by Caro Carson
“Yes, I did, but it’s irrelevant.”
“Good. It was always murder to get you to stop long enough to take a nap.”
Oh, but he had stopped her. He’d been very effective about getting her into bed. They’d make love, an afternoon interlude, a savoring of bare skin sliding on bare skin, and then she’d sleep like a baby.
Her gaze dropped to his throat again, to the skin revealed where the tie was missing. The man looked good in candlelight.
This was all wrong. She’d prepared for a business meeting, but here they were in a restaurant, sparring about her work habits, almost as if they were a couple. One had to love someone to argue with them about the hours they put into their job. Braden had once loved her, but that had died a long time ago. When he’d accepted the return of her ring, he’d lost the right to berate her work habits.
“I appreciate your concern, Braden. West Central will return accurate data on pentagab within the week, and I assure you the statistical analysis won’t suffer because one person in the research department failed to get adequate rest. Let’s move on. When Myrna delivered your message today, I took the opportunity to prepare a list of West Central’s assets.”
“In one day.”
“Yes. Like I said in the conference room yesterday, I’d like to give PLI the right of first refusal. We’ve got a lot to offer.”
“You can speak to Cheryl Gassett about that.”
“But this is why we’re here.”
The waitress chose that moment to introduce herself. Lana pasted a polite look on her face as she churned inside.
“We’re not ready to order,” Braden said to the smiling young woman.
Lana didn’t bother opening her menu as the waitress left. “Why would I deal with Cheryl when you’re right here, right now?”
“I’m one of the presidents of PLI, Lana. West Central is too small for me to personally work with.”
“Yesterday, it wasn’t too small. You took the meeting, not this Cheryl Gassett.”
“I wanted to see West Central again. I used the migraine study as my excuse. I needed to go back there one more time.”
Lana refused to ask why. The reason was going to be something personal, something to do with her. She wasn’t ready for this. Any one of a dozen Pandora’s boxes could open. She’d only come tonight for work.
“Fine,” she said briskly. “I’ll contact her. While PLI is in the process of building, I assume Cheryl will still consider West Central until the new facilities are viable?” If she’d learned nothing else in the past forty-eight hours, she’d learned that Braden wanted things to be viable.
“We have more important ground to cover.”
She opened her portfolio and called upon her training as a physician to operate dispassionately. Her voice was emotionless when she spoke. “Braden, I came here prepared to work with you. Nothing more.”
“I need more. I want to know where things went wrong, six years ago.”
She sat back, stunned.
Braden was direct. “The last time I spoke to you was over the phone. We were seventeen hundred miles apart, and you were sobbing—”
“No.” She refused to have this discussion. She was wild to avoid it. “The last time we spoke was in my office, around midnight. You canceled our eight o’clock meeting, then you scheduled this dinner through my assistant. Here we are.” She slid one set of papers toward Braden. “I’m sure it will be at least a year before PLI can complete the building, and in the meanwhile, West Central can offer—”
“You were sobbing, damn it, and you wouldn’t let me say anything then, either.”
“This isn’t the time or place.”
“It’s now or never, for me. There are things I need to know. That last phone call from you was too short, and too confusing, and too important.”
Alarm made her turn in her seat, angling toward the door.
“And so help me, Lana, if you leave this restaurant, I’ll follow you. And then we’ll have this conversation in the parking lot. Your choice.”
“You lured me here,” she accused, feeling trapped. “You had no intention of doing business with West Central at all.”
“As you so astutely began to point out to me, PLI will need to use existing facilities while our own are being built. Don’t worry, Dr. Donnoli. Your precious research department will be duly analyzed as a possibility for all appropriately targeted studies.”
He had the absolute gall to slap the papers back onto her portfolio, close the folder and set it on the window ledge next to their table. “Now, I’d like to speak to Lana, the woman I once planned to marry.”
“She’s not available.”
He leaned the smallest bit over the table, and she gave herself away by inching back.
“You owe me this,” he said.
“I owe you?” Like a dam breaking after days of strain, the words rushed out of her. “You are the one who left me. You left Texas, and you left your training as a physician, and you left me. All at once.”
He sat back at her words, doing a fine imitation of a man who was amazed. Words seemed to escape him for a moment as he shook his head in disbelief. “Is that how you’ve twisted it for yourself? All this time, you’ve been painting yourself as the injured party?”
“I am the—I was the injured party.”
“I never left you. I never gave up on us. That was all you, Lana.”
Their table was in an alcove, but it wasn’t completely private. The diners at the nearest table turned their heads at their emphatic statements.
Lana lowered her voice. “You moved to Boston instead of starting our life together in Texas.”
“I moved to Boston temporarily, to get my MBA from one of the best schools in the world.”
“Two years, you would’ve been gone.”
“Two years, while you were working hundred-hour weeks as chief resident. We wouldn’t have seen each other, anyway.”
“We would have if you’d been working at the hospital, too, like we’d planned.”
“I didn’t want to be a doctor, Lana.” He practically ground his words out through clenched teeth. “How many times can I tell you? I knew in our second year of residency that I wouldn’t be happy as a physician, but by then I’d put so much effort into it, I was wise enough to finish the program.”
“I never heard any of those doubts during that second year. Not until we were well into our third year, and already engaged.”
He looked away from her at that, silent for a moment as he rubbed his jaw. Lana felt a little satisfaction that she’d gotten him to look away first.
“I didn’t complain during the second year, because that’s when I fell in love with you,” he said, gazing out the dark window. And then, even more quietly, “Wild horses wouldn’t have driven me away.”
Her heart hurt all over again at the reminder of what it had been like to be loved by this man. To be a priority in his life.
He turned to her again. “But by the third year, I knew that I couldn’t live an entire lifetime in the wrong career, even with you by my side.”
“But you finished your residency, anyway, and then you wasted it. You would have been a great doctor, and you wasted it.”
“No—you would have been a great doctor. I’m sure you are a great doctor. You love everything about it. You have a calling for it. I didn’t.”
“We both graduated in the top ten percent of our class.”
He made a dismissive gesture. “Because I’m smart, Lana. Just like you. I didn’t say I couldn’t have been a doctor academically or technically. But being smart would not have made me a great doctor where it counts—in the treatment room, one-on-one with the patient.”
Lana sat back in her chair. “So instead of working with me, the fiancée you’d promised to spend the rest of your life with, you left.”
“I went to get an education in the area where I wanted to apply my talents. Med school had always been my parents’ idea, not mine. They had this picture in their
heads of all three of their sons becoming doctors, just like Dad. They groomed us for it for as long as I can remember. They got their way—they could tell their friends I’m a doctor, because technically I am, but I’m leaving the actual doctoring up to Quinn and Jamie.”
Another little arrow lodged in her heart at the names of his two brothers. When she’d lost Braden, she’d lost his family, too, including the two men who had already accepted her as their sister. Braden had changed his mind about their future, and that had changed everything. Everything.
“You knew I wanted us to start a practice together,” she said, resentment fresh inside her. “We’d talked about buying Dr. Forrest’s practice from him when he retired.”
“You knew I was applying to MBA programs throughout that final year of residency. I was wise enough by then to know that we’d be happier in the long run if we were each satisfied with our careers.”
It had dimmed her happiness, though. The future they’d planned together was no longer adequate. Resentment had made its ugly entry into their relationship, and she hadn’t known how to prevent it, not when being a physician was still considered good enough for her, but no longer good enough for Braden MacDowell.
And then I got pregnant; that didn’t fit into anyone’s plan.
She’d loved him madly. Deeply. Yet he’d become no more than a voice on a phone line while she held a positive pregnancy test in her hand.
She couldn’t say such a thing out loud, not after years of silence, so Braden continued speaking.
“I thought a two-year sacrifice would pay off in decades of happiness with you. A long-distance relationship was going to be hard, but I knew what I felt for you wasn’t going to change in two years.”
“Well, it’s been six years now, not two. Feelings did change, didn’t they?”
She said it as more of a statement than a question, but she was suddenly aware that the answer wasn’t necessarily clear. There was something in the way he was looking at her in the flickering candlelight. Something in his voice, as if the hurt and the emotion were still raw for him.
“Didn’t they?” she repeated and held her breath.
“Lana, I...” Again, he looked away from her, out the window, into the night. “Lana, there’s another woman. It’s been six years. Six years. I went to the jeweler to buy her a ring. I thought it was the right thing to do.”
To get down on one knee again? To open a little velvet box and make a woman’s heart stop with your declaration of undying love?
He’d already done that once, in a hospital’s chapel. For her. And she’d believed every word. Somewhere in her heart, a little piece of her still believed he’d love her forever.
“Lana, I need to be heart-whole to offer this woman a diamond ring. I came back to West Central yesterday to face my memories. To bury them. I wanted to be certain that my feelings for you were over.”
That little, private piece of her heart died. Emotions flashed through her, one by one. Shame, that she’d even saved a corner of her heart for him. Sorrow, for what had never truly been between them and never would be. Then rage, over the fresh pain he was bringing her.
The rage obliterated everything else. She snatched her portfolio off the window ledge and nearly tipped her chair over as she stood.
“Lana, wait.”
She’d made it only one step before Braden grabbed her arm, as she had grabbed his just yesterday by the elevator.
She shook his hand off in a vicious, decisive move. “Do you really expect me to sit here and listen to you break up with me again? My God, Braden, how could you? How could you?”
She strode out of the romantic restaurant, letting the fury keep her head high as every person in the place watched her exit.
* * *
Braden spotted Lana as she was trying to open the door of an older car, a plain vehicle that was parallel parked on the street. She was illuminated by the glow of the streetlights, her figure highlighted every few seconds by the headlights of a passing car, making her seem all the more vividly alive against a flat black night.
God, she was beautiful. In every flash from the headlights. From every angle, in every mood.
But she’d always been beautiful. It hadn’t saved their relationship then; it wasn’t going to help him now. He needed answers, and the only woman in the world who could provide them refused to.
“Lana!” He was angry now, truly angry.
She was trying to jam a key in the car door’s lock. He hadn’t seen anyone do that in a decade, at least.
“Go away,” she said, but she dropped her keys onto the pavement. She laid her portfolio on the roof of the car and bent down to retrieve the keys, and that amazing silky black hair of hers fell over her shoulders and face as she half twisted in his direction. “Everything I needed to say, I said six years ago.”
I couldn’t hear most of it through my own grief.
“Damn it, Lana, talk to me.” He tossed his suit coat on top of her car’s roof, too, then lifted her by her shoulders out of her crouch, turning her to face him. The dry air of a cool Texas night was all that was between them. God, he wanted to kiss her. It had become a habit, a way to settle all their differences, and he craved it still.
Another car passed, too close.
“We can’t stand here and chat, Braden. Yes, we’re over. Go live your life with your new fiancée. You have my blessing. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
She was beautiful in her anger, alive in his hands, but he was an older man now. Six years of unanswered questions had taught him that communication between the sheets wasn’t enough.
“I want to know where we went wrong,” he said. “When, exactly—because things were falling apart even before you got pregnant. How did that tie in to it? If you hadn’t gotten pregnant, would we have stayed together?”
She went absolutely still.
“If you hadn’t miscarried, would you have married me for the sake of the baby? Or did you already hate me enough by then to leave? Was that miscarriage the last straw?”
“I don’t want to talk about that with you.” She twisted out of his hands and went back to jamming her key in the door.
“What the hell—? I was your fiancé. I would have been the father of that baby. If you don’t talk about it with me, who do you talk about it with?”
“No one. That pregnancy is not something I want to remember.”
It threw him, how badly that hurt. He’d come here tonight prepared to bare as much of his soul as was necessary to learn how she felt about their past. He’d swallowed enough pride to admit to her the real reason he’d taken the meeting at West Central yesterday, but a man could only take so much. If she wouldn’t talk to him, then he’d let her go and he’d deal with it himself.
Like I’ve been dealing with it for the past six years. Always wondering what if, what if...
His pride hadn’t helped him, not when it came to his heart.
“Please, Lana. I’m the one who needs someone to talk to. You are the only one. The only one who even knows about that loss. You may not need to talk to me, but I need to talk to you.”
Chapter Eight
The scene unfolded for her as if she were watching someone else’s life. There he was, handsome. Humble. Asking for her help to get over an intensely personal experience, the loss of their unborn child.
Please, Lana...
There she was, afraid. Afraid that if they had this talk, things would never be the same. If they relived that time, would they tie everything up neatly and then put those memories away, forever? She wasn’t ready to let her last piece of him go; the painful memories were all she’d had of him for six years.
Or maybe, just maybe, she didn’t want him to know that the miscarriage had been all her own fault. He would hate her, more than he did already.
Please, Lana...
Braden waited for her answer. She stayed numbly in that surreal state of mind, waiting to see how this scene would unfold, when she was sucked back
to reality with a crash. Literally.
An ungodly sound from the street, the impact of metal and mortar, bones and glass, made Lana turn instinctively. Braden’s arms were instantly around her, his body shielding her for those critical seconds before silence fell. Lana pushed her way out of his arms to see what had happened.
On the other side of the street from the restaurant, an open-bed pickup truck had crashed right through a storefront. Lana spotted the bodies that must have been thrown from the truck’s open bed, sprawled in unnatural positions on the concrete. A few people were frantically making their way out of the store, pushing their way around the ruined truck, climbing through the shattered wall of glass that had been the front of the store only seconds before.
As one, she and Braden began running toward the scene that others were instinctively trying to leave.
“Call nine-one-one,” Lana ordered him, barely slowing to check for traffic before crossing the four-lane street. Her first rule in any medical emergency was to call for an ambulance. Her second was to never assume someone else had already called.
“Doing it,” Braden answered tersely, cell phone in one hand, his other on the small of her back as they half ran, half walked to the first body that lay facedown on the concrete in front of the store.
She knelt by the prone body, not daring to roll the adult male over. He surely had shattered bones that could puncture vital organs if she moved him. She pressed two fingers on his wrist, but there was no discernible pulse. They’d reached him first because he’d been thrown the farthest from the truck. She pressed a hand to his carotid artery, willing him to have even the faintest pulse, but she could tell from the unnatural flatness of his skull that it had been shattered.
“Deceased.” She said it out loud, out of habit, although there was no nursing assistant to make notes.
She started working in a triage mode. That patient was gone; on to the next. Adult female, supine. Lana found a pulse with one hand and opened each eye with her other, looking for any response in the pupil. She had no penlight to flash and had to rely on the store’s exterior lighting to produce some response. Fixed and dilated, no apparent hemorrhage site, pulse regular.