“But something more than that happened. Maybe more than you planned. Certainly more than I’d expected.”
“What?” She didn’t bother to brush the tears away. She didn’t care. She wasn’t wearing makeup anyway.
“I started to care, really care, for the first time in my life. I was so stupid I didn’t even realize it at first. But when those tears started running down your cheeks, I knew I wanted to hold you in my arms and kiss away the sadness, protect you from anything that would cause that smile to disappear from your lips.” He held his arms out to her.
Liz had made many mistakes in her life she wasn’t aware of until later. This time she knew she was making a mistake but she did it anyway. She didn’t care. She couldn’t help herself. She walked into Matt’s embrace.
Nothing in her whole life had ever felt so good as his arms around her, holding her tight, cradling her against his chest. She felt like she’d come home after a long and turbulent journey, that she could rest secure in the knowledge the man she loved so much loved her, too.
She held him tight. She wanted to absorb the feeling of her arms around him. She wanted to give herself up to being protected, shielded, cherished. She wasn’t an impulsive girl this time, falling in love with a pretty face, flattered by the attention of a man who could have had any woman he wanted.
She was a woman, tried by misfortune, who could tell this time it would last.
“I didn’t want to care for you,” Matt said. “I didn’t want to care for anybody.”
“I know. I wore down your defenses with my children.”
“You wore down my defenses by your stubborn refusal to let me hide behind my excuses. And your children. And your wonderfully long legs. And your cooking.”
“Chauvinist!”
“Not guilty. I’ll be happy to share the cooking, but I’m only good with sandwiches and the microwave. I dread to think what Rebecca would say about my fried chicken. And I’m perfectly willing to let you admire my wonderfully long legs. We can begin right now if you like.”
Laughter bubbled up inside Liz. “You are a brazen man, and you know it wouldn’t take much to make me just as bad as you.”
“Let’s play dare.”
“How do you do that?”
“I make a dare, and you’ve got to top it.”
“Absolutely not! You have no shame.”
“Not anymore. I’ll do anything it takes to keep that smile on your face.”
She was certain he hadn’t meant to introduce a sobering thought, but he had. He couldn’t keep the smile on her face because they couldn’t share a life together.
“What did I say?” he asked when her smile vanished.
“Nothing. It was a lovely thought.”
“Then why are you looking like you want to cry again?”
“How can you expect me to keep smiling when you know you’ll leave in less than a year and I’ll stay here?”
“It doesn’t have to be that way.”
“Yes, it does. Everything you want is in places like New York. Going back there would make you the person you were when you came here. It would make me the woman David rejected.”
“No, it wouldn’t.”
“You’d have to be like that to survive. And I’ll never fit. I know. I tried.”
“This is no way to figure out what to do,” Matt said. “Both of us are too emotional. We need to wait until we have time to think about it logically.”
“Nothing’s going to change. You still want—”
The shrill ring of the telephone cut her off. Liz turned to answer it.
“Ignore it,” Matt said.
“I can’t. Somebody might be hurt.”
The phone sounded shrill and insistent.
“They can call 911.”
“Matt, you know you’d never forgive yourself if someone was hurt and you didn’t go.”
The ringing was getting on her nerves. She jerked up the receiver. “Hello.” She listened a moment, then turned to Matt. “It’s Josh’s mother. He’s screaming in pain, and she doesn’t know what’s wrong.”
Matt didn’t hesitate. “Wait up for me. We have to talk,” he said as he turned and started for the door. “Tell Mae I’m on my way,” he called back over his shoulder.
“He’ll be there in five minutes,” she told Mae Worsley. “Don’t worry. Matt will fix Josh up in no time.”
Liz hung up the phone. Any woman who married Matt Dennis would have to share him with his patients. Any time of the day or night. But his job wouldn’t close her out as David’s did. It would bring all his patients together into one tight-knit group around him. She and the children would be in the center with him. She could stand that.
She walked to the front door. She reached it in time to see Matt turn the corner at Hannah’s Drugs. The Worsleys lived about five miles out of town on the road that passed by the clinic. She felt certain no matter what troubled Josh, Matt would be able to fix it. But would he be able to fix what troubled her? What troubled them?
Could anybody fix two lives so badly broken?
Chapter Seventeen
It was past 4:00 a.m. when Liz heard Matt’s car pull into the driveway. She sat up in the bed and cut on the light. She waited. She expected his knock.
“Come in.”
She knew the moment he stepped through the door they weren’t going to continue their conversation. He stood in the doorway, tie gone, shoes in his hand, looking straight at her. He looked so down, so defeated, she immediately feared the worst.
“Is Josh all right? He isn’t dead, is he?”
It didn’t seem possible, but she didn’t know what else could have affected Matt so profoundly.
“He’s okay now,” Matt said.
“What happened?” It made her frantic to see him standing there like he didn’t know where he was and didn’t care.
“He was bleeding internally. We had to take him to the hospital at Woodstock. I stayed until he was feeling better. They’ll send him to Charlottesville first thing this morning.”
“Are you going with him?” She moved over and patted the bed. He sat down, dropped his shoes and gripped her hands.
“No. There’s nothing else I can do. Hell, I never could do anything.”
“You’ve just spent hours taking him to the hospital, making sure he was as comfortable as possible.”
Matt broke away. “I didn’t become a doctor to make appointments and pass out aspirin. I did it to make people well.”
Liz had never seen him with his confidence shaken. She’d never seen him vulnerable in any way.
“Here’s a great kid, his parents’ only child. It’ll kill them to lose him, and I can’t do a damned thing but take him to the hospital and hold his hand. Hell, a drunk off the street could do that much.”
“That’s not true,” she said. “You do a great deal.”
“What? Tell me one way that Josh Worsley is better off than he was the day he came to my office.”
“You’ve identified his disease and set up treatment. You’ve counseled his parents, explained everything—”
“And he’s not one bit better for it,” Matt said, his voice rising in frustration. “He was screaming when I reached his house. Screaming! Do you know what it’s like to watch an eight-year-old boy scream with pain and know there’s not a damned thing you can do about it?”
This was just the kind of thing Matt had tried to protect himself against by keeping his distance. She’d talked him into letting down his barriers, into caring for his patients. He cared now, far more than she ever thought possible, and it was hurting him as badly as anything that had happened to him in Gull’s Landing.
It was all her fault. “It must be very difficult,” she said. “I can’t imagine—”
“It makes me feel like a fraud who gives people hope, then ducks out before they realize he hasn’t really given them anything.”
“But you haven’t ducked out. You’ve been to see him nearly every night.”
“I spent four years in college, three years in medical school, two as an intern, three specializing. Twelve years! That ought to be enough to educate even the dumbest college freshman, but not me. I can’t even fix up a kid whose greatest wish is to see a Redskins football game.”
“Matt, you can’t beat yourself up over this. Nobody could have done more for Josh than you did, regardless of how many years they spent in school. You have to accept the fact that you can’t do everything.”
“But that’s just it. They expect us to do everything.”
“No, they don’t. Mae and Addison know there’s nothing you can do.”
“There ought to be. A kid like that shouldn’t have to die.”
Liz shivered. Matt had turned away. She touched his arm and he looked up at her. “Is he going to die?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is this the first time you’ve actually known a patient who might die?”
“Yes.”
She put her arms around him, and he pulled her to him. They sat without moving for several minutes. She didn’t know what to do except hold him. She couldn’t imagine what it must feel like to know people put their lives in your hands and then not be able to save them. It must be a terrible feeling of helplessness, of failure. Georgia had told her about his many successes when he was a resident, but she was certain it would be the failures that stood out in his memory.
Who would be with him in the future to comfort him when one of his patients didn’t make it, when a little part of him died because he felt he’d failed? Not a wife too busy with her own career to see his suffering. Not an office staff anxious to scrub up and get home when their shift ended. No, he’d be left to go through it on his own.
And it was her fault. She’d forced him to tear down his barriers, all because she thought she knew what was best for him. It might make him more human, but just how much could one human stand?
Matt seemed to stiffen slightly. He released her and stood. “Sorry. I guess I kind of lost it.”
He had collected himself. His moment of weakness was gone. But she couldn’t let him retreat into his shell blaming himself either for Josh or for reacting like a human being.
“No, you were grieving. All people have to do that, and doctors are people, no matter how much they try to deny it.”
He kissed her on the mouth. “I do love you,” he said. “You never fail to keep me straight.”
She scrutinized his face. He didn’t look devastated anymore. A moment of weakness. But he was all right now. “You don’t need me or anybody else to tell you what to do. But it’s nice for a woman to know her man needs her, that he has to lean on her for a change.”
“I need you. Especially tonight.”
Liz didn’t know when she said yes. She supposed she’d said it days, even weeks before, but she couldn’t force him to go back to his room tonight. He would go through this again and again, but tonight was the hardest. It was the first time.
Besides, she loved him. It would be impossible to send him away.
“Come sit next to me,” she said. She put the extra pillow behind his back, and he enfolded her in his arms. She rested her head against his chest. She could hear the sound of his heart beating. She pulled his shirttail out of his pants and slid her hand inside, against his warm skin.
His heart beat a little faster.
He held her closer and kissed the top of her head. “I was afraid you’d be asleep,” he said softly.
She looked up at him. “You said you wanted to talk.”
He smiled. “I’ve changed my mind.” She sat up and he kissed her, gently, lingeringly. “I decided we’ve been talking too much.”
She rested her head on his shoulder. She could feel his hands playing over her back, the thin fabric of her pajamas a fragile barrier between them. “Take off your shirt,” she said. “I want to touch you.”
“Only if you let me take off your top.”
“You first.”
Matt pulled his shirt over his head and dropped it on the floor. Liz couldn’t wait for him to remove her top before she started running her hands over his chest. She’d wanted this for so long, dreamed of it, told herself it would never happen. She couldn’t get enough of touching him. She put her arms around him and absorbed his warmth. She kissed his abdomen, his chest, his nipples; she smiled to herself when she felt his heart skip a beat then race forward.
“You’re so warm and soft,” she murmured.
“A man’s supposed to be strong and rough.”
Liz tilted her face so she could look up at him. “Not my man.”
“At least strong and virile.”
Liz placed her hand over his groin. “I think that question’s been answered.”
With a growl Liz swore came all the way from his toes, Matt pushed Liz down on the bed and dived beneath her pajama top. Even before she could pull it over her head, he buried his face between her breasts. The effect on her body was so overwhelming she could barely summon the strength to take off her top and toss it aside.
Her muscles ached, became heavy with tension, which caused her to shiver despite the heat rushing through her veins. The touch of his hands on her skin—the feel of his lips on her breasts—caused her nerve ends to become so acutely sensitive her skin hurt. Need flowed through her body with the speed of a brushfire.
Matt was kissing the tops of her breasts, tracing her collarbone with the tip of his tongue, kissing her breasts again. All the while, he gently massaged her nipples. Shafts of desire shot through Liz like a wildly disorganized display of fireworks. When he touched her with his tongue, then his lips, she gasped for breath.
“You’re...having...all the...fun,” she managed to say.
“I’ll try to do better.”
“I didn’t...mean that L..want...to touch...you.”
She ran her hands along his neck, his shoulders, his back. She felt the corded muscle, skin that burned to her touch. But the roughness of his jeans against her bare legs reminded her he was still wearing enough clothes to appear in public.
“You’re still wearing your jeans.”
He must not have heard her. He kissed the underside of her breasts, meandered down her side, began to trace designs on her stomach with his tongue. Liz decided that when it came to being a lover, an M.D. beat an M.B.A. any day. David had never done anything like this.
Matt distracted her so completely she hardly noticed when he eased her out of her pajama bottoms.
“You, too,” she said. “I want to touch you.”
“Not yet.” He moved up to take her mouth in a deep kiss.
His tongue forced its way between her teeth. She gasped. His hands began to knead her breasts. She couldn’t get enough of him. Forcing her hands between their bodies, she struggled with his pants. No one but Matt would wear a belt with jeans.
He broke their kiss long enough to say, “I’ll do that.”
A few moments of scrambling movements, and she had the sheer pleasure of feeling his hot, bare skin next to her own. She reached for him, but he slid down her body, kissing chest, breast and belly.
“Not fair,” she murmured.
“I’ll explode if you touch me.”
“I’m exploding already.”
“It’s not the same.”
She sat up in the bed and turned her body completely around. He was ahead of her. They ended up nose to nose, their heads at the foot of the bed, their feet on the pillows.
“You’re not going to let me touch you?”
“Not yet.”
“When?”
“When you’re ready.”
He touched her, entered her with one finger, and heat pooled in her loins. Gently moving within her, he touched a spot that acted on her like an electric shock. Her body arched off the bed.
“What are you doing?” she gasped. Nothing like that had ever happened with David.
“Trying to give you pleasure. Did you like that?” He touched her again.
Liz didn’t know if she could wait much longer. Matt touched that spot again, and she moaned.
“Now?”
“Yes.”
“Can I touch you?”
“Gently.”
Liz reached out and closed her fingers around him. He felt so soft and hot. And so hard. She wondered if it was uncomfortable. He touched her on that spot again, and she squeezed him. It was pure reflex, but it forced an anguished moan from him. He pushed her hands away.
“Open for me.”
She relaxed. His body became one with her own.
He kissed her long and languidly. But as the tempo of their lovemaking increased, as their bodies became slick with the heat of their passion, their kisses turned into a battle. Each one seemed driven to consume the other. Mouths, tongues, hands searched for ways to deepen and intensify the melding until Liz had no thought of anything but the waves of pure pleasure that washed over her with increasing intensity.
Finally their kisses became noisy gasps. Their bodies reached that fulfillment they’d been striving for ever since that first kiss. Liz reached the peak, let go and floated down the other side.
When her breath returned to normal, she lay nestled in the embrace of the man she loved.
Matt woke to find himself in an unfamiliar bed. It took a moment before he remembered what happened the night before. He and Liz had made love. He turned over, but the space next to him was empty. He lay back.
For a moment, he didn’t know what he actually felt about that. He loved Liz, but he wasn’t ready to face the consequences of what loving her meant.
He had to now. He couldn’t make love to a woman, then act like nothing had happened, not with the woman he loved.
Much to his surprise, a knot somewhere inside of him seemed to loosen. He had already begun to face the consequences of loving Liz. Making love to her was just one step. Next he had to convince her that they could have a future together. Her marriage to David would have failed no matter where they lived. People could hate in small towns. They could love in big towns. Sure, things would be different, but everything in his life was different now.
Just What the Doctor Ordered Page 20