LITMIR.BIZ

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      “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

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