Rescued By Marriage. Dianne Drake

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СКАЧАТЬ gray sky again, hoping there wasn’t soon to be water in her kitchen, living room and bedroom, too. “Besides, I have real patients now, and it appears my practice has officially opened.” All that was true, but it didn’t make the situation any easier. Still, something could be worked out. It had to. That’s the mindset she had to keep about her. For Meghan, she would make it work, or she’d be forced to return to Miami, contenting herself with a visit from her daughter on alternating weekends and holidays, while Anthony’s parents raised her. With that in mind, there simply wasn’t another choice here. “So, I’ll stay and see how it goes.”

      Della reached into her pocket to feel the money folded in there. It was silly of her, but it felt good to be on her own. If the situation hadn’t been so dire, it might have been laughable—the wife of Dr Anthony Riordan going almost giddy over a few dollars. She hoped that wherever he was now, heaven—which she doubted—or hell—which was likely the case—he had a lot more to fret over than money. “Guess it’s time to take a look at the rest of my bad news.” As she said that, a jagged streak of lightning split the sky, followed by an earsplitting roll of thunder. “It just keeps getting better, doesn’t it?”

      “We should make a run for it,” Sam urged, grabbing Della’s hand to pull her along with him toward the house, “before we get drenched. These storms pop up out of nowhere like that, and they can be pretty bad.”

      Della couldn’t help herself. She yanked herself away from Sam and turned her face to the heavens. As the sky opened up and it began to pour, she stood in the middle of her falling-down-you’d-have-to-be-crazy-to-own-it calamity of a new life and laughed. It was either that or cry, and crying wasn’t going to help her accomplish what she needed to here, because she needed to do so much in so little time.

      * * *

      Inside, in the kitchen, Sam opened and slammed shut every door and drawer, looking for matches. “You don’t happen to smoke, do you?” he called to Della, who was huddled, soaking wet and shivering, on a stool in front of the unlit fireplace in the living room.

      Too dumbfounded to comprehend everything around her, Della stared blankly at the room. It was empty and cold, and pelting raindrops on the roof sounded like gunshots exploding in rapid bursts, over and over. Outside, the dreary, late afternoon sky was turning darker by the minute, and since there was no electricity going, it was as dark inside as it was out.

      Overall, it was dismal and Della simply sat in the middle of it, staring into the empty fireplace. “No matches,” she called back. He knew she was trying hard to mask the discouragement in her voice, but he could hear it almost as well as he could hear his supervisor telling him not to get himself involved. But the sadness and near-desperation that slipped into her voice when her guard was down involved him.

      “I don’t smoke, but maybe we could use the lighter in the car,” she continued. Adjusting her position on the stool, the floorboards creaked and groaned under the shift. “Want me to go get it?”

      “What I want is for you to come to your senses. Go back with me to Mrs Hawkins’s for the night and sort this thing out. You can take a shower, put on dry clothes, eat a fit meal, get a good night’s sleep and have a fresh look at your options in the morning.” She was so vulnerable, and yet so stubborn. He’d known her all of three hours and already he was feeling responsible and protective. Bad for his job, even worse for his personal life.

      Once was enough. He’d learned that lesson well enough, and he sure wasn’t willing to put himself through anything like that again. If he were being smart about this, he’d be on his way back to Mrs Hawkins’s right now, to settle in for the evening. Alone! Without Della on his mind.

      But it seemed he wasn’t as smart as he’d thought he was, inasmuch as he wasn’t heading out the door. More than that, he wasn’t even thinking about heading out the door. Instead, he was already regretting the cold, hard floor on which he was about to spend the night if he couldn’t convince her to return with him. Della wasn’t about to be convinced, though. Deep down he knew that.

      “No need to,” she replied. “The roof doesn’t leak, so I’ll be fine.”

      “On the floor, in the dark. That’s not fine, Della.” It was more like insane. “What were you planning, anyway? To come here and find a quaint little seaside cottage all neat and tidy with everything you needed?”

      “There’s only one thing I need, and the rest of it doesn’t matter. I’ve got furniture coming in a few days, I think I can be handy with some of the repairs and I’ve got a medical practice to organize. Sleeping on the floor in the dark isn’t important.” She stood up and walked over to the wall, then ran her fingers lightly over its covering. Layer upon layer of peeling wallpaper, highlighted by splotches of yellowed newsprint and dabs of peeling paint here and there. Solid, but ugly. “And I’ll go have the electricity turned on tomorrow morning. So it’s only for one night.”

      Sam stepped into the living room, holding up the matches he’d found in the back of one of the kitchen cabinets. “You’re a stubborn woman, aren’t you?”

      She smiled. “I prefer to call it optimistic. Although my husband always accused me of being too stubborn for my own good. I think, though, I was too stubborn for his good. He wanted something I was too stubborn to be.”

      “Which was?”

      She smiled at him. “Anything I wasn’t.”

      “Divorced?” he asked.

      She shook her head. “Widowed. Going on to four months now.”

      That took him off his guard. “I’m…um…I’m sorry, Della,” he murmured, even though he didn’t see much sadness on her face. He looked for it, too, but her expression seemed more relieved than sorry. The sadness he would have expected wasn’t in her voice, either. Her pronouncement that she was a widow had come out as a rather flat statement, much the way he might make the same pronouncement of his divorce— sorry for the circumstance, but not totally consumed by it. So, had Della’s marriage been as bad as his? “Is that why you’re here, to get away from the memories?” Which was why he was there. That, and the fact that Massachusetts was almost as far away from California as you could get—California, where his ex-wife still roosted. That expanse of geography between them didn’t hurt matters, either.

      “Trust me, you can get away from a great many things, but the memories are something that will always stay with you. I’m here because I need a new life. It’s as simple as that. Sometimes you have to go back to the beginning and start over to find the place you’re meant to be. That’s what I’m looking for—the place I’m meant to be.”

      “And you think you’re meant to be here on Redcliffe?”

      “It doesn’t matter what I think. I’m here, I’ve bought this place and as of this afternoon my new life started. That’s where optimism will help me more than being stubborn. I have a lot to do, and I’m going to have to look on the bright side in order to do it.” She flicked off a piece of brittle wallpaper and watched it flutter to the bare wood floor. “Stubborn’s what’ll keep me going, though.”

      Maybe befriending a new widow put a little more of a noble spin on his need to help her, but somehow Della didn’t seem like a typical widow in mourning. She was mourning something, though, and it should have been her husband, but to Sam it seemed like there was more to it. Was there something deeper than the loss of a husband? “I suppose there’s potential here,” he said as he crossed over to the fireplace to start a fire. “You’ve got a sound structure, and that’s always the best place to СКАЧАТЬ