The Doctor’s Former Fiancée

by Caro Carson

  She knew that was what he was thinking while he smoothed her hair. She remembered it from before, when they’d been so in love. She closed her eyes, unwilling to cry at this moment. They were still so in love.

  “Lana, look at me.”

  She did, melting with emotion, dying from anticipation.

  “What we’re about to do might have obvious consequences,” he said in a voice husky and deep. “Are you on any birth control?”

  A cold trickle of reality penetrated the pleasant barrage of sensation that his warm skin was causing.

  “N-no.” She wasn’t protected, but she didn’t want him to stop tonight. She wanted his body and all the pleasure it would bring—but she’d forgotten such a basic thing.

  Her disappointment must have shown on her face, because Braden touched her lips with a finger. “Don’t worry. There are condoms in the first aid kit. Nothing is one hundred percent effective, though. Especially not condoms.”

  Her body was adjusting to the sensation of being next to his, freeing her mind to concentrate on his words—which must be important, because the man was waiting for her to say something when he should be touching her.

  “It will be fine,” she said.

  “The last time we made love, the very last time, the odds caught up with us. You told me it sent you into a panic. You told me this week that you can’t handle the idea of having children. I need to know, Lana, before we do this. Are you going to be okay if you get pregnant tonight?”

  “What?” She ought to feel as if that icy creek water had been dumped on her, but his body was against hers, too warm to let her freeze. “Why would you ask me that now?”

  “Because I can’t do you harm. How can I take pleasure in this when there’s a chance that it will result in something that terrifies you? It’s like playing roulette with your happiness. I can’t do it.”

  She gaped at him, speechless. He was half-nude in her sleeping bag. She could feel the heat and hardness of his length against her thigh; the flannel of his pants hid nothing. He didn’t feel like a man who couldn’t; he most certainly could. Right now.

  “The other night, on the porch, you said you weren’t able to handle being a mother. Tell me why.”

  “You want to talk?” she asked, incredulous. “This is a terrible time to talk.”

  “No, it isn’t. We have the entire night. You can tell me anything, and I’ll stay right here and listen, and keep you warm and safe.”

  He’d listen, but he wouldn’t like what he’d hear. She wasn’t normal, a woman who happily anticipated centering her life on the needs of a child. He’d be turned off if he knew how much she dreaded the idea.

  “I thought we were going to have sex.” She sounded like a sullen child, even to her own ears. “That’s all I wanted to do.”

  Braden rolled onto his back with a hiss, a short sound of air through his teeth. He sounded frustrated—or furious. Startled, Lana looked over at his profile.

  “That’s a damned selfish thing for you to say, Lana. I’m not here to have my heart broken again. I won’t make love to you this weekend and then have you decide we shouldn’t be together.”

  I’m not here to have my heart broken again.

  With those words, he blew away the last of her lingering resentment for the loneliness she’d survived. Humbled, she sought his hand under the covers and interlocked her fingers with his. “I’m sorry. I forget sometimes that I wasn’t the only one in pain for the past six years.”

  He closed his eyes and squeezed her hand. “The pregnancy was traumatic for you. Take me back there. It was October, and you were four months into your year as chief resident. I imagine you were in your apartment, standing at a bathroom sink, holding a pregnancy test in your hand. You read the result. What was your first thought?”

  “That my life was over,” she whispered. “Everything I’d accomplished, gone in an instant.”

  Braden waited.

  “I did the math in my head. I wouldn’t make the full twelve months of the residency year. I held that stick, and I thought ‘all gone.’ I’d already lost you—or at least, I’d already lost any chance of the future we’d planned, owning a practice together. And now I was going to lose what I had left. I wasn’t going to be able to finish my residency.”

  He rolled to face her again, keeping their joined hands between their chests.

  “I’d deliver near the end of May. You would still be at Harvard, taking finals, probably leaving for a summer internship in some Fortune 500 company in Chicago or L.A., living your businessman’s dream, but my dream was over. I’d be forced to take maternity leave at my parents’ house, so my mom could help me change diapers around the clock while I healed from...”

  She swallowed and barreled on. They’d delivered babies as residents. “While I healed from the delivery. My dad would be so disappointed.”

  Braden shifted so that her head was on his bare shoulder. “Your dad might have been happy to have a grandchild. He’s a very traditional guy. You make it sound like you would have been a disgraced teenager from his era, kicked out of school, but you were twenty-seven, and you would have been married.”

  “Married to an out-of-town husband, spending my days cooking and cleaning and caring for a baby, like every other woman my dad has ever known. I wouldn’t be special after all. When you’ve always been praised for being the best, being normal can be a failure. Dad took such pride in me being the best.”

  “Instead of being the best doctor, you would have been the best mother.”

  “That’s the problem. I don’t want to be the best mother.” She could feel her own temper rising. Braden didn’t understand. Even at the time, he’d treated the pregnancy as if it was no big inconvenience. Tonight, he wanted to hear the whole ugly truth of her feelings? Fine, then.

  She untangled herself from their cozy cuddle and swiftly sat up, turning on him so he could see her face. “I don’t want to be the best mother. I had the best mother. My mom was the best, and do you know what that made her? Tired. That’s what cooking and cleaning and caring for your husband and your children gets you.

  “I learned that lesson when I was young. Because I was a girl, I was expected to be her helper. Every once in a while, I’d catch her standing at the kitchen sink and looking out the window. Her only view was the house next door, where another mother lived, another tired woman. Then my mother would sigh, and her little break was over, and she’d start scrubbing another pot, cleaning it just to get it dirty again for another meal. I felt sorry for her.”

  She’d started to cry, tears trailing down her cheeks, but she wasn’t sad. She was angry.

  Braden sat up, shoving aside the sleeping bag, but she held him off with a stiff arm when he would have pulled her close.

  “I learned how to wax a floor and clean a tub. I helped the best mother in the world with the dishes every single day. My brothers took out the trash. That’s a manly chore. Do you know how long that takes? Five minutes, once a week.” She swiped at her tears. “I wondered why they got such easy jobs. Were they better than I was? The answer was obvious, even to a child. They were boys. They didn’t have to learn how to be a mother.

  “But then, there was school. Everyone got their report cards on the same day. Dad looked them all over at the same time. Mine was the best. I could beat all the boys at school.”

  Braden bent one knee and rested his arm on it, settling in for her story. He didn’t interrupt. He didn’t sigh in sympathy, or nod in agreement, or shake his head in disgust.

  He did hold her hand, and he waited.

  “One glorious day when I was in high school, my middle brother—Antonio, you remember him—asked me when I was going to finish the laundry. He had a debate coming up for the end of the school year, and he needed a dress shirt to be pressed. I was in the middle of studying for final exams. I remember it, clear as day, even the page in my precalculus book. I was taking the same course as a sophomore that my brother Roberto had taken as a junior.�
�

  She paused to dash her cheek against her sleeve and laughed ruefully at her own words. “Do you see how proud I was of that? It’s been twenty years, and I still remember it.

  “Anyway, Antonio asked when the laundry would be done, and my dad hollered from his TV chair, ‘Leave Lana alone. She doesn’t have to do your ironing. She’s got a math test to ace.’

  “I’d just been handed the golden key. I had a way out. I didn’t have to do all the boring things that my mother did, not as long as I was the star student. You know the rest. I was valedictorian. I won scholarships. I went to medical school. My life was a lot better than my mother’s, as long as I was better than everyone else in school.” She paused, relieved that no more tears had fallen.

  Braden squeezed her hand. “I don’t think that was your only reason to excel, but I can see that it added incentive. Your personality is to master whatever task is at hand. I’ve always admired that.”

  “It annoys you. Just this week, you said something about me working late because I wanted to prove I was the best.”

  “It challenged me. You weren’t giving up on pentagab. It’s been too long since I’ve had you around to keep me on my toes. I like that drive.”

  “It’s not a good trait. I was still being the best when I got pregnant. I was the best damned resident at West Central, so good that they were paying me double to stay an extra year and train all the other residents. I was pretty proud of myself, remember?”

  “You had a right to be. Chief resident is an honor.”

  “Stop being so nice about it.”

  Damn it, she could feel the tears welling up again. She let go of his hand and held hers up in a gesture that imitated holding a small, plastic stick.

  “When I held that pregnancy test in my hand, I thought how disappointed the faculty would be in me. Instead of chief resident, I was just going to be the pregnant girl who couldn’t fulfill her commitment. My dad, the faculty, myself—all disappointed. Do you see how bad I am? A normal woman would be happy that she and her fiancé were having a baby. Not me.”

  She was sick of her own tears. She hated to relive the misery. She grabbed the shirt she’d worn earlier and used it to dry her face, making an attempt to laugh off her distress. “At the time, I was in the middle of a serious pity party. I’m reenacting it for you.”

  Braden didn’t smile.

  There’s nothing amusing about finding out you almost married a drama queen.

  Lana tossed the wet shirt into a corner of the tent and attempted a calming breath. “I would’ve had to take May and June off, at a minimum, and I was worried that the third-year residents would take all the openings for private practices in Austin. If I had a C-section, August would be off the table, too. Honestly, I was scared at the idea of taking any break at all, because what if I loved maternity leave? What if I didn’t want to leave my baby and start a new job?”

  It was as overwhelming now as it had seemed then.

  “Can you imagine the irony? I resented being pregnant for taking away my dream of being chief resident, but it was possible that the opposite could happen. After twelve years of effort to become a doctor, I might resent my career, for taking me away from my baby.”

  Her last words hung in the silent, cool air of the tent.

  “Your baby,” Braden said. He scrubbed his hands over his face, a move of frustration. “Not our baby.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. Of course it was our—”

  “That wasn’t a criticism of you. It’s on me. I couldn’t have been more absent. Look at all the ramifications you just laid out. I never considered half of them. Would my wife need extra help after a C-section? I never thought about it.”

  He seemed upset. She knew him, and she knew that when Braden was upset, he found release in action. He couldn’t walk anywhere, though. It was cold outside, and they were half-dressed in a heated tent in the middle of two thousand acres, and there was nowhere for him to go, nothing for him to do.

  Lana tried to soothe him. “You didn’t have to think of those things. We never got to that point.”

  He reached up to lower the lantern’s light. They’d been in the tent long enough for their eyes to adjust, and they didn’t need the bright light to see clearly.

  “You thought of them,” Braden said. “I should have, too, instead of saying patronizing things like ‘it’s unexpected, but it’s going to be okay.’ No wonder you mailed my ring back.”

  “What did you say?” Her words came out as a whisper.

  “No wonder you mailed my ring back. It was the right thing for you to do.”

  She could not mistake his meaning: he was no longer angry with her for breaking their engagement. She’d already learned this week that he had never blamed her for the miscarriage. That left...

  Nothing. Nothing but a clean slate between them.

  “Braden.” She rose on her knees, nearly knocking him over in her eagerness as she took his face in both of her hands. “Braden MacDowell, I’ve missed you every single day since I put that box in the mail. I hate living without you. May I have my ring back?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Stay right there.”

  Braden dropped the briefest of kisses on her mouth, then rolled to his hands and knees and started unzipping the tent’s door.

  Lana dove for the safety of her sleeping bag as the cold air rushed in and Braden rushed out. She listened to his footsteps. He wore only the flannel plaid bottoms on a winter’s night, running to the pickup truck. She heard the horses as they let him know he was crazy by stamping their feet and shaking their leads. The truck door slammed shut, and a moment later, Braden practically dove through the tent door.

  “It’s frigging cold out there.”

  “Get under the blanket.” For the second time that night, she lifted the flap of the sleeping bag.

  Braden didn’t hesitate to join her. His bare chest was like ice.

  “Eek! Don’t touch me.”

  Braden started backing out of the sleeping bag.

  “No, stay. You’re cold. Just don’t touch me.” It was a ridiculous idea, of course, because the sleeping bag was a single. They laughed and shivered and scooted around, making room for each other. “Are the horses okay? Do we need to trailer them?”

  Braden tapped her nose. “They’re fine, and you’re a good cowgirl for asking. They’ve got their own coats, plus blankets, too. It’s only freezing if you’re a naked man.”

  “Hmm. I don’t actually see a naked man anywhere.”

  “Let a guy warm up before you make him take off his pants. Speaking of cowgirls, do you want to live in Texas after we’re married? I don’t want to assume anything.”

  “Oh, yes. Do you?”

  They were cozied in the sleeping bag up to their necks now. Braden nodded. “I can’t move immediately, but I’ll be home often this year. Way more often than when I was in Boston.”

  “Because now you’re filthy rich.”

  “Yeah, I kind of am.”

  Braden’s body heat had quickly chased away the cold. Lana was already growing too warm. She wiggled one shoulder and arm out from under the covers.

  “You don’t like the idea of marrying a rich man?”

  She didn’t ask how he’d guessed. They seemed to be so very in tune with each other. “It complicates things. No medical practice is going to generate the kind of income that your job does. If PLI needs you to move, I’ll have to give up my job and start over somewhere else.”

  Their faces were close together, sharing her pillow. Braden kissed the corner of her mouth. “It’s not a competition. I’m not competing with my wife ever again. If we want to live in Texas, then we’ll live in Texas.”

  “You didn’t let me finish. I’ll have to give up my job and move with you, because I’m not going to live without you.” She threaded her fingers through his hair and kissed him hard. “I missed you so terribly. Now that you’re back, it’s going to be hard to let you go for even a shor
t business trip. I want my ring back, something to show the world that you’re mine while you’re gone.”

  “I couldn’t sell that ring.” Braden smiled at her, but Lana thought there was a trace of sadness behind his smile.

  “But it isn’t quite the same anymore. We’ve gained a lot of experience the hard way, but that experience is precious. Your ring is more precious now, too.”

  He rose and positioned himself so he was kneeling in the traditional pose of a man who proposed. Lana could only stand on her knees in the low tent. He was bare-chested and she was bare-legged as they faced each other on their knees, but that seemed perfect to her, perfect in every way.

  Braden must have been holding the velvet box in his hand the entire time, because he simply turned his palm up to reveal it. “I hope you’re not disappointed. I had it altered yesterday.”

  He opened the little box. The ring inside looked nothing like the simple solitaire she remembered. The diamond in the center was surrounded by two more circles of diamonds. There were so many stones with so many facets, the ring sparkled even in the low glow of the camp lantern. In the Texas sun, it would burst with light.

  Lana fell from her knees to land on the floor with a thud. “My goodness. My gosh.”

  Braden sat beside her quickly. “It’s too much, isn’t it? But look, the center is your diamond, the original stone. It’s still there, still just as strong as our feelings for each other.”

  He stopped himself abruptly, then continued with a dip of his chin that very nearly made him look shy. “This sounds sappy, but that’s how I thought of it. I wanted to show you that I’m not taking our love for granted. I protected it with another circle of diamonds. That’s how important it is to me, do you see?”

  “I do. It’s so incredible that this is how you see me. That this is what you think I should wear.”