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Ben met his gaze head-on, never wavering. “By staying here. By doing what you originally planned and working beside you at the clinic.”
The words struck a faraway chord, nudging at memories that had belonged to the idealistic man Shayne had once allowed himself to be before seeing how foolish that was. He’d since made his peace with reality, striking an acceptable middle path. And then had become incredibly surprised when Sydney had come into his life and he’d discovered that life actually had more to offer. But this wasn’t about him; this was about Ben. And Ben was about irresponsibility.
Shayne’s eyes narrowed as he glared at his younger brother. He wasn’t going to be taken in so easily. “When was the last time you practiced medicine?”
An easy grin slipped over Ben’s lips. “I don’t have to practice, I’ve got it down pat.” Seeing the exasperated look on Shayne’s face, Ben immediately raised his hands in complete surrender to ward off any words or rebuke. “Sorry. I could never resist that line.”
Shayne’s face darkened. “Medicine’s not a joke, Ben. Especially not here.”
Ben’s expression sobered. “No, it’s not. You’re absolutely right. And to answer your question, last week.” He saw Shayne raise an eyebrow quizzically. “That’s when I last practiced medicine. Last week. Wednesday.”
Shayne waited for the punch line. When it didn’t come, he provided it by recalling Ben’s old tricks. “Playing doctor with a willing woman—”
“Has its rewards,” Ben concluded freely. “But I wasn’t playing, Shay,” he insisted. “I was part of a medical group in Seattle. My specialty is pediatric care.” He didn’t add that it was a very lucrative practice. That by coming here he had walked away from an income that totaled almost half a million dollars a year. Shayne was not impressed by statistics like that. To Shayne it had always been about the healing, nothing else. “There were four of us in the partnership,” he explained. “Andrew Bell specializes in orthopedics, Will Jeffries is an internist and Josiah Witwer is a cardiologist.”
“And your specialty is children,” Shayne repeated.
Ben couldn’t tell if Shayne was interested or just going through the motions. He did know, though, that he’d missed Shayne. Missed him more than he’d ever realized. Missed, too, how good Shayne’s nod of approval had made him feel. He needed that nod again.
“Yes,” Ben answered, then added, “We’d all overlap, taking over if someone was away. But mostly we stuck to our fields of expertise.”
Shayne nodded, his expression stoic. “Pay’s good, I imagine.”
There was no point to lying. “Pay’s great. But this isn’t about the pay, Shay,” Ben insisted. “This is about coming back. About finding a place for myself.”
No one knew better than Shayne how persuasive Ben could be. His charm had gotten him out of many sessions of detention, out of well-deserved punishments. He had a glib tongue and a Teflon body. There was no place for either in his clinic.
Reaching for the decanter of brandy he kept on his desk, Shayne poured a small glass for Ben and then one for himself. “We don’t need someone who wants to put on a hair shirt for a week and then take off—”
“I’m not going to take off,” Ben said, interrupting him. The smile on his lips had faded just a little. “I’m willing to do whatever it takes. I’m good, Shayne. You know that. I’ll do whatever you need.”
Shayne sat down on the edge of the desk and sipped his brandy slowly, watching his brother over the rim of his glass.
“What happened?” he finally asked.
Ben shrugged carelessly. “I grew up.”
“I mean to Lila.”
Ben took a breath, as if to brace himself against the words. Against the memory. “She left me,” he said simply. Raising his glass in a silent toast, he took a healthy sip before lowering it again. “That was part of the growing process.”
“Left you,” Shayne said slowly, as if digesting the information. “Just like that?”
“Just like that.” It still felt incredibly painful, more than a year later. It had taken him a year to get his act together, to take his feelings out of deep freeze. “One morning I rolled over in bed and reached out for her, but she was gone.” There’d been just the shortest of notes to say that they were different people now and she was leaving because she was bored.
Shayne watched him for a long moment. He couldn’t help feeling just the slightest bit vindicated. “Hard being disappointed in someone you thought you could count on, isn’t it?”
He had that coming, Ben thought. But even so, he couldn’t help the defensive response that rose to his lips. “I’m sorry that I hurt you, but you should have known better than to count on me back then. You were always the stable one.”
Being the stable one was a quality that, though expected, was so easily taken for granted. At times, he felt like a roof, there to give shelter and never to be noticed. Not like Ben. “And you were the one everyone doted on.”
“And the one nobody took seriously,” Ben said. He took another long sip of brandy. The guilty feelings that had haunted him, that had brought him here, refused to be sublimated.
Shayne laughed shortly. “You didn’t want to be taken seriously.”
That was the boy he’d been. But he wasn’t a boy any longer. “I do now.” Putting down his glass, Ben looked his brother in the eye. “Whatever it takes, Shay. Whatever it takes,” he repeated with feeling. “I want to stay in Hades.”
Shayne gave no indication as to whether or not he welcomed his brother’s presence. The suspicious glint in his eyes remained. “Someone suing you for malpractice?”
Ben shook his head. He had that coming, too, he supposed. That and a lot more. Time and again, he’d taken Shayne’s trust and abused it. But he was here now and he was going to prove himself. No matter how long it took. “I’m a good surgeon, Shayne. A good doctor.” His record was without blemish. Whatever else he might have been, he was always dedicated to his profession. “You could use the help.”
“I have the help,” Shayne countered. He poured himself a little more brandy, topping off Ben’s glass. “Since you’ve been gone, I’ve taken on a nurse practitioner and she lured her brother to come settle here. He’s a heart specialist. Jimmy Quintano.”
Silence wove its way around the corners as Ben absorbed what his brother had just said. He’d never thought that anyone would actually come here. When he was growing up, everyone wanted to leave Hades. Everyone but Shayne and his friend Ike.
“Then the answer’s no?” Ben finally asked.
“I didn’t say that,” Shayne said, warming the glass between his hands. “You can join me at the clinic. But we go by my rules.”
Ben felt the way he had as a kid in the dead of winter when he finally saw a ray of sunshine slicing through the eternal darkness. He grinned at his brother. “Whatever you say.”
“The first thing I ‘say,’” he told Ben, finishing his drink, “is that the clinic opens at seven.” He received the expected response from Ben, who looked properly sobered by the piece of information. “Something you’d like to say about that, Ben?”
Ben gave him a completely innocent look that didn’t fool his brother for a moment. “Yeah, can I catch a ride with you?”
Shayne snorted. “Seeing as how you’ll be sleeping in the guest room tonight, I don’t suppose that’ll be a hardship.”
Unable to contain his enthusiasm, Ben rose to his feet and embraced his brother. Shayne endured the contact, neither returning the embrace nor moving back to terminate it.
“It’s good to be back, Shayne.”
“We’ll see, Ben. We’ll see.” The look on Shayne’s face as they separated told Ben that his older brother was far from being won over yet.
But he would be, Ben promised himself silently.
He’d never been a morning person. Ever.
The two cups of extrastrong black coffee that were now infiltrating his veins, attempting to jolt his bloodstream into some semblance of attention, helped a little but not nearly enough. The swaying of the Jeep as Shayne drove them into town the next morning was all but lulling him back to sleep. It was a struggle to keep his eyes open.
When he realized that his lids had shut, he jerked his head up, but not before Shayne spared him a look. “I can still turn around and drop you off back at the house, Sleeping Beauty.”
Ben shifted in his seat. “Nope, I’m fine.”
Shayne laughed. “Yeah, for a zombie.”
Busted, Ben yawned and stretched, rotating his shoulders. “Just takes me longer to come around, that’s all.” Shayne had always been just the opposite, getting up in what amounted to the middle of the night as far as he was concerned. Like the marines, his brother got more done before eight in the morning than most people accomplished all day. “Besides, I’ve always done my best work after twelve.”
Shayne gave him a knowing look. “Yeah, I know.”
For once he wasn’t referring to anything that had to do with the fairer sex. He was being serious. “You know what I mean.”
Shayne merely slanted a glance at him before pulling his Jeep into the first parking space located directly at the rear of the clinic.
They were here. He hadn’t even realized it, Ben thought. Shayne had taken the shorter route, not through the town but the back roads, and they had approached the whitewashed, single-story building from the rear.
Getting out, Ben took in the building with its fresh coat of paint. The paint wasn’t the only thing that seemed new. He followed Shayne up the back stairs as he unlocked the door. “Is it my imagination or—”
“We’ve added on,” Shayne told him. “A couple more exam rooms,” he specified, “and an O.R. for minor surgery. Anything major we still send them on to Anchorage General.” That was one of the reasons he and Sydney had a single-engine plane, so that patients could be flown to the city if need be.
“More exam rooms,” Ben echoed. “Is the town really growing?”
“Some,” Shayne allowed. Walking in first, he waited for Ben to cross the threshold, then shut the door again. The clinic was almost eerily quiet. “We’ve had some new blood come in.” Shayne went into his office. He took out his lab coat and put it on. As an afterthought, he reached in for his spare one and held it out to Ben. “And fewer people leave.”
Ben slipped on the white coat. Almost like old times, he thought. “That new blood, is it responsible for the restaurant and emporium I saw when I was driving through?”
Shayne smiled to himself. By regular standards, the town was almost standing still. But as far as the citizens of Hades were considered, they were experiencing a building boom. An actual firehouse had been constructed less than a year ago, joining a renovated movie theater and a very small hotel.
“In part. Ike and Jean Luc have been investing in the town and adding buildings here and there.”
“Ike? You mean the bartender at the Red Dog Saloon? Your friend, Ike LeBlanc?” Growing up, Ike and Shayne had been friends. He remembered the man as being outgoing and gregarious, while his cousin, Jean Luc, had been the quiet one. He couldn’t picture either as entrepreneurs.
Shayne nodded, straightening the collar on his lab coat. “He’s branching out.”
Following Shayne into the main reception room, Ben shook his head. He never thought progress would come to Hades, a place that had seemed frozen in time when he’d lived here. “I’ve missed a lot, haven’t I?”
“Yeah, you have. But you can catch up.” Shayne realized that he shouldn’t count on his brother so soon. Ben had a long way to go before he proved himself dependable. “If you’re serious about staying.”
“Very serious.” Whatever else Ben was going to say was temporarily placed on hold as he looked out the window that faced the front of the clinic. He saw a willowy-looking blonde holding on to two little girls. The twosome seemed determined to pull as far away from each other as possible, taking their mother with them. He glanced at his watch again. A shade before seven. “Looks like you’ve got patients.”
Shayne glanced at the appointment book that Alison had left opened for him on her desk. Right beside it was a computer tower holding the exact same information. Sydney teased him and called him her lovable dinosaur, but he’d always preferred paper and pen. It made him feel more hands-on and in control of a situation. Software could whimsically swallow up all the information just when he needed it most.
“That would be Heather and her two girls, Hannah and Hayley,” Shayne told him.
“Heather?” The instant he repeated the name, bits and pieces of memories came flying back to him. Memories he realized he had all but forgotten. Memories that made him smile.
She looked thinner, he thought. And prettier, although definitely more harried.
“Heather Kendall. Ryan,” Shayne clarified. He couldn’t remember if Ben had left Hades before or after Heather had married Joe Kendall.
Ben stepped away from the window but continued to look at the woman and her daughters. All three were unaware that they were being observed.
“I know who she is.”
Ben’s quiet tone caught Shayne’s attention. He vaguely recalled that there’d been something between Ben and Heather, but then, at one point or another there’d been something between Ben and every female under the age of fifty in Hades. Never mind that the men outnumbered the women in Hades by seven to one and any woman had her pick of men. Every female Shayne knew of had chosen Ben at one time, and he had chosen them.
About to unlock the front door, Shayne paused, looking at his brother. “You okay?”
Ben shook off the memory of one exquisite night by the lake and skin softer than silk.
“Like I said, I’m fine.” He flashed a grin. “Nothing more coffee won’t help.”
“Coffeemaker’s in the back,” Shayne told him. “Feel free to pitch in. Alison hates making coffee.” Flipping the lock, he opened the double doors and smiled down at the two energetic little girls. “Hello, Hannah, Hayley.” He looked up at Heather. “You’re early.”
As she struggled with her daughters, who were now tugging harder, not just to avoid each other but to get away altogether, Heather offered Shayne a smile that was just a little weary around the edges.
“I know. Lily’s giving me the morning off, but Beth just called me to say that she’s not feeling well and won’t be coming into the restaurant. That leaves Lily juggling the breakfast crowd on her own.” Lily had been good to her, coming to her rescue when Joe was killed in the cave-in and offering her a job. She’d been the world’s worst waitress, but Lily had stuck by her. Leaving her in the lurch was not the way to repay her. “I hate doing that to her.”
Shayne shook his head. “If I know Lily, she’ll get Max to wait on tables.”
Max Yearling was Hades’s lone law enforcement officer. He was also Lily’s husband. Like Jimmy Quintano, Lily had come to Hades by way of Alison, who in turn had found her way to Hades because of Luc. Luc had gone to Seattle on vacation and on his first day there, had come to her rescue when someone had attempted to mug her. It was because of Luc she’d learned about Shayne and his clinic. Eager to make a difference, she’d come up to the tiny town to work. Her siblings had come to visit. And one by one, each had lost their hearts, not just to the land but to the people bound to it.
Shayne smiled to himself. In a way, the town’s history was like one long, intricate nursery rhyme, with one family member following another. Hades now boasted of four Quintanos, three of whom were married to Yearlings, while Alison, who had come to him originally to become an accredited nurse practitioner, was now married to Jean Luc.
“I’d rather she didn’t. I need the job,” Heather told him, only half joking.
Hannah, her six-year-old, was struggling to break free and make a dash for the front parking lot. “I don’t want a shot,” Hayley protested vehemently, her lower lip quivering as tears began to fill her eyes.
“No shots today,” Shayne promised. “Just a check-up to see if that nasty rash you and your sister have been passing to each other has finally cleared up.”
“A nasty rash?” Ben repeated in mock disbelief as he came forward. He looked from one girl to the other, appropriately wide-eyed. “You two girls don’t look as if you’d have a nasty rash.”
“We did,” Hayley, the more outgoing of the two, declared. She pointed a finger at her older sister. “Hannah got it first because she was playing in the bushes Mama told her not to.”
Fear faded as Hannah took offense, embarrassed in front of the stranger. “Was not.”
Hayley fisted her free hand at her waist the way she’d seen her mother do. “Was, too.”
Ben got down on one knee, refereeing. “I bet that old bush just jumped up at you and grabbed you, didn’t it, honey?”
The excuse clearly appealed to Hannah, who nodded her blond head vigorously, sending her curls bouncing up and down. “Uh-huh.”
“Gotta watch out for those magical bushes,” Ben agreed. “They’re fast. Where did it grab you?”
Hannah never hesitated. She pushed her sleeve up immediately, exposing her right arm. She pointed to an area that had been an angry pink only a couple of days ago. “Right here.”
Still on his knee, Ben examined the area carefully. “Looks like it’s gone to me.”
“Mama rubs this yucky stuff on us,” Hayley told him, moving aside her own sleeve to show him that her skin was clear as well.
“That’s because she loves you.” Ben looked up at Heather. “Right, Mama?”
Heather forced herself to nod her head, her eyes almost glued to the man talking to her daughters. Her voice had deserted her around the same time that the temperature in the room had gone up twenty degrees and the lights had suddenly dimmed to the point where she had to struggle to keep from slipping into darkness herself.
She could feel her heart pounding in her chest, its cadence echoing the refrain that kept repeating itself in her head: He’s back.
Ben’s back.
Chapter Three
“Looks like both your girls are doing very well,” Shayne told Heather. Or the woman that had been Heather until a couple of minutes ago, Shayne thought as he glanced at the shell-shocked expression on her pretty face. Apparently he wasn’t the only one who’d been caught off guard by his brother’s sudden reappearance in town. “Heather,” he added for good measure.
When the girls’ mother gave no indication that she had even heard him, he repeated her name, a bit more forcefully this time. From all appearances, Ben had lost none of his magnetic pull nor any of his effect on women.
Shayne shifted until he was directly in front of her. Almost amused, he passed a hand in front of her face. It was a beat before she even blinked.
“Heather,” he deadpanned, “how long have you had this hearing loss?”
It took all she had to pull herself out of the mental abyss into which she’d unexpectedly sunk. Shaking off the mental cobweb as best as she could, Heather looked at Shayne.
“What? Oh, I’m sorry, Doc Shayne, it’s just that, well—” Words deserted her.
“Yes,” Shayne said, glancing toward Ben, “he has that effect on all of us.” There was only the slightest hint of sarcasm in his tone.
“No, no, I mean—” Flustered, Heather struggled to get a hold of herself. “I’m just surprised to see—to see Ben back, that’s all.” Trying to address Shayne, her eyes were still drawn to Ben as she spoke.
Damn, she was doing it again, tripping over her own tongue. But then, as her mother had enjoyed pointing out, she’d never been one of those women for whom composure was second nature. Composure wasn’t even remotely residing in her neighborhood at the moment.
Heather made another attempt to collect herself. She wasn’t that wide-eyed twenty-three-year-old Ben had made love with by the lake that last summer before he abruptly disappeared. She was years older than the seven that had passed. Life’s requirements had done that to her. They had made her a mother twice over, as well as a wife, then a widow.
These days she found herself being a caretaker, her mother’s keeper, in addition to being the sole support of her little family. Most of the time, she was also her mother’s chief source of money, as well.
Her mother.
Oh, wow. Martha Ryan was going to have a lot of choice things to say once word of Ben’s return reached her. Even if she said nothing to her mother herself, and she didn’t really intend to, the woman would find out. Word always spread in Hades.
Anticipation coursed through her veins. Her mother had never liked Ben. Whenever she did mention his name, Martha Ryan always compared him to the husband who had first deserted her and then divorced her through a lawyer he’d retained in Wichita, Kansas. As she grew older, Heather ceased to hold her father’s disappearance against him. Instead she began to understand why he’d gone. It had a great deal to do with self-preservation.
She felt Ben’s deep-green eyes on her and did her best not to squirm. Not to react at all. She succeeded marginally. But then, she’d heard that stone statues reacted to his gaze.
Heather cleared her throat. “Are you back?” she managed to ask, fervently praying she’d sounded at least a little aloof.
Her cool demeanor, if attained, was spoiled by Hayley’s very plaintive and accusing wail. “Mama, you’re squeezing my fingers off.”
Heather instantly loosened her grip. “Sorry, baby,” she murmured under her breath. Even as she uttered the words, she could feel several shades of pink dash up the sides of her throat. The colors spread even more rapidly to her cheeks.
“No need to hold on to her so tightly,” Ben told her genially. He looked down at the younger girl. “She’s not going anywhere, are you, Hayley?”
Hayley, like every female over the age of twelve months, instantly responded to both his tone and his smile. She shook her head madly from side to side, her eyes never breaking contact with his.
“Uh-uh.”
The next moment she was tugging her hand away from her mother’s grasp. The second she was free, she slipped her hand into his, accompanying the action with a huge smile aimed directly at him. Unknown to her five minutes ago, the man had suddenly become the center of her universe.
That’s the way it usually was, Heather thought ruefully. Every girl she’d gone to school with had a crush on Ben.
He didn’t remember her being this pretty, Ben thought. Or this silent. For a moment he forgot that Shayne was her doctor. “Do you have time for a thorough exam?” he asked her. When he saw Heather’s eyes widen in surprise, Ben realized that he had left off a few crucial words that might make the difference. “Of the girls,” he added. “Just to put your mind at rest.”
Beside him, he heard Shayne’s impatient intake of breath. He’d stepped on toes again. But no one else was in the clinic and there was time to be thorough. What he recalled most about practicing here with Shayne was that they’d always been rushed to see as many patients as they could within the space of a day.
“That’s okay. You don’t need to bother. The rash was only on their arms.” It took everything she had not to turn and run, clutching her daughters to her. Her own voice sounded almost breathless to her as she answered.
C’mon, Heather, get a grip.
Heather tamped down an onslaught of erupting nerves. She needed to calm down before she made a complete idiot of herself.
Very carefully Ben examined the arms of first Hannah, then Hayley before making his pronouncement. He addressed his conclusions not to Heather, but to her daughters, who appeared to absorb his words as if they were tiny little sponges. Their eyes shone at being treated like adults.
“I’m happy to tell you girls that there’s no rash here now. Guess the yucky medicine made it go away.”
“Guess so,” Hayley agreed, solemnly nodding her head.
Hannah said nothing, only looked at him with her wide green eyes. When he returned her gaze, she suddenly turned shy, shifting closer to her mother. Though part of her face was buried in Heather’s shirt, Hannah kept one watchful eye on him.