In a Doctor's Arms

by Lisa Mondello

Teresa nodded. “It’ll do until then.”

  “What is it?”

  She waved him off. “Nothing urgent. Just something Benny said that doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “But Cammie wasn’t there at the scene. I called her into the clinic when I was called by the dispatcher. What would she have to offer?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe nothing.”

  He smiled. “I’m glad to see you’re really embracing this. I like that.”

  Teresa rolled her eyes. “I’m not out to save the world, Dennis. I just think Allie probably saw what happened and can help me sort things out with Benny. Cammie may have some insight into Molly that may be useful. She was Molly’s best friend and knew her.”

  “What does knowing Molly have to do with the accident?”

  “Like I said, maybe nothing. But it’s important that I find out as much information about the accident as possible so I can counter Benny’s negativity and blame. If he relies only on his memory or imagination of what happened, he may continue to blame himself for things that weren’t his fault, and I won’t be able to help him move on.”

  “Then I think it’s a good idea that you have a talk with them. Benny shouldn’t have to carry guilt for what happened. Driving over Abbey Bridge during the daytime can be a challenge when too many cars are involved. The conditions on New Year’s Eve made it much worse.”

  Teresa shook her head. “Benny’s so confused. He won’t tell me about what drove him the other times he tried to hurt himself, what was going on in his life. So I have no idea if this incident is even related to his past depression.”

  The worried look etched Dennis’s strong and handsome features once again. “He didn’t say anything at all?”

  “All he said is that it’s all his fault Chuck is hurt, but he didn’t cause Molly’s accident. I keep thinking there’s more than what meets the eye here. There was enough going on with the weather that night to cause a pileup without laying blame in any one direction.”

  Dennis opened the glass front cabinet door above the counter and pulled out a can of olive oil. He sprinkled oil on the cast-iron frying pan already settled over the flaming burner and pushed the cut pieces of raw chicken into the pan.

  “Want me to heat the tortillas?” she asked then took a sip of her root beer.

  “Have you ever done it before?”

  “Once or twice,” she said, her lips stretching into a grin Dennis found infinitely appealing.

  “Then you’re light-years ahead of me.”

  She chuckled. “You really don’t cook often.”

  “No, I’m usually satisfied with a frozen TV dinner or takeout from the Twin Falls Café across from the clinic. Most nights I call ahead to Louise to make up a plate of whatever is on special. I never had to cook while I was in Iraq, and Donna used to do all the cooking before.”

  “Donna?”

  “My former fiancée.”

  Her breath hitched. “You never mentioned you were engaged to be married.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “No, just noteworthy.”

  He glanced at her and remembered a time when something as small as standing in the kitchen brought back memories of Donna. But now he searched for some remnants of regret or sadness and found that they weren’t there. Instead, he reached over and cupped her cheek. He flipped a lock of her hair behind her ear, letting his fingers pause on the flesh beneath her ear. He was over Donna…but was he ready to risk his heart on Teresa?

  “I think of it as a small blip in the grand scheme of things.”

  “Your engagement was a blip?” she asked skeptically. “Oh, that’s romantic. I wonder why she split?”

  “What makes you think it was her who left?”

  “Okay, bad assumption.”

  He shrugged, trying not to let the fact that Teresa was dead-on correct get the better of him. “She was the one to leave me. But it was mostly Stockington Falls she didn’t want. She asked me to go with her when she left.”

  “And you didn’t run after her.”

  Dennis returned to sautéing vegetables. “No, I didn’t run after her.”

  “Were you together long?”

  “Yes. All through med school, in fact. But the strange thing was when I came back from Iraq, it was glaringly clear that our visions for the future were very different. To a certain extent I knew that before I left on my tour. I thought we’d overcome it, find a way around it, whatever.”

  “But that didn’t happen?”

  “I’m not career military. I’m in the army reserves and was called out for a tour in Iraq. I didn’t mind being called. I wanted to do what I could for the soldiers there. Donna and I had been separated for fifteen months by the time I returned. She was fully entrenched in her job at Mass General and wanted nothing to do with the things I had realized were really important to me. We tried the long-distance relationship thing for a while, but it didn’t work. In the end, it didn’t hurt as much as it would have if we didn’t respect each other so much.”

  “So you called off the engagement just like that?”

  “Pretty much. She got a job offer in D.C. and wanted me to go with her. I asked her to come here, which she did for about a month to see what had such a hold on me. The clinic was almost open at that point. One morning, she just woke up and said goodbye, and that was it.”

  Teresa’s mouth had dropped open during his story. When she became aware of it, she lifted the gold-rimmed glass to her lips to take a sip of drink.

  “It sounds very…”

  “Adult.” He practically spat out the word as if it tasted bitter, and there had been days it had. But since he’d met Teresa, it amazed him how much those bitter feelings had faded.

  Teresa listened to Dennis with interest. It amazed her just how open he was being with her. Once people found out she was a therapist, they usually closed off from her, even the ones who came to her for counseling. Everyone has painful things they want to hide, and everyone was afraid of how much they might actually spill while talking to a professional. But this was more than just uncharacteristic openness that she was getting from Dennis. She’d never known a man to be so transparent and feel so comfortable with it the way Dennis seemed to be.

  “You sound as though the behavior bothers you more than losing someone who was important to you.”

  He shrugged, tossing the vegetables into the skillet. Teresa decided not to tell him he should be sautéing instead of stirring. Seeing the vulnerable side of Dennis as a man instead of the practical medical doctor was worth more than perfectly sautéed chicken and vegetables.

  She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been that open with anyone. Even before everything had fallen apart in Hartford, Teresa hadn’t really had anyone she felt she could confide in. Would she still have run from Hartford if there had been someone there she could turn to? If someone like Dennis had been there, would it have made a difference? She didn’t know. She was the one people came to for answers, yet she had none for herself.

  “I think that was the whole problem. We were too professional, too courteous with each other. We respected each other’s position and didn’t cross the boundaries. Except once.”

  “Only once?”

  “Yeah, if you can believe that. I pressed her to stay in Stockington Falls. We’d met in Boston during our residency. I told her I couldn’t stay there. She knew that. I’d already decided Stockington Falls was where I wanted to start my practice, but I wonder if I’d ever really shared that with her. When I left for Iraq, I asked her to marry me and come live here.”

  “She must have wanted to or she never would have said yes to your proposal.”

  He gave her a wry grin. “She did say no, at first. I was pretty persuasive. And being young and in love, we didn’t look far enough ahead. But I think she said yes against her better judgment just as I proposed somehow knowing it wasn’t going to end up the way I envisioned. Anyway, it only seemed fair to respect her wish to make a difference prac
ticing medicine in D.C. instead of a small community like Stockington Falls.”

  “Any regrets?”

  “You reach thirty-six years of age and you’ve achieved some sense of who you are and some measure of success. I don’t mean monetarily but personally and professionally.” He glanced at her quickly, then back to the frying pan. “Success is measured in many more ways than just in a career.”

  “I think you’ve done a tremendous job here. From what Vanessa told me, Stockington Falls never had a medical facility before you started the clinic.”

  His smile was slight but filled with pride that made it seem much bigger than it actually was. “It’s one of the reasons I wanted to come back here after I left the army. I’d been gone for almost ten years. I knew I couldn’t live in D.C., which is where Donna is now. This is where I’d always planned to be. Funny though, I’d always pictured myself at this age with at least a few kids running around.” He shrugged. “God had other plans, I guess.”

  Teresa chuckled. “You’re not ancient, Dennis. You could still have a family. There’s plenty of time.”

  His gaze bored into her, strong and meaningful. “What about you, Teresa? Have you ever thought about having children?”

  Her jaw dropped open and closed in a millisecond as she thought carefully about what she would say. Her mouth suddenly felt like cotton. “I guess I’ve always thought it would happen sometime in the future. Most of the time I think of the kids at the high school as being my children.”

  “Your work in Hartford, it’s important to you?”

  “Yes, very much. It always was, anyway. I put my heart and soul into my work for the past ten years.”

  “Then what made you come running to Stockington Falls?”

  She stared for a few seconds, not quite knowing what to say. She didn’t want to talk about her reasons for coming, although it was clear Dennis knew there was something that had made her run. Was she really such an open book that he knew she’d not just come to Stockington Falls for a simple change?

  Of course, his conversation with Spencer had probably given him more reason to suspect it even if he didn’t have the facts to go along with his assumption. Dennis was a smart man, and a simple check of the archives from the Hartford Courant on the internet was probably all he needed to put two and two together. Still, if he knew the truth, he didn’t push, as if he was waiting for her to make the first move in telling him what really happened.

  She wasn’t ready to go there. While she couldn’t deny that she felt quite at home with Dennis, her wounds were still raw, and she needed to nurture them a little while longer before uncovering them in front of anyone.

  Lord, will it always be this hard?

  “That’s almost ready, isn’t it?” she finally asked.

  Dennis averted his gaze—not noticeably, but she knew… He’d wanted an answer, wanted her to open up to him the way he had to her. And the low rumbling sound he made showed his disappointment that she hadn’t.

  He nodded his head in answer to her questions. Dinner was almost done and so was the conversation about Hartford and her reasons for being in Vermont.

  It was only then that Teresa realized she’d practically gone the entire conversation without doing her part for dinner. She’d been so totally engrossed in Dennis’s story that she’d forgotten her offer to heat the tortillas. “Just give me a second to get these ready.”

  He grabbed a skillet from the lower cabinet and dropped it on the burner next to the other pan. He was inches from her in the tiny workspace. There was a whole, wide-open kitchen behind them, but they were standing close.

  It took Teresa a second or two to realize Dennis had killed the flame under the frying pan he’d used to cook the chicken and vegetables. He just stood there, staring down at her while she flipped the tortilla.

  She braved a glance up at him, the all-built-for-serious-business Dennis Harrington. No matter what he was doing, he always looked strong and capable.

  His voice was low when he spoke. “Are you afraid, Teresa?”

  She moistened her lips. “Of what?”

  “Of working with Benny.”

  She sighed. “I’m okay, Dennis. You don’t have to worry about me freaking out on Benny or running through the halls of the clinic again.” She pressed her hand to her face as shame crashed in with the memory of it all. “I know I shouldn’t have done that.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  She snapped her gaze at him.

  “What did you mean?”

  “You reacted to Benny and the situation. Yeah, I get that, and I know you’ll be on your guard. If that part was going to be a problem, you wouldn’t have come back and agreed to help him. I’m not worried about you quitting. I’m worried about you. He’s my nephew, and I know how difficult he can be. Are you up for it?”

  She chuckled. “You mean teenage attitude? Piece of cake.”

  “Lady, you’re one strong woman,” he said with a deep chuckle that was balm to her soul. “Something tells me you’ll give him a run for his money. And look at you.”

  She slowly lifted her gaze to him, saw his shaking head.

  “What’s wrong with me?” She glanced down at her sweater and long skirt as if she’d find something glaringly wrong with the way she’d dressed. She’d worn her shirt right side out. Her clothes were clean.

  Dennis tipped her chin up with his finger.

  “You look incredibly cute right now, but you’re burning the tortillas.”

  She gasped and pulled the flat pan off the burner before flipping the tortilla. It was indeed on its way to being burned.

  “Then stop distracting me,” she said.

  Dennis gave her a teasing grin. “Was your takeout of choice Chinese or pizza?”

  He had her pegged.

  “Okay, I’m not much of a cook myself. I admit it. Subs at the corner sub shop. Stop distracting me from what I’m doing.”

  “Okay but only because I’m hungry. I won’t distract you any more with conversation until we sit to eat.”

  She let Dennis go on thinking it was the conversation that had her burning the tortillas. Only she knew it was the distraction of the man whose company she was in.

  Chapter Seven

  They did, indeed, continue their conversation through dinner, but Teresa was glad that the subject was far away from Hartford. Neither one of them had trouble finding things to talk about—so much so that Teresa was surprised when she glanced at the clock on her way to putting the dirty dishes in the sink and it read 9:30 p.m.

  As Dennis loaded the dishwasher, she made coffee; then they settled on the overstuffed sofa in his living room. Quite a bit larger than the small living area of the cottage, Dennis’s living room was decorated in a soothing palette of earth tones and vintage pieces of furniture. She wasn’t sure if they were antiques, but they blended well together and made the room look homey.

  The granite fireplace that commanded the opposite wall from the sofa had the small glow of fading embers. Dennis has started the fire earlier, but it had died down from neglect during their dinner. As she curled up on the sofa with a warm cup of coffee in her hand, she watched as Dennis stoked the fire back to life.

  He’d pushed the sleeves of his white shirt up on his arms as he worked, revealing a nasty scar on the inside flesh just below his elbow. She’d seen scars similar to this on troubled students over the years, usually self-inflicted or the result of a knife fight.

  In the dim light, the scar could easily be overlooked, but now that she’d found it, Teresa had a hard time keeping her curiosity over it in check.

  “Did you get that scar playing sports when you were a kid?” she asked, hoping it was from something as simple as childhood athletics and not a result of something that had happened while he was in the army.

  His eyes drifted from the fire he’d just set a log on to her, his gaze lingering on her lips, then her eyes, then moved to the scar on his arm. “I was a resident at Boston General when I
got this wound.”

  Her stomach sank. “Oh, that can’t have been good.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” he said, pushing the fire screen shut and settling onto the sofa next to her.

  “Do you mind me asking how it happened?”

  “A kid just out of high school came in the E.R. one night. He was higher than the moon and thought he was Marilyn Manson or John Lennon or who only knows what.”

  He shifted to his side, bringing her legs up so they stretched across his on the sofa. She wiggled her toes as he rested his hands on her feet. As he caressed them, she sank back against the back of the sofa and listened to his story.

  “The guy never really had a chance,” he said softly. “I never like saying that, but it was true. It was almost as if he was already gone the moment they wheeled him in on the gurney.”

  “If he was that far gone, how did he manage to hurt you?”

  Dennis sighed heavily, his hand stopping in mid-motion on the heel of her foot but remaining in place. “It was as if he’d come to life on a surge of adrenaline—just all of the sudden. Drugs will do that. One minute he was down and the next he was slipping a hunting knife from his boot and swinging. I wasn’t what he was aiming for. Truth of it is, I don’t even think he could see me. But the blade found its way in my arm before the police officer who’d come in with the EMTs restrained him. I was lucky this is all he hit. For a while, I thought I was going to lose the use of my arm. But I was luckier than him.”

  Teresa groaned softly. “Don’t tell me.”

  Dennis cocked his head to one side. “You work in the school system. I’m sure you can figure it out.” He shook his head. “That was a long time ago. Unfortunately, things like that don’t just happen in the city. I’ve seen that very thing happen right here. Although, thankfully, not as often. What makes it harder is that I know most of the kids here.”

  “Is that why you wanted to come back to Stockington Falls? To help people you know instead of dealing with strangers?”

  “People are people wherever you go. In Iraq, it didn’t matter to me if I was treating a soldier or an Iraqi who couldn’t understand a word I was saying. If they needed help, I was there. But coming home was different. I wasn’t just a tourist coming here to ski like everyone else. I saw there was a need that wasn’t being filled, and it was going to take someone who loved the place and loved the people here to fill it. I guess you could say it was my wake-up call from the Lord. There was no reason I couldn’t make as much a difference in Stockington Falls as I could in Boston.”