LITMIR.BIZ

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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?”

      “I beg your pardon?”

      “I said, are you—?”

      “I heard what you said. I’m just not sure I understand

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