The Doctor's Secret Child

Dear Molly, Hilda had written. Our winter has been hard. The kitchen pipes froze twice last week and the price of fish is very high. Cadie Boudelet’s new grandchild came down with bronchitis, poor little thing. The Livingstons had a chimney fire last week and nearly burned the house down. Our TV broke and we have decided not to get another because there’s never anything worth watching, so I try to get to the library once a week. I sold four quilts at Christmas which brought in a bit of extra money. It started snowing at the end of November and hasn’t stopped since and here we are in April already. Your father hardly ever leaves the house because he’s afraid of falling on the ice. Hoping this finds you and your little girl well, I remain your loving Mother.

Typically there was no question about their life. No spark of interest in Ariel’s doings and only the most cursory inquiry about her health. The apparent indifference had fueled a decade-long resentment in Molly which she’d been sure nothing could undo. But the unguarded joy on her mother’s face when she realized who it was standing at her bedside left that resentment in tatters, and had Molly questioning her assessment of those sparse, uninformative letters.

Suddenly she saw the loneliness written between the lines; the utter emptiness of a woman who’d given up hope of the kind of affection which tied families together. The recognition left her awash in yet another wave of guilt.

“But, I’m here now, Momma,” she whispered, stuffing the sodden tissues back in her pocket and fumbling her way down the darkened hall to the kitchen. “And I’ll make up for the past by seeing to it that whatever future you’ve got left is the best I can make it.”

Nothing in the kitchen had changed. The same old refrigerator, past its best when Molly had been a child, still clanked along in the corner. The same two-burner stove stood on the far side of the sink. What was surely the world’s ugliest chrome kitchen set—table topped with gray Formica, chair seats padded with red plastic—filled what floor space was left. The only new addition was the calendar thumbtacked to the wall near the back door, and even it looked exactly like its predecessors, except for the date.

Small wonder her mother showed no interest in getting well. A caged hamster racing endlessly on its treadmill led a more interesting and varied existence.

There was canned tomato soup in the cupboard, and in the refrigerator a block of cheese, some butter, a jar of mayonnaise, and half a loaf of bread. Molly found the cast iron frying pan where it had always been, in the warming drawer below the oven, and set to work. She might have come a long way from the days when she’d worn hand-me-down clothes, but the lean years in between had taught her to make a nourishing meal out of whatever she happened to have on hand. Hot soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, with tea on the side, would serve for tonight.

The kettle was just coming to a boil and she was turning the sandwiches in the frying pan one last time when the back door shot open and sent a blast of cold air gusting around her ankles. But it didn’t compare though to the chilly glare of the woman who came in with it.

Cadie Boudelet never had been one to smile much, but the drawstring of disapproval pulling at her mouth gave new definition to the term “grim-faced.” “I heard you were back,” she announced balefully. “Bad news travels fast in these parts.”

“Lovely to see you again, too, Mrs. Boudelet,” Molly said, unsurprised to find nothing had changed here, either. The Boudelets and every other neighbor had viewed her as an outcast ever since she turned ten—a Jezebel in the making, with the morals of an alley cat in heat already in evidence—and a warm welcome would have left her speechless. “Is there something I can do for you, or did you just stop by to be sociable and say hello?”

“Hah! Still got the same smart mouth you always had, I see.” Cadie slammed an enameled casserole dish on the table and crossed her arms over her formidable breasts. “I brought your ma a bite for her supper, so you can throw out whatever you’ve got cooking there—unless you were making it for yourself, which is likely the case since you were never one to think of anybody’s needs but your own.”

Sorely tempted though she was to dump the contents of the casserole over the woman’s self-righteous head, a brawl on her first night home would hardly further her mother’s recovery, Molly decided. So steeling herself to restraint if not patience, she wiped her hands on the dish towel she’d tied around her waist and said, “I understand you’ve been very kind to my mother since she came home from the hospital, and for that I’m grateful. But now that I’m here, you need go to no more trouble on her behalf.”

“No more trouble? Girl, a load of it walked in the door when you decided to set foot in town again, and all the fancy clothes and city airs in the world can’t hide it. Just because you snagged yourself a rich husband don’t change a thing and you’d have done your ma a bigger favor by staying away. She don’t need the aggravation of your being here when she’s got all she can do to deal with your daddy’s passing.”

Just how unwisely Molly might have responded to that remark was forestalled by the sound of the front door opening and footsteps coming down the hall. A moment later, Dan Cordell appeared in the kitchen.

“Good grief!” she exclaimed, exasperated. “Doesn’t anyone around here believe in waiting to be invited before they march into someone else’s house?”

“No need to,” Cadie informed her. “People around here got nothing to hide—as a rule, that is. ’Course, that could change, depending on who’s living in the house in question.”

Accurately sizing up the scene, Dan raised a placating hand. “Just thought I’d stop by to make sure you were handling things okay before I call it a day, Molly, that’s all. Is that one of your fabulous casseroles I can smell, Cadie?”

The drawstring around her mouth relaxed enough to allow a smirk of pleasure to slip through. “It is. And there’s plenty more at home, if you’ve got time to stop for a bite, Doctor.”

The smile he cast at the old biddy left Molly wondering how the icicles draped outside the window didn’t melt on the spot. “Thanks, but it’ll have to be some other time. I’ve got a dinner engagement tonight and I’m already running behind. Molly, can we speak privately a moment?”

“You listen to what the doctor tells you, girl,” Cadie warned, wrapping her shawl around her head and yanking open the back door to let in another Arctic blast. “He knows what he’s talking about and your ma’s lucky he was there to look after her when she needed the best. He’s a good man, is our Doctor Cordell.”

In the silence she left behind, Molly stared across the kitchen at Dan, an age-old bitterness souring her tongue. “Tell me something, Doctor. How come you’re everybody’s fair-haired darling despite your many past delinquencies, while I remain forever a pariah, no matter how much I might have reformed?”

“Maybe I work harder to change public opinion than you do, Molly,” he said, propping up the wall with his altogether too impressive shoulders. “Or maybe I don’t go quite as far out of my way to offend people. You’ve been home what…an hour? Two? And already you’re squaring off with your next door neighbor. If I hadn’t shown up when I did, you’d probably have wound up decking Cadie when you should be on your knees thanking her.”

It—he!—was the last straw! Cadie Boudelet was a tiresome, ignorant woman who seldom bothered to learn the facts before she arrived at a conclusion, which rendered her opinion of Molly, or anyone else for that matter, irrelevant. But that he should have the nerve to stand there mouthing holier-than-thou platitudes, as if the mere idea that Molly might not have achieved heights of perfection comparable to his caused him intolerable pain, just about made her throw up and she wasted no time telling him so.

“You make me sick to my stomach, Dan Cordell! If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s a man who pretends he’s above reproach to the one person in the world who knows differently. And if you think sticking ‘Doctor’ in front of your name entitles you to change history, you’re even more arrogant than you are insufferable!”

CHAPTER TWO

“YOU don’t think much of me, do you, Molly?” he said, glad she didn’t have a kitchen knife at hand or he’d probably have been wearing it between his ribs.

“I don’t think about you at all,” she informed him loftily, “except when you force yourself to my notice. Then I find you irritating beyond words. So say whatever it is you came to say, then please leave.”

He’d thought, when he heard she was coming back, that seeing her again wouldn’t much affect him. Thought that age would have mellowed the fiery rebel he’d known briefly more years ago than he cared to count. She’d be a little plumper around the edges, both emotionally and physically; a little complacent and a lot less arrestingly gorgeous. Less inclined to fly off the handle, too. After all, she’d risen well above her impoverished beginnings, according to her mother, and had surely outgrown all those old resentments.

He’d been wrong on every count. The girl she’d been paled beside the woman she’d become. Spitting fury at him from across that sorry little kitchen, dark hair tumbling around her face, dark eyes flashing, her burgundy red skirt flinging an echoing slash of color across her magnificent cheekbones, she might have stepped out of a Russian drama, or a gypsy saga.

No wonder Cadie Boudelet had been on the verge of a stroke! Molly Paget had bloomed into much too exotic a specimen for the staid population of Harmony Cove to take in stride, and lost none of her rebelliousness in the process.

“If I’m irritating and insufferable, you’re impossible,” he said, fully aware that in firing a counterattack he left himself wide open to another verbal onslaught, but too intrigued by the challenge to let the opportunity pass. “I’m sorry if my being a doctor leaves you nauseated but the fact is, I earned the right to the title, just as you earned the right to call yourself a mother. And I fail to see what history has to do with the way things stand today.”

“Not everyone’s memory is as hazy as yours,” she said, with a lot less passion than he’d expected. “Coming back here is like taking a one-way walk into the past. I’m hardly in the door before you’re all lining up to tell me not to bother unpacking my bags.”

“You storm back into town with both barrels blazing, ready to take on all comers, and wonder why no one’s rushing to put out the welcome mat? It’s not other people’s perception of you that’s the problem, Molly, it’s that permanent chip on your shoulder.”

“I’m not the one who put it there.”

All at once, she looked defenseless, leaving him to wonder if she was quite as hard-boiled as she liked to appear. Her mouth drooped and if it weren’t that she’d always known how to use those stunning eyes to good effect, he might have been fooled into thinking they held the faint sheen of tears.

As if anyone or anything could make Molly Paget cry!

Shoving aside the preposterous urge to take her in his arms, he shifted his weight so that both feet were planted firmly on the floor, and rammed his hands in his jacket pockets, out of temptation’s way. “You are the one who chooses to keep carrying it around, though. Take a little well-meant advice from an old friend, Molly: drop the attitude and learn to give a little, and I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts you won’t have to take nearly as much flak as you seem to expect.”

“And it was for this that you wanted to speak privately with me? To dish out—?”

“No. Consider it a bonus thrown in without charge. The reason I dropped by is that I just got word the public health nurse is held up at one of the outlying farms and probably won’t make it back in time to look in on your mother. Hilda needs two different medications before she goes to sleep. If you like, I can walk you through what they entail or, if you’re not comfortable with that, I’ll come back again last thing and administer them myself.”

Her face told him she didn’t much like either option. “It depends what you mean by medication. If it involves sticking needles in her—”

“It doesn’t,” he said, unable to curb a smile. “If it did, there’d be no question but that I’d be the one to do the sticking, if for no other reason than I remember you don’t cope well with needles.”

“You do?” Her mouth formed a perfect O of surprise, reminding him of a rosebud about to unfurl.

“Uh-huh.” He wrenched his gaze away, and stared at the calendar on the wall, which he found a whole lot less distracting than her face. “You cut yourself on a glass, your first day waitressing at The Ivy Tree. I drove you to my father’s office and when he told you you’d need stitches, you just about passed out.”

She turned her left hand palm up and stroked her right forefinger over the faded scar. Her clothes were expensive. Her gold hoop earrings and the bangle around her wrist held the subtle gleam of the real twenty-four carat stuff. Yet she wore no rings, he noticed. No diamond solitaire or wedding band to proclaim her marital status.

“I’m surprised you remember that,” she murmured.

So was he. He hadn’t thought of the incident in years, but having found a crack in his defenses, nostalgia streamed through him like warm honey. She’d been irresistible as sun-kissed peaches, the summer they’d met. Sweet, delectable, and ripe for the picking, even with blood dripping down her uniform, and he’d wasted no time volunteering to be her driver. “There are a lot of things I remember about that summer, Molly,” he said.

Her face grew shuttered. “There are a lot I’d prefer to forget. I was very young at the time.”

“Yes. A lot younger than you led me to believe.”

“And you,” she said, “were a great deal more callous than was necessary. Telling me you’d grown tired of me was enough to get yourself off the hook. There was no need to parade my replacement under my nose to prove the point. No need to humiliate me in front of the other waitresses by letting your new girlfriend order me around as if I were her personal servant.”

“Either memory serves me badly, or you’re confusing me with someone else. I recall no such thing.”

“Her name,” she said, spitting out the words as if they were bullets, “was Francine. And she wrapped her legs so far around your waist when she rode pillion on your motorcycle that she looked like a boa constrictor preparing to devour her next meal.”

How he didn’t choke on his laughter was a direct contradiction of everything he’d learned in medical school. He should have needed resuscitating! “You always had such a way with words, Molly. It’s nice to see you haven’t lost your touch.”

But she wasn’t amused. If anything, the way she skewered him in a glare left him suspecting she’d been hurt more by his rejection than she let on at the time.

What she couldn’t begin to guess was that he hadn’t exactly walked away heart-whole, either. But even he’d had to draw the line when he’d learned she was only seventeen and not the almost-twenty she’d claimed. He might not have amounted to much in those days, but nor had he been completely without conscience.

“I’m sorry if I was less than sensitive.”

“I’m not,” she said bluntly. “If anything, I’m grateful you showed yourself in your true colors. You gave me the incentive to make a fresh start somewhere else.”

“How so?”

She started to reply, then seemed to think better of it. The flush on her cheeks deepened and she turned to the stove, leaving him to stare at her back. “Never mind. Let’s just say I grew up in a hurry and realized I’d been miles out of my depth in thinking we could ever have lasted as a couple.”

“So you left town, met the man of your dreams, settled down and started a family.”

She tilted her shoulder in a small shrug. “I met the man of my dreams. Did you ever meet the woman of yours?”

“I’m not married yet, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Why not? Haven’t found anyone with good enough bloodlines to assume the role?”

“It so happens that I have,” he said, ignoring the taunt. “Which reminds me, I’m running late and keeping her waiting, as usual.” He tore a blank sheet from the prescription pad in his pocket and scribbled directions on it. “Here’s what your mother will need before you settle her for the night. The meds are on a tray, on the dresser in her room. If you run into any difficulties or have any concerns at all, call my service and they’ll page me. And don’t forget to make that appointment to see me tomorrow at the clinic.”

“If I have time.” She tossed the answer over her shoulder with calculated defiance.

“Make the time, Molly,” he warned her. “This isn’t a request, it’s an order, and if you care about your mother at all, you’ll follow it.”

He kept her cooling her heels over half an hour when she showed up as scheduled, at eleven-thirty the next morning. Though tempted to cancel the appointment with a curt “My time’s valuable, too!” when told he’d been called to the hospital, she thought better of it and took a seat in the waiting area.

Meeting him on neutral ground, especially one as sterile as the setting where he shared space with two other doctors, was infinitely preferable to having him drop by the house whenever the mood took him. The less personal their contact, and the less he saw of Ariel, the better.

The shock of meeting him again, of finding him in charge of her mother’s case, was still too new. Molly felt brittle as blown glass around him—completely at the mercy of emotions as untoward as they were unanticipated.

Such a state of fragility was dangerous. It left her susceptible to letting slip little details which could lead to his asking questions about Ariel’s father which she wasn’t prepared to answer. But avoiding him was impossible, so deal with him she must. Now that she’d had time to digest her mother’s situation, she had questions of her own—concerns which hadn’t immediately occurred to her when he’d made his house call yesterday, but which definitely needed to be addressed.

As well, there was the issue of the fantasy life her mother had dreamed up on her behalf and which Molly felt compelled to tone down with at least a smidgen of truth, for Ariel’s sake if no one else’s.

“Well, I had to tell people something!” Hilda had protested, when Molly had confronted her on the subject of the phantom rich husband waiting in the wings. “It was the only way to shut people up. Even though no one knew for sure the real reason you left town, it didn’t stop the gossip.”

“But, Mom, what if someone asks Ariel about her supposed daddy—why he didn’t come with us, or what sort of work he does or why her last name’s Paget and not Smith or Brown or Jones?”

“Why would anyone question a child her age about things like that?”

“Your nosy neighbors—the very first chance they get, and we both know it!” Molly had shaken her head in dismay. “If you felt you had to lie, couldn’t you just have kept it simple and said I’d taken a job somewhere else? Or better yet, let them have their say and ignore them?”

“No,” her mother had said, with more vigor than Molly would have believed possible two hours before. “Why, Alice Livingston heard you were in jail, if you can imagine! So I put a stop to things the only way I knew how and that was to spread news they didn’t want to hear. Once word got out you’d married a rich man, you became boring and people found something else to wag tongues over.”

“I’m surprised anyone believed you in the first place!”

Hilda’s face had broken into a smile, and she’d covered Molly’s hand with hers. “Child, even your father believed me, and I never said a word to make him think differently! I know you despise me for letting him treat you the way he did, so you might find this hard to understand, but it hurt me, Molly, to have to stand back and do nothing when he went after you. It hurt me as much as it hurt you. The only difference was, my bruises didn’t show.”

Exhausted from the long day’s travel, Ariel was already asleep in the little room down the hall. The house was peaceful, the curtains drawn against the bitter night, and nothing but the low drone of the furnace in the cellar to compete with the budding intimacy between the two women. As far as Molly could recall, it was the first time she and her mother had ever exchanged confidences so freely. It allowed her to ask a question she’d never dared voice before.

“Then why didn’t you leave him, Mom? Why didn’t you take me and just run away? How could you stay married to such a brute?”

Looking haggard suddenly, her mother had wilted against the pillows. “You said it yourself more than once, Molly. We live in a backwater here, about a hundred years behind the outside world. I was forty-three when I had you, and women of my generation didn’t walk out on their husbands, it’s as simple as that. And he wasn’t always bad. When we were first married, he was a lovely man. But the accident changed him. Losing his leg cost him his livelihood, child. He’d always been big and strong. Able to do anything. But a cripple’s no use on a fishing boat when the weather’s stirring up a storm, and it killed something in him to know he wasn’t the leader of the fleet anymore.”

“Having only one leg didn’t hamper him too much when he was chasing me down the street in a blind rage.”

“Because you reminded him too much of how he used to be—healthy and strong and independent. He was eaten up with anger, Molly, and it made him do and say wicked things at times.”

“At times? There was hardly a day went by that he didn’t make me miserable! If I was wild, he did his part in driving me to it.”

Her mother had sighed and squeezed her hand again. “Don’t let yourself fall into that trap,” she said sagely. “He passed on his looks to you, and you’re beautiful for it, but don’t take on his bitterness and make it your own. It’ll sour the rest of your life, if you do, and come to infect that sweet granddaughter of mine, as well.”

Molly had had all night to mull over her mother’s words and much though it galled her to admit it, they made a certain sort of sense. Coming back to Harmony Cove had made her realize the extent to which John Paget still warped her thinking from beyond the grave. But only because she allowed him to. Although breaking the habit wouldn’t be easy, it was the only way she’d ever free herself from his painful influence.

The clinic’s outer door flew open and Dan strode in, bringing a cold, fresh whiff of snow and frigid sea air with him. “Hi, Molly,” he said, breezing past and stopping at the receptionist’s desk to pick up his messages. “Have a seat in my office and I’ll be with you in a sec.”

But it was closer to ten minutes before he followed. “Cripes,” he said, flinging himself into the beaten-up old chair behind the equally battered desk, “what a morning!”

“Actually, it’s now the afternoon,” Molly said, glancing pointedly at the clock on the wall. “And my appointment was for eleven-thirty.”

“Sorry about that,” he said, sounding anything but.

“You could have fooled me!”

He fixed her in the sort of semi-stern, semi-cajoling gaze which no doubt left most of his patients, especially the women, slobbering with delight and falling all over themselves to do his bidding. The way the laugh lines deepened at the corners of his eyes and his lashes drooped over those brilliant blue irises struck Molly as nothing less than ludicrous. Did he think he was auditioning for leading man in a soap opera or something?

“Babies don’t always show up when they’re supposed to, Molly, you should know that,” he said. “Or was your daughter the rare exception and born exactly on schedule?”

When Ariel was born wasn’t something she was willing to discuss with him but it was clear from the way he continued to regard her that he expected a reply. There was a layer of hidden steel under all that warm, fuzzy charm. “Not quite,” she said.

“There you are, then!” He flashed one of his thousand megawatt grins and slapped the flat of his hand against the even flatter planes of his stomach. “Are you hungry?”