The memory seemed permanently imprinted into his head, of standing on the front porch of her parents’ house just hours after he had left her there, those stars still in his eyes.
He’d expected to find the woman he had just realized he loved.
Instead, he’d found chaos. Anna was gone. She must have left soon after he had dropped her at her doorstep, with one, last, long, lingering kiss and the promise of many more.
Both of her brothers were living away from home at the time but Richard clearly remembered the reaction of the three remaining Wilders. Her father had been devastated, her mother baffled and Ella had been crushed.
He couldn’t really say she had left without a word. She’d mailed him a letter that had arrived the next day—a terse, emotionless thing.
What kind of fool was he that he could still remember the damn thing word for word?
Dear Richard.
I can’t do this with you right now. I’m so sorry. I meant everything I said last night about my feelings for you, but after I’ve had a few hours to think about it, I realize I can’t string you along while I try to figure out my life. It wouldn’t be fair to you and to be honest, I’m not sure I have the emotional strength for it. You deserve so much more.
I have to go, Richard. I can’t live this lie anymore. Being with you last night only showed me that more clearly. I’m being crushed by the weight of my family’s expectations and I don’t know any other way to break free of them. I only wish, more than anything, that I didn’t have to hurt you in the process.
She had signed it with love and, while he had wanted to believe her, she had made no other effort to contact him.
That had been eight years ago. Another lifetime. Then had come Lynne and Ethan and his world had changed once more.
But his heart had never forgotten her.
He sighed, acknowledging the truth of that rather grim realization.
Some part of him still had feelings for Anna Wilder, feelings he didn’t dare take out and examine right now.
It was a damn good thing his partner was representing Walnut River General in the whole NHC matter.
Richard wasn’t sure his heart—or his ego—could handle being screwed over by Anna Wilder again.
* * *
Two days later, Richard sat in his office rubbing the bridge of his nose and trying to fight back the odd sensation that the walls of his office had suddenly shrunk considerably.
“Say that again. Where are you, Phil?”
His partner gave a heavy sigh, sounding not at all like his normal affable self. “Wyoming, at the Clear Springs Rehab Center. It’s supposed to be one of the best in the nation.”
“Rehab, Phil? Is this some kind of sick joke?”
“I wish it were that easy.”
“I’m stunned!”
“You shouldn’t be,” the other man said wearily. “You covered for me enough the last six months that you should have seen the clues. Peggy’s gone. She moved out two weeks ago and took the kids with her.”
Those walls seemed to crowd a few inches closer. “You didn’t say a word to me!”
“What was I going to say? I was too ashamed. My wife left me, my kids aren’t talking to me. I’ve only held it together at work by luck and a hell of a good partner.”
Okay, Richard had to admit he had suspected something was going on. With all the sick days and missed meetings, he had wondered if Phil was fighting a serious illness he wasn’t ready to disclose.
In retrospect, he wondered how the hell he possibly could have missed the signs.
“I’m an alcoholic, Richard. I can’t hide it anymore. I’ve tried to stop a dozen times on my own and I can’t. This is the only way I know how to straighten out my life.”
All the pieces seemed to fall into place with a hard thunk and again Richard wondered where his own head had been to miss something so glaring in his partner and friend.
Yeah, there had been mistakes the past few months—a couple of serious ones that Richard had been forced to step in and mend. But he had just assumed Phil would tell him what was going on when he was ready. He hadn’t minded the clean-up work. Phil had been a mentor and a friend since he came to the practice straight out of law school, green in more than name and a single father of an infant to boot.
“How long will you be there?” he finally asked.
“As long as it takes. I wish I could be more specific than that but I don’t know at this point. The average stay is two months.”
Two months? Richard fought down a groan. They had too much work as it was and had discussed adding another partner to the practice to help ease the burden.
“What about your clients?” he asked.
“I’m sorry to dump them on you. But my two junior associates have been basically carrying everything for the last few months, anyway. They can bring you up to speed on the major cases. I’m not worried about anything but the hospital takeover attempt. I’m afraid you’ll have to step in and handle that. My files are copious, though. You should find everything you need there.”
“I’ll take care of everything on this end,” Richard assured him. “You just focus on what you’re doing there.”
“Thanks, man. Entering into a partnership with you was the smartest move I’ve made in years.”
Richard hung up a few moments later and let out a long, slow breath. He was concerned about his friend, first and foremost. But he was also suddenly overwhelmed with the weight of more responsibilities.
The hospital merger had been Phil’s project for six months. Richard had helped a little but getting up to speed on all the intricate details was going to take days, if not weeks.
Talk about a complication. Just when he was thinking he wouldn’t have to have anything more to do with Anna Wilder, circumstances had to go and change dramatically.
He would have no choice now but to work with her, on a much closer level than he was sure made him completely comfortable, given their shared past.
* * *
Amazing how a day could go from rough to truly miserable in the space of a few moments.
Anna stood in the cafeteria line in the basement of Walnut River General, wondering why she was even bothering to grab a salad when her appetite had abruptly fled and the idea of trying to force down lunch was about as appealing as walking back through the halls of the hospital and encountering another of her testy siblings.
She sighed, moving her tray along the metal track, one step closer to the cashier.
Blast David anyway.
Of all her siblings, she would have expected him to at least be civil to her—not because they had been the best of friends but because she had a tough time thinking he would bother to involve himself in the political side of things at the hospital.
Peter had at least tried to be brotherly to her, but because he was so much older than she, their lives had always seemed on slightly different tracks.
Ella had been closest to her, in age and in their relationship. If not for the distance she herself had placed between them after she dropped out of medical school and moved away from Walnut River, she imagined she and her sister would still have been close.
David, though, had always seemed a challenge. She’d always had the vague sense that he resented her. He had never been deliberately cruel, had just treated her with somewhat chilly indifference, making it overtly obvious he didn’t want to be bothered with a whiny little sister who wasn’t even really related to him.
She supposed nothing had really changed. Rather blindly, she pushed her tray one person closer to the cashier, replaying the scene outside the cafeteria doors just a few moments earlier.
After spending all morning going over records the hospital refused to allow her to take off-site, she had been tempted to go somewhere in town for lunch. Maybe Prudy’s Menu downtown or a fast-food place somewhere.
But since she was looking at several more hours of analyzing patient accounts, she had decided to save time by eating in the cafeteria.
&
nbsp; Big mistake. She should have considered the possibility that she might encounter one of her testy siblings.
Sure enough, when she reached the cafeteria, the first person she had seen had been David, looking relaxed and happier than she’d seen him in a long time.
Becoming engaged and moving back to Walnut River apparently agreed with him. He had lost the edgy restlessness that had seemed so much a part of him for so many years.
She had smiled and opened her mouth to greet him, forgetting for just an instant where things stood between them.
Before she could say anything, he looked straight through her, then turned around and walked out of the cafeteria, leaving his food behind, as if he’d just stumbled into a leper colony.
No, not quite right. David was a compassionate, caring physician. He would rush right in to help anyone who was ill, especially if they suffered from a potentially life-threatening condition.
Apparently, she ranked somewhere well below a colony of lepers in her older brother’s estimation. He couldn’t even manage to bring himself to say hello to her.
Anna sighed. She had to stop being so maudlin about her siblings. She had made her choice when she had suggested Walnut River General as a possible acquisition target to her superiors at NHC. She had created this situation and she had no business moping about it.
“Looks like you’re up,” someone said behind her and Anna realized with some chagrin that while she had been sitting brooding, the line had moved forward and she was next to checkout.
She jerked her tray forward along the metal rails then watched with horror as her diet soda toppled sideways from the jolt. In her distraction after the scene with David, she apparently hadn’t fastened on the plastic lid securely. As the cup fell, the contents splashed out—directly on the woman standing behind her.
Anna’s face burned and she wanted nothing more than to leave her tray there and just escape. Still, she forced herself to turn to the other woman and found an elegant, pretty redhead wearing a pale green Donna Karan suit and a white blouse that now sported a golfball-sized caramel-colored stain on the front.
The woman looked vaguely familiar but Anna was quite certain she had never met her.
“I am so sorry,” Anna exclaimed. “I’ll give you my card. Please send me the bill for the dry cleaning.”
The woman’s smile was remarkably gracious. “Don’t worry about it. This was my least favorite blouse, anyway.”
“I’m sure that’s not true.”
The woman laughed. “Well, maybe second least-favorite. I’ve got an orange thing in my closet that’s really a disaster.”
She narrowed her gaze, her smile slipping just a fraction. “You’re Anna, aren’t you?”
Anna’s stomach clenched. She really wasn’t sure she could handle another confrontation right now. The woman was liable to dump her entire lunch all over her.
“Yes,” she said warily. “I’m sorry, have we met?”
“No, though I was at your father’s funeral. And I’ve just seen a picture of you in Peter’s office.”
“You…you have?”
“It was a picture taken at your father’s last birthday party and has all four of you together. I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long time. I’m Bethany Holloway.”
Bethany Holloway? This was Peter’s fiancée?
Here was another stark reminder of the rift between her and her siblings. Her brother was marrying this woman in a few weeks and this was the first time Anna had even met her.
“Your total is six dollars and twenty-three cents,” the cashier said pointedly. “You can go ahead and get another soda if you want.”
Anna realized abruptly that she was holding up an entire line of hungry people. “Let me at least pay for your lunch,” she said to Bethany.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I do,” Anna insisted. The cashier gave her a new total. Anna handed her a twenty and pocketed the change.
“That was not necessary, but thank you, anyway,” Bethany said, moving with her out of the way so others could pay for their lunches.
“You’re welcome,” Anna replied. “I mean it about the dry cleaning.”
Bethany shook her head. “I’ve got on-the-go stain removal stuff in my office. Soda should come out in a flash. If nothing else, I always keep a spare shirt in my office and I can change into that one after lunch. Please don’t worry about it.”
Anna had to admit, she was astonished. Bethany Holloway was actually smiling at her. She couldn’t quite figure out why. Not only had Anna dumped soda all over her, but Anna would have assumed Peter’s fiancée would be firmly on the opposite side of the family divide.
“I was supposed to meet Peter for lunch but he had an emergency. I guess I need to get used to that if I’m marrying a doctor, right? I hate to eat alone, though—are you meeting someone for lunch?”
“Uh, no.”
In truth, she had planned to take the tray up to the tiny little hole in the wall office J.D. had begrudged her to go over the accounts.
“Good,” Bethany said. “We can sit together and you can tell me all of Peter’s secrets.”
Her warm friendliness left Anna feeling off kilter, as if one of her heels was two inches shorter than the other, and she didn’t know quite how to respond.
“I’m afraid I don’t know any. Of Peter’s secrets, I mean. I’ve been away from Walnut River for a long time.”
Bethany smiled. “That’s all right, then. You can tell me all of your secrets.”
Bethany headed for a table without looking to see if Anna followed or not. Anna again fought the urge to flee to the relative safety of her borrowed office.
But she wasn’t a coward. For some strange reason, her brother’s fiancée wanted to talk to her and Anna didn’t see that she had much of a choice but to comply.
CHAPTER FIVE
Anna slid into the booth opposite Bethany, wondering how she was possibly going to be able to swallow with these nerves jumping around in her stomach.
It was silly, really.
She had no reason to be apprehensive around Peter’s fiancée. By all appearances, Bethany was kind and gracious. Anna didn’t know many women of her acquaintance who could handle having a soda slopped all over them with such aplomb—especially when the one doing the slopping was on the outs with her fiancé.
She tried to focus on what she knew about Bethany and remembered that at one point she had been in favor of the merger, identified by NHC as a definite vote for their side. She decided there was no reason to talk around the issue.
“I understand you’re an efficiency expert here at the hospital,” she said when they were both settled. “And you’ve been on the governing board of directors for a little over a year.”
Bethany raised a slim auburn eyebrow. “NHC has a good research team. I suppose you have complete dossiers on every board member.”
Anna toyed with a piece of lettuce, refusing to feel like a corporate stoolie. “You know how it works. It pays to know the players. At one point you were considered firmly on our side.”
“I was. Absolutely.”
“But you’ve gone on record opposing it now,” she said. “Is that because of Peter?”
It was a rude question and one she regretted as soon as the words came out. To her vast relief, Bethany only laughed.
“Oh, he would love to hear you say that. No, I didn’t change my vote because of my relationship with your brother. From an efficiency standpoint, the merger still makes sense. I won’t deny that.”
She paused and appeared to be considering her words with delicate care. “From a human standpoint, though, I’m not convinced Northeastern HealthCare has the best interest of our patients at heart.”
Just like that, Anna automatically slid back on the defensive. “If you look at the statistics, you’ll find we have a great track record at other hospitals of improving patient access to care while saving money at the same time.”
“I know
all the arguments, Anna. I promise, I’ve read the reports on NHC. We could debate this endlessly and I’m not sure we would get anywhere. There are compelling arguments on both sides but right now I have to go with my gut, that this deal isn’t right for Walnut River General at the moment.”
She lifted a slim hand to forestall any further arguments. “Let’s talk about something else, okay? I’m sure you get enough arguments from everyone and I’d really like us to be friends.”
Anna wasn’t sure that was possible, given the current situation, but she found she desperately liked the idea of having Bethany as a friend.
“I hate to be a bridezilla,” Bethany continued, “but can we talk about my wedding?”
Anna gulped. She would almost rather stage a public debate on the merger right there in the cafeteria than talk about her brother’s wedding. Short of getting up and leaving her food there at the table in her rush to escape, she wasn’t sure how to wiggle out of it.
“Okay,” she said slowly.
“You’re coming, aren’t you?” Bethany asked. “Last I checked you hadn’t sent an RSVP. You did receive the invitation, right? I sent it to your New York apartment and was hoping it didn’t miss you on your way here.”
Yes, she had received it. She had pulled out the elegant sheet of calligraphied vellum and had stared at it for a long time, sorrow aching through her at the distance between her and her siblings.
In the end, she had slipped the invitation into her briefcase, though she had absolutely no intention of accepting.
“Yes. I got it,” she admitted.
“And? You’re coming, aren’t you?”
“Does Peter know you sent me an invitation?”
Bethany blinked but not before Anna was certain she saw a little glimmer of uncertainty in the depths of her green eyes.
“Of course,” she answered, but somehow Anna was certain she wasn’t telling the whole truth.
The vague suspicion, that tiny hesitation on Bethany’s part, was enough to remove any lingering doubt in her mind about whether to attend the wedding.
“I’m really happy for you and Peter,” Anna said. “But…I don’t think I can make it.”
Reunited in Walnut River Page 5