The Doctor's Do-Over

“—and you were a kid. Legally, anyway. And what I’d begun to feel for you … inappropriate doesn’t even begin to cover it. No way on God’s earth was I going to act on what I was feeling, but damn, it scared me. That everything our relationship was predicated on …” He scrubbed the heel of his hand across his jaw, then banged it against the railing. “What you wanted that night—hell, what I wanted—redefined wrong. You’d always trusted me. And I refused to violate that trust. Even though it nearly killed me.”

She took a deep breath. “So you freaked.”

“To put it mildly. No matter what I did, I was going to hurt you. Worse than you already were. And afterward, when I went back to school …” His gaze touched hers. “I had no idea how to fix it.”

Yanking her sweatshirt hood up over her head, Mel faced the moonlight-stippled currents for some time before finally saying, “It took a while, but eventually I got over the rejection. Once the hormone fog cleared. Because, like you said, what else could you have done? Your silence, though … That devastated me, Ry. Not gonna lie.”

His gut twisted. “So you got even.”

“Not on purpose,” she said after a moment. “I mean, I didn’t set my sights on your brother. Small consolation though that might be.”

Ryder frowned. “He came on to you?”

“Not blatantly, no. Not at first, anyway. He just suddenly seemed, I don’t know. Interested. Like he cared. And I was hurt, Ryder. Hurt, and confused, and adrift …” One side of her mouth ticked up. “And, okay, mad. At you, for basically walking out of my life. At myself, for being an idiot. For ruining the one good thing in it.”

She paused. “I made a terrible mistake, Ryder. Not that I don’t love Quinn with every fiber of my being, but the rest of it?” Her head wagged. “I disappointed everyone, especially my mother. Who adored Quinn, don’t get me wrong, but I know she never quite got over how badly everything ended. Then there was Nana, who never spoke to me again—”

“This being the same woman who cut herself off from her own daughter, right? For reasons known only to herself? You’re not responsible for other people’s grudges, Mel. And as far as that agreement goes—legally it’s worth bupkiss.”

“Yeah, well, it’s amazing, how strong a motivator fear is. You want to talk freaked?” She pointed to herself. “Poster child. And if I’m being completely honest, at least it got me out of St. Mary’s. Me, and my mother, even if she never quite saw it that way. Got both of us away from … everything.”

“Meaning my family.”

Several beats passed before she said, “In all fairness it’s not as if they treated my parents badly—and I always did have a soft spot for your father. At heart he’s a good man. In fact, I gathered he was behind the generous financial considerations. And as far as Jeremy and I went—we used each other,” she said flatly. “And we both knew it. So there was never any ohmigod, you can’t separate us we’re in loooove thing going on. If the dude couldn’t be bothered to acknowledge his own kid, I could live with that. I hated him for it, but I could live with it. For your parents, though, to turn their backs on their first grandchild …” She gave her head a sharp shake. “For your mother to go so far as to demand that I take care of the ‘problem’—that was a lot harder to handle.”

Of course it was. Because while he may have detected a glimmer of regret in his mother’s eyes, he doubted it was any match for the stubborn pride that motivated every action and decision Lorraine Caldwell had ever made. And hearing Mel echo his mother’s earlier admission …

Ryder shut his eyes, wrestling to control his breathing before saying, “I want to make things up to you.”

“Forget it, Ry. What’s done is done.”

“Even if I say I’d like to get to know Quinn? Why not?” he said when her gaze slammed into his. “Just because my brother had his head up his ass—”

Mel pushed herself away from the railing and started back down the boardwalk. “Not gonna happen.”

“She’s still my niece.”

“Which I can’t tell her, brainiac.”

“They can’t legally—”

“Legal has nothing to do with it!” she said, stopping short, the wind whipping strands of hair that had escaped the hood across her face. “I know what my rights are, okay? I know what I could do. I also know what I can’t do. And won’t do. And that’s anything that could potentially hurt my kid—”

“So you’re tarring me with the same brush? When I knew nothing about it?”

“You weren’t there, Ryder!” she said, tears shining in her eyes. “Weren’t there when your mother called me a little tramp in front of my humilated mother, who’d been loyal as hell to yours for more than twenty years! Weren’t there when she accused me of trying to worm my way into the family, saying that since clearly my plan to snag you hadn’t worked, I’d gone after Jeremy, or when she made me do a DNA test before Quinn was born to verify that Jeremy was really the father!”

Ryder’s stomach plummeted. “Dammit—I had no idea—”

“No, you didn’t. Don’t. So believe me, I want less to do with your parents than they want to do with me. And if you get involved with Quinn …” She jerked away. “It won’t work, Ryder. Because the past … it doesn’t go poof simply because you want it to. But here’s the weird thing …”

Suddenly calmer, as though the storm had blown over, she started walking again. “Now that I’m a mother, too? In a way I get where your mother was coming from. About how you do anything to protect your kid. I didn’t—don’t—agree with her methods, but I understand her motivation.”

Mel’s mouth pulled flat, exactly the way she used to as a child, when she’d made up her mind, by golly, and nothing and no one was going to change it. “Quinn’s already hurting, from her grandmother’s death, from my breakup. At least one of those things I had some control over, and I blew it. Forgot, when I went and hitched my wagon to a rainbow, there was someone else involved. So you better believe I learned my lesson. Meaning I’d hack off a limb before I’d let Quinn anywhere near the people who wrote her off.”

Even in the dark, the pain in her eyes, her voice …

“And you thought I’d written you off, too.” When she shrugged, he said, over the guilt dammed up at the back of his throat, “I swear, things would’ve been different if I’d known.”

“Right. What on earth would you have done?”

“I don’t know. Something. Married you, if nothing else—”

“Oh, yeah,” Mel said on a high-pitched laugh, “your parents would’ve been totally on board with that idea. Do you really think they would have let you jeopardize your education, your career, when they wouldn’t let Jeremy jeopardize his? And Quinn wasn’t even yours! Not to mention, what makes you think I would have let you do that?”

“You can honestly say you wouldn’t have even considered it? Especially given—”

“That I had the mother of all crushes on you?”

“A crush I had a damn hard time not reciprocating!”

She blinked, then released another laugh, this one softer. Sadder. “And marriage would’ve made it all okay? Au contraire, my friend. It would’ve ruined everything.”

“Except I did that anyway, didn’t I?”

On a cross between a groan and a growl, Mel clamped her hands to her head, tromping down off the boardwalk to the parking lot. “God, why are we even talking about this? Like we can somehow change what happened? It’s done, it’s over, and the second this business with Nana’s house is straightened out, I’m outta here. So you tell your mother she has absolutely nothing to worry about, the last thing I want to do is make waves.”

Nearly to the car, Ryder grabbed Mel’s hand. If she was shocked, she didn’t let on. Instead she calmly met his gaze, her brows slightly raised.

“I know I can’t even begin to fix what my family broke. Or even what I broke. But to at least honor what we had—”

“What we had doesn’t exist anymore,” Mel said softly, reclaiming her hand. “And it hasn’t for a long, long time. We’re not those two kids anymore, Ry.” She smirked. “Can’t go back, no way to go forward. So. Think this is what they call a non-starter—”

At the sound of some ridiculous ringtone, she dug her phone out of her pocket. “Huh. It’s April …” She put the phone to her ear. “Yeah?” Ryder saw her brows crash, then she yanked open the car door. “We’ll be right there.”

“Everything okay?” he asked after getting in beside her, barely getting his seat belt fastened before she zoomed out of the sandy, unpaved lot and back onto the street.

“I didn’t quite get it all, April wasn’t making total sense, but apparently Quinn sliced her hand open on a nail or something.” At Ryder’s silence, she let out a sigh. “I suppose logically I should let you take a look, huh?”

“Up to you. But the nearest E.R.’s a good half hour away. And I have my bag in my car.”

“Of course you do,” she muttered as they flew into the weed-cracked driveway and she cut the engine. But before he could get out, she snagged his wrist. “Not one word—”

“Can I at least tell her we were friends? She’s going to wonder why we were together,” he said when she opened her mouth to protest. “She knows you lived here before, right? So we happened to run into each other—”

“Fine, fine, whatever.” She shooed him toward the door. “Just get in there before my kid bleeds to death.”

Ryder slammed shut the car door and trudged up the porch steps behind Mel, thinking he’d never been so angry, at so many people, for so many reasons, in his life.