by Carol Grace
After the last patient left, she paused in the doorway to his office. “Are you coming to dinner?” she asked.
“Is he coming?” Sam asked.
“I assume so,” she said coolly.
“Then I’ll be there.”
“You’re afraid I’ll brainwash him, aren’t you?” she asked.
“I’m afraid you’ll seduce him.”
Hayley paled. The implication was clear: I’m afraid you’ll seduce him…the way you seduced me. Her knees shook, and she felt as though she might faint. She gathered all her strength, took a step forward and slapped him across the face. Stunned, he jerked backward.
“I deserved that,” he muttered, rubbing his hand over his cheek.
“Yes, you did.” She marched out of the office then, leaving him standing there, his eyes glazed, his cheek still carrying the imprint of her hand. She walked home in a daze, passing a few people on the sidewalk without speaking, without seeing them. She’d never struck anyone in her life. Not in anger, not in frustration. She didn’t believe in violence. But she wasn’t sorry she’d done it.
He didn’t come to dinner. She wasn’t surprised. Charles wasn’t, either. He said he’d run into Sam in the diner having a cup of coffee after work. Hayley found she had no need to brainwash or seduce Charles into taking the job. Not that she would have done either. He was convinced to give New Hope serious consideration by the time he arrived for cocktails in the living room. Over dessert he said he’d like to hang around for a week and see if it was the right place for him.
“Sam told me I’d like it here,” Charles said, balancing his plate of crème caramel on his lap on the couch.
“Sam said that?” she asked. He must have realized that if Charles stayed, he could leave. “It’s a wonderful town, but then, I’m prejudiced,” Hayley said. “What else did Sam say?”
“He said it was a great place to live and bring up kids. There’s really everything a person could want—fresh air, friendly people, fishing…. Honest to God, when he finished talking about the quality of life here, the friends he’d made, the patients he’d treated, I almost felt sorry for him, going back to San Francisco.”
“I wouldn’t feel too sorry for him,” Hayley said dryly. “He has everything he wants there. If I didn’t know him so well, I’d say he was giving you a sales talk.”
Charles nodded. “Maybe. But I’ve been through other interviews and I think I know when somebody’s being insincere. I think he really believes it. He’s an interesting guy. At first I thought he was one of those arrogant, hotshot surgeons who’s full of himself. But underneath he’s really a good person. I, uh, it’s none of my business, and maybe you know it—” Charles’s face turned red as he spoke “—but that guy has it bad for you.”
Hayley shook her head. Sam had really done a number on Charles. Talked him into spending some time in New Hope while giving the impression that he was interested in her. Which he had been. For a while. Now it was over. Sam could leave with a clear conscience, now that they had a solid prospect. She couldn’t help it, she had to ask. “What makes you say that?”
“He said something about you.”
Hayley didn’t want to hear what he had to say about her. But she was a glutton for punishment. “Go on.”
“He said you were everything that was good about New Hope. You’re honest and kind and generous, unpretentious.” Charles pushed his glasses up his nose and looked at her through his thick lenses. “The man acts as though he’s in love with you and with the town. But if he is, then why…? I don’t get it. Well, anyway, I’m keeping my options open.”
Hayley opened her mouth to beg him to accept the job, to forget his other options, because Sam was going and going for good, but instead of speaking she set her coffee cup down abruptly and went to the kitchen. She stood there, gripping the edge of the counter while the tears streamed down her face. She knew that whatever happened, Sam would leave as soon as he could and he’d never be back. She knew, too, that all hopes of forgetting him were futile. She would never be able to walk into his room without remembering the night she’d first made love with him.
Damn him. Damn him for saying something nice about her, damn him for making her indebted to him for convincing Charles to stay, for spoiling her for anyone else, for making it impossible for her to live in her own house without being haunted by his presence…without seeing him every time she went to the kitchen, to the garden or slept in her bedroom.
Of course she got over it. She stopped crying in a few hours. In the morning, after a sleepless night spent listening for Sam’s car, a bleary-eyed Hayley was suffering a monumental headache. At the office, she found Sam had written a detailed history of every patient for Charles, what treatment he recommended and a little character sketch. He must have been up all night working on it, then he’d left town quietly without leaving so much as a note for her or picking up his things at the house. He was that anxious to avoid her. She didn’t care. She would ship them to him. But she couldn’t stand to even pack them up. Not yet.
As the days passed, every time she went into the room he’d occupied, she was hit with the faint smell of his shaving lotion and the memories of their nights together. She couldn’t believe he would walk out on her like that. Couldn’t believe he didn’t think of her from time to time. Believe it, she told herself. She meant nothing to him. It was time to get that through her head.
It was especially hard to get it through her head when she talked to Mattie at her house where she was recovering.
“I can’t leave the office for a week without everything falling apart,” Mattie complained, wearing a velour robe and sitting across from Hayley at Mattie’s pine kitchen table.
“Nothing has fallen apart,” Hayley assured her. “There has been a seamless transition. Wait till you meet Charles.”
“Already met him. Awfully young, isn’t he? Yes, he came to see me as soon as I got back from Portland. Said Sam told him to. Said I can go back to work next week. I asked him if he’s staying for good. Told him Doc Bancroft was in practice for sixty years. He said he couldn’t promise anything. Said he wouldn’t leave until we had a replacement. What’s that mean?” Mattie didn’t wait for an answer. “When I get back you can take some time off. You look terrible.”
Hayley smiled weakly. “Thank you, Mattie.” She stood up to refill her teacup, afraid Mattie would see beyond her pale face and the dark smudges under the eyes into her broken heart.
“What’s wrong with Sam, taking off like that?” Mattie asked.
“Nothing. Charles came, so we don’t need him anymore,” Hayley said, not mentioning that Charles hadn’t signed a contract, preferring to wait until he was sure this was the right place for him. She intended to make an effort to convince him as soon as she could. But right now she didn’t seem to have the energy to convince anybody of anything. Least of all to convince herself that she wasn’t in love with Sam
“Humph. Told you, you should have invited him to dinner more often.”
“His leaving had nothing to do with me,” Hayley said.
“You expect me to believe that?” Mattie asked. “After I saw the way he looked at you, the way you looked at him. I may have a bad heart, but my eyes are working just fine. Something was going on with you two.”
“Yes, all right,” Hayley admitted with a sigh. “Something was going on, something that we started back in high school. But we’re grown up now and it’s over. Life goes on.”
“How’s life going on with Sam?”
“I have no idea,” Hayley said.
“Why don’t you give him a call or better yet go down and see him.”
“I can’t do that,” Hayley said indignantly. “Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, I don’t know where he is. He’s not supposed to go back to work for another few months.”
“He’s at home in San Francisco,” Mattie said. “He called me this morning to see how I was.”
Hayley’s mouth fell open in surprise. �
�How…how thoughtful.” She wanted desperately to ask if he’d asked about her, but she pressed her lips together to keep from saying anything.
“He asked about you,” Mattie said, and Hayley’s heart skipped a beat. She told herself he was just being polite. If he really wanted to know how she was, he could call and ask her himself.
“I suppose he thinks I’m just pining away for him,” Hayley said. “I hope you told him I was doing fine,” Hayley said.
“Of course,” Mattie said. “He’s trying to decide what to do with himself. He’s considering several options.”
Hayley had to bite her lip to keep from asking what they were. “Well,” she said. “I’d better be getting back to work. Charles isn’t quite sure where everything is.”
True to her word, Mattie came back to work full-time, and Hayley had nothing to do. Except for the occasional guests, she felt cast adrift without a purpose to her life. The town still held a certain charm, a new store had opened up on Main Street; she was roundly congratulated for finding a new doctor; the beaches were beautiful; but something was missing. That something was Sam. Her life stretched ahead of her like a long, flat beach leading nowhere.
She picked up the phone a dozen times to call him, but she only got a recorded message from his starchy secretary, saying he was away from his office and if this was an emergency she could “press one.” She could call him at home, but she didn’t want to ask Mattie for his number and give her the satisfaction of knowing she was trying to reach him.
But Mattie was one jump ahead of her. On the day Charles signed a lease on Grandpa’s office, she came by the Bancroft House and handed Hayley Sam’s home phone number and address. “Sam’s leaving on a trip. Wouldn’t you think he needs the clothes he left behind? Seems to me it’s a good excuse to take a run down there, bring them to him.”
“Why should I?”
“Because you can’t get on with your life until you close this chapter,” Mattie said wisely.
“Sam seems to have gotten on with his without closing this chapter.”
“I’m not too sure about that,” Mattie said. Before Hayley could ask what on earth she meant by that, Mattie was walking down the walkway to her car. She waved over her shoulder and left Hayley standing in the doorway with the paper clenched in her hand. Burning a hole in her hand. Until she knew she had to do something about it. Mattie was right. It was time for closure.
She packed Sam’s belongings into his suitcase and placed it next to hers in the trunk of her grandfather’s old car. She drove straight through down Highway 5 to the San Francisco address on the paper Mattie had given her. It was a tall building, a luxury condominium in a posh neighborhood. Hayley ran a comb through her hair, straightened her jacket and squared her shoulders. But she couldn’t still her pounding heart. What if he’d left already? What if he slammed the door in her face, which she deserved after slapping him. She almost hoped he would, because if he let her in, she had no idea what she was going to say.
She stood outside the glass doors so long the doorman was giving her a suspicious look. She gave him a brief smile, then went up to the twenty-third floor and knocked on the door.
“Come on in,” he yelled. “It’s not locked.”
She opened the door to a sparsely furnished, high-ceilinged apartment and stood in the middle of the living room on a polished-oak floor, looking out at a spectacular view of the Golden Gate Bridge.
“You’re late.” Sam’s voice came from another room.
Hayley tried to answer, to say she wasn’t late and she wasn’t who he thought she was, but her throat was too dry.
When she heard Sam’s footsteps coming down the long hall, she turned slowly from the window expecting him be so surprised to see her he would gasp or his mouth would drop open in amazement. Instead he stood there looking at her for a long moment, his gaze steady and unwavering.
“It’s about time,” he said, his voice rusty, as if he’d been saving his voice for a long time.
“You knew I was coming?” she asked.
“Sooner or later,” he said. “I’ve left the door unlocked for the past two weeks.”
“Of all the nerve. You are the most arrogant, conceited, self-absorbed—”
He cut her off then by moving toward her, so big, so tall, so sure of himself that she clenched her hands into fists to keep from being overwhelmed by him. He dragged her into his arms, holding her tightly against his hard body. She could smell the warmth from his skin, feel his heart pounding. She didn’t fight him. She couldn’t. She was one thousand miles from New Hope, but in his arms, she was home.
Her fists relaxed and she sagged against him, wrapped her arms around him and hung on for dear life. Yes, he was everything she said he was, but despite it all, no matter what he was, God help her, she loved him. And if he wouldn’t live in New Hope, she’d have to live here. Because life without him was no life at all.
“You’re right,” he murmured, his breath warm in her ear. “I’m all of the above. But I’m working on it. I’m trying to change. But I need your help. I love you, Hayley, I’ve been in love with you for half my life, and I need your love, too.”
“You’ve got it,” she whispered.
“And I need some time. And a change of scene.”
She lifted her head and looked into his dark eyes. “How big a change?” she asked.
“Very big. All the way to Africa. You’ve never been on safari. I’ve never visited my patient, and I want to see your village.”
“Africa!” She choked on a laugh. She was giddy, light-headed and almost hysterical. Did he say Africa? “How can you…how can we…”
He smiled and her heart contracted. If she hadn’t been clinging to him she would have fallen down.
“We fly to London,” he said. “Spend a few days shopping, sight-seeing, then fly into Nairobi. Hire a Land Rover and a driver—”
She pressed her fingers against his lips. “I get the picture. What then?”
“Then we go to Mombassa…”
“I mean when we come back.”
“That’s up to you.”
“I want to get married,” she said firmly.
“Big surprise,” he said. “I suppose you want kids, too.”
She nodded, her throat suddenly clogged with tears of happiness. Sam and kids and heaven, too. “Yes, oh yes, but I don’t know…I might not be able to…I’m not sure—”
“I am,” he said firmly, one hand catching her chin so he could look into her eyes and send positive thoughts directly from his soul to hers. “I’m sure that you and I will have a whole houseful of kids. If, that is, we get started right away.”
She nodded. If he believed, then so did she. “Where will we live?” she asked, her voice a bare whisper.
“I always wanted to raise my kids in a small town,” he said.
She felt like laughing. She felt like crying. She felt as if her heart was overflowing. Without another word, Sam lifted her into his arms and carried her into the bedroom. The waves hit the shore at Fort Point; the gulls swooped over the water, and inside the twenty-third floor of the condominium, Sam took a four-carat diamond ring from a case on his bureau, got down on his knees and asked Hayley to marry him.
Her smile was more dazzling than the morning sun outside. She didn’t have to answer. Her kiss said it all.
Epilogue
Old-timers still called it the Bancroft House, though anyone who had come to New Hope within the past seven years called it the Bancroft-Prentice place, the place where the three Prentice kids played kick ball with their friends, built a tree house with their father, splashed in a wading pool on summer days with their mother and took over the playhouse.
Their father, once a heart surgeon, now did research into atherosclerosis in an office he built on the grounds, and commuted once a month to Portland where he gave a seminar at the medical school there. No matter how busy he was, he always made time for surf fishing with his six-year-old son, Matt. And their mothe
r, once a bed and breakfast proprietor, now was a full-time wife and mother.
“You know you’re even more beautiful than you were at eighteen,” Sam told her one glorious summer day, coming up behind her on the wide verandah and wrapping his arms around her.
“That’s because I got everything I ever wanted,” she said, leaning back against him. “What about you? I dragged you back here to live. Are you ever sorry?”
“Sorry? Sorry I left that mausoleum I lived in? That job that was leading me to an early grave? You know the answer to that.”
“I don’t mind hearing it again.”
“Okay, here goes,” he said, lifting her hair off her nape to brush his lips across her soft skin. “You saved me from a life of loneliness. You taught me to love and trust and to give. You made all my dreams come true—a house, a family, a wife. The most gorgeous, sexiest—”
She turned in his arms. “Okay,” she murmured, blushing as if she were seventeen again. “That’s enough.”
“Wait, there’s more,” he said. But she cut him off with a kiss. Sam was no more resistible now than he’d been when she first met him or when she married him. For a man who’d never known love, he had found an amazing capacity for giving and receiving it. From the community, from his children and from her.
He lifted her off her feet and spun her around, and in the distance the laughter of their children echoed across the sprawling grounds, reminding them both to always follow your heart, because the heart has its reasons….
ISBN: 978-1-4592-1336-4
THE MAGNIFICENT M.D.
Copyright © 2000 by Carol Culver
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the editorial office, Silhouette Books, 300 East 42nd Street, New York, NY 10017 U.S.A.