenarios worthy of Hollywood in its heyday, where the women were witty and the men were wonderful and everyone knew exactly when to say goodbye. No awkward slips of the tongue. No red-faced embarrassment. No explanations a woman could go to her grave without hearing. Worthless fantasies that she could pack away with yesterday’s newspapers and chipped dinner plates and toss into the trash.
She wasn’t quite sure when she had stopped looking at him simply as her colleague and started looking at him as a man, but it had been fairly early in their association. He was warm, funny, charming, and gorgeous. A woman would have to be made of stone to resist him, as his track record would attest. She had heard chapter and verse about his way with the ladies, but up until last night she had seen little evidence of a social life. It seemed as if he spent most of his time at the hospital, at the office, or with his two younger kids. If he had been seeing anyone the last few years, she was the best kept secret in town, and they all knew how tough it was to keep a secret in Shelter Rock.
“There you are.” Mary from next door popped out onto her porch just as Ellen fit her key into the lock. “Somebody’s been looking for you all night, hon. She said you wouldn’t mind if I let her in, but since you didn’t mention anyone, I wasn’t about to give her the spare key.”
“Did she give a name?”
Mary frowned. “Dorothy? Doris? Dee Dee! That’s it. I think she said her name was Dee Dee like the doughnut shop.”
Ellen rested her forehead against her front door. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “A small blue-eyed woman with curly red hair like mine?”
“Yes,” said Mary, “and the loveliest hands I’ve ever seen.”
“That’s my sister Deirdre.” Deirdre who floated from job to job and town to town like a soap bubble on the breeze. Deirdre who never answered her e-mail, her snail mail, or her phone calls until she needed something.
“Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. And here I thought you were an only child!”
“Nope,” said Ellen, trying to stand in the shadows so Mary wouldn’t notice she was still wearing the same garden party dress that the elderly woman had admired the previous afternoon. “Actually I have two sisters. Mary Pat and Deirdre.” Half sisters, but Mary could do without the full version of the story. She looked surprised enough as it was. Ellen knew exactly how she felt. She had been every bit as surprised to learn about them herself.
“I don’t think I ever saw your sisters around here before, did I?”
Ellen took a deep breath. Most families were dysfunctional to one degree or another. Why should hers be any different? Funny how after all these years, the embarrassment still ran deep.
“We’re not the closest family,” she said. “Mary Pat has her hands full with her five kids and Deirdre—” She shrugged her shoulders in a gesture she hoped convey
ed benign bewilderment.
“She had a harp in the back of her car.”
“A harp!” The last time she’d seen Deirdre, her sister had been carting around a tenor sax and a pair of bongos.
“And a dog.”
“What kind of dog?”
“A big one,” Mary said, spreading her arms wide. “The kind that slobbers. Let me tell you, that windshield was a sight. I don’t know how she could see the road.”
A minor sex scandal, a harp, and Cujo, and it wasn’t even eight o’clock yet. The day was off to a great start.
She glanced around the quiet parking lot, then back at Mary. “Do you have any idea where she went?” Deirdre’s plans often did a 180 while she waited for the traffic light to change.
“Sorry, honey, but I didn’t ask. I heard her ring your bell again around midnight. She stayed a few minutes on your front step, then drove off. Maybe—” Mary’s thick gray brows knotted in a frown. “Hope you don’t mind me asking, but isn’t that the same dress you were wearing yesterday?”
* * *
Hall’s cell rang as he was pulling into his parking space at the hospital. He angled his Rover into position and grabbed for the phone.
“Dr. Talbot speaking.”
“What the hell were you thinking?” Susan Galloway Aldrin’s melodious tones launched themselves straight into his cranium. A cold shower and black coffee had restored his equilibrium, but nothing short of full-body anesthesia could have protected him from Susan on a rampage.
“Care to ratchet it down a few decibels, Suze? I’m in a hospital zone.”
Girls of Summer (Shelter Rock Cove - Book #2) Page 2
