Читать книгу The Doctor's Daughter - Judith Bowen - Страница 7

CHAPTER ONE

IT NEVER CEASED to amaze Lucas Yellowfly how, in this life, you couldn’t discount coincidence. Sure, good luck was good management, but sometimes you had to wonder.

Look at today’s mail, for instance. How likely was it he’d get an invitation to a baby christening, a letter from his sister, who never wrote when there was a phone in town, and a job application from a woman he’d once loved? Twelve long years since he’d seen her. No woman had ever measured up quite that way since.

Pete Horsfall, his law partner, mostly retired but still in the office a day or two a week, had tossed the application on Lucas’s desk after lunch. Lucas had just picked up his personal mail at home and read the invitation to the christening of Joe and Honor Gallant’s baby boy. His sister’s letter he’d tucked in his pocket unopened after examining the postmark. Somewhere on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. He wanted to think about it on his short walk back to the office.

So Theresa had ended up on the coast again. With her daughter, presumably. Lucas’s sister had had her share of problems. He was always ready to help her, no questions asked, especially since Tammy’s birth eight years ago. He just wanted a few minutes to think about what Theresa might be up to this time before he opened the envelope and found out.

And then, as soon as he sat down at his desk, there was that application for the legal assistant’s position from Virginia Lake staring him in the face, on top of the handful of six or seven applications Horsfall had already opened and read. Lucas wondered if Virginia was on his partner’s short list. If she wasn’t, he pondered briefly how he’d get around the old man and get her hired.

Because that was what he intended. He didn’t care what her qualifications were. He’d train her himself if he had to—he wanted to see Virginia again. He wanted her back in Glory.

When had he seen her last?

Graduation night. Her graduation. He’d come back to Glory with one thing on his mind—to show the town that had never had time for the Indian kid from the south side of the tracks just how wrong they were. He’d had a freshly inked bachelor of arts degree in one pocket and a letter accepting him to one of the country’s top law schools in the other. He’d planned to ask the doctor’s daughter to the dance—the one girl in town who’d been considered completely beyond his reach. All she could do was turn him down, right?

But she hadn’t turned him down. She’d said yes, and Lucas wasn’t sure his life had ever been the same again.

He’d had his eye on her all through high school, although she was several years behind him. She’d been wild. Crazy and wild, and it seemed there wasn’t anything she and that boyfriend of hers, Johnny Gagnon, wouldn’t get up to. She was the bane of Doc Lake’s life. His only daughter. His and that stiff society dame. As if there was any society in the town of Glory!

But Doris Lake did her best to pretend there was. Only, it was extremely difficult with a flame-haired daredevil of a daughter who drag-raced her daddy’s Oldsmobile on the abandoned airfield five miles out of town and thumbed her nose at every convention in the book.

Maybe that was why she’d accepted his invitation to the senior prom. Because he was hands-off. A half-breed. A no-good with a drunk for a father and a brittle, worried, worn-out mother who somehow kept the family together by cleaning houses in the fancy district up on Buffalo Hill. Doc Lake’s wasn’t one of them. Lucas didn’t think he could have borne the shame at eighteen, no matter how proud he was of his mother now, at thirty-five. The old man was dead finally, of a rotten liver and a broken heart, a salmon-eating Fraser River Sto:lo dead in prairie Blackfoot country, home of the buffalo-eaters. And a few years ago, Lucas had bought his mother a retirement apartment in south Calgary, which she shared with her older and only surviving sister. Family was a part of his life Lucas rarely talked about. The truth was, nobody asked.

Or maybe Virginia Lake had accepted his invitation becaue her boyfriedn was in jail.

Johnny Gagnon had a string of petty charges against him by the time he quit school at sixteen. Joyriding, public mischief, shoplifting. He had a laughing, darkly handsome face and a devil-may-care attitude to match Virginia’s. Even when he went to work as a grease monkey for the local mechanic, Walter Friesen, he hung around the high school, revving up his old Thunderbird in the parking lot, waiting for Virginia to finish class. When Virginia was out of town, Lucas would see him driving up and down Main Street with any number of other female companions. Or steaming up the car windows with some girl at the Starlight Drive-in.

The day of Virginia’s graduation, Johnny was in jail for grand larceny. Car theft. He wasn’t a young offender anymore and the Glory Plain Dealer didn’t call it joyriding in their “This Week in Court” column. He got six months, was out in three, but by then Lucas had taken his girl to the senior prom and earned Gagnon’s enduring enmity.

Not that Lucas Yellowfly gave a damn. Where was Johnny Gagnon now? Ha. Lucas hadn’t thought of him in years. Probably in a maximum-security pen somewhere. Dorchester or Kingston. Well out of society’s hair, anyway, he presumed. Lucas had grown up and dedicated his life to the law. He’d put the violence of his own youth behind him. The bar fights, the rodeo brawls, the lies dreamed up to protect his no-good father and tired mother from the town’s scorn—all of it behind him. He believed in the law now. In the power of justice.

And his profession had been very, very good to him. He had an excellent income, a knockout wardrobe, savings in the bank, a stockbroker on retainer, holidays in the south every January, a BMW—he’d achieved all the trappings of success. And, best of all, he’d come back to Glory to do it. He’d shoved his success in the town’s face and they’d had to take it. Now he could accompany any single woman in Glory to any dinner party, anytime. He was in demand. Fathers brightened when they saw him arrive with their daughter on his arm. Where were the scowls of the old days?

Lucas enjoyed every minute of it. Revenge, they said, was sweet. Indeed, it was.

He frowned slightly as he examined the facts on Virginia’s resumé. Thirty, diploma in office management and legal research, past experience... He ran his eye quickly down the list and frowned again. It seemed she’d had an awful lot of short-term jobs in a lot of different towns. He glanced at her cover letter.

Then his eye stopped. His heart stopped. She had a child. A boy, five years old.

Lucas pushed back his chair and put his feet up on the desk, hands behind his head. He stared out the window.

Single. With a child. Coming back to Glory. What had happened in Virginia Lake’s life?

Lucas told himself he’d do everything right. He’d let Pete handle it; otherwise, she might remember that prom date and the night they’d spent together and maybe change her mind. When he saw her, in person, it would be different. There’d be no embarrassment on either side. She’d know he cared. The way he always had. She’d know he’d never do anything to hurt her. She’d know she’d come to the right place. If he could help her, he would.

Yes, he’d let Pete take care of things. Lucas couldn’t afford to blow it. He’d been waiting for Virginia for a very long time.