by Dianne Drake
It felt like the bottom was falling out of her world. Everything was totally whirling out of control, getting further and further away in the distance. She was losing Coulson. Losing Tadeo. Not that she ever had them, but still. She couldn’t even imagine what life here would be like without them. “What about your patients?” she asked, trying to sound steady when nothing inside her was.
“I have an idea that your hospital will have enough doctors coming and going so that the medical care here will be well covered. We’ve gone from famine to feast, medically, which is all I ever wanted in the first place.”
“But you’re part of that feast, Coulson. The people here want you, not the visiting doctors who’ll be coming to the hospital. You’re the medicine in the area and they don’t want an outsider.”
“They’re good people. They’ll be glad to have anyone who wants to practice here.”
“But my visiting doctors are coming for the children.” Weak argument, she knew. “Not to staff a general medical clinic.”
“You’d recruit doctors who would turn away a patient, even if that patient isn’t the specific one they’ve come to see?” He shook his head. “I don’t think so, Red. You’re going to bring in people who are just like you and your father. So I don’t need to be here any longer.”
She wasn’t sure what was causing all this, but the one thing she did know was that Coulson hadn’t had these feelings before she’d come here. Which made her feel terrible. It was like she’d ripped the dream right out from under him, and that had never been her intention. In fact, she had been looking forward to a shared medical community because … because she’d let herself dream a little, too. Dream of something beyond the hospital and the clinic and the work. Or maybe it was a dream that encompassed all that, and more. But she’d never been demonstrative. She remembered sitting there that day her parents had walked away, just watching them. No crying out, no begging them to stay or come back. She’d sat in her child-size wheelchair with silent tears and watched them leave. And in her littlegirl heart, she’d known they weren’t coming back. Yet, all these years, she’d wondered what would have happened if she’d asked them to stay. That wasn’t taking anything away from her real father, the man who wanted her. The big question always lingered, though. What if? “You can’t go,” she said, knowing she couldn’t live with another what if.
“But what if I can’t stay?”
“Because of me? Is that what this is about? I’m here, my father’s here, now you’re feeling … edged out?”
He spun round, marched out of the water and straight at her. “No one edges me out, Red. But nothing’s working like I’d planned and I’m thinking that it would be easier to try it again somewhere else.”
“Nothing ever works out like anybody plans, Coulson. We want things. We create fantasies around what we want and those turn into our goals. But how many little girls really do grow up to be fairy princesses, and how many little boys really do become cowboys or firemen? Life happens, things change. People change, and their goals change. That’s just the way it is. The thing is, you can let your heart keep breaking the way I know yours is right now, or you can start over right where you are. God knows, I’ve had to do that a few times in my life. And you know what? Each time my direction changes, I see something better out there for me. Coming to this island wasn’t my dream. I wanted this hospital, but I always pictured it in Chicago or London or Montreal. And it was huge, with resources you can’t even imagine. But my father started going blind and everything was different. Everything changed. I knew he couldn’t function in the hospital of my dreams, knew he wouldn’t be able to cope in a large city setting. So because his heart was here, I knew this was where I had to be, too.
“And the hospital I’d planned … nothing like the one I’m getting. But the one I’m getting, now that I’m almost there, is so much better. My vision for it changed and I’m glad it did because …” She swallowed hard. This was the part that scared her, but no more what ifs. Never again. “Because I met you, and you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I fell in love with you here, and I want to stay in love with you here. You, me … Tadeo. But if you can’t be here, if you absolutely can’t be here then I’ll go, too.” She hadn’t expected that part, but it was true. She would go. “If you’ll have me.”
His eyes widened, but apart from that there was no big show of emotion. Not like she’d hoped for, not like she’d wanted. Because this was the place where they should have fallen into each other’s arms. But he was still towering over her, stiffly. Was it because she’d misread him so badly? Maybe he didn’t want a cancer survivor because cancer always did hover. Or maybe she’d seen something where nothing existed. “And if you won’t have me.” she said, after a big gulp, not sure what words came next. Not sure how to extricate herself gracefully from the moment. “Then I’ll just have to …”
“What, Red?” he asked, as a spark of amusement leapt to his eyes. “What will you just have to do?”
“Actually, I never planned to get this far into the conversation.” She rose up to her knees. “And I’m debating my options. One would be.” She beckoned him down with a crooked finger. “There’s room for two on my towel.”
“Barely,” he said, stepping in even closer.
“Barely makes it better, doesn’t it? Or is this.” What if … what if he didn’t want her? “… just foolish? I mean, we’ve never … not even so much as a kiss, and here I am presuming more than you’ve ever hinted at. But life is short, Coulson. You may only get one chance to go after what you want, so I have to know. Could we do this? You and me together? Give it a try and see what happens?”
He shook his head. “Can’t do that, Red.”
Her heart sank. She’d had her big, brave moment and now it was time to retreat. Cut her losses. Hide her heart. “I understand,” she said, wishing she could bury herself in the sand.
“Understand what?” he asked, kneeling down in the sand next to her.
Instinctively, she pulled away from him “We didn’t even have a relationship. Not like most people would define it. But I thought … you know, it doesn’t matter what I thought because I was wrong.”
He nodded. “Or maybe you weren’t.”
“So you’re staying?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” He sighed heavily. “Don’t know anything.”
Now, this was awkward. She didn’t know how she could be on the same island with him, let alone in the same little village, seeing him day after day, knowing what a fool she’d made of herself.
“If I stay, can you manage with me on one side of your fence, you on the other? Would that work for you, Red?”
So he was considering staying, but not with her. In answer to his question, she scooted herself back away from him, then stood, grabbed her towel and poised herself to march off with whatever dignity she could still muster. But he grabbed her by the arm. Stopped her. Spun her around to face him. And damn it, even his touch, as impersonal as he intended it, gave her chills. She couldn’t control herself.
“Answer me, Red. Would that work for you?”
“You know what, Coulson? I gave it a shot … my best shot. But I misfired and there’s no second shot lined up for me. OK? You do what you want. Stay, leave. I don’t care because I learned a long time ago that when you care too much, you get hurt. And that’s something I can live without.”
“The caring or the hurting?”
His eyes were suddenly so gentle she had to look away or be lost for ever.
“Red? Erin?”
“Don’t do this to me,” she begged.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You are, though. Don’t you see? You’re hurting me. Taking Tadeo, and leaving here. I don’t know how I can get through that. And don’t tell me that I’m strong or that some other visiting doctor will take your place because that’s not going to happen.”
“But you are strong. You just don’t know it.”
“And that’s supposed to be good enough? Erin Glover is strong, she can take care of herself? Well, it’s not good enough. I live in a safe world. I have since the first time my father gave me a piece of candy and asked me my name. And this … all this isn’t safe.” She pointed to the beach, to the trees, to the blue hospital building in the distance, to the crazy patchwork-colored fence. “It scares me. You scare me. And more than anything, my feelings for you scare me because.”
“Tell me, Red. Say it out loud.”
She swallowed hard. “Because I didn’t know those kinds of feelings could exist. You’re not safe, Coulson. If anything, you’re the unsafest man I’ve ever known, and I should have fallen in love with someone who was safe, but I fell in love with you instead.”
He chuckled. “I’m not sure whether to be insulted or flattered. The lady claims she loves me by telling me she should have fallen in love with someone else. I’ve had a few women profess various feelings for me in one way or another, but never quite so grudgingly.”
“So I lack social skills.”
He pulled her into his arms. Held her tight. Just lingered in the feel of her body pressed to his for a moment … a sensation he wanted to last for ever. “It’s not about giving it a try. It’s about doing it. Also, simply doing … us. Your social skills are just fine,” he said, on a sigh. “All the social skills I need in my woman.”
“Your woman?” she asked.
His woman. Absolutely, definitely his woman. “Trouble at first sight. I knew when I set eyes on that red hair you were going to be trouble for me, and I don’t mean anything to do with the hospital.”
“But you haven’t. Never. Not anything.”
“You mean, not this …?” Leaning forward, he ran his fingers lightly down her neck, stopping just at her collarbone, where he bent and placed a row of delicate kisses, a trail of them that didn’t stop until he reached her shoulder.
“Not that,” she said on a shiver.
“And I’m assuming none of this either?” His next kisses went to the swell just above her breast. Harder kisses, ones that lingered a little longer. Ones he didn’t want to stop but knew he had to because even this innocent little moment with Erin was almost more than he could bear.
“None of those either,” she murmured. “And that’s a pity,” she said, nuzzling herself a little harder against him, “because those kinds of kisses are usually rewarded with something like this.”
In an instant her fingers were woven around his neck, and she was standing on tiptoe in the sand to reach his lips with kisses that were neither tentative nor conditional. Meeting her tongue with his, feeling the wet, satiny heat merging with the pure, honey taste of her, Adam pressed his fingers into the small of her back, pulling her closer, harder. Then they settled into a fiery kiss—one with a beginning and a promise, one that promised even more passion and committed to everything. One that settled Erin back down on the towel and showed Adam once and for all that there was definitely room enough for two.
“Coulson,” she said a while later, when their passion had gone as far as it could on a public, even though semi-secluded beach. “I wanted … I mean, I never thought we would …”
He shushed her with a finger to her lips, and she responded by pulling his finger into her mouth and sucking.
“You’re going to get us both in a lot of trouble if you keep that up,” he warned, even though he did nothing to stop it.
“Could be fun,” she said, almost shyly.
That was something he liked about her … loved about her, that shy sweet sexiness that was as spicy as anything he’d ever known. “Let me guess. You’re such a good girl, you’ve never gotten into trouble before, have you?”
“Define trouble,” she said, her shyness turning to daring as she looked up at him. “Show me, Coulson. Show me trouble.”
His answer was a moan as he scooped her up into his arms. “It’s on the other side of the cove, in my private beach cabana.”
“I like private,” she said, on a sigh.
It was hours, days, maybe an eternity before she realized that she might be missed. “I think I should go,” she said, pulling the gauzy sheet up around her, not so much to shield herself as he knew every inch of her intimately now but more to separate herself from the moment to make their parting easier. This was a wonderful place, his cabana. A small little beach shack he’d built that she never wanted to leave. But reality rained down. It was time.
“I think you should stay awhile longer.”
His bare backside was facing toward her and even as a physician, who’d seen the beautiful lines of a man before, she couldn’t take her eyes off him. Sleek, perfect. Her lover for a moment, but beyond that. “If I stay, you’ll break my heart.” With his beauty, with the emptiness of words not yet spoken, words she desperately wanted to hear. But there’d been no mention of him staying on the island, or changing his mind, not even that he loved her, and she could feel the dull ache of it beginning to settle in again. Being his woman was wonderful, but not enough. “And in the end, Coulson, I have to figure out a way to be able to function here.” He didn’t turn round, didn’t move. Simply stood there, every masculine inch of him, against the backdrop of a white sandy beach and, beyond that, an eternity of blue. Blue was a color of hope, though. That was why she’d chosen it for her hospital. Yet now, when she saw all the blue just outside the cabana, she felt a swell of discouragement. Even sadness for another loss, for someone else walking out of her life.
“You’ve never called me Adam,” he said. “Why’s that?”
She sat up, pulled her knees up and rested her chin on them, thinking about it for a moment. The truth was, she didn’t know. Didn’t have any idea. “Habit, maybe,” she finally said, not totally convinced.
Eventually, after what felt like an eternity, he turned to her, yet he kept himself half-hidden in the shadows of the filmy curtains. “Maybe the same reason I’ve called you Red since the day we met … to keep the relationship impersonal.”
“But we’ve changed since that day. Both of us have.”
“Have we? Have we really?” He heaved a sigh then returned to the bed and crawled in next to her, yet avoided any touch, any closeness. “The thing is, I know why I’ve called you Red. I wanted to be impersonal. That was my goal. I wanted to stay detached, even disinterested because … well, I guess you can say that once bitten, twice shy, but that’s a cliché and it’s not really the truth. For a lot of reasons, it was easy to hide behind the failure of my first marriage, and always hold it out there in front of me as a shield. I didn’t want to get involved, and that’s the honest truth. I was good without involvement, and my life was easier when it didn’t have to take someone else into consideration … someone who would let me down, someone I would let down. In my little closed-minded patch of the world, that was good. Then there you were and I knew the instant I saw you that you were going to disrupt everything in my life. Totally turn it all upside down, probably in ways I couldn’t imagine. Like I said, I knew it that first day at the bar, and I’ve known it and seen it every day since. And the thing is, part of me wanted that upheaval … was probably even ready for it. But most of me really just wanted to keep that shield up. Except you have a habit of slipping right through. Every single time I thought I had my defenses up, you simply walked straight in. And you do it so naturally … Erin. You walk gracefully through life and that’s a rare gift. It’s also frightening to a man who wants to be set in his ways.”
“Let me guess. Nobody wants that more than you do, right?”
He chuckled. “Right. And, I’ll admit it. I didn’t want to get involved … to get to the place where we are right now, because I knew if we did, and for whatever reason, we couldn’t sustain it, someone would lose, something would change. Your life, my life … hopes and dreams. Funny thing was, last night, when I actually started thinking in terms of really changing my life or leaving here, that’s when it finally dawned on me that it’s not about losing or even
changing. I lost so much to my first wife and I didn’t want to lose this, too. So when you were Red, you were …”
“Impersonal? Nothing you could lose?”
“Definitely impersonal. And maybe that was a little bit of my battle still playing out. But you know what? I can walk away from here, start a new life, and that’s what it will be … a new life. Not the outcome of a battle—win, lose or draw. Old conditioning dying hard, I suppose. Or, like you said, old habits.”
“But can’t you start that new life here?”
“Can I?”
“There’s nothing stopping you from doing whatever you want, so I don’t understand.”
“Yes, I think you do, Erin. Maybe you’re not ready to say it out loud, but you do understand. So answer this. You still call me Coulson because …”
“Because I didn’t know you wanted me to call you something else.”
He shook his head. “That’s not it.”
“Then, like I said, it’s a habit.”
She pulled the gauzy sheet up to her throat and started to slide away from him, but he reached out and held her there. Still separated, but so close the awareness of her bare flesh on his fought to distract him in ways he was only just learning that Erin could distract him as no one ever had. “Say the words, Erin. You have to say the words. We both need to hear them.”
“There aren’t any words, because I don’t know what you’re talking about. And this is a stupid conversation, going on and on about what I call you. I need to go and see the architect, then talk to my dad about—”