“You don’t understand,” she said, dropping her gaze and turning away from him. He caught her arm and forced her to turn back. “There is something I can do about it. I’ve spent my entire adult life doing something about it. I know I can’t save Gary, but this whole thing with the Winchesters and the Newports? The children’s hospital they’re building? That cancer pavilion they’re going to fund? Do you realize how many people that will help because I was there to take care of their father?”
“But that doesn’t have to be your entire life, Lucy. You don’t have to be this selfless angel. You get to have your own life, too. Just because my wife died doesn’t mean I died. I’m still here. I’m still fighting. I haven’t given up—and I’m sure as hell not going to give up on you. I didn’t understand all those years ago why you came on to me. I didn’t want to betray Gary’s memory by taking his girlfriend. But turning you down and walking away from you has been one of the biggest regrets of my life and now I’ve got a second chance to show you how much you mean to me. I’m not going to screw that up again.”
“It won’t work,” she said stiffly. “My job and my life are here. Your job and your life are back in Cedar Point.” Her mouth twisted into a frown and he thought she might be about to cry.
Good, he thought. That stoic crap sucked.
But she didn’t. Instead, she squared her shoulders and said, “Thank you for the wonderful evening—the dress and everything. Thank you for looking out for me. It’s something that I hadn’t realized I was missing. I accept your apology. You can go back to Iowa with a clear conscience.”
He couldn’t hurt any more than if she had actually punched him. “You’re just going to walk away from this? From us? You don’t understand how special this is. I didn’t come back here because I needed a clear conscience. I came back here because I love you, damn it.”
Then she cracked, just a little. “You’re making this harder than it has to be,” she said in a small voice.
Wasn’t that rich? “That’s because I’m willing to fight for what I want. And I want you.”
The look she shot him was so forlorn that it cut right through him. But then she said, “It wasn’t meant to be seventeen years ago and it’s not meant to be now. Please, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get to work. Goodbye, Josh.” With that, she turned around and walked into the bathroom.
And once again Josh was all alone.
God, he hated this city.
Fourteen
Normally, on Saturdays and Sundays Lucy went down to the lakefront or did her shopping. But for the third Saturday in a row, Lucy was sitting by Sutton Winchester’s bed. It wasn’t as if she had to watch him every moment of the day. The treatments were working, which meant he slept a lot. Still, Lucy felt a responsibility to be here, just in case. Her nurses needed a break, anyway, and all of this time gave her the chance to review her other patient files.
Whether he realized it or not, Sutton Winchester was a test case. Inoperable cancer that had already metastasized to the lymph system was not an easy thing to treat and the fact that he was responding at all was encouraging. What worked for him might work for others, too.
Which was what was important here. Not the way her heart felt—as if it had been cut out of her chest and put in a cooler full of ice to be donated to someone else who needed it more. Not the way Josh’s face had crumpled when she’d said goodbye.
Not the way she’d had one magical, romantic, perfect night. Her only one.
She caught herself staring at the old man. She’d seen pictures of him in his prime, of course. Sutton Winchester was hard to miss and the press had loved him. The man who was sleeping in the bed next to her workstation bore almost no resemblance to that captain of industry. She knew about his reputation—the mistresses and his willingness to get dirty when it came to business. By all accounts, Sutton Winchester was possibly the most selfish man she’d ever had the privilege to treat.
And, somehow, he was also turning out to be one of the most generous. The money that his children had donated to Midwest—in addition to the money that the Newports were already sinking into the new children’s hospital—would save countless lives. As much as she did not want to personally like Sutton Winchester—and he made it very hard to like him sometimes—she couldn’t help but be thankful for him.
Because of one of the most selfish, egotistical men in the world, people like Gary might have a better chance. If he’d been able to get the kind of treatment that Sutton was getting now, surely his leukemia wouldn’t have killed him before he turned eighteen.
She shook her head and tried to focus on her files. She was feeling maudlin, that was all. She was tired, her feet hurt after an evening in unfamiliar high heels—and she couldn’t stop thinking about Josh.
A small but insistent part of her brain was convinced she was making a mistake. A huge mistake. Because she was pretty damned sure she loved Josh.
Oh, who was she kidding? She’d loved him for years. Years. Even while she’d been dating Gary, she’d loved Josh. It hadn’t been this passionate, intense kind of love—but even then he was a good man who protected those he cared for. He’d made a dying boy and a socially awkward girl happy simply by being himself.
And now...now he’d made her love him even more. He’d sent her flowers and brought her dinner and made love to her. Okay, yes, he’d also revealed himself to be painfully human and capable of mistakes. But everyone made mistakes. He’d made it up to her. Oh, how he had made it up to her.
But what was she supposed to do? He’d blown back into her life like a tornado—and she certainly felt destroyed. Her life was in Chicago. His was in Iowa. He couldn’t stand being in Chicago because everything about it reminded him of his dead wife—and that still left open the question of children. There was no us, not for her and Josh. There couldn’t be.
A maid delivered Lucy’s lunch. There were copies of both the Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune on the tray. Sutton roused himself and demanded to see the newspapers. Lucy handed them over without a second thought. Today’s lunch was a quiche Lorraine with two slices of fresh-baked bread and delicate asparagus spears wrapped in bacon. This was not hospital food and as much as she wanted to get back to her regularly scheduled life, she was going to miss having a personal chef.
“Who is this?” Sutton said, his tone of voice demanding.
Lucy sighed and finished chewing her bite of quiche. “Who is who?”
“This is you, right? Who is this fellow you’re dancing with?” Instead of holding the paper out for Lucy to see, Sutton held it up to his eyes. “My girls did a good job with you. If I were a stronger man, you’d have been dancing with me—and doing a whole lot more than dancing.”
“It’s good to see you’re feeling better,” Lucy said patiently as she set her tray aside and moved to stand next to his bed. She didn’t encourage patients to hit on her—no woman in her right mind would—but it was a good sign that Sutton still had a lot of fight left in him. “Let me see.” Even as she said that, she realized who had to be in the picture with her.
She’d only danced with one man. Josh Calhoun.
Sutton tilted the paper so that she could see the picture of her and Josh. Oh, God—it was a really big picture—almost half a page. The rest of the page was a write-up of the event. The entire next page of the Sun-Times was nothing but photos of the Newports and the Winchesters and all of the other rich and famous people who’d been there.
“Is that the fellow who keeps sending you flowers?” Sutton asked.
Lucy didn’t like the way his voice had dropped and taken on a slightly suspicious tone. She paused as if she was trying to remember his name. “That’s... Josh Calhoun. I think he runs the Calhoun Creamery.”
That wasn’t much a lie, was it? No, not really. She had conveniently failed to answer the question of whether or not Josh h
ad been sending her flowers. It also didn’t answer the question of whether or not Josh would send her any more flowers.
She didn’t want him to. Was it wrong to just want a clean break?
Sutton looked as though he was thinking, so Lucy headed him off at the pass. “It was quite an event. Your daughters—and your son—did an amazing job of planning it. The hospital administrators were so happy and I think people had a really good time.”
She backed away from the bed to sit down with the remains of her lunch. But she didn’t have much of an appetite. She shoved the tray aside and returned her attention to her computer. Lives were on the line, after all. Her patients and their families relied upon her to be the cool, levelheaded voice of reason in a scary and dark time. She couldn’t afford to be distracted by something like love.
And, really, she should be better at this. She had years of practice of holding herself apart, of keeping up a wall between her personal emotions and those of her patients. She had to—it was the only way to stay sane.
So why couldn’t she keep up a wall with Josh right now?
The back of her neck prickled and she glanced over to see Sutton staring at her intently. And it was only twelve forty-five in the afternoon. How was she going to make it through the next day and a half until her nurses came back on duty without letting this grumpy old billionaire barge into her personal life?
“Yes?” Might as well get this over with. She didn’t do well with dread.
“You remind me of her,” Sutton said in a voice that was so quiet she almost didn’t hear the words.
“Excuse me?”
His eyes drifted closed. “The look on your face... The greater good. That’s what she used to say. The greater good for her sons. The greater good of my reputation. She had all these reasons why we couldn’t be together...”
Lucy sat very still. What questions was she supposed to ask? Because there were questions that needed answers—she knew that. Carson Newport had been coming to visit this old man for days in the hopes that he would say something—anything—about his mother. And Sutton hadn’t opened his mouth. Except to her.
Why her?
“I wish I’d fought harder,” he said, his voice starting to drift. “Don’t talk yourself out of what you need. She was so beautiful. You remind me of her...”
And then he was breathing deeply, his chest rising and falling.
Lucy sat there, every hair on her body standing at attention—she felt as though someone had applied the defibrillation paddles to her chest and forgotten to yell Clear.
The greater good? Of course, she had to be concerned with the greater good. She was a doctor. She saved lives. Everything she did was for the greater good—moving into this house, attending that gala ball. Her entire life was about the greater good. What did having her heart broken once—okay, twice—mean when held up against all of the people she had saved? It didn’t mean a damned thing. What mattered was advancing cancer treatments. What mattered was comforting people during hard times in their lives. What mattered was...
What mattered was that kids like Gary died because they didn’t have access to good doctors and proper treatment.
What didn’t matter—what had never mattered—was that she had been a thirty-five-year-old virgin. That she had been frumpy and ugly and unable to connect with the people who surrounded her.
It didn’t matter that she had been alone and that she had been lonely.
So, yes—she had her reasons. Really good reasons.
And she was already fighting as hard as she could.
* * *
Somehow, Josh found himself at the cemetery where Sydney was buried. He was pleased to see that the grass was neatly mowed and there were flowers at the headstones. He’d had very little contact with his in-laws in the preceding years—they had tried to get together that next Christmas after Sydney had died, but it was too painful for all of them and they’d drifted away until it was just cards on holidays and birthdays.
“Syd, I screwed up,” he told her as he knelt and pulled a stray weed away from her headstone. “I should’ve come to see you sooner. I’m sorry. But it just hurt too much.” He sat there for a moment, waiting for the overwhelming grief he’d always felt whenever he thought about coming to visit her grave.
It didn’t come. He was filled with a sense of sorrow, of regret for a life they hadn’t been able to spend together—but it wasn’t the crippling pain that he’d come to associate with the memory of his wife. Maybe he was finally getting over it. “I found someone,” he said in a low voice. “You remember me telling you about her? Lucy. Lucy Wilde. We ran into each other again and... And there was something there. Something good. I didn’t expect it and now...” He shook his head. “Now I don’t know what to do. I’m the one who always knows what to do, but not this time.” He scrubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms. “She says it can’t work. She’s married to her job and her job is here, and I can’t be here because this is where you and I were. When I’m at home in Iowa, I’m okay.”
Even as he said it, though, he knew that that wasn’t the truth. He knew that he hadn’t been okay until he came back to Chicago for Lucy. He did his job and he ran his company and he worked with his siblings—but that wasn’t okay. That was just barely keeping it together.
He was so tired of keeping it together. He didn’t even want to settle for being okay anymore. He wanted to feel good again.
He wanted to eat Thai food and drink wine and watch the sunset with Lucy. He wanted to take her out on the town and dance her around. He wanted to go to sleep with her in his arms and he wanted to wake up that way, too.
He swiped his eyes again. “I want to make this work with her, but I don’t know how.”
He didn’t know how long he sat there—long enough for the back of his neck to get hot from the sun. He desperately wanted to feel Sydney’s presence, to hear her voice telling him that it was going to be okay. Just as she had before the doctors had wheeled her into surgery.
But he didn’t. Sydney was gone.
Josh was alone, the way he’d been for the past five years.
And if he didn’t find a way to change Lucy’s mind, that’s how he was going to stay.
Fifteen
A week had passed since the morning Josh had realized that Lucy was not going to come out of the bathroom anytime soon and he’d gathered his clothes and walked away from her. In the seven days since, the urge to go back and force her to see reason hadn’t gotten any less strong.
It was noble, really, how selfless she was. How she put her patients ahead of herself.
Josh was not that selfless. By comparison, he was a selfish, selfish person.
But more than that, he was a selfish person with a plan.
“So,” his grandfather said, once Paige, Trevor and Josh’s youngest sister, Rose, had all settled in the conference room at the Calhoun Creamery. “What’s this all about?”
“Philanthropy,” Josh told him. “I was recently reminded that philanthropy is good for business.”
Paige, Trevor and Rose exchanged concerned glances, but their grandfather just smiled. “What did you have in mind?” he asked.
“I’ve been thinking that it’s time for us to invest in the Cedar Point community more heavily. I’d like to start with the Cedar Point Regional Hospital.” He took a deep breath. Sometimes, the line between selfish and selfless was so thin as to be nearly invisible. “A long time ago, my best friend died of leukemia.”
Paige leaned over and placed her hand on top of his, giving him a reassuring squeeze. “Gary—I remember him.”
“If he’d had a better doctor and top-notch care, the outcome might have been different.” Everything might have been different. But if there was one thing he’d learned in his life, it was that there was no going back. He had to k
eep moving forward. “My friends, the Newports, recently donated a significant amount of money to sponsor a cancer pavilion expansion at Midwest Regional Medical Center in Chicago. Thanks to their generosity, they’re going to make it one of the most advanced cancer-fighting hospitals in the country. I know we can’t replicate that level of success here—but surely we can help Cedar Point Regional build a better cancer unit.”
Paige and Rose exchanged another worried glance as Trevor said, “Are you feeling all right? I mean, this is a great idea and I think we’re all happy to get behind it—but you’ve spent the last five years hoarding the profits from the business.”
Josh winced. That was true—but he hadn’t thought of it like that. He had just thrown himself into the business. It hadn’t been about the money. It had been about pretending to be okay. And he was done pretending.
But his grandfather was grinning widely. “I think this is a brilliant idea. But, you know, the hospital is going to need to bring in someone to run this new oncology unit. Jim Cook is a fine doctor, but I don’t think he’s up-to-date on the latest in cancer treatments.”
Josh resisted the urge to snort with amusement. He had completely befuddled his siblings, but he wasn’t fooling his grandfather. Not even a little bit. “I think I know someone who might be interested in the job.” He hoped, anyway. Cedar Point Regional would never be comparable to a world-class institution like Midwest.
But people lived here. They were born here, they got married here and they died here. The best that Dr. Cook could do for most people suffering from rare forms of cancer was refer them to Des Moines to see a specialist.
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