His Healing Touch

by Loree Lough

  But he’d been too stealthy, too secretive. Like the night shadows that blanketed the Delaney house, he managed to slip in and out without making a sound, without leaving a trace…not even the slightest footprint.

  “Pickles, Kasey?”

  Buddy’s harsh, abrasive whisper slammed into her thoughts like a hammer. Again, she jumped, nearly upsetting the pickle dish.

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.”

  But his sneaking up on her—figuratively and literally—was getting to be a habit, and not a good one, either. She leaned in close and hissed through clenched teeth, “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you do that on purpose, that you like frightening me.”

  He blinked, eyebrows raised. One hand on his chest, he said, “Kasey, you break my heart talkin’ like that. I love ya like crazy.”

  She sat back, thankful no one else had heard their quick, quiet exchange.

  This time, it was Buddy who leaned close. “Like I’ve said before, what reason would I have to hurt you? Hmm?”

  They were nose to nose. Near enough to kiss, close enough for Kasey to believe the spark in his dark eyes was put there by spite. She reared back and cleared her throat, wishing the meal would just end, that everyone would just go home.

  Because it was all she could do to keep from holding her head in her hands and screaming.

  He stretched out on the cushions of the brown tweed couch in the doctors’ lounge, fingers linked under his head and feet hanging over the worn sofa arms, and groaned.

  Wade flopped onto the matching chair across the room. “You’re makin’ old man noises, Adam.” He propped his feet on the coffee table. “Keep that up, and pretty soon you’ll be belting your trousers up under your armpits.”

  “Tell you the truth,” Adam said around a yawn, “all I care about right now is getting five minutes of sleep.”

  Wade stretched. “Thanks for taking care of that popped stitch for me. I never would’ve made it all the way around the beltway in time to keep the next one from going.”

  Shaking his head, Adam closed his eyes. Popped stitch, ha! What should have been a ten-minute quick-fix turned into a four-hour ordeal. The elderly woman who’d popped a stitch worked herself into such a frenzy over it that she disconnected her monitor wires and her feeding tubes, and tore out the staples securing her bypass, as well.

  “You’re supposed to say, ‘No problem, pal. You’d do the same for me.”’

  “No problem. You’d do the same for me.”

  Chuckling, Wade said, “You forgot ‘pal.”’

  “No,” Adam said, grinning as he opened one eye, “I didn’t.”

  Wade wadded up a paper napkin that someone had left on the table and tossed it at Adam, who didn’t even flinch when it landed beside his head. The only movement was the steady rise and fall of his chest.

  “Man, you must be pooped. You’re not even tempted to throw it back?”

  “Sure. Put it in a safe place and I’ll get around to it when I wake up. Or at the turn of the century, whichever comes first.”

  “So how was dinner?”

  Scrubbing his face with both hands, Adam shook his head. That kiss in her kitchen was the only thing he could recall. “Delicious,” he said, grinning to himself.

  “She’s a good cook, huh?”

  I have no idea, Adam thought, but she’s a good kisser….“How ’bout your dinner?” he felt obliged to ask. “Did your sister make her famous sausage stuffing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you bring Marcy?”

  “Nah.”

  In response to the downhearted tone in his friend’s voice, Adam sat up. “What did you do, take Carole, instead?”

  Wade grimaced. “You’ve gotta be kiddin’.”

  Adam wasn’t surprised. The blond gum-snapper would have been to a Cameron family celebration what an alligator would be to a baby nursery.

  “Who did you take?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Why not?”

  In place of Wade’s usual mischievous grin, there was a tight-lipped scowl. “Mom’s got…she was diagnosed with breast cancer a couple weeks back.”

  Adam winced. He’d spent almost as much time in the Cameron house growing up as in his own. Despite the nasty divorce when Adam and Wade were ten that forced Mrs. Cameron to take a full-time job, she’d found time to bandage Adam’s skinned knees, to stitch the rips in his football jersey, to teach him to waltz before his junior prom.

  “Sorry to hear that,” he said. A tight knot formed in his stomach as he wondered why things like that happened to people like Mrs. Cameron.

  “Have they done a biopsy yet?”

  Nodding, Wade said, “Yeah.”

  It didn’t sound good. Not good at all. “So they’ve scheduled surgery?”

  He nodded again. “Yeah. Next week.”

  Adam didn’t have to ask if the doctors would perform a radical mastectomy; Wade’s tone made that clear enough.

  “How long have you known?”

  “Since day before yesterday.” Wade leaned his elbows on his knees, pressed his palms to the sides of his head. “She insisted on a quiet no-guests-allowed dinner. Wouldn’t say why. The rest of us thought maybe early senility was startin’ to set in, ’cause you know how Mom loves big family gatherings.” His voice broke slightly when he added, “Now we know why—”

  “How is your sister taking it?”

  “’Bout the same as me, I guess, putting on a brave face for Mom….”

  …and falling apart when she isn’t around, Adam finished silently.

  Wade got to his feet and stared at the ceiling. “I’ve got a bad feelin’ about this, pal. A real bad feelin’.”

  Adam stood, too, and walked over to his friend. “No reason to think that way,” he said, dropping a brotherly hand on Wade’s shoulder. “They’re working miracles in oncology these days.” He gave the shoulder a slight shake. “Look, if there’s anything I can do—take some of your patients, do follow-up exams, make hospital rounds—”

  Wade nodded. “I might take you up on some of that. Thanks.” He held Adam’s eyes. “She asked me to tell her ‘unofficial son’ that he’s the only non-Cameron allowed at the hospital that day.”

  Her unofficial son.

  That’s what she’d been calling Adam since he and Wade met in Mr. Beazley’s fifth-grade classroom. From the moment Adam had first set foot in her galley kitchen, Mrs. Cameron had made him feel like a member of the family. Years later, on one of the many nights he’d spent on her living room sofa, she’d caught him sneaking back into that tiny kitchen, and somehow coaxed a tearful confession out of him…about the Halloween prank, about the extra part-time job he’d taken to earn money for the Delaneys. After that, there was nothing he couldn’t tell her; after that, she was every bit as much a friend to Adam as anyone he’d ever known, as anyone he ever would know.

  How could something like cancer be happening to a woman as kind, as giving, as Mrs. Cameron? If he lost her…

  Adam shook off the horrible thought of a world without Jaina Cameron.

  Being a doctor should have made accepting things like that easier.

  It didn’t.

  The lounge was so quiet that Adam could hear melting water pecking the refrigerator’s drip pan. A lump formed in his throat, and he swallowed to keep a sob at bay. Wade needed him to be strong now, needed his support. He pocketed his hands. “I’ll give her a call first thing tomorrow, get the particulars, clean up my schedule so I can be there.”

  “She’ll like that.” Wade gave a halfhearted, grating chuckle. “Guess it takes something like this to put things in perspective, eh?”

  Perspective?

  “All that worrying about what Kasey Delaney knows, about her maybe taking us to court, suing us for everything we have to get even for what we did….” Wade rubbed his eyes and gave a heavy sigh. “Compared to what Mom’s about to go through, none of that seems very important.” His eyes challenged Adam. “Does it.”<
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  Adam could have repeated his belief that Kasey had a heart as big as her head, that even if she knew about their part in her father’s death, she wasn’t the vindictive type. But that wasn’t the kind of assurance Wade needed at the moment.

  If he thought for even a minute that God would answer the prayers of someone like him, Adam would have fallen to his knees in an eye-blink. But he knew better, of course, and so he said, “Only thing that’s important right now is making sure your mom gets through this, safe and sound.”

  “Yeah.” Wade shuffled toward the door. “Listen, thanks, man.”

  Adam held up a hand. “Hey, it’s all in a day’s work.”

  “I wasn’t talking about what you did in the O.R.”

  Somehow, Adam had known that. “Get some sleep. You need it.”

  “Look who’s talkin’. You look like something the dog dragged in.”

  “Ha-ha,” Adam said, smiling humorously.

  Wade walked into the hall and pressed the elevator down button. The doors parted and he stepped inside. For a moment, he just stood there, looking back at Adam. And then he said, “Sure would be nice to be able to count on a bona fide miracle once in a while, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Adam whispered as the doors hissed shut. “It sure would.”

  “I don’t get it,” Kasey said. “Why all the secrecy?”

  “Because,” Buddy answered, “if I told you where we were going, it would spoil the surprise.”

  She sighed. He’d shown up, unexpected as usual, and laid such a guilt trip on her about the tense way they’d parted on Thanksgiving night that she’d agreed to take a ride with him. But they’d been driving for nearly half an hour.

  “Easy,” he said, “we’re almost there.”

  “Good. Because I have twenty-four ‘little arrangements’ to make for the grand opening of the Arundel Mall.”

  If he heard the sarcasm in her voice, Buddy didn’t show it. He steered the sports car between two towering brick pillars that flanked the entrance to a tree-lined drive. As he maneuvered the mile-long ribbon of black asphalt, Kasey noticed a tennis court and a pond in the distance, a guest house beyond the barn.

  “So what do you think?”

  “It’s gorgeous.” She counted six horses in the whitefenced paddock. “Who lives here?”

  “I do. Well, I will, once all the papers are signed, sealed and delivered.”

  “You?”

  He frowned slightly. “Why do you sound surprised?”

  Kasey shrugged. “It’s just… How many acres?”

  “Twenty-five. Eighteen are wooded.”

  As if to punctuate his answer, the house came into view. The facade was three stories high and built of solid brick, with no fewer than three dozen many-paned windows. Like brawny arms, a chimney hugged each side of the mansion: beside them, thick, gnarling oaks that had likely been standing guard for centuries.

  Buddy parked on the circular drive, facing the mansion, and climbed out of the car. “C’mon,” he said, waving at her through the windshield. “Don’t you want to see the inside?”

  “Sure,” Kasey said, joining him, “I’m game.”

  Side by side, they climbed the curving multitiered brick steps. Once he’d unlocked the double-high, double-wide black doors, he took her hand and led her inside.

  “Wow,” she whispered, her voice echoing from the black-and-white marble floor, “the foyer is bigger than my whole downstairs!”

  “You think this is something, wait ’til you see the kitchen.”

  He’d been right, she realized the moment they set foot in the room. All white, from floor to ceiling, the kitchen boasted every appliance known to modern man…and a few she didn’t recognize. “Wow,” she said again. “It’s beautiful.”

  He half ran up the plushly carpeted, curved staircase and beckoned her to follow. On the landing, he stood at the tall, arched window. “You can see the Gunpowder River from up here. Gorgeous, isn’t it?”

  Kasey nodded. It was gorgeous, all right. With pines and meadow grasses as far as the eye could see, the lawn stretched out before them like a hilly, verdant blanket. Clumps of graceful white birches dotted the landscape. A grouping of grapevines here, a cluster of leaf-bare fruit trees there. “It’s like something out of a movie,” she said, as he continued upstairs, taking the steps two at a time.

  He showed her a library, an office, and a bathroom bigger than any she’d ever seen. In the master bedroom, he opened the doors to twin closets, each larger than the room she called her own at home. There were shelves for sweaters and pegs for belts and scarves, and a built-in padded bench in the center, where, she supposed, the lady of the manor could sit to slip into the shoes she’d chosen from one of several dozen cubbies.

  She threw open the French doors and stepped onto the balcony. “Buddy,” she said, peering onto the back lawn, “what’s a bachelor like you going to do with all this space?”

  He grasped her hands and looked meaningfully into her eyes. “I’m gonna fill it up with kids—yours and mine—that’s what.”

  Kasey felt her jaw drop. Kids? Hers and…his?

  She licked her lips, swallowed, cleared her throat. Surely he didn’t mean—

  He reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew an elegant black velvet box. When he lifted the small, creaking lid, sunlight glinted from the biggest solitaire she’d ever seen.

  “Buddy,” she whispered, “what’re—”

  He got down on one knee and slid the diamond ring from its satiny pillow. Balancing her left hand on his right palm, he held the ring between the thumb and forefinger of his free hand. “Kasey,” he said, “will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?”

  She wanted to tell him to get up and brush the dust from the knee of his trousers. Wanted to tell him to put that enormous diamond back into its fancy little box. Don’t put that thing onto my finger! she wanted to say.

  Turning from him, she rested both palms on the polished wood banister. Why had he put her in such an awkward position? How was she supposed to ride all the way back to Ellicott City from—she didn’t even know which Baltimore suburb this was!—after rejecting his proposal?

  “Kasey,” he whispered, standing beside her now, “you don’t have to answer right away. Give it some time. Think about it for a couple of days, let it sink in.” With a grand sweep of his arm, he gestured toward the lawn. “This could all be yours, Kase…yours and mine and our kids’….”

  What shady deal had he struck to get the money for a place like this? she wondered. What poor fool had he snookered, what lies had he told? She’d always suspected that his commercial wheelings and dealings were less than honest, that the individuals he ‘wheeled and dealed’ with were less than reputable. But she’d shrugged it all off, thinking it wasn’t any of her business. How he earned a living was between Buddy and God.

  Well, he’d made it her business by popping that question, and she wasn’t the least bit happy about it. “Would you take me home now?” she said quietly, voice trembling.

  “Okay,” he said, and she couldn’t help but notice that his voice was shaking, too. “But on one condition.”

  She blew out a heavy breath. “What.”

  “That you won’t give me an answer now. That you’ll promise to think about it, at least?”

  Kasey counted that as two conditions, but she didn’t say so out loud. If pretending to agree with his stipulations would get her out of here, away from this place…

  She nodded. “Okay,” she said, then started walking.

  She moved quickly out of the master bedroom, through the wide, high-ceilinged hall, down the expansive mahogany-railed staircase. And, heels clicking as she ran across the marble foyer floor, she made her way to the front door, onto the porch, to his fancy one-of-a-kind car.

  Kasey could almost picture him up there, stuffing the ring back into its satin slot, snapping the box shut and pulling the French doors to, with an angry thump.

  As if to prove
her right, he slammed the big doors shut with a bang, locked them with a flourish and stomped toward the car. “What’s wrong with you?” he demanded, palms flat on the driver’s side fender. “Why did you run off like that and leave me up there, all by myself?”

  She shook her head, avoiding his eyes. “I needed air,” she said. And it was true. His proposal had stunned her, scared her, taken her breath away. Even out here, with twenty-five acres around her, Kasey felt stifled.

  But she reminded herself it would be a long, difficult ride back home if she didn’t cooperate…or at least give the appearance of cooperation.

  “I-It was a lot to absorb. I never expected… I’m surprised and…” Finally, she mustered the courage to look up. “I don’t know what to say, Buddy.” Not entirely true, but not a lie, either, because she knew what she wouldn’t say. She wouldn’t say “yes,” not now, not ever.

  His angry look dissipated, melted into an expression she could only call “understanding.”

  “Oh, I get it now,” he said, smiling. “Well, okay, in that case, I’ll be patient.” He gave the fender a gentle knock, then opened the driver’s door and slid behind the wheel. “I did this for you, remember.”

  Kasey pretended she hadn’t heard that, as she got into the passenger seat.

  “Buckle up,” he said, starting the engine.

  Somehow, even with the seat belt securely fastened across her chest, she didn’t feel safe, didn’t feel the least bit secure. Somehow, Kasey knew that even though she’d told Buddy what he’d wanted to hear—for now, anyway—it was going to be a long, long ride home.

  The answering machine was blinking when she got into the house. Fortunately, Buddy had dropped her off in the driveway, apologizing for not being able to come inside—saying he had “some paperwork to take care of”—because the call was from Adam and one thing she didn’t need was Buddy’s jealousy right now.

  “Hi, Kase,” came his pleasant, masculine voice. “Sorry I didn’t stop by last night. Had an emergency, and a—” the usually smooth voice faltered “—and a friend with a big problem.” Adam cleared his throat. “I, uh, wondered if maybe it’s… I was hoping it isn’t too late. You said something about leftovers, from Thanksgiving dinner, and well, I, uh…” She heard his frustrated sigh. “Just gimme a call when you get in, will ya? I hate talking to these machines….”