Christine Rimmer - The M.D. She Had To Marry

Now she proposed to drag his baby to Southern California to scrape and starve right along with her.

It wasn’t going to happen. “I’ll help out, all right,” he said. “We’ll get married. You’ll live with me. You can paint your paintings in Meadow Valley just as well as in L.A.”

“I said no, Logan. And I meant it.”

He folded his arms across his chest—mostly to keep himself from reaching out and strangling her. “This isn’t last September. You can’t just explain to me how I don’t love you and I’m only on the rebound from your sister and it’s time we both moved on.”

“You happened to agree with me last September, in case you’ve forgotten.”

Had he agreed with her? Maybe. He’d been confused as hell last September. Hard to remember now what he had felt then.

Jenna had left with Mack McGarrity.

And then, out of nowhere, her little sister, who had always irritated the hell out of him, showed up on his doorstep, real concern for him in her gorgeous blue eyes and a big chocolate cake in her hands.

“You need chocolate, Dr. Do-Right,” she had said. “Lots of chocolate. And you need it now.”

Dr. Do-Right. He hated it when she called him that. He had opened his mouth to tell her so—and also to tell her to please go away.

But she just pushed past him and kept walking, straight to his kitchen. She put the cake on the counter and began rifling the drawers. It didn’t take her long to find the one with the silverware in it.

“Ah,” she said. “Here we go.” She grabbed a fork, shoved the drawer shut and thrust the fork at him, catching him off guard, so that he took it automatically. “Eat.”

He looked at the fork and he looked at the cake.

Damned if she didn’t know just what he was thinking. “No,” she said. “No plate. No nice little slice cut with a knife. Just stick that fork right in there, just tear off a big, gooey bite.”

He stared at her, stared at her full mouth, at her flushed face, her wide eyes…

And he realized that he was aroused.

Aroused by Jenna’s troublemaking little sister, damned if he wasn’t.

He had set down the fork, backed her up against the counter and spoken right into that deceptively angelic face of hers. “Shouldn’t you be back in L.A. by now?”

Her breathing was agitated, though she tried to play it cool. “I told Jenna I’d take care of things here.”

“I don’t need taking care of.”

She didn’t say anything, just looked at him through those blue, blue eyes.

“You’d better go,” he had warned.

She made a small, tender sound.

And she shook her head.

They ate the cake some time after midnight, both of them nude, standing in the kitchen, tearing into it with a pair of forks, then feeding each other big, sloppy bites.

Lacey shifted in her chair. Logan’s eyes looked far away. She wondered what he was thinking.

He blinked and came back to himself. “I don’t want to analyze last September. It happened. We weren’t as careful as we should have been and now you’re having my baby. You know damn well how I feel about that.”

Yes, she did know. He was just like Jenna. He wanted children. Several children. He also wanted a nice, settled, stay-at-home wife to take care of those children while he was out healing the ills of the world. A wife like Jenna would have been.

In almost every way, Logan and Jenna had been just right for each other. Too bad Jenna had always loved Mack McGarrity.

Logan held out his hand.

Lacey knew that she shouldn’t, but she took it anyway. He pulled her out of the chair. He would have taken her into his arms, but she resisted that.

Her belly brushed him. They both hitched in a quick breath at the contact and Lacey pulled her hand from his.

She turned toward the table, toward the grocery bags still waiting there, thinking that the move might gain her a little much-needed distance from him.

It didn’t. He stepped up behind her, so that she could feel him, feel the warmth of him, close at her back.

He spoke into her ear, his voice barely a whisper. “You need me now, Lace. Don’t turn me away. Give me a chance. I want to marry you and take care of you…of both of you.”

Oh, those were lovely words. And, yes, they did tempt her.

But it wouldn’t work. She had to remember that. It couldn’t work.

He did not love her. He couldn’t even say that he no longer loved her sister. He’d marry her out of duty, in order to claim his child.

And she would spend her life with him feeling like second best, wondering when he kissed her if he was imagining her sister in his arms. She didn’t want that. They had too many differences as it was. Without love on both sides, they wouldn’t stand a chance.

Gently, he took her shoulder, the touch burning a path of longing down inside of her, making her sigh. He turned her to face him.

And he smiled. “I’m feeling pretty determined, Lace.”

She smiled right back at him. “So am I.”

“We’ll see who’s more determined of the two of us. I’m not going away until you come with me.”

“Then you’re in for a long stay in Wyoming.”

“I can stay as long as I have to.”

“You couldn’t stay long enough.”

“Watch me.”

“What about your practice? How will your patients get along without you?”

“Don’t worry about my patients. I have partners to cover for me. I can stick it out here for as long as it takes.”

“Oh? And where will you be staying? Have you made reservations at the motel in town?”

“No. I’ll stay here with you.”

He looked so certain, so set on his goal. She couldn’t stop herself. She touched the side of his face. The stubble-rough skin felt wonderful—too wonderful.

She jerked her hand back, thinking how much one thoughtless touch could do. In a moment, she’d have no backbone left. Whatever he wanted, she’d just go along.

“You can’t stay here,” she said in a breathless tone that convinced neither Logan nor herself. “It’s out of the question.”

He pressed his advantage. “Look. You’re alone here. The baby’s due any day now. I don’t even see a phone in this cabin. How will you call for help if there’s an emergency?”

She tipped her chin higher. “I’m in no danger. The main ranch house is nearby—you must have driven past it to get here.”

He nodded. “I stopped in there for directions, as a matter of fact. And it’s too far away. You could have trouble reaching it, if something went really wrong.”

“I have a cell phone. I can call for help if I need to.”

“You’re telling me that a cell phone actually works out here?”

“Yes.”

He made a small chiding noise. “Not very dependably, though. I can see it in your eyes.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m perfectly safe here.”

“Not in your condition. You know you shouldn’t be alone.”

He was starting to sound way too much like her cousin. Zach—and Tess, too—had been nagging her constantly of late, trying to get her to move to the main house now that her due date was so close. She kept putting them off.

She did plan on moving, as soon as the baby came. Tess already had a room ready for the two of them, with a nice big bed for her, and a bassinet and a changing table and everything else that the baby would need.

But right now, Lacey felt she was managing well enough. And the cabin did please her. She had music—a boom box and a pile of CDs in the sleeping nook. She read a lot and she sketched all the time. Lately, since just before she’d come to Wyoming, she’d discovered that she no longer had the kind of total concentration it took to work seriously on a painting. But that was all right. She sensed that it would come back to her, after the baby arrived—no matter what Xavier Hockland, her former teacher and mentor, chose to believe.

And certainly she could manage to make it to the main house when her labor began. Tess could take her to the hospital from there.

Logan began prowling around the room. He stopped by the big stove. “What do you use to heat this place?”

“Wood. Lately, the weather’s so mild, I hardly need heat, though. And if I do, I only have to build one fire, in the morning. By the time it burns down, it’s warm outside.”

“How do you cook?”

“Same thing. I build a fire.”

“You’re chopping wood in your condition?”

She made a face at him. “No. Zach takes care of it. He keeps the wood bin out in back nice and full.”

“But you have to haul it in here and build the fire yourself?”

“It’s not that difficult, Logan.”

“Heavy lifting is a bad idea at this point. Your doctor should have told you that.”

“Logan. Come on. Stop picking on sweet old Doc Pruitt. I only carry in a few pieces of wood at a time. There honestly is no heavy lifting involved.”

He marched over to her again. “You need help around here. And even if you won’t marry me, I think I have a right to be here when my baby is born.”

She opened her mouth to rebut that—and then shut it without making a sound. He was right. If he wanted to be here for the birth of their child, who was she to deny him?

“Who knows?” he added. “You might even need a doctor in a hurry. Then you’d be doubly glad that I stuck around.”

Score one more for his side. She could go into labor any time now. If, God forbid, anything should go wrong before she reached the hospital in Buffalo, it wouldn’t hurt to have a doctor at her side.

And who was she kidding, anyway?

Beyond the issues of her isolation in the cabin, of a father’s rights and Logan’s skills as a physician, there was her foolish heart, beating too hard under her breastbone, just waiting for any excuse to keep him near for a while.

It astonished her now, to look back on all those years growing up, when the name Logan Severance had inspired in her a feeling of profound irritation at best. Logan Severance, her sister’s perfect, straight-A boyfriend, who played halfback on the high school football team, took honors in debate and went to University of California in Davis on full scholarship. Logan Severance, who seemed to think it was his duty to whip his sweetheart’s messed-up little sister into shape. He was always after her to stand up straight, carping at her about her grades, lecturing her when she ran away or got caught stealing bubble gum from Mr. Kretchmeir’s corner store.

Sometimes, she had actually thought that she hated him.

But not anymore.

Now she knew that she loved him. She had figured that out last September, on the fifth glorious day of their crazy, impossible affair. It turned out to be the last day. As soon as she admitted the grim truth to herself, she had seen the self-defeating hopelessness of what she was doing. She had told him she couldn’t see him anymore.

He had called her three times after she returned to L.A. She’d found his messages on her answering machine and played each of them back over and over, until they had burned themselves a permanent place in her brain. She had memorized each word, each breath, each nuance of sound…

“Hello, Lacey. It’s Logan. I was just—listen. Why don’t you give me a call?”

“Lacey. Logan. I left a message a month ago. Did you get it? Are you all right? Sometimes I… Never mind. I suppose I should just leave you alone.”

“Lace. It’s Logan. If you don’t call me back this time, I won’t try again.”

She had started to call him a hundred times. And she had always put the phone down before she went through with it, though she had known by his second call that she was carrying his baby, known that eventually she would make herself tell him.