“What did you say?” he asked softly.
She shook her head, her hair brushing his skin. “Wow,” she lied. “Just wow.”
He laughed softly and pulled her closer and she wondered how she had ever found the strength—or the stupidity—to walk away from this eight years ago.
* * *
He awoke to the pale light of early morning filtering through his window and an odd sense of peace.
The sensation was unfamiliar enough that it compelled him to slide a little further into consciousness. Most mornings, he jumped out of bed ready for the day’s many battles—from his regular tussle with Ethan over breakfast cereals to pondering the many things on his to-do list.
This morning, his limbs were loose and relaxed, his thoughts uncharacteristically still.
While he was trying to piece together why that might be, a sexy feminine scent drifted through the air from the pillow beside him, and he saw an unfamiliar indentation with a few long blond hairs against the pillowcase.
The memories came flowing back—of Anna in his arms, her mouth eager, her body soft and responsive.
He closed his eyes, reliving the incredible night they had just shared. It had been more than he would ever have imagined. Much more. He had never known such tenderness, such overwhelming sweetness.
They had made love three times and each time had been more intense than the time before.
And now she was gone.
He opened his eyes, not quite sure why he was so certain of it. Her clothes were gone and some instinct told him he didn’t need to search his house to know he wouldn’t find her.
He couldn’t say he was really surprised. Saddened, maybe, but not really surprised.
The bleak inevitability of it still made him want to throw on a pair of jeans and tear off after her, chase her down at her apartment and confront her, but he checked the impulse. What the hell good would that accomplish, besides making him look like an idiot?
He sat up, his emotions a tight hot tangle in his chest. He was in love with her—a thousand times more now, this morning, than he had been eight years ago. Those had been fledgling, newborn feelings.
This, what he felt right now, was powerful and strong.
Too bad for him, but if their history ran true, Anna was likely to whip out a twenty gauge shotgun and blast his heart right out of the sky.
He didn’t learn his lesson very well with her, did he? He was either a masochist or he had no sense of self-preservation whatsoever.
Anna just wasn’t emotionally available.
She couldn’t make it more clear to him if she took out a damn billboard right outside his office.
Even when they made love, he could sense she held some part of herself back, something she hid away from him. He didn’t know whether that was a protective mechanism from a childhood where she struggled to belong, or if it stemmed from her dedication to her career, but even in his arms she wouldn’t let him through that last line of defenses.
He sighed. So much for the relaxed state he’d awakened to. His shoulders now ached with tension and regret.
It was still early, just barely daylight. He wasn’t going to lay here and brood, he decided. He had survived having his heart broken by Anna Wilder before. He could certainly do it again. The trick was returning to as normal a life as possible, forcing himself to go through the motions until the vicious ache in his heart began to fade.
He was getting to be an expert.
When she had left before, the only thing that had saved him had been law school. He had thrown himself into his final two years, until he didn’t have room in his brain to think about anything else but tort reforms and trial transcripts.
At least now he had Ethan to distract him.
A good, hard run before he went to his mother’s to collect his son for the day would be an excellent place to start picking up the pieces of his world, he decided. A little physical activity would be just the thing to burn off this restlessness suddenly churning through him.
Ten minutes later, dressed in jogging shorts and a T-shirt, he was heading out the front door when he spotted an envelope on the coffee table in the living room.
He saw her name on the front and realized this must be the letter from her father. His mind flashed to the night before, to her coming through the door and into his arms. She had been holding it then. Sometime during the wild storm of emotion that came after when she had wept in his arms, she must have dropped it on the table.
He was going to have to return it to her, which meant he would have to see her again.
Sooner, rather than later.
He grimaced, gazing malevolently at the envelope. Getting over her again would be a hell of a lot easier if he didn’t have to face her every damn time he turned around.
* * *
She was an idiot.
Anna sat in her living room, Lilli curled up at her feet and her laptop humming on the coffee table in front of her as she tried to focus on work instead of the delectable image of Richard, naked and masculine, as she’d left him a few hours earlier.
Walking away from that bedroom and out of his house had been the single hardest thing she had ever done.
She had stood watching him sleep for a long time in the soft light of early morning, trying to force herself to go.
With one arm thrown over his head, his features relaxed and youthful in sleep, he had been so gorgeous that she had wanted nothing more than to climb right back into his bed and never leave.
She sighed, gazing at her computer until the words blurred.
She was in love with him.
It was one thing to face such a thought when she was in his arms, when his body was warm and hard against hers. It was something else entirely in the cold unforgiving light of morning, when she couldn’t escape the harsh reality that they had no possible future together.
She had destroyed any chance of that eight years ago, when she made the fatal decision that proving herself to her family was more important than following her heart.
It had been a colossal mistake. She could see that now.
Richard didn’t trust her enough to love her. Even when he had been deep inside her, she had seen the doubt shadowing his gaze, the edge of distance he was careful to maintain.
She deserved it. She had hurt him by leaving, more than she had ever imagined.
The night she had shared dinner with him at his house, he had told her with blunt and brutal honesty that he had only dated Ethan’s mother because she had reminded him of Anna.
He had offered her his heart eight years ago and she had callously refused it. She supposed it was only right and just, somehow, that now she would be the one to bleed.
She stared at her computer for a long time then glanced at the clock. She had promised Mr. Daly her report would be posted on his private server by noon, which gave her only an hour to finish up.
Compartmentalizing her heartache was almost as hard as walking out of Richard’s house, but she forced herself to focus on work with the harsh reminder that she only had a few days left in Walnut River. Either way the board voted, her work here would be done by the end of the week and she could return to the city and the life she had created there.
She quickly input the new numbers from the hospital in her report then went online to access Daly’s private server via the instructions he had given her the night before.
It only took a moment to upload her report. Just as she was about to disconnect she spied a folder she had never seen before, labeled WRG/Wilder.
She stared at it for a long moment, a vague foreboding curling through her like ominous wisps of smoke where they didn’t belong.
She had no business reading Daly’s private files, even if they did have her name on them.
But he had given her the access code to his server, she reminded herself. Surely he wouldn’t have done that if the server contained information he didn’t want her to see.
Maybe this was some kind of message to
her and he meant for her to see it. Maybe if she didn’t read it, he would accuse her of not doing her job somehow. The man could be devious that way.
After another moment of dithering, she surrendered to her curiosity and opened the folder. It contained only one file, she saw, with the initials P.W.
In for a penny, she thought, and clicked to open it….
Ten minutes later, she printed out the document after making her own backup copy. Her hands were shaking so much she could barely move them on the keyboard to disconnect from the server.
She shut down her laptop and folded it closed, then eased back on the sofa. Her stomach roiled as the bagel she’d had that morning seemed to churn around inside her. She pressed a hand to the sudden burning there while her mind whirled with the implications of what she had just read.
She wasn’t sure which emotion was stronger inside her right now—outrage at what her superiors planned for the hospital or the deep sense of betrayal that she had been used.
P.W. stood for Peter Wilder. That had been abundantly clear the moment she opened the file that turned out to be an internal memo between Daly and his three closest cohorts.
She closed her eyes as snippets of the memo seemed to dance behind her eyelids. Force out old guard. Bring in cheaper labor. Cut costs and services.
It was bad enough that NHC planned to do exactly as her siblings claimed, sacrifice patient care for the bottom line. Worse was the way they intended to win this battle, by using her to bring down her siblings, primarily Peter.
Peter Wilder leads the opposition, the memo stated clearly. Take him out and you’ll cut the opponents off at the knees.
The smear tactics outlined in the memo were brutally ugly, ranging from manufacturing malpractice allegations to planting a patient willing to accuse him of sexual misconduct.
Anna pressed a hand to her mouth, sickened all over again as she remembered her own passionate defense of Northeastern HealthCare, how absolutely certain she had been that the company had the community’s needs at heart.
How could she have allowed herself to be so blind?
She thought she had been doing the right thing. For two years, she had bought into the NHC philosophy of providing streamlined medical care to reach the masses. She had wanted to believe in their mission. She had nothing but respect for her direct supervisor, Wallace Jeffers. He had always struck her as a man of integrity and honor.
Not everyone at NHC was like him, she had to admit. Now, as she looked back over two years, she could see times she had turned her head away at practices that might have blurred ethical lines.
She hadn’t wanted to see them, she acknowledged now. She had wanted only to focus on her career and climbing as high as she could. Wallace had talked about her succeeding him as vice president of mergers and acquisitions, sometime long in the future, and she had wanted it.
She’d been brought into this project not because of any brilliance on her part, she saw now, but because she was a Wilder. Alfred Daly seemed to have an almost pathological need to win the NHC merger. He was frustrated and angry at all the complications and delays the past six months in what should have been a simple process.
Of course he would use any advantage in front of him. No doubt he thought her presence would be enough to distract her family while NHC implemented more nefarious plans.
This memo was dated a few weeks earlier. She read it again, sick all over again. Were the wheels in motion already? Was her brother going to be hit any day now with some kind of trumped-up malpractice suit or an allegation of sexual abuse?
Her honorable upright brother would be devastated by either option.
“Oh, Lilli. What am I going to do?”
Her dog yapped in response, her head cocked and her eyes curiously sympathetic.
The dog held her gaze for just an instant before she suddenly scampered to the door with an excited yip, then sat vibrating with eagerness, her little body aquiver.
As usual, Lilli was prescient. The doorbell rang an instant later and Anna groaned, tempted to ignore it and pretend she wasn’t home.
The doorbell rang again, more insistently this time. Who was she fooling? Her car was in the driveway, and whoever was out there probably knew she was sitting here trying to pretend she was invisible.
“Anna?” She heard through the door and closed her eyes at the sound of Richard’s smooth voice.
Who else? She only needed this.
She was even more tempted to ignore the doorbell, but she just couldn’t bring herself to do it. Finally she ramped up her courage and forced herself to wrench open the door.
Sunlight gleamed in his golden hair and he looked gorgeous—sexy and casual in jeans and a polo shirt. She had an instant’s image of how she had left him that morning, the sheets tousled at his waist and his muscled chest hard and warm.
Awkwardness at seeing him again temporarily supplanted her dismay over the memo.
A few hours ago, she had been in his arms. She had no experience with this sort of thing and didn’t know how to face him.
“Hi,” she finally said, her voice throaty.
He nodded, though his stoic expression didn’t change.
“Would you…like to come in?”
After a moment, he stepped through the doorway with a reluctance she didn’t miss. He stopped for a moment to greet Lilli, who hopped around with infatuated enthusiasm.
“I can’t stay,” he finally said. “I’m picking Ethan up in an hour. I just wanted to return this. You left it at my house.”
He held out a familiar envelope and she stared. She certainly hadn’t forgotten the stunning news that she was James’s daughter but the letter had completely slipped her mind when she was sneaking away from Richard’s bed.
“Oh. Right. Um, thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
They lapsed into an awkward silence. She wished she could read his expression but he seemed stiff and unapproachable.
“Why did you…”
“Look, I’m sorry I…”
They both spoke to break the silence at the same time and Anna gestured. “You first,” she said.
He shrugged. “I just wanted to know why you rushed away this morning without a word. You could have at least nudged me awake to say goodbye.”
She flushed, not at all in the mood to talk about this right now after the tumult of the past half hour.
Richard made it sound like she had taken what she wanted from him and then left on her merry way without giving him another thought. It wasn’t at all like that, but she could certainly see how he might have been left with that impression.
She couldn’t very well tell him she had been terrified by the wild torrent of emotions rushing through her, that she had been almost desperate for the safety of a little distance from him.
“I don’t know that I can answer that,” she finally said, her voice wary. “I was hoping to avoid this kind of awkwardness. I guess I thought it would be…easier that way.”
His mouth hardened. “I wouldn’t want you to try something hard.”
His words were quiet, which only made them that much more devastating.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. Forget it.” He looked toward the door as if he regretted saying anything and wanted to escape.
“No. I’d like to hear what you have to say.”
“You sure about that?”
She folded her arms across her chest, though she knew that pitiful gesture would do nothing to protect her heart.
“Yes. Tell me.”
“I’m just looking at your track record. You quit medical school because it was too tough for you.”
“Not true! I had straight A’s my first year. I walked out because I hated it!”
“Fine. You’re right. It wasn’t tough academically, just emotionally, which for you was even harder. So instead of staying and explaining to your family that you hated it, instead of taking a stand, you chose to run. You w
ere so afraid of your family’s reaction that you gave up on us before we even had a chance. You’ve got a track record, at least where I’m concerned, so I guess I wasn’t really surprised you walked out this morning. It’s what you do. You’re good at it.”
She managed, just barely, not to sway from the bitter impact of his anger. How dare he? she wanted to say, but the words tangled in her throat. She only had to look at her laptop and that damning memo to know he was right. Absolutely right.
She was a blind, self-absorbed idiot whose actions were threatening her family and her community.
She deserved his condemnation and more. Much more.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
He needed to shut the hell up and just leave, pretend the last twelve hours hadn’t happened, but Richard couldn’t seem to make the words stop coming. “Even as we were making love, I expected you to leave. That doesn’t make it hurt any less. That’s all I’m saying.”
Her features had paled a shade, but in typical Anna fashion, she stiffened her shoulders. “I don’t understand. If you have such contempt for me and think I’m such a terrible person, why would you want anything to do with me?”
Though her tone was calm, dispassionate even, he didn’t miss the hurt in her eyes, a pain she was trying valiantly to conceal from him.
“I don’t think you’re a terrible person. Quite the contrary. I wouldn’t be—” in love with you, he almost said, but checked himself just in time “—I wouldn’t be here if I did. I think you’re a brilliant, capable, beautiful woman who doesn’t see her own strengths. You don’t see yourself as I do, as someone with the ability to cope with anything that comes along. Because you don’t see it, you protect yourself by avoiding things you’re afraid you can’t handle.”
She looked as if he had just punched her in the gut and Richard sighed. He needed to just shut the hell up and leave. He tended to forget how vulnerable she was.
He had no business coming here, twisting everything, making it all about her.
“I’d better go. Ethan will be home soon. I just thought you might be looking for your father’s letter.”
Reunited in Walnut River Page 12