Читать книгу Rescued By Marriage - Dianne Drake, Dianne Drake - Страница 9

“WITHOUT tests I can’t tell for sure, but I don’t feel anything out of place—no tumors, no significant swelling,” Della said as Mayor Vargas sat shirtless in the opened back of her SUV while she prodded and twisted his arm. Besides being tall, he had an extraordinary muscle mass, the evidence of a rigid, disciplined workout routine. “You’ve got full range of motion, which is good, and I’m not even feeling any popping, which is good, too. If you had an injury like a torn rotator cuff, you’d be experiencing some limited range.”

“It comes and goes,” he conceded. “Has been for months now, and just when I think it’s bad enough to have it looked at, it gets better and it seems like a waste of time.”

“Both shoulders?” she asked, switching her exam to his left shoulder. Manipulating her fingers along the shoulder line from his neck out to the furthest part of his shoulder, Della kneaded hard enough to assess the muscle, then she worked his entire arm up and down, back and forth, and at last in a wide circle.

“Not usually, but sometimes I get a twinge.”

Next she went in for the final diagnosis and did a deep, pinpointed probe to the joint, one so hard that the mayor flinched. “Hurt a lot?” she asked.

“Like you knew exactly where the worst spot was and dug right in.”

“I did.” Della smiled. “Takes practice, and years of poking and prodding,” she said as she returned to his right shoulder for the same pinpointed probe, which elicited both a flinch and a gasp from him. The mayor actually pulled away from her. “But along with the pain comes a diagnosis and a treatment plan.”

“One that’s good, I hope,” he said, rubbing his sorest shoulder.

Della glanced over at Sam, who was sitting casually on a tree stump. This had been a simple exam, yet he was watching it very intently. Did he want to be back in practice again? On impulse, she asked, “Would you take a look, Sam?” She really didn’t need his opinion. With or without tests, the mayor had bursitis. The symptoms fit, the pain response fit, and to be sure she’d send the mayor over to Connaught for a blood test and X-rays. But something was compelling her to include Sam in this, and she wasn’t sure what it was. Maybe only a hunch that he wanted to be in practice, or a little wistfulness in his eyes.

“Um, sure,” Sam responded quickly, then hurried through the knee-deep grass to the car. “I used to be an internist, so I think I can handle a second opinion.”

He did much the same exam as she had, poking and prodding, and amazingly she caught herself almost transfixed, watching him work. Sam was so intense about it, so serious and methodical. And the wistfulness she’d seen in his eyes earlier turned to…was it passion? He might be a doctor she would trust Meghan’s care to, and that was the highest praise she could give.

“Well, the bad news is…” he started.

Both Mayor Vargas and Della blinked in surprise.

“The bad news is that I’ll never have your build, no matter how hard I work out. How many hours a day do you train?”

“Two, sometimes three. Weights, mostly. Some boxing, a little basketball, swimming.”

“Like I said, that’s the bad news…for me. The good news for you is that I’m going to concur with Dr Riordan’s diagnosis.”

“Which I haven’t made,” she reminded him.

“But you were going to say bursitis, weren’t you?”

“Bursitis?” the mayor asked.

“Bursitis,” she confirmed. “An inflammation of the bursa.” Which he didn’t know about, judging by the puzzled look on his face. “We all have hundreds of bursae throughout our bodies. They decrease the friction between two surfaces that move together, most commonly in areas such as where muscles and tendons glide over your bones. Think about a small plastic bag filled with a little oil. You can rub it between your hands and there’s a smooth glide to it, but if you remove the oil it’s a rather rough rub. Constricted. That’s basically the function of the bursa, to provide that smooth rub, and if it becomes inflamed, it loses its glide. Hence, bursitis.”

“And how did I cause that?”

“Repetitive motion over a long period of time is one way. Or an injury. I’m guessing it’s from your workouts, though.”

“Is it curable?”

“Not curable as much as it’s manageable, but it does have a tendency to flare up from time to time, which means you may have to, at some point, adjust your workout routines to favor your condition. But we’ll deal with that after I see the X-ray report. For now, I want you to massage your shoulder for about fifteen minutes with an ice pack, three or four times a day, and make sure you don’t leave the ice on any spot for more than a few seconds or you can actually get frostbite in your muscle.”

“Instead of an ice pack with regular ice cubes, freeze some water in a paper cup then roll that over your shoulder in a massage,” Sam added. “Feels a lot better than ice cubes.”

Della gave him an appreciative stare. “Voice of experience?”

“I fancied myself as a writer once. Sadly, I was one inflamed bursa away from writing a best-selling novel.” He rubbed his elbow, then grinned. “Struck down in the middle of my prologue.”

“You couldn’t be a writer so you became a doctor? Aren’t you quite the multi-faceted man?” Like the doctor who’d gone off to Paris to be an artist. So where was Sam’s real heart? she wondered briefly. “Anyway,” she said, turning back to the mayor, “take ibuprofen for a week. Go by the recommended dosage on the label, then come back and see me in a couple of days and we’ll take a look at how you’re getting along and figure out what to do from there. Also, by then I’ll have found my prescription pad, and I’ll write you a script for lab work and X-rays.”

Her second appointment for the day now over with, Della received her pay with almost as much glee as she’d received her first. Glancing up at the gray clouds rolling in as she tucked it away in her pocket, she was hoping against hope her roof wasn’t going to leak, because a patch was not the place she wanted her first earnings to go. Most of it would go for the clinic, but a little would buy Meghan a gift.

“Are you sure you’re going to stay here with the storm coming in?” Sam asked. “I’m not sure about the condition of your house. It might leak.”

“It looks like I’ll be finding out in another few minutes,” she said, heading up to the porch.

“Like I said before, I think that agent who sold you this practice should have been more honest about it. There may still be room to get out of the contract.”

She stopped on the first step and looked at Sam. “He was honest. I simply didn’t ask enough questions. And I should have come here first to have a look. But I didn’t so it’s all water under the bridge now.” She glanced upward at the 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 start. It’s worthy of some optimism, too, because without it you do start from the beginning. With it, the course of what’s to come is already outlined.” He was starting again without that structure. The course of what was to come with him wasn’t anywhere close to being plotted on an outline.