From Humbug To Holiday Bride

“Forget I called.” He thought he heard a slight warble, but he couldn’t be sure. “Go back to sleep,” she said, clearing her throat. He closed his eyes again and stood on the cool hardwood floor, rotating his shoulders to stretch his muscles as he dressed. “Hamish?” she questioned when he didn’t answer.

“I’ll be there,” he said.

“No. I didn’t mean it. Really, 1 didn’t mean it. I was just…it was stupid…I’ll never forgive you if you embarrass me by coming down here in the middle of the night. Besides, they just gave me a sleeping pill, and I won’t even know you’re here.”

“You wouldn’t have called if you weren’t in trouble,” he replied.

“Trouble?” she chided, but he detected a lack of force in her words. “You know me better than that. Now, go back to sleep. I’m going there myself.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Please,” she whispered. “Please don’t be so damned…serious. I swear I’ll never forgive you if you come down here at this time of night. I swear it.”

He was torn with indecision, and then she hung up, saying, “I’m getting very sleepy,” slurring her words slightly. “Very…sleepy.”

He sat on the edge of the bed, feeling the cool draft on his feet. He was now wide-awake, agitated because once again she had tied him in knots, and wondered what he should do. He knew in his heart that she had been desperate to call him. She had never called him before.

He dressed quickly and slipped out of the house into the pre-dawn night. As he drove to the hospital, he blamed her stubborn, prickly pride for how she had reached out in despair with one hand while insulting him and pushing him away with the other. Then he thought about her early life, the. trauma of her mother’s death, being neglected by an insensitive father. He remembered the fear he had seen in her eyes and suspected there were probably very few people she had learned to trust in her life. And yet she had become a strong, accomplished woman. He understood why she had wrapped her pride around herself like insulation from a hurtful world.

He fought a sense of foreboding while he drove to the hospital. He had a sickening feeling in his gut. She needed him. She must, he realized, to have called him like this.

He prayed for serenity and guidance while he hastened to her room. When he strode through the door, he found her sitting on the side of her bed, dangling her feet over the edge. She was beautiful, her hair tousled from sleep, the scar on her face fading to pink.

She wore one of those ugly, thin hospital gowns pulled off one shoulder, her legs bare to midthigh. Her muddy green eyes looked up at him. “You came,” she whispered, and then her eyes closed, and he knew he was in trouble. He wanted to touch her. He wanted very badly to touch her. “There,” she rasped, pointing to a messy array of colored pamphlets.

He reached out and picked up several, then glanced quickly through them. They were promotional brochures, glossy and brightly colored, featuring modern buildings, Victorian mansions, sterile bedrooms and lots of people in residence—people in wheelchairs, most of them with white hair, wrinkled skin and empty eyes.

He looked questioningly at her, fanning the brochures out in front of him. She nodded, her eyes filling with tears. “Nursing homes,” she confirmed. “I get to choose one.”

“Oh, my God,” he gasped, dropping them onto the bed. He picked her up impulsively, as if she were a child, and when he felt her good arm go around his neck, he held her against him, her legs dangling free over his thighs, her face nestled in his neck. He turned in a slow circle, burying his face in her hair, and he let his heart ache while his body reveled in holding her. Absently, he pulled her gown closed over her back and held it there with his arms clasped around her. She felt frail and soft. Helpless. Warm. “Am I hurting you?” he whispered into her tangled hair. She shook her head a little wildly, and he felt wetness on his neck. “They can’t send you away. You’re going to get well,” he whispered. “I won’t let them do this to you. I won’t let it happen.”

Lost in comforting her and not wanting to let her go, he failed to notice how much time had passed until his arms felt the strain, and he finally returned her to the bed.

Her mouth was open slightly in obvious bewilderment, and he noticed how very kissable it looked. She had felt good pressed against him. She had felt damned good in his arms. He might have intended to give her comfort, but there was something deeper going on, and he recognized it all too well.

Quickly, he went to the closet and got her robe. He helped her get her injured arm into it. She kept her face lowered, obviously unwilling to let him see the tears she had likely fought not to shed in the first place.

“I have money,” she said finally in her husky voice. “But I have nowhere to go. I can’t take care of myself yet.”

“Your father? Another relative? A friend?”

“No. No, I can’t Nobody would want me. I can’t.”

“We’ll think of something, dear lady,” he said, sitting alongside her on the bed. “We’ll think of something.”

“There’s a convalescent center nearby, but it’s all old people. They’re all old. And I’m young, damn it. I’ve never needed anyone to take care of me. Never. I don’t know what I’m going to do now.”

“We’ll find somewhere else,” he reassured her.

“They’ve given up on me because I haven’t made any progress lately. They think this is as good as I’m going to get. They’re wrong. I’m going to get better. I’m going to get much, much better.”

“I believe you.”

“You’re the only one who does.”

“Well, you called me,” he sighed. “I didn’t think you had kept the number.”

She reached over with her left hand and used it to raise her limp right hand. There, written across her palm was his telephone number in ballpoint pen, smudged but legible, as if she had traced over it many times. “It’s been there for weeks. Every day after my bath, I go over it again so it won’t fade, so I’ll always know where it is,” she said.

Something lurched in his chest when he looked at her palm and thought of her outlining his phone number in her flesh every day and only calling him in the middle of the night when she was desperate. He raised her chin and looked into her glistening eyes. He saw that something in her had been defeated, and even though she had consistently rejected his efforts to help, he was now apparently her last resort.

He remembered the day Maralynn had died. He’d stayed with her all night long, sitting beside her bed. At the time he’d felt there was something bleak and desperate about a hospital in the middle of the night when sounds echoed only occasionally through the halls, amplified by the absence of people talking and moving about. He’d thought then that it was best to be asleep. It had seemed to him that if you didn’t get to sleep before darkness descended on the hospital, you would not get to sleep at all.

He tried to imagine what B. J. Dolliver had gone through, and he decided she had agonized for a long time before she’d called him. He suspected her pride would not have let her call unless she was overwhelmed with fear.

“I can’t stay here,” she said.

“When did you get the pamphlets?”

“Two days ago. They expected me to make a decision by now. I think I’m supposed to be gone. I told them I could pay for the room if my insurance doesn’t cover it.”

“Why did you wait so long to call me?” he asked.

He watched her raise her chin in a weak reflection of defiance. “I vowed I would not call you at all.”

“But what about that?” He gestured toward her limp hand with his telephone number written on her skin.

“I never intended to use it,” she said after a long silence.

He sighed. “Your destructive pride driving you to the wall.” He looked at her. “How do you expect me to arrange something in less than twenty-four hours?”

“You believe in miracles. I know you do. I don’t know anybody else who believes in miracles,” she said in a tearful, jerky voice.

Deep in thought, he stuffed his hands into his pockets and ambled to the windows. There was only one place he wanted to take her, and it was probably the last place she ought to be. He could let her sleep on the daybed in his office, and probably Mrs. Billings and the children could help. He didn’t think some people in his congregation would like the idea, but then he didn’t like the idea much himself. And although Mrs. Billings would be thrilled at first to have her heroine under their roof, he was sure B.J.’s rough edges would wear her welcome thin in quick order.

It was an idea bordering on insanity, he realized. She wasn’t his responsibility. She was dangerous to him, in fact, a threat to the orderliness of his full, rich life. How could he even think of taking her home, now that he found himself attracted to her?

Still, there seemed nowhere else for her to go. She was terrified of a nursing home, so terrified that she had finally swallowed her pride and called him. What he feared most was her feeling defeated and helpless and taking an easy exit to avoid a fate worse than death. He remembered Mrs. B repeating Deborah’s fears, although until now he had assumed they were both mistaken. He had to know.

“What if I can’t find a place?” he asked.

“You said you would.” For the first time, he sensed the flatness in her husky voice.

“If I can’t, then what?” She hesitated. He listened closely to her voice, to each nuance and pause. His back to her, he kept his eyes shut to sharpen his perceptions of her. “Then what?” he insisted, not kindly.

“I won’t go,” she said, and he barely heard her.

“If I walk out this door today and say I can’t help you, what will you do?” She didn’t answer. “What will you do?” he demanded, letting frustration edge his words.