Saving Dr. Ryan

Her eyes had gone a smoky-blue. From the colors in the shirt, he supposed. “S’okay,” she said, only then she must’ve noticed he was staring at the shirt, because she looked down at it, then back up at him, blushing a little. “Ivy said you wouldn’t mind if I borrowed this until I got my things.”

“I don’t,” he said, because oddly enough, he really didn’t. Only then she laced her hands around her knees through the bedclothes, and smiled, and damned if something inside him didn’t just melt all to hell.

Ryan cleared his throat. “How’re you feeling?”

“Like I just gave birth. Other than that, not too bad.”

“Any light-headedness?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Bleeding’s normal?”

“Seems so to me, and Ivy said it was, too. I’m cramping some, but I guess that’s to be expected.”

Ryan folded his arms across his chest, grateful to be back on solid ground again. “A good sign, actually.”

“What they don’t tell you is the pain doesn’t quit once the baby’s born.”

“You want a Tylenol or something?”

But she shook her head, just as he figured she would.

“You don’t have to tough it out, you know.”

A thin smile stretched across her lips. “Yes, I do.”

Not knowing what to say to that, Ryan walked over to the bassinet, grinning down at the ruddy-faced little girl asleep inside. “She kind of grows on you, doesn’t she?”

This time, Maddie’s laugh was full and rich. “Takes after her mama, I guess.”

Despite the lack of self-pity in her words, they perturbed him nonetheless. “You’re not red and wrinkled, Maddie,” was the only thing he could think of to say, which was at least worth another laugh.

“No, I suppose not. But I’m no beauty, either. Not like Katie Grace. I imagine I’m gonna have to beat the boys off with sticks by the time she’s ten.”

Amy Rose began to stir, making little “feed me” noises. Ryan gathered up the baby with an ease fine-honed from handling other people’s babies for so many years, talking silliness to her as he checked her diaper—no meconium yet, but he imagined that would pass with the next feed—then carried her to her mother. But he didn’t give Maddie her baby right away, using the infant as an excuse to bide his time until he figured out what to say.

Damn. He was no good at this kind of thing. But there was no way he could let her self-deprecation pass, either.

“Don’t sell yourself short,” he said, which earned him a puzzled look. “We never see ourselves the way others do, you know.”

“Oh,” was all she said, then reached for her daughter, a tiny crease settling between naturally arched brows. Her hair slithered over her shoulders in a hundred glistening layers as she spoke softly to her baby. Her scent surrounded him, shook him, a combination of shampoo, his own clean shirt and…her. Somehow, inexplicably, whatever it was that would enable little Amy able to pick her own mama out of a hundred other nursing mothers, Ryan picked up on, too.

She undid two buttons, guided her baby to a high, small breast. Ryan made himself focus on Maddie’s face, again unnerved by his reaction. Not only was it unprofessional, if not downright unethical, but up until an hour or so ago, he would have thought it impossible.

He retreated to the end of the bed, leaned on the footboard. Quietly dug himself in deeper. “In fact,” he said, “my brother even commented on how pretty you are.”

Her head snapped up at that. “Your brother?”

“Hank. He owns the Double Arrow.”

Silence followed, punctuated only by the sounds of a busily suckling baby, the hiss of heat from the radiator. Then: “Does kindness run in your family or what?” She lifted those steely eyes to his, littered with questions. And maybe a little hope. Or was that disbelief?

Ryan folded his arms across his chest. Smiled a little over the ache nudging his heart, that this woman should mistake a casual comment—not even made in her presence, for pity’s sake—for kindness. “Not especially, no. What I mean to say is, none of us are any good at flattery. Well, except maybe for Cal. I mean, our mother made good and sure we could keep company in polite society without embarrassing her, but…”

Ryan caught himself, wondering how—and why—the conversation had flipflopped. But she was grinning at him, her ingenuousness trickling past his resolve. “How many of you are there?”

Oh, hell. He didn’t want to go down this path, he really didn’t…but he did like making her smile. Especially since he imagined there wasn’t a whole lot in her life worth smiling about these days. “Three. Me and Hank—we’re eighteen months apart—and Cal, the baby.”

“The baby?”

“Well, to us he is. He’s eight years younger than I am.”

“Which probably still makes him older than me.” She angled her head, making her hair glisten some more. “Right?”

Ryan stuffed his hands into his back pockets. “Well, I guess it does at that.”

“And your parents?”

“Both dead.”

“Oh.” Her cheeks pinked. “I’m sorry.”

“They were already older when they had Hank and me. Mom was in her mid-forties when Cal was born.”

“Oh, my goodness!” she said, her eyes wide, then added after a moment, “Does Cal live around here, too?”

“Yep. He raises horses, out on the family farm. Well, his farm now. We all inherited when Dad passed, but Cal’s in the process of buying us out.”

Her expression thoughtful, Maddie shifted the baby up to her shoulder to burp her. Then she glanced around the room, and he saw something like a shadow shudder across her features. Ryan’s gaze followed, sliding over the dull wallpaper and furnishings he’d never bothered to change, although he’d been planning on giving Suzanne a free hand with redecorating after they were married. Afterward, it hadn’t seemed worth the bother.

“Like I said, this hotel’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”

Her eyes lifted to his, a smile just barely tweaking up the corners of her mouth. “How’d you come by such a big place?”

“I inherited both the house and the practice from the doctor who used to live and work here.” He shrugged. “I figure as long as the house isn’t falling down around my ears, that’s good enough.”

“Spoken just like a man,” she said, her gaze meeting his for a moment before dipping back to her baby, now feeding from her other side. She palmed the tiny head, smiling a little, then glanced around. “Still, there’s a nice…feeling in here, you know?”

Her wistfulness clutched at his heart. Ryan checked his watch, wondering where his patients were, why they weren’t coming to stop him from hanging himself.

Why—why?—was he pulling the desk chair over closer to the bed, straddling it backwards and plunking his butt down?

And when her brows lifted, he heard himself say, “You’ll find I’m a real good listener, Maddie.”

She looked down at Amy Rose, who’d fallen asleep with the nipple still in her mouth. The temptation to let some of these worries out of her brain, like relieving the pressure on a simmering pot, was nearly overwhelming. She also knew once she started, she would be hard put to hold back. Being truthful was just part of her nature. But she did not want him to feel sorry for her, either. Only she didn’t see how that was to be avoided, once she told him her tale.

Except he was waiting, and she was being rude now, wasn’t she?

After Maddie buttoned herself up, she lifted her knees, laying the baby against her thighs so she could watch her sleep. So she wouldn’t have to look into those kind blue eyes any more than was absolutely necessary, where she knew she would see any number of things she wouldn’t want to see. Like judgment. Or worse, pity.

She skimmed over the first part of her life, about how her teenaged mother had given her up to the foster care system when Maddie wasn’t but three years old; how she’d been shunted from home to home until she came to live with Joe and Grace Idlewild as a twelve-year-old smartmouth with a chip on her shoulder the size of a house, and how they’d been the closest things to parents she’d ever had; how her mother had never come back for her, and how Maddie had eventually given up hoping she would.

And then how, against her foster parents’ wishes, she’d fallen in love at seventeen with Jimmy Kincaid, a virtual orphan like herself; how the boy—for he hadn’t been but eighteen himself at that point—had given her to believe that, with him, she’d have the one thing she most wanted in the whole world, which was a life, a family, a home of her own. How he’d had such big dreams, about being successful, about making lots of money. And how she’d let herself believe those dreams could be hers, in large part because he’d been the first person she’d ever met who’d had dreams, which had seemed to her at the time much more enticing than determination and hard work.

Even though she kept her eyes averted, she told the doctor all this without shame on her part, because while she would admit to the foolishness of youth, there had been no shame in being young. Or in having dreams, even if the dreams of her youth had been foolish.

“Except at some point…” She let out a sound that was half sigh, half laugh. “Well, eventually I realized that Jimmy wasn’t inclined to work for any of his dreams. He just somehow expected them to happen, I guess. But no matter what, there is no power in heaven or on earth strong enough to make me give up my babies the way my mama did me.”

The doctor’s silence made her finally look over. He was sitting backward on the straight-backed chair, his hands fisted one on top of the other to make a pillow for his chin while he listened, his gaze intense.

“Even if it meant staying married to an abusive man?”

“I know that’s how it looks, but he wasn’t always like that. When I got pregnant the first time, you never saw anybody happier than Jimmy. And even when things were rough, he was never mean to me or Noah. Not…not at first. It wasn’t until I got pregnant with Katie Grace…”

The memories stung more than she’d thought they would. But she’d gotten this far, might as well see it through. Just like she had her marriage.

“Jimmy’s usual method for dealing with his frustrations was to simply walk out. Which he did more and more, toward the end,” she added on a sigh. “Sometimes for hours, sometimes for days.”

“And this didn’t bother you?”

“Sure it did. But he’d always come home eventually, all sorry for what he’d done, and he’d always have some money—and I learned early on not to question where he got it—and I wanted so hard to believe, each time, that things would be better.”

Her eyes got all gritty feeling; she took a moment until the feeling passed. “I guess I took it on myself that whether the marriage survived or not was up to me. I don’t feel that way anymore,” she quickly added when she saw Dr. Logan’s expression darken.

“What happened?” he asked quietly.

“I got pregnant a third time. I know it sounds irresponsible, but I couldn’t tolerate the Pill and Jimmy hated using…you know. So I got a diaphragm from the clinic, but then Jimmy showed up out of the blue one night and maybe I didn’t get it in right, I don’t know…” She grasped the sleeping baby’s tiny hands, smiling when the delicate little fingers automatically grasped hers. “He wanted me to get an abortion. I said no.” She swallowed. “He…didn’t take it too well.”

“He hit you?”

Maddie nodded, staring hard at the baby, trying to block out the memory of Jimmy’s anguished face afterward. “I was so…shocked, that he’d actually do that. I mean, it wasn’t like this was entirely my fault, was it? So I threatened to walk out right then and there. Only he started crying, sayin’ over and over how sorry he was, that it wouldn’t ever happen again. I’d never seen him cry before. Maybe I shouldn’t’ve taken him at his word, but…we’d been married for four years by then. He was the only man I’d ever loved. And everybody makes mistakes, you know?”

Again, the silence. On a deep breath, Maddie lifted her gaze to the doctor’s, seeing in his eyes the one thing she’d least wanted to—that he didn’t understand. “I had to give him another chance, don’t you see? I had two children under the age of four and another on the way. And for a while, things were better. He got a real job, we were doing okay, he stuck around… Then one of his ‘buddies’ came up with another ‘sure thing’. I tried to talk him out of it, but…well. And of course, the ‘sure thing’ didn’t pan out, and Jimmy got more depressed than I’d ever seen him. He still had his job, but it was just on a loading dock down at the Wal-Mart, and…and I don’t know. I got the feeling he just…gave up.”

By this time, she was talking more to herself than to Dr. Logan. “I didn’t know what to do. How to reach him or anything. He wouldn’t talk to me by that point. He stuck around more, but he wasn’t really there, y’know? Anyway, he was off from work one morning, so I decided maybe it might be nice to run to the grocery store without having to drag two little kids with me. I didn’t normally leave Jimmy alone with the kids, but I wasn’t feeling good and the shopping still had to be done, so I said he’d have to watch the kids. I could tell he wasn’t any too thrilled about it, though. When—”

She clamped her lips together, even as the tears escaped yet again.

“Maddie?”

On a deep breath, she continued, her voice trembling. “When I got home, maybe an hour later, Katie was hiding behind the couch, crying so hard she could barely catch her breath. I found Jimmy b-back in the kids’ bedroom with Noah, who was screaming, screaming…” She squeezed her eyes shut, but she could feel her heartbeat in her temples. “The belt was still in Jimmy’s hand.”

When she opened them, she found the doctor’s eyes riveted to hers, his face rigid with fury. But he didn’t say a word. So she looked at the baby instead, which only tangled up her emotions even more. “How I managed not to lose the baby, I do not know, because I started yelling at Jimmy like a crazy woman, telling him to get out of my house and to never come back, that our marriage was over, that if he ever hurt one of my babies again, I would kill him. I had no idea….”

She shook her head, still disbelieving after all this time. “He took the car, eventually landing in some bar he’d never been to before, where he got stinking drunk and picked a fight with somebody he shouldn’t’ve. Guy hit him back, Jimmy’s head caught the edge of a table when he fell. By all accounts, it shouldn’t’ve been enough to kill him….” Her stomach was shaking up a storm; she willed it to settle down.

After a moment, Dr. Logan stood and approached the bed. He didn’t say anything at first, like maybe he was afraid to, but his set mouth and wrinkled brow told Maddie probably more than she wanted to know. He simply stood beside her, his hands crammed in his back pockets, watching the baby for several seconds, until his breath suddenly left him in a great rush. “And now I suppose you blame yourself for his death?”

She thought on that for a bit, then said, “Not as much as I did at first. I mean, yes, I was the one who told him to get out, but it wasn’t me who told him to drive way the heck out to some bar he’d never been in before, pick a fight with a local twice his size. And it wasn’t me who’d made a mess of my life, or took out my frustrations on a five-year-old child.”

The side door buzzer went off, making both of them jump.

“That’ll be my first victim,” he said, finally looking at her. “The office is right next door, so all you have to do is thump on the wall if you need anything—”

“I’ll be fine,” she reassured him with a shaky smile. “You just go on now.”

He touched the baby’s head with two fingers, then left the room.

“Well, hey, Alden,” Ryan said, coming up with a grin for the elderly man sitting in the waiting room, a grin which he then shared with Alden’s Lancaster’s pinchy-faced daughter Ruthanne sitting beside him, her black patent leather purse clutched tightly on top of even more tightly clutched together knees. The old man was just in for a checkup after a bout with pneumonia he’d gone through a few weeks ago. “Come on in, come on in… How’re you feeling?”

But then it was as if something just shut right down inside of him, because Ryan barely heard his patient’s “Not too bad, considerin’,” as the pair followed him into the office, barely said two words to the old man as he checked his vitals, listened to his lungs and heart. Wasn’t until he caught the odd looks the two of them were giving him that he realized he wasn’t acting like his normal self.

Which might have something to do with the fact that he sure as hell wasn’t feeling like his normal self.

Ryan fixed a smile to his face, dragged his bedside manner back out on display, and got through the appointment as best he could. But after they left, rather than calling in the next patient—Sadie Metcalf and her chronic psoriasis—he decided maybe he’d better take a minute to collect his thoughts.

The fifty-year-old rolling chair behind Dr. Patterson’s oak desk creaked mightily when Ryan slumped down into it, his palm cradling his cheek. It wasn’t as if he’d never heard stories like Maddie’s before. Or borne witness to the effects of neglect, ignorance, abuse on mind and body. And it wasn’t as if he hadn’t been fully aware he was wading into treacherous waters, encouraging her to talk. Still, it wasn’t the tale itself that had left him so shaken—she hadn’t said anything he hadn’t expected to hear in any case—it was the telling of it.

The way she kept that soft, raspy voice of hers steady, even though her hands trembled with the emotion brought on by freshly remembered wounds. The way she’d looked at him—the few times she did—as if daring him to judge her. Not that she was asking for absolution for the decisions she’d made, not even those he imagined she’d be the first to admit hadn’t been any too smart.

Why he should be feeling something like admiration for a woman who made no apologies for loving a man who had left her with nothing but a pile of debts and three children, he didn’t know. Yet he did. She’d given that love freely, unselfishly—the illogical, irrepressible, irresistible love of youth, Ryan mused sourly. And now, even though that love had left her in a fix and a half, her pride still balked at having to ask strangers for help.

Like a stubborn child, Ryan thought, snapping upright and rubbing his eyes. A stubborn, courageous child with the soul of a woman, a woman who deserved far more than life had given her thus far.

A woman who deserved the kind of man who would put her first.

Who could offer her more than dreams.

A rap on the office door disrupted Ryan’s brooding. He got up, opened the door to look down into Sadie Metcalf’s puzzled smile. “Don’t mean to rush you, Dr. Ryan, but Alden left some time ago…?”

“Yes, yes…sorry,” Ryan said, standing aside to let Sadie in, at the same time pushing a whole bunch of thoughts he shouldn’t even be having out.

A tiny window over the tub let in enough light for Maddie to see her reflection in the medicine cabinet over the pedestal sink, upon which she now leaned heavily, frowning at herself. The tile floor chilled the bottoms of her bare feet; she barely noticed. The shakiness from having told Dr. Logan her story had already begun to ease some, mainly because there seemed little point in dwelling on things she couldn’t change. She would grieve for what she’d lost every day of her life, but her heart told her that her marriage would’ve died anyway, even if Jimmy hadn’t. Her love for him sure had, although she’d resisted admitting that to herself for some time after the fact.

Oh, Lord, it was all too much to think about right now. She finally got around to brushing her teeth, which is why she’d come into the bathroom to begin with. When she finished, though, she squinted at her reflection, her mind wandering off in a different direction entirely.

Why on earth would anybody call her “pretty”? All she saw was a redhead complexion without the benefit of having red hair, a mouth that was no more than a slit in her face, a nose that was too long, eyes that were too wide apart. And a figure? She wouldn’t know a curve if it bit her.

And, no, she was not feeling sorry for herself. Those were just the facts of the matter.

Maddie let out a sigh, then shuffled back to bed. Oh, well…if nothing else, she supposed it was still a nice ego boost to know that some man, somewhere, found her worth looking at. And since ego boosts came few and far between in her life, she figured she might as well make the most of this one. Even if it had come secondhand, like her clothes, through a source who didn’t see her as a woman at all.

Which, she thought on a yawn as she felt herself drift off, she supposed was just as well, all things considered.

Ryan’s last appointment of the day—removing a dozen stitches from Roy Farver’s forehead where renovating his hen-house had led to a run-in with a wily two-by-four—had been gone for a half-hour or so before he heard the thumps and thuds and animated conversation that signaled Ivy’s and the children’s return. They burst into his office, bringing the chill with them. Both children sported brand-new jackets, Noah’s navy-blue, Katie’s a hot-pink bright enough to blind half the state.

“Look what Ivy buyed me, Dr. Ryan!” Noah beamed at him, apparently momentarily forgetting his apprehension. “It gots like a hunnerd pockets an’ everything!” Seated at his desk, Ryan removed his glasses to peer at the kid, who was gleefully slurping down what was left of a chocolate ice-cream cone. Dots of color stained his pale cheeks over an ice-cream stuccoed chin, while bits of yellow leaves clung to his dark curls. Then Ryan’s gaze shifted to Katie, who, clinging to Ivy’s hand, gave him a shy, chocolate-coated smile in return. She looked down at her coat, then back up at him, her smile broadening.

“I look pretty,” she said, her voice weightless as goose down.

“You sure do, sweetheart,” he said, ignoring the dull ache curled up inside his chest like a dog settling in for the night. Then he waved Noah over, grabbing a tissue to wipe off the sticky little face. When he gently took the child by the arm, however, the boy flinched, the fire going right out of his eyes.

“It’s okay, grasshopper…I just want to clean you up a bit. I won’t hurt you.”

After a moment, Noah nodded, although he still made a helluva face when Ryan tried to undo some of the damage. “Where on earth you take these kids, Ivy?”

She hadn’t bothered unfurling herself from that poncho thing she wore, so he guessed she wasn’t planning on staying. “Verna Madison’s youngest gal’s about to have her third baby, they’ve got four-week-old lab pups. You seen them yet? Five of ’em, gold as sunshine. And full of the devil.”

“C’n I go show Mama my coat?” Noah asked between licks, completely undoing Ryan’s cleanup job.

“Your mama and sister are taking a nap,” he said, wondering how Maddie was going to react to Ivy’s purchases. “Which they both need.” At the child’s crestfallen expression, he added, “You know, I’ve got about a million blocks out in the waiting room. Why don’t you go build something to show your mama later?”

When the children had gone, Ryan stretched back in the desk chair, making it squawk. Hard to believe those were the same frightened children who’d shown up on his doorstep barely twelve hours ago. A knot formed in his chest at the thought of any child’s having to feel that kind of anxiety.

He could only imagine how Maddie must feel.

He glanced up at the midwife, whose face indicated she was thinking much the same thing. She caught his stare, blushed. “I didn’t figure it would hurt them to have a treat. And the coats were half off. Last year’s stock or something.”

Shaking his head, Ryan leaned forward again to gather up the charts strewn across the blotter. “Looks to me as though somebody wants to be a grandma real bad.”

Ivy let out a sigh. Her daughter Dawn, whom Ivy had raised on her own, had left Haven before the ink was dry on her high school diploma, going off to college, then law school. Now an attorney at some high-falutin’ firm in New York City, Ivy’s only child seemed determined not only to never set foot in Haven again, but to never give her mother any grandbabies, either. “Guess I’ve just about given up on that score. Not that I’m not proud of my daughter, but I swear I’m gonna wring her skinny little neck if she tells me one more blessed time her career’s far more challenging, reliable and stimulating than raising a kid could be.”