“Morning, Sandy,” Gloria said, wanting the floor to open up and swallow her whole before she could spend any more time wondering what her employees thought of her. The only good thing about this situation was that Sandy was discreet and loyal. “I’ve just got a quick consult with Dr. Madden before my first patient. Did I miss anything this morning?”
“Nope,” Sandy assured her, continuing on her way to her desk. “Morning, Dr. Madden.”
“How’re you doing?” Aaron answered vaguely.
Gloria and Aaron filed into Gloria’s office. She shut the door but didn’t bother sitting. She was out of patience, and Aaron wasn’t going to be here that long.
She got right up in his face.
“What?” she demanded. “You’ve got ten seconds.”
To no one’s surprise, Aaron launched a full-out charm offensive.
“You’re hurt.” Nodding like the soul of sensitivity, he dimpled at her, eased closer and reached for her waist. “I understand that—”
“Understand this,” she said sweetly. “If you touch me again—ever—I will slap you. And I don’t care who hears it.”
His expression cooling by several degrees, he took a step back. “There’s someone else, isn’t there? You’re screwing someone else, aren’t you?”
This accusation, coming from him, was so incongruous—so patently outrageous—that the only thing she could do was laugh.
He bristled.
“Coming from the man who’s been sleeping with a woman other than his wife for the last two years? Wow. That’s rich.”
“You think this is funny? I asked you a question, Glo.”
“What I do is no longer any of your business,” she said, standing firm as her amusement slipped away. “And you need to leave.”
He didn’t move.
They faced off in a brittle silence, with Gloria wondering where she’d finally gotten the courage to end it and mean it. Maybe it was as simple as God’s light hand on her shoulder, giving her the strength to decide what was and wasn’t okay with her and to settle for nothing less. In the end it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that this was over, and she meant it.
The funny thing was, she wasn’t particularly angry or sad about it.
Just resolute.
Consternation formed such deep groove lines between his eyes that she almost felt sorry for him.
“You love me.” The closest thing she’d ever seen to genuine pain flashed across his expression. “That doesn’t end like that.” He snapped his fingers. “This can’t be over like that.” Another snap.
She tilted her head and thought about it.
“I was attracted to you. I wanted you. I waited for you.” She paused, wanting to get it all out there and to say it right, because she knew this chance wouldn’t come again. “I gave everything I had to you. I threw away my moral code for you. I felt guilty for you. I hid in the shadows. For you.”
He shook his head and raised a hand, clearly wanting to slow her down. “Gloria—”
“I put my life on hold for you. For two years. I thought I loved you. I thought we were worth it, but now—”
Hope lit his face as he reached out for her. “We are worth it, baby.”
She shrugged helplessly. “But now I just look at you and see...a waste of time. A lesson learned.” She pressed her lips together, trying not to let a sudden flare of bitterness get the best of her. “All I see is a man who doesn’t care about what I need or want.” She hesitated, then decided there was no point to pulling her punches now. “A selfish man.”
He took an aggressive step forward, his heavy brows flattening over his flashing eyes. “I’m selfish?”
“Oh, I know I’m not innocent.” She snorted derisively, shining the relentless spotlight on herself and thinking of all the times and ways she’d wronged his wife and the mother of his children, a woman she’d never even met and who had certainly never done anything to harm her. When karma swung back around in Gloria’s direction, it was surely going to give her a big bite in the ass. “Trust me, I know. I’m ashamed. I have to live with that. I deserve the guilt.”
“Look,” he said, rubbing a hand over the top of his head and clearly thinking hard. “Look...we both need some time to think—”
“Oh, I don’t need any time,” she assured him. “The only thing I’m thinking is thank God your wife never knew about us. It would’ve hurt her for no good reason.” She paused. “Well, that and thank God we always used condoms.” Crossing to the door, she opened it for him. “Goodbye, Aaron.”
For a few seconds he seemed too stunned to move, but then he got his body in gear and walked toward her, his steps slow and deliberate. Then he was in her face again, dimpling with the self-assurance that had undoubtedly helped him float through life with minimal thought to how his actions affected others.
“You’ll be back.” The confident gleam that she knew so well crept back into his eyes as he stepped over the threshold and turned to face her. “There ain’t a man out there that can make you come like I can. You’ll be back.”
A startled burst of laughter hit her, hard, before she managed to choke it back. What a narcissistic SOB she’d hooked herself up with. Why had she never seen it before? The sad thing was, he really believed that nonsense. Luckily, she was just the woman to burst his oversize bubble.
“Oh, honey,” she said, reining in her smile and dropping her voice. With exquisite care, she straightened his tie and smoothed the lapels of his lab coat. “I thought you knew. I can buy a vibrator that’ll be twice as effective as you and only half the hassle. Bye, now.”
In the most deliciously satisfying moment of her life, she shut the door in his shocked face. Then she turned back around, swiped her hands together—good riddance—and surveyed her office.
She was no longer hungry, so she dumped the oatmeal in the trash. But she was still a little agitated, and her office didn’t feel quite right after his unwelcome invasion. In fact, it felt contaminated. Not that there was much she could do about it, since she had to see her first patient in a few minutes. And it wasn’t as if she had a priest on speed dial. Otherwise, she’d call him in to perform a quick exorcism of Aaron’s spirit, both from her office and her life.
But she did have air freshener and hand sanitizer.
She liberally spritzed the air with her laundry-fresh spray, then squirted a full tablespoon of her industrial-strength sanitizer in her hands. She worked it in, which was the rough equivalent of dunking her hands in undiluted bleach, then took a deep breath, feeling slightly better already.
But, man, it was hot in here. She pressed both hands to her cheeks and discovered that she was crying. Not an ugly cry, though. Just a few random tears that were a lingering memento of what had already been a very emotional day.
And it wasn’t even noon yet.
“Wow, Glo,” she murmured to herself, shaking her head. “You’re a real mess, you know that? A real freaking mess. And to think they gave you a medical license. First rule of pulling it together? Stop talking to yourself.”
She shut up.
There. That was a step in the right direction.
But she couldn’t very well greet her patients looking as if she’d been crying. So she swerved into her private bathroom and was using a tissue to mop up the blotchy mascara patches under her eyes when her phone vibrated in her lab coat pocket.
Normally, if someone called her right before an appointment, she’d let it go to voice mail. But the possibility that it might be Cooper was too enticing to pass up, and she had the phone in her hand by the middle of the second vibration.
Her pulse kicked into overdrive when she saw the display.
“Cooper,” she said, trying not to sound flustered. “Hi.”
“You sound funny,” he told her.
“I do not sound funny. And we don’t know each other well enough for you to know whether I sound funny or not.”
He made a disbelieving sound. Did a smirk have a sound? Because if so, it’d sound just like that.
“We’ll get back to that. What’d the doctor say about Talia?”
“The usual,” she said. “They’re doing blood work and scans. We should know more by the end of the day.”
“Waiting sucks.”
“Yeah. But her oncologist’s a good guy and he won’t mess around. So she’s in great hands. And guess what—Tony showed up at her appointment and asked her to marry him. He had the ring and everything! So now they’re engaged! But don’t mention it until Tony tells you.”
“You’re happy for her?”
“Very happy for her. She deserves some happiness.”
“So do you, Doc. So why did you sound funny when you picked up?”
There he went again, sniffing out all her secrets like some sort of emotional bloodhound.
“It’s not even worth getting into.” She fidgeted with agitation, checking her watch and smoothing her skirt. “Forget it. So do you have a breakfast meeting?”
There was a pause.
“I can wait,” he said.
“Fine,” she snapped. “If you must know, nosy, Aaron was just here.”
Longer pause.
“Yeah?” he asked, his voice tight. “How’d that go?”
“I can’t get into it. I have patients waiting.”
There. She sounded very firm and official, and that should put an end to the third degree.
A low rumbling sound suspiciously like a growl came from his end of the line.
“You’re like a dog with a bone, Eagle Scout. You know that?”
He ignored this insult with the single-minded focus of a bloodhound. With a bone.
“What did the guy want, Gloria?”
“He wants me back,” she told him. “He always wants what he doesn’t have at the moment.”
“Is that so?” he said in a voice like splintered ice. “And where do you stand on that? Now that you’ve had a couple nights to sleep on it?”
“I told him to get out. I’m done with him.”
“What?” Cooper asked. “You did?”
“Yeah. It’s over.”
Cooper hesitated. “You don’t just wrap up a two-year relationship, even a bad one, in a single conversation.”
“I’m. Done. With. Him.”
A sharp exhalation followed by a shaky laugh. “I’m glad to hear it,” Cooper said.
Chapter 7
Two nights later, Gloria lay in bed in a wired and exhausted stupor. Flat on her belly with her head and one arm dangling over the side, she watched the sharp blue display on her alarm clock.
One forty-seven.
She hadn’t been sleeping well. To make things worse, today’s surgeries had kicked her butt, leaving her wrung out and stressed. A liposuction patient had developed a bleeding complication, scaring them all for several tense moments. Another patient, a scheduled breast reduction, had to be canceled because her blood pressure wasn’t stable.
This wasn’t how she’d imagined spending her life all those years ago, in the backbreaking days when she’d worked and clawed her way through college, medical school and her residency. She’d never thought she’d be spending all her time and training helping rich women in their relentless quest for ageless physical perfection. She’d thought she’d help people who’d been burned or otherwise disfigured in accidents. She’d thought she’d mend the precious faces of children born with cleft palates. She’d thought she’d spend her days doing something worthwhile that made her proud of herself.
That was her problem these days. She didn’t know what it felt like to be proud of herself.
Then there was Talia. Always Talia.
She stared at the clock.
Still one forty-seven.
Tonight’s bath hadn’t helped her unwind, nor had the mug of hot milk and honey, nor had the second mug of hot milk and honey, this one liberally laced with brandy.
Nothing helped.
Her eyes were gritty, her shoulders knotted and her nerves frayed.
Cooper hadn’t called again.
One forty-seven.
Over on the nightstand, her phone buzzed, its bright display dissipating the shadows and lighting up the bedroom. Startled, she snapped to attention, scrambled up to sitting and grabbed the phone.
Cooper, she saw, feeling a swoop of relief so powerful it scared her. She hadn’t realized how much she liked hearing from him or that she’d been waiting for it.
“Hey,” she said.
“Sorry to call so late. Are you sleeping?”
“No.”
“I was hoping...”
“Yeah?”
“You didn’t think about me today, did you?”
Gloria couldn’t admit the truth, but she couldn’t manage a breezy lie either. Her hesitation probably told him everything he needed to know.
“So I forgot to mention,” he said, his voice a low rumble in her ear, so close that it was almost as though he was here in the room—in the bed—with her, “I’ll be home on Friday.”
Her heart began doing a funny staccato thing.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. So you could have dinner with me.”
She shouldn’t be this tempted, and for one fleeting second she hated him for seeing inside her, exploiting her weaknesses and showing her again—as if she could ever forget—what a mess she was. Having an affair with a married man and then, just when she grew enough brains to get out of that bad situation, thinking about another man. Wishing he would call. Wanting to see him again. When had she become one of those despised women who couldn’t survive for two seconds without a man by her side?
What was she doing?
How was she ever going to be proud of herself if she never stood on her own two feet?
“I can’t,” she told him.
“You can’t eat?”
“I can’t have dinner with you.”
“You’re right,” he agreed. “Dinner’s way too significant, and I don’t want you thinking I like you too much.”
God, she thought, grinning even though she didn’t want to. Why was he so disarming?
“Cooper—”
“Lunch, then. Lunch has no significance as a social convention. It’s just lunch.”
“I’m a disaster right now, Cooper. You know this. You shouldn’t even want to spend time with me.”
“I’m a disaster, too. I’m a workaholic. I have issues about being adopted. And I haven’t cleaned out my sock drawer in months. Years, probably. So have lunch with me.”
Catching herself just before she began to laugh, she gave herself a swift mental kick in the ass. Focus. She needed to focus. “I can’t.”
“Gloria—”
“I can’t. Please understand.”
A harsh sigh. “So you don’t think about me?”
Did she think about him? Please. Was Times Square overrun with tourists?
“That’s not the issue.”
“It’s the only issue, Doc.”
The rising frustration in his voice hardened her resolve. She couldn’t play with his emotions or send mixed signals or jerk Cooper around the way Aaron had jerked her around. She wasn’t going to do it.
“I need to figure out why I’m so screwed up.” There it was, right on the table for all to see: her biggest shame. �
�I need to figure out who I am and what I need. And I can’t do it if I go straight from him to you.”
For the longest five seconds of her life, he didn’t say anything.
“If you don’t want me hanging around,” he told her, his voice husky, “then tell me not to call you anymore. It’s easy.”
She took a deep breath and, for once in her life, did the smart thing.
“Don’t call me anymore.”
Thumbing the off button, she dropped the phone to the carpeted floor with a soft thunk, resumed her belly-down, arm-dangling position on the bed and stared at the clock with gritty eyes.
One fifty-one.
Two Months Later
Jackson Hole, Wyoming
Cooper topped off his bourbon, sipped half of it and did another lap around his huge room, growing more agitated with each step. He and his brother, Marcus, had flown out west to Sweet Heaven, the over-the-top ranch owned by one of their clients, Judah Cross. Judah, an aging rocker with enough hard-living mileage to give Mick Jagger and Steven Tyler a run for their money, had invited them, along with Claudia Montgomery, who worked at a competing auction house, to his home to be vetted. Judah wanted them to “peel back the layers” so he could “get to know their souls” and thereby decide which auction house was worthy of handling his memorabilia sale.
Which basically meant that Judah was requiring everyone to jump through a lot of hoops and listen to his woo-woo existential B.S. before he awarded anyone his business.
Since the memorabilia was worth at least 20 million, they’d all sucked it up and attended Judah’s bonfire tonight—yes, bonfire, with hot dogs, s’mores and even bison burgers—and talked about their innermost secrets.
Fun had not been had by all. The process had been the rough equivalent of being caught peeing in a public elevator, and he was not keen to repeat it.
Ever.
Finishing the last of his bourbon, he savored the trail of heat down his throat and swiped the back of his hand over his mouth.
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