“Am I just supposed to be okay that Grant is perfectly content to have me in his bed whenever he feels like it and for us to act like a family when it’s convenient for him?” Harley grumbled. “All my life I’ve been either ignored or underestimated by my family. Is it so wrong to want the man I love to love me back?”
Seeing the shock on Jaymes’s face, Harley wished she’d reined in her bitterness. She’d bared her heart and confessed that she’d fallen in love with him five years ago. His response had been to dismiss her feelings, declaring the emotional attachment impossible simply because they’d barely known each other.
“No, of course not,” Jaymes said, “but you can’t expect him to love you back just because you think he should.”
“I know. If he would just stop putting up walls,” she complained, “but he won’t.” If he’d been willing to offer her the slightest encouragement, she would’ve compromised her plans and figured out how to run Zest without being in Thailand full-time. Instead, he’d insisted that he’d never feel the same way and her stubborn pride was all that saved her from making an even bigger fool of herself.
“I’m in love with him and he refuses to even consider giving us a chance,” Harley continued. “How do I just accept that?”
“I don’t know.” Jaymes reached out a comforting hand and squeezed her friend’s arm. “But if you run back to Thailand, aren’t you just giving up?”
While Harley knew she was no longer the immature eighteen-year-old who’d run off when life got too complicated, if she repeated her mistake of five years earlier and behaved like one, she wouldn’t be the only one to suffer.
“I’m afraid that if I don’t give up, I’ll be the one giving in and settling for less.” Harley released a quavering breath. “Maybe it’s all a moot point. The fact that he’s unwilling to budge from his current position leads me to think that he’s right. I would be forever unhappy with what he’s willing to offer.”
“Sounds like you’ve made up your mind about returning to Thailand. Do you have any idea when you’re going to go?”
“I told Beth that I would stick around and attend the TCC ball. It seems like a fitting bookend to my relationship with Grant since it was at that same ball five years ago when he and I met. This year’s gala will mark the moment when I abandon all hope that we have a future.”
“So, you haven’t abandoned all hope yet?” Jaymes asked, her expression suddenly optimistic.
Struck by a sudden bout of indecision, Harley considered how she should answer her friend. Hadn’t she accepted that Grant would never give their relationship a fighting chance? Why then was she questioning what might happen if she stuck around for one more week? Gave more of herself to him? Maybe she could wear him down like wind and water carved rock.
Harley sighed as her vacillating mood shifted once more. “Maybe not all hope.”
* * *
With everything blowing up in his personal life, Grant was relieved to get back to his practice where stability and discipline reigned. But in order to give his patients the quality of care they came to him for, he had to force down his frustration over Harley’s stubborn insistence on returning to Thailand and taking his son away from him. It went against his beliefs to meet with patients and not give them his full and complete attention. This particular characteristic had driven Paisley crazy because she’d expected to receive the same focused attention he lavished on his patients. No matter how much she complained about his distance, Grant never seemed to be able to give her what she needed.
How strange that everything about his relationship with Harley was the exact opposite. Since she’d returned to Royal, he found himself constantly distracted. When he wasn’t dwelling on her soft skin and lush mouth, he cataloged her various smiles and how each one messed with his emotions. His ability to focus on matters at hand suffered, thoughts tangling with emotions until he couldn’t separate them.
After how he’d behaved around her five years earlier, he should’ve done a better job keeping his distance from her. They could’ve co-parented their son in a civil, cordial way and not fallen prey to the chemistry that set fire to his blood. If he’d remained in control, he wouldn’t be plagued by uncertainty. If he hadn’t kept tumbling into bed with her, could he have handled things better? Making love to her had stirred up his emotions, making him reactionary rather than rational.
His desk phone buzzed, letting him know that his next appointment was waiting. Grant got to his feet with an impatient huff, wishing he could fling his worries aside as easily as a dog shed water. Unfortunately, the anxiety that clung to him was more like spiderwebs and proved difficult to escape.
“Here’s Gracie Diaz’s chart with her labs,” his nurse declared, handing him a file. “She’s in exam room three.”
“Thank you.” Grateful for something concrete to focus his attention on, Grant opened the file and began scanning the results as he strode down the hall.
Yet, despite his best efforts, his emotions continued to churn as he opened the exam room door and strolled inside. Gracie Diaz sat with her hands clasped in her lap, white knuckles betraying her nerves. Seeing the stress in her beautiful dark brown eyes, Grant reined in his own disquiet. Although he rarely knew much about his patients beyond the medical information written in their files, Miss Diaz had become quite a household name in recent months after a lottery win took her from an anonymous personal assistant to a celebrated multimillionaire.
“Hello, Gracie,” Grant said, softening his expression in the hopes that he would put her at ease. “How are you doing today?”
During her last visit, she’d been quite loquacious as she’d shared how much her life had changed in the past few weeks and spoken of her dream to be a mother. As was the case with several of his patients who were single, she’d decided to become pregnant through in vitro fertilization. In preparation for that procedure, Grant had initiated a standard barrage of tests to ensure that everything would go smoothly. The results had been less than ideal, but nothing he couldn’t remedy.
“I’ll be doing better after you tell me the results of my tests. Your nurse said you wanted to see me again before we started the procedure. Does that mean you found something wrong?”
“It’s nothing serious,” Grant said. “Just a minor hormone imbalance that could affect your chances of getting pregnant if we don’t treat it.”
This news relaxed her somewhat. Her lips softened into a big smile. “Well, that’s a relief,” she said with an unsteady chuckle. “I was convinced you were going to tell me I wasn’t a good candidate for in vitro.”
“No. Nothing like that.”
“Good. I’ve wanted to have a baby for so long now and before the money came along, I didn’t have the resources to make it happen.”
Never once with all the couples or single women who’d come to him wanting a child had he ever pondered their strong determination to create a family. However, after spending time with Harley and Daniel, he understood the drive. His fierce attachment to the boy wasn’t a decision he’d made. It was a gut-deep response to a primitive yearning. He couldn?
??t will it away any more than he could change the color of his eyes. It was part of him that he accepted without conscious thought.