The Doctor's Meant-to-be Marriage

“You will get through this.”

“If only Paul were here…” Her voice trailed off and she sighed.

“He’s watching over you, Connie. You know he is.”

Lowering her head, the woman nodded. “I miss him.”

Pain at Connie’s loss pricked Jared’s heart. If ever love existed, Connie and Paul Black had shared the elusive emotion.

“I know you do,” he said softly. He himself missed the man’s positive outlook and robust laughter. He could only imagine Connie’s loneliness and sense of loss.

Her hand trembled within his grasp. “Maybe this is the Lord’s way of bringing us back together.”

“No!”

Connie jerked back.

Jared hadn’t meant his outburst to startle her. Hell, his shout had startled him. He lifted Connie’s hand, holding the fragile fingers with care. “You have to fight. Paul would want you to beat this. For your daughter. Your grandsons.”

She patted his cheek with her free hand, then leaned her head against his shoulder and cried. Feeling awkward, Jared let her.

Although the delay put him behind with his other patients, he spent another thirty minutes with Connie, scheduling her PET scan to see if there were any other hot spots in her body. He prayed the scan would reveal only the tumor in her hip. Fortunately, she’d had a negative PET scan a little more than a year before as part of her routine cancer follow-up. Perhaps the disease really hadn’t metastasized outside the hip joint.

He’d hope for the best.

He moved through the rest of the day in a daze, seeing his patients but unable to focus on anything other than the defeated look on Connie’s face when she’d left the office.

In the past twenty-four hours he’d hurt two women who elicited powerful emotions inside him.

With Connie, he’d had no choice. And with Chelsea, well, there really hadn’t been a choice there either.

He glimpsed her from time to time in the hallway. Although he’d felt her gaze on him, he’d carefully avoided looking at her. Each time he thought of her hurt look the night before, he pushed his guilt aside, letting the fresh keep company with the old. Guilt was something he had an overabundance of.

Two weeks later, frustration plagued Chelsea. Despite their working similar schedules, Jared managed to ignore her almost completely. Oh, there were the occasional glances when he thought she wasn’t looking, but the moment their eyes met he’d get busy or disappear.

At times his rejection felt like salt poured into the wounds of her childhood. Into the wounds of his rejection when she’d been seventeen. She still wasn’t good enough.

Perhaps that was for the best because there was no place for a relationship between her and Jared to go, and she’d only end up hurting even more.

“Hey, sis.” Will popped into her office and caught her daydreaming. “Why the long face?”

“No long face.” She immediately stretched said long face into a smile. “Just thinking.”

“About?” He plunked himself down in the chair across from her desk.

“Your birthday,” she covered. Actually, she and Leslie had discussed his birthday earlier. They’d decided to throw a party. “This is the first year in some time that we’ll be together. What are your plans for the big day?”

He shrugged. “Just another day in my book.”

“Another day?” This coming from the man who’d always made a big deal of her birthday? Perhaps he’d been trying to make up for their parents who’d repeatedly failed to acknowledge the day as anything out of the ordinary. Even while she’d been away at medical school, Will had always found a way to make her day special. “Ha, don’t try to fool me. You live for birthdays.”

He gave a disheartened sigh. “That was before I was turning thirty-five.”

“Thirty-five on a man looks good.”

“There is that

.” He grinned devilishly.