Trading Secrets

by Christine Flynn

  He’d gone to boarding schools. In summer when he’d been home, only staff had been there. When he’d been home for winter holidays, the women had been busy entertaining, spending and trying to figure out if they should mother him or ignore him. “None were ever close to begin with.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s not that big a deal,” he said. “They came. They went. They weren’t mom material, anyway. They were only after his money.”

  “No wonder he divorced them.”

  He didn’t want her defending his father. “My father always knew what he was getting,” he informed her tightly. “He was the one with the control. He married trophies who seemed to think what his money bought them was worth his manipulation. Everyone knew it was his wealth and power that provided the cars, the clothes, the servants. He made sure of it.”

  The coffeepot sputtered and hissed between them. Needing something to do before his buried agitation surfaced completely, Greg opened another cupboard, took out two mugs.

  “He made it just as clear that he could take it all away anytime he chose. From all of us.” Ceramic clinked against the counter. “I learned that the less I asked for, the less he had to hold over my head.”

  He’d learned to ask for nothing, to expect nothing, to count on nothing.

  Last night he’d thought mostly of how he never should have let his relationship with Elizabeth go as far as it had. The only reason he figured he had was because part of him wanted what he’d seen other people have, even as part of him balked at the very idea. Nothing about his past had even entered his mind.

  Wishing he hadn’t allowed it to now, he stared down at the empty mug.

  The feel of Jenny’s small hand on his arm drew his glance to her face.

  “He treated you like that, too?”

  At her quiet question, the quick tension spiking through him eased. Or maybe what relieved it was the distraction of her touch. There was gentleness in it. Softness. Warmth.

  “Until I left,” he admitted.

  “When was that?”

  “After I told him I didn’t want to be a lawyer.”

  “You were in law school?”

  “Not quite. I was in my third year of college.”

  He wasn’t making sense to her. He felt certain of that as she slipped her hand away, self-consciously crossing her arms as if she’d only now realized how easily she’d reached for him.

  “There has always been a Reid for a partner in the law firm my great-grandfather started,” he explained, drawn by her instinctive need to soothe. “My father had bragged for years that I would be the fourth generation to uphold the tradition. That’s why it took me so long to work up the courage to tell him I didn’t want to study law. I wanted to practice medicine. When I told him that, I was informed that the choice wasn’t mine to make. He paid the bills, therefore he would make the decisions. He told me that if I didn’t continue in law school, I’d have to pay for school myself.”

  His father had also maintained that he would never make it on his own, he told her. In the senior Reid’s usual dismissive and dogmatic style, he’d said that Greg was too much like him to ever give up the finer things money could buy, that having come from such affluence, he would never be able to live among the masses. He’d gone on to claim that it was from him that he’d inherited his intelligence, his drive and his name. He didn’t much care for the rebelliousness he insisted Greg had inherited from his mother, but he assumed his son would grow out of it once he realized how impossible it would be to make it on his own.

  “The bottom line was that I was who I was because of him, that I would be no one without him, and that I would never be able to afford Harvard without his money to pay my way.

  “Then he played his trump card.” An edge hardened his tone. “He said I owed him my loyalty because he had raised me after my mother had gone. It seems she’d been given the choice of me or a substantial settlement to disappear.”

  His mother had obviously chosen the money.

  “That was the last day I spoke to him. I made it through college and medical school on scholarships, loans and odd jobs.” The edge sharpened. “Anything I become, I become on my own. Not because of his influence or wealth.”

  Jenny watched the muscle in his lean jaw jerk, saw the deep breath he took to blow off what little anger he had allowed past his rigid control. She had the feeling from the way he seemed to constantly check his emotions that he had worked hard to bury the rage he surely must have felt at his father’s arrogance. And the hurt. He would have worked just as hard to bury that, too.

  Empathy and outrage simmered in Jenny’s heart. What she felt most was a deep ache. For him. The way his father had treated him bordered on criminal. There had been no caring, warmth or emotional security in Greg’s young life. He’d said little about it, but it sounded as if there had never been anyone there for him. No one he could count on to ease the little hurts or share the little joys. No one to temper the awful coldness and mental abuse he’d been subjected to by his father.

  To have revealed that his own mother had chosen money over him had been unimaginably cruel.

  “It’s no wonder you don’t want your inheritance.”

  His big body seemed to go still.

  “Elizabeth said she wanted you to use it,” she said, reminding him of the little yelling match she’d overheard. “I had no idea what she was talking about,” she confessed. “But I can see now why you want nothing to do with his money.”

  His arm still seemed to be bothering him. Either that or the tension in his muscles had made it start aching again. He cupped his hand over his shoulder, absently kneading as he studied a spot on the floor.

  “I’m not even supposed to have it.”

  She ducked her head, caught his glance. “So how did you get it?”

  He gave a mirthless little laugh.

  “By default. One of my father’s partners called a few months ago to tell me my father was revising his will to cut me completely out of it. Jack, the lawyer,” he clarified, speaking of the man who’d known Matthew Reid through all his marriages and also happened to be Greg’s godfather, “wanted to know if there wasn’t some way my father and I could reconcile.” He edged his fingers toward his neck. “I told him I couldn’t see how.

  “Two days later he called again,” he continued. “This time it was to tell me that my father had been playing golf and collapsed. He’d died of an unexpected heart attack.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “About three and half months now.”

  “Did you have to go to Cambridge?”

  Mercifully he’d been spared wrestling with that decision. “Even if I’d wanted to go, I couldn’t get away. Bess was on vacation and I couldn’t leave the clinic unattended. Jack took care of the arrangements and called me a week later. That was when he told me that the new will hadn’t been ready to sign and that my father had already destroyed the old one. As his only legal heir, I inherited everything.”

  He shook his head at the irony of it. “My father didn’t know squat about how to treat people, but he was good lawyer. He couldn’t have thought anything was ever going to happen to him to have left a gap like that.”

  Jenny couldn’t help but think that such egotism easily fit the man Greg had described. Her interest was more in son than father, though. She finally understood the edginess everyone had sensed in him of late. More important to her, she was beginning to understand…him.

  He had gone to the loan program for medically underserved areas not only to help repay his tuition, but because the program assigned doctors to the very sort of places his father had said he would never survive in. He had proven not only that he could make his own way, on his own, as he chose, but that he could manage quite well without whatever high-end creature comforts his father had deemed so necessary.

  She couldn’t imagine how awful it must have been for Greg to live constantly feeling he had to prove himself.

  “So ho
w long before you can get rid of your bequest?”

  Her simple query spoke volumes to Greg.

  She hadn’t suggested that he keep the money. She hadn’t tried to come up with a dozen ways to gloss over where the money had come from or, as Elizabeth had, told him he might be carrying a grudge a little too far.

  Jenny had immediately understood that he wanted only to be free of what the estate represented. In the past three months Elizabeth had never once grasped that. In one way or another, every time they’d been together or spoken on the phone, she had reminded him that the estate needed to be taken care of and that it was there for his use.

  Even Larry Cohen, his attorney and an a old friend from college, couldn’t believe how he was balking at filing the necessary papers.

  The difference between them and Jenny gave him pause. So did the quiet way she watched him.

  Wondering if any woman had ever looked at him the way she did, he gave his head another shake. “I have no idea how long it will take. I have a mountain of paperwork from my attorney that I’m avoiding.”

  He was legally responsible to see that everything was taken care of in probate and beyond. His father’s attorney and his own had done what they could in the short term, but they were hamstrung until he read and signed what had been sent him. He told her that, too.

  The coffeemaker hissed to silence. Picking up one of the mugs, she filled it for him. Considering how he viewed love, she could see now why he had so little interest in marriage. Considering everything else he’d said about making it on his own and what she’d overhead when Elizabeth had offered her own and her father’s money to buy a house, she suspected he also didn’t want anyone’s help with his personal problems.

  She had to offer, though.

  “How many documents are you talking about?”

  “My bottom desk drawer is about full.”

  She watched him through the steam rising from his mug. “Is that what’s in those manila envelopes that law firm in Boston sends you?”

  He hesitated. “Yeah. Why?”

  “It just explains why you get so tense when you see one. You know, Greg,” she said, making her tone deliberately light as she reached for her own cup. “I know I said I wouldn’t offer unsolicited advice, but it seems to me that you’re only prolonging the agony. Would it help if I read through the documents for you and gave you a summary? There are bound to be things in there that are more pressing than others. I could filter out what can wait, and then you’d only have to deal with what can’t. Then, once you get everything tied up, you could use the money for something constructive.”

  “I already figured I’d give it to some charity.”

  The quiet rush of coffee being poured underscored the soft tones of her voice. “Then it might be easier for you to get started on everything if you have something specific in mind. Some specific cause to work toward.” She had no idea how much money they were talking about. She strongly suspected, however, that it had a lot more zeros than fit in the average checkbook. “If you make your inheritance stand for something positive, rather than something that reminds you of the past, maybe you could even develop a little enthusiasm for getting everything settled.”

  Greg’s first thought was that she was right. She had said she wouldn’t offer unsolicited advice. His second was that he couldn’t imagine feeling anything but aversion for the task. Sharing a personal burden wasn’t something he was at all inclined to do, either.

  He might have told her all that, too, since he seemed to be telling her everything else, when the muffled sound of the bell over the front door jerked their attention to the hallway.

  “Where is everyone?” Bess called over the rattle of her keys. “Why isn’t the door unlocked and the shades raised?”

  Jenny glanced at her watch as Greg stepped back. She hadn’t even considered how close they’d been standing to each other until he deliberately widened that negligible distance. In the seconds before the front door opened, she’d noticed only how shuttered Greg’s expression had become.

  “We’re in the break room,” she called, realizing she should have opened the clinic ten minutes ago.

  He hadn’t said what he’d thought of her offer. She suspected from the quick withdrawal she’d sensed in him that he hadn’t thought much of it all.

  “What did you forget?” he called, stepping into the hall as Bess hurried toward the medicine room.

  “Mrs. Belier’s insulin,” she muttered, stuffing her keys into the pocket of her red sweater. “I forgot that we upped her dosage last week. I didn’t have enough with me to get her through until the next.”

  She glanced up as Greg turned into his office, mug in hand.

  Jenny, carrying her coffee, too, headed up the hall.

  Catching the disquiet in Jenny’s face, the nurse practitioner frowned. “Is everything okay?”

  Jenny made herself smile.

  “Everything’s fine.” Or would be if I hadn’t just totally overstepped myself with Greg, she thought. She’d just wanted to help. The way he had helped her. “I just…got a late start.”

  “As long as everything’s under control.”

  “It is,” Jenny assured her, and hurried off to open the waiting room blinds as the bell over the front door tinkled again and the mayor’s redheaded wife poked her head inside.

  “Jenny.” Claire Jefferson’s overly bright smile clearly indicated she wanted something. “You’re just the person I need to see. Do you remember when you helped make those costumes for the senior class play?”

  By seven o’clock that evening Clair’s innocuous-sounding request had led to a state of distress Jenny hadn’t experienced in weeks. She couldn’t have imagined anything that would have disturbed her more than Greg’s continued silence about her offer, but that and the depth of his emotional scars were now the last things on her mind.

  The mayor’s wife wanted her to help make costumes for the Pumpkin Festival coming the end of October. Wanting badly to fit back into the community, she’d said she’d be happy to and told herself she’d figure out later how to fit the project into her work schedule.

  That was what she’d started to do as she stood at her kitchen counter staring at the wall calendar she’d just pulled from its packing box.

  She hadn’t taken it out earlier because she’d intended to paint before she hung it. With no social life or appointments to make, she hadn’t needed it, anyway. That lack of activity was evident in all the blank little squares that followed the last entry for August. Move had been written in the box for the fifteenth. The only entries for the two weeks prior to that were for appointments with her attorney, a Detective Mortensen and for two depositions. She’d also noted the dates she’d canceled utilities.

  It was what wasn’t there that had her feeling a little sick.

  There was no little devil’s pitchfork on any of the little squares for that month. Flipping back a page, she noticed the little symbol for her period missing in July, too.

  With all the chaos of Brent’s arrest, she had totally forgotten that her period had been due that following week. When she had remembered it, she’d chalked its lateness up to stress and steadfastly refused to even consider that anything else in her life could go wrong. With moving, settling in, starting over, she’d managed to forget about it again.

  She couldn’t help but think about it now.

  As she started counting, she realized that her second period was now over a week overdue.

  Chapter Seven

  Jenny thought the day would never end. From the moment she’d arrived at work the next morning, the need to know for certain if she was pregnant had plagued her with the relentlessness of a toothache. Had she still lived in the city, she would have bought a pregnancy test last night and put a quick and immediate end to the awful suspicion that had kept her up painting her kitchen walls long past midnight. But this was Maple Mountain. The only place to buy a pregnancy test was the pharmacy inside the gift shop. Depending on who
might have seen her, news of such a purchase could have been buzzing on the grapevine by the time she’d made it back home.

  Her only options were to drive to St. Johnsbury, which wasn’t such a big place itself, or use a pregnancy test from the clinic. She had already slipped her money for one into the petty cash box, since she couldn’t figure out how else to pay for it.

  Now if everyone would just leave, she could get the test from the supply room. The patients were gone, Bess had nearly finished her charting, and Greg was on his phone in his office talking to a colleague in St. Johnsbury about Sally McNeff’s mother. Since the older woman’s cancer surgery a few months ago, Greg had been taking care of her chemotherapy. The results of the blood work he’d sent to St. Johnsbury for testing didn’t look good.

  There were things about working in the clinic that Jenny really didn’t want to know. Just as there were things she did want to know but which left her feeling sad in far different ways.

  Greg had been trading calls off and on all day with the Rural Health Corps and had asked her to reschedule his appointments for Friday. He had job interviews then in New Hampshire.

  “There are days when I just want to wring the neck of every patient I see.” Bess, having a bad day herself, made the terse announcement as she put her last patient file in Jenny’s in-box for Jenny to file. “One complains of being short of breath, but won’t quit smoking. Another doesn’t want to take her cholesterol medication because her insurance only covers part of the cost, but won’t watch her diet or get extra exercise. And don’t even get me started on what insurance will and won’t cover. I spent two hours on the phone today after sending documentation and test results, and Marlene McGraw’s carrier won’t budge.”

  The day hadn’t been good for anyone.

  Praying her own wouldn’t get any worse, desperately hoping it was just nerves and stress making her period so late, Jenny turned off the printer and the computer and killed the hum of the fan in the corner.

  As she did, Bess headed for the bottom drawer of a file cabinet and pulled out her purse.