Chapter Fifteen
Molly woke up to Ben lying beside her, one of his arms draped around her waist.
She smiled softly and closed her eyes again, not wanting the feeling to end, not wanting her problems to surface yet. Ben…their night together had been more than she had ever hoped or imagined. He had made her feel sexy and desirable and loved and safe. He had made her feel. And then he’d held her. And they had talked for hours, in the dark, like they had when they were young. She had almost been giddy. For a few fleeting seconds, she remembered that girl and she felt like her. And then a bit before dawn he’d made love to her again, and they had fallen asleep together.
She tried to enjoy lying here and not thinking about her problems…the humiliation that still stung when she thought of what her mother had said last night in front of their friends. Ben had risen to the occasion and had spoken before she could, and what he said about being proud of her had solidified what she had always known about him…but it made her angry with herself, that she’d just stood there—like a victim. She had thought she would only be in Shadow Creek for a year, but now, with Ben, it changed everything; except how could she live here with her mother? Her mother wanted to destroy everything he was working for.
“Please tell me that’s not regret.” Ben was staring at her, his brow furrowed. A ripple of longing struck her at the sight of him. He looked delicious, with his hair all messy and his dark stubble…and the no clothes.
“As if I could ever regret last night,” she said.
He grinned, that grin she remembered. The one with a healthy dose of male pride. “The best night of my life, because we were together,” he said, kissing her softly.
His cell phone rang and he cursed. “I don’t want to answer that,” he said against her mouth.
“What if it’s your mother?” she said, reaching for his phone on the nightstand. She grabbed it and glanced at the display. Her face flooded with heat as the image of a gorgeous brunette smiled at her. Not his mother.
She handed him his phone and he frowned, silencing the call.
“A friend?” she asked, trying to sound nonchalant.
He shrugged. “Yeah.”
“She’s pretty.”
He groaned and ran his hands down his face. “Her name is Olivia. We…dated for a bit. That’s all. I’m telling you just because she lives in Shadow Creek, and if we run into her, I don’t want you to be caught off guard.”
She nodded, trying to use her professional doctor demeanor instead of the cowardly, insecure girlfriend one that was slowly sneaking up on her.
He sat up, leaning against the headboard and looked at her. “Molly.”
She smiled. “It’s fine. Obviously, you’ve had girlfriends. I get it,” she said, grabbing his T-shirt from the foot of the bed and pulling it over her head. She stood up, feeling comfortable in the large shirt, loving that it smelled like him. “I need coffee.”
She walked out of the bedroom and headed for the coffee maker, trying to focus on how happy she was just a few minutes ago. She would not think of his girlfriends and how normal they must have been compared to her.
“Molly,” he said, walking into the room. She added the water to the coffee maker, trying not to notice how good he looked just wearing his jeans and leaning against the counter. She turned the coffee maker on and took out two cups.
“Coffee is almost done. What time are you working today?” she asked, hoping the coffee maker would hurry up and beep.
“What are you doing? What is this? Don’t shut me out. You have to talk to me.”
Right. Because that’s what adults did. God, was she a fool. She took a deep breath and faced him. “Fine. I feel stupid. I feel insecure.”
The coffee maker beeped, saving her from looking at him, because as she spoke his jaw had started clenching and he was running his hands through his hair. She added milk to hers and handed him his cup. He put it down without taking a sip. He opened his mouth to speak and then stopped and cleared his throat. “You and last night.” He shook his head and looked down for a second. “That was the best night of my life. That was sacred. That was love between a man and a woman. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. The rest is shit, Molly. It’s meaningless, hollow, with the sole purpose of sexual release. I would never compare what we shared in bed with anyone I’ve been with. There is no comparison.”
She tried to take a sip of her hot coffee, but her throat hurt with emotion. He walked up to her and took her hand in his. “Talk to me. Tell me you understand.”
“I understand what you’re saying on a logical level. It’s the heart that’s having a little time catching up. For the last nine years, I was just going through the motions, trying to pretend I was normal but knowing I wasn’t. It was taking me too long to recover, too long to want to be with a man, to want to explore that side of myself. Or maybe I just wanted to come back to you. Maybe I just needed you,” she whispered.
“I want you to be confident. I want you to believe me,” Ben said, his voice gruff. “I love you, Molly. I never stopped loving you. I never forgot you, and I never got over you. Now you’re here, and I don’t want to lose you again. I want to spend the rest of our lives together. I want you to feel safe and loved and valued. I want to be your rock, your husband, the father of your children, just like we planned nine years ago.”
Molly tried to catch her breath, to stop the feelings that might actually make her agree with him. She was torn between clinging to this fairy tale he was offering and running away. “Ben,” she said, moving from him. He dropped his hands from her body, letting her walk away from him, and that hurt even more, because she knew why he did that so quickly. Everything had changed, now that he knew. “I don’t want those things anymore. I’m not the same girl. I don’t want marriage or…babies.”
Surprise flickered across his eyes. She caught the flash of vulnerability, and it made her hate herself. She stood across the room where it was safe.
“Okay, so what do you want?”
“I just want to go on being Dr. Mayberry. I want to work and…”
“So what’s this, then? Where do we stand?” he said, leaning against the counter, and she knew he was forcing himself to look relaxed. Muscles rippled in his strong, bare shoulders, and she let her gaze trail over him, admiring for what had to be the hundredth time, his beauty.
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I…I didn’t plan any of this. I wanted to tell you everything that had happened because it was wrong of me to keep it from you. I was wrong to not tell you—”
“Stop it,” he said, his voice harsh. He hung his head and then looked back up at her, his tone gentler. “You did what you had to do at the time. Don’t apologize. Don’t worry about me. I’m not the victim here.”
“Maybe that’s just it. Maybe I can’t be the victim. I don’t want to be the victim anymore. I’m the girl with the screwed-up family. Your friends all know that I gave away my baby—”
“I don’t give a shit!” he yelled. She recoiled. “I don’t give a shit what people think about us. And they aren’t like that. They wouldn’t think the worst of you. God, who cares? Who cares about anything other than what’s here, right now in this room?”
His jaw was clenching and unclenching, and he was angrier than she’d ever seen him. She never should have gotten close to him again. It had been selfish. She just loved him, she always had. But this wasn’t what she wanted, and she wasn’t what he needed. Ben needed someone who wanted a family, and she had already decided that it wasn’t for her anymore. He had always wanted to be a father. She couldn’t be the wife he needed her to be, and she couldn’t be the mother he needed for his children.
“Don’t tell me what I see when I look at you. You are Molly, the first and last girl I ever loved,” he said, standing straight.
“What about kids?” she whispered, crossing her arms over her chest, feeling pain seep through her. She was hurting him all over again.
He shrugged. “I will take what I can get. If I get you and only you, then that’s enough for me,” he said hoarsely.
She blinked back tears and struggled to maintain her composure. “It’s not fair of me to ask you to change your dreams. You’ve always wanted to be a dad, and you’ll make a great father…and husband.”
He ran a hand through his hair. “But not to you. I’m not the husband for you.”
She looked down at the ground, unable to deal with the hurt in his eyes. “People change, dreams change. Maybe this is too hard because you knew me before. I’m not the same.”
He threw his hands in the air. “Neither am I. I don’t know what’s around the corner for me or you. What if I get hurt in a fire? What if I can’t work as a firefighter anymore? What if one of us gets cancer? When you love someone enough, you get through it with them. It brings you closer. I know you—I know if something happened to me, you’d be by my side. Why can’t you let me do that for you?”
She clasped her hands together tightly. “I want to. I don’t know how. I don’t know how to do this with someone. I am a doctor and I can fix people, and I can’t fix myself, Ben. I am almost thirty years old, and I look like I’ve got it all together but it’s a lie.”
He shook his head. “It’s not a lie. You do have it together.”
She dug her nails into her palms. “I haven’t been in a relationship. Not since you. I haven’t wanted a guy. Nothing. I don’t even know that side of myself.”
His eyes glistened with moisture, and she had a hard time breathing. It was like the more she exposed of herself, the harder it became, not easier. It was supposed to get easier. This was not easier. He looked down and cleared his throat a few times before looking up at her with so much grief and sympathy she wanted to run and hide. Maybe she should have known. This was Ben. He loved deeply, he protected people, he felt. “Then we figure it out together. I won’t pressure you. We take it slow.”
She blinked as tears pooled in her eyes, blurring his handsome face. “You’ve been with other women,” she whispered, her throat so tight she could barely scrape the words through. “Normal, whole women. I can’t compete with that. I would stand at the grocery checkout line and flip through the women’s magazines. Or the headlines on the cover would jump out at me, like the covers on Cosmo, the ones about how to give amazing blow-jobs or mind-blowing sexual positions, and I would be repulsed, like I’d become physically ill just reading that. That’s not…me. That’s not my world. I can’t do that, and you’re going to want someone who can give you all of that. That’s the stuff you did with other women, how… I can’t compete,” she said, squeezing her eyes shut. She hadn’t known how hard any of this was going to be.
His face was white, and she didn’t know if it was because he was finally seeing how messed up she still was or if it was because he felt sorry for her. Or maybe himself. “I know you’re having a hard time believing me, because you have so much to process. This is not a competition. There is no competition where you’re concerned. That stuff means nothing. Nothing.”
She nodded repeatedly, looking from him to the ground, wanting to believe that it was that simple. Her entire adult life she’d devoted to being the best doctor possible. She could do that. She could pour herself into her work and be the best. But this…relationships…this wasn’t something she could study. This required her heart. This required her to be vulnerable, and she didn’t do that very well.
He ran his hands down his face, not taking them off right away, and she wondered if she pushed too far. When he lowered them finally, his cheeks were wet, his eyes damp. “Let’s get something straight,” he said, walking toward her as he spoke. “If I had known…if you had told me what had happened, I wouldn’t have been with anyone. I would have waited. I would have waited a decade, a lifetime for you, Molly.” He turned around, and she wiped the tears from her face. “I wasn’t given the chance. So, yes, there have been women. Casual relationships that mean nothing. What you and I have is another level; it’s a real connection. It’s not two people just getting off; it’s two people loving each other. You have to trust me. You have to trust that.”
A sob broke free, and she looked up at the ceiling, away from him. “So you’re a thirty-three-year-old man, and you’re going to enter into a relationship with a woman who doesn’t know if she’ll be able to give you what you need.”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re doing. You need to stop thinking you know what I’m thinking or know what I need. Shut out the crap from the rest of the world. The expectations that you think I have of you. If all I get is you spending the rest of your life with me and nothing else, then I’ll take it. But I know you. I know the girl you were before, and I know the woman you are now. Both of you responded to me. Just like I respond to you the second you walk into a room. Or the second you spill coffee all over me,” he said, cracking a one-sided smile. “And I know you feel the same, because whether or not you want to acknowledge it, when I touch you, you feel the chemistry. It’s in your eyes, it’s in the way you curl into me, it’s in the way you kiss me, it’s in everything we did in that bed. But I don’t care; I’m not worried about any of that. I just want you.”
She looked down at the ground. “I never planned on staying here.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I never planned on staying in Shadow Creek. I signed a one-year contract. I’m going to Mexico with Doctors Without Borders. It’s on my career bucket list. This was a career move for me, but I had no intention of staying in this town with my mother…”
“Me.”
“There are too many memories here. There’s too much bitterness. I have issues…with my mother, and they will never be resolved. I don’t want that. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life trying to avoid her at the grocery store or coffee shop. My father was never told because my mother claimed it would kill him, but he died anyway, thinking his daughter didn’t give a crap about him. I have been walking around with this secret, and I can’t keep doing it. My sisters don’t get me. They think I’m just this career-driven, cold person who shut them out of my life. I can’t do this. I can’t stay here,” she said, panic rising as she voiced everything that had been eating her up inside.
“You can if you really wanted to. I think you’re trying to work off some guilt for giving up your baby. You think if you can go out there and save as many babies and kids as you can, then you’re doing some kind of penance. You’re searching for something you’re never going to get, and you’re going to throw your life away trying to find it.”
She sucked in a breath sharply. “That’s not true.”
He nodded. “It is. Stop running. Forgive yourself. You saved your baby.”
She took a step back.
“I…I was thinking I need some time alone. Like maybe I should go back to the inn and try and sort things out.”
He looked as though she’d just punched him in the stomach. “I’m not holding you here prisoner. Don’t say it like that.”
Because he didn’t want to be associated with any kind of psychopath. Because he would always have to watch how he touched her, how he talked to her, how he treated her…because he knew the truth, and Ben was a good guy. He would never do anything to make her feel uncomfortable. And that was what she feared. It would never go away; it would always be there. “I know. I just mean, I know why we started this; you were worried about your mother. Now she’s feeling better. We don’t have to tell her we’ve broken up right away. She won’t know for a few days that I’ve moved out. I can tell her if you want. I know you’re going to get the position as chief. We will wait it out. We can appear publicly until it’s official. It’s the deal we made.”
He let out a short laugh and looked down at the ground. “I don’t need you to do that. Fine, Molly. You do what you need to do. You may think you’re doing the right thing. You are probably justifying all of this in your head, thinking you’re saving me. You’re doing me a favor because you’re so different, you’re so screwed up now, but you’re lying to yourself and me. You’re doing this because you’re scared, and you feel vulnerable now that you’ve let me in. Well, here’s the truth: I have loved you for my entire adult life, and I will continue to. There will be no other woman for me. I will not get married to anyone else. I will not touch another woman. I’ll sit in this house until I’m an old man, by myself. There’s one woman for me, and it’s you. I will take you in any form, any day. You will always be that girl with the killer smile and sweet laugh. You will always be that girl who can make me forget where I am with just one look. You turn me on, you make me crazy, and there will never be anyone else who can do that. But you go, do what you need to do to survive. But I’ll be right here. When you’re ready, you come and find me. I will welcome you back with open arms, sweetheart.”