A Marriage Worth Fighting For by Lilian Darcy

Author:Lilian Darcy
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2012-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

“Please come up again as soon as you can,” Alicia had said to MJ on the phone on Sunday night. “We need to get this sorted out, one way or the other.”

She’d sounded strained and unhappy, and the darkest part of him had thought, Good. If this is no picnic for you, Alicia, that’s only what you deserve. The better part of him had hated to hear her struggling so much, pretending things were fine, giving the truth away only in her tone and that one plea.

Now it was Thursday afternoon and he was doing as she’d asked. Hannah Majeska had been through her epic session of surgery, with himself and two other orthopedic specialists working over her for eleven solid hours. The other two trauma cases he had covered the worst and then turned over to his juniors for the next forty-eight hours, and there was nothing important enough in the world of medicine to bring him back to the city this time, before those forty-eight hours were over.

He thought about telling Alicia exactly how much effort it had taken to shift his schedule around and off-load his cases and appointments. Fifteen phone calls, and that didn’t include the ones his office staff would have to make. Even in his head, though, he could hear how arrogant it would sound, and saying it out loud would be worse.

He’d never questioned his own ego before. Dad considered it a vital tool in a doctor’s skill set and he agreed. If you doubted yourself, you would never have the courage to go into the O.R. with guns blazing and stop someone’s heart, or transplant their liver, or fill them with plates and screws.

But maybe you had to learn to keep your ego purely for the job. Maybe your personal life was different, and you had to be more humble there.

Lord, he felt he’d had more lessons in humility these past eight days than he’d had in his whole life.

“Maybe I need them,” he said to the ribbon of road spooling out beneath his wheels.

He drove through without stopping, because he was too impatient to lose a moment, and arrived on the outskirts of Radford at just after four.

* * *

MJ had texted Alicia with his arrival time as he left the city. He’d updated his estimate twice when he hit traffic and realized he was going to be a little later than he’d first said, and she knew his precision about the time was yet another signal that he was trying hard.

But it left her knowing exactly when to expect him, which meant she had so much conflicting emotion pinned on the moment.

Today had passed so slowly, as had the whole six days since MJ had left. She hadn’t seen another adult all day. Andy had been at work, while Claudia had taken little Ben with her on a tour of available office space in the area, as she was hoping to set up her accountancy and financial-planning business within the next few months.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.