Yours to Keep: A Loveswept Contemporary Romance Read online

  “Dr. Hansen!” a nurse called as he rounded the corner at a trot. “Can I—?”

  He paused to smile at her. “Can it wait?”

  She smiled back, nodded.

  “I promise, you’re first in line.”

  “Exam three,” another nurse called.

  He lifted the patient chart from the wooden rack on the door. Despite being nearly five minutes late, he didn’t open the folder or knock on the door right away. He stood there. One last moment to himself before the afternoon unfolded. The shine of Ana’s dark hair in the sun, her soft lower lip. The gleam of gratitude and admiration when he’d rescued her. He got to play the hero all the time with the mothers of his patients, but this was different. With the mothers, it was an accidental side effect, an unwanted residue of doing his job. With Ana, he’d gloried in it. He’d rescue her again and again if he could. Because he had the odd feeling it was the other way around, which made no sense. That when he opened that door, she’d rescued him.

  From what?

  He took a deep breath, rolled his shoulders, and gathered himself. Then he raised his fist, knocked on the exam-room door, and went in.

  Three-year-old Mary Freyer sat on the exam table, her curly blond hair in two matching ponytails, her feet dangling off the end, drumming a beat on the metal of the table.

  “Hi, Mary,” he said, in the playful voice he used with very young kids. “Are you playing the drums? What song are you playing?”

  She turned her head, and he turned, too. Her mother sat in the wooden-armed chair beside the exam table, slim and cool, her long hair tugged back in a smooth ponytail.

  Oh. He’d forgotten about Nicole Freyer. Nicole Freyer was one of the desperate mommies.

  Desperate mommies were an occupational hazard, like parents who asked him pediatric questions at awkward moments. They were usually the mothers of infants or toddlers. They felt ugly and unattractive because of post-pregnancy body changes, insecure because the dynamics in their household had shifted radically, and bored because they were smart and highly educated but they’d been forced to spend long hours playing Candy Land and watching Sesame Street. It all added up to a terrible case of frustration, and he was, unfortunately, an outlet.

  He felt sorry for them. Actually, he hurt for them, partially because he remembered when Trish went through a very similar phase. But that didn’t keep him from maintaining a safe distance—as much for their own good as for his. And, yes, Nicole Freyer had been an offender, at Mary’s one-year appointment. At the end of the visit, when he’d extended his hand to shake hers, she’d moved past his extended hand, put both her palms on his chest, and laid her head against him so that the clean shampoo scent of her hair swam into his consciousness. He’d fought down his instinctive physical reaction, said, “Pardon me,” as if he’d accidentally walked into her, and spun out of the office.

  Now she looked calm and collected, not desperate at all, but he felt a low-grade wariness take root, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to shake it. He’d keep physical and emotional distance between them, more than usual.

  “Nicole—good to see you. What brings you here today?”

  She lowered her chin as if she were ashamed. “I think I’ve been in denial.”

  He smiled. “It happens to the best of us. Don’t beat yourself up. Tell me what’s going on.”

  “Mary’s behavior has been weird. She’s been angry and fearful. More clumsy. Hypersensitive. I kept telling myself it was just a phase, that she was in a growth spurt. But.…” She fiddled with her earring, her hands shaking. Her voice shook, too, as she said, “Her preschool teacher noticed the behavior change. She said she needs to be evaluated. She said it’s the age when spectrum disorders show up.”

  He hated the idea of Mary Freyer, one of the sunniest infants he’d ever known, with an autism diagnosis. Unfortunately for Nicole and Mary, preschool teachers were notoriously good at identifying kids on the autism spectrum. They saw many kids the same age, so they knew when something was wrong, and they weren’t so close to the situation that denial blinded them. “Okay. Let’s not jump to any conclusions. I’m going to ask you a lot of questions.”

  Nicole nodded.

  He quizzed her for several minutes about the changes in Mary’s behavior. Then he thoroughly examined the child, teasing her into letting him search for Elmo in her ears and throat and listen for people singing songs in her chest and back. She didn’t giggle when he palpated her belly. She hardly reacted at all, which worried him more than he wanted to admit. Afterward, he sat on his stool and rolled it so that he was sitting across from Nicole.

  He wished he could tell Nicole Freyer that she had nothing to worry about. This was the hardest part of his job, when the news wasn’t all good, even if it wasn’t—at least yet—all bad. “If I were seeing her for the first time, I wouldn’t necessarily know that anything was wrong. But what you’re telling me does concern me, and it concerns me even more that her teacher felt the situation was serious enough to bring it to your attention.”

  There were deep worry lines between her brows. He leaned forward. “I’m going to give you the name of a developmental specialist. I want you to make an appointment. If you have trouble getting one, call the office and tell the nurses you need to speak to me. I’ll figure out how we can get you seen. I know it’s awful to have to wait when you’re worried.” He wrote the name of the specialist on a piece of paper.

  “I’m really freaked out,” she confessed. Her eyes were red-rimmed.

  He took a deep breath. The appointment was running over. It was eating up his break time, guaranteeing that he’d have to rush other patients later. He’d be late getting home to Theo—more hours the boy would spend alone, less time they could spend together this evening. Tonight would be devoted to whatever punishment Ethan meted out for the signature forging and whatever fight Theo put up.

  But there was no sidestepping—no rushing—Nicole Freyer’s kind of anxiety. She needed his reassurance, and she needed it now. And if delivering bad news was the worst part of his work, at least he could do the best possible job of delivering it sensitively and patiently. “This kind of thing often turns out to be nothing,” he said as gently as he could. “I’m very conservative. I refer kids for hundreds of tests and evaluations that don’t turn out to be anything worth worrying about.”

  Some of the creases in her forehead smoothed out. “Like Mary’s Lyme test in the spring,” she said. “That turned out to be a false alarm.”

  “Exactly.”

  He held the door open. He stood well back as she passed by, but if she’d thought of making another attempt on him she gave no sign of it, only stepped through the door with Mary in tow.

  He was relieved when she was gone.

  When Ana got home to Hawthorne that night, someone had left the front door of her triple-decker apartment building open, a kid’s sneaker propped inside. She kicked the sneaker out of the way and let the door close behind her. She wished people wouldn’t do that. This wasn’t Beacon, where you could leave your car unlocked in the driveway, your fancy GPS and iPod Nano sitting on the front seat, and have a fighting chance they’d be there in the morning.

  That would be nice.

  What would it be like to live that way, with your sense of safety justified? A life where simple contentment was not a punishable offense?

  She dug in the outer pocket of her backpack for the key to her family’s unit on the second floor.

  Thinking that way was a waste of her energy, because this was her life, and this, or some close variant of it, would always be her life. That was what her mother had signed her up for all those years ago when she’d failed to extend the visas. And Ana had done a damn good job of not wallowing in regret. She’d made something of herself, the most that could be made under the circumstances. She was proud of what she’d done, proud of not getting sucked into self-pity. She wouldn’t start now, despite Ed Branch.

  She walked up the stairs to their apartment
, let herself in. Her sister lay on the ugly orange-and-brown-plaid wool couch, watching TV.

  “Saludos, sis.” Cara didn’t break eye contact with an episode of Dancing with the Stars.

  “Hey.” Behind the TV noise, Ana heard her nephews in their bedroom, and loud music from the apartment below. She set her backpack on the floor beside the couch. The living room was only slightly larger than Ed Branch’s office but neat, empty of the kids’ books and clothes. Cara must have straightened up.

  Cara reached out a hand to pat her sister’s arm. “Cómo estás?” They always spoke Spanish—or, really, Spanglish—at home.

  “Estoy cansado.”—“I’m tired.”

  Ana sat on the sagging couch beside her sister’s bulky form, untied her sneakers, and kicked them off. She threw herself against the cushions and put her feet up on the ancient glass-topped coffee table. There was another chair, an overstuffed armchair upholstered in rust velvet, where Ricky usually sat, but it was empty now. All the furniture faced the towering flat-screen TV.

  She didn’t know, and didn’t want to know, how Ricky had managed to afford the TV. She knew he hadn’t stolen it outright, and that was enough for her. It had to be. No drugs beyond alcohol and pot, no gang membership, no theft, and with those three accomplishments he was doing better than three-quarters of the men she knew. It sucked that the bar was so low, but there it was.

  On impulse, she reached out and tugged a handful of her sister’s thin, tight braids and was rewarded with a faint smile from Cara.

  Onscreen, the daughter of a prominent senator whirled with her partner. Ana wondered if the senator’s political party had pulled strings to get her on TV right before the midterm elections.

  Cara might not even know who the senator was. It was even faintly possible that she didn’t know who was president. Ana’s sister and brother lived inside a bubble of their own making—their family, their neighborhood, their Dominican friends. Cara was twelve when she came to Hawthorne, old enough that assimilating had been much harder for her than it had been for Ana. Cara’s kids were citizens, but their mother had gotten lost somewhere between her two worlds.

  “Where’s Ricky?”

  Cara dragged herself to a sitting position, reached for the remote, and muted the TV. “Watching baseball at Ernie’s.” For the first time since Ana walked through the door, Cara looked at her full on. “You okay? You look a little …”

  Yeah, she felt a little whatever-it-was, too. Exhausted. Like she’d been turned inside out and scooped hollow. Part of it was the nature of her life—up by five, teaching by six, tutoring all afternoon, teaching again in the evening. Part of it was the terror and disgust she’d felt in Ed Branch’s office, which had taken five years off her life. But most of it was Ethan Hansen. She still felt buzzy and thrilled by the few moments she’d spent in his company. And two different parts of her brain warred with each other. Or maybe it was one part of her brain and the whole rest of her sex-deprived body. Twenty-seven-year-old women weren’t supposed to be celibate, were they? It wasn’t natural.

  “Spill it, sister.”

  “You look tired, too,” Ana said. Her sister worked only one paid job, but also mothering a preteen and two teenagers and caring for an extended household had made her prematurely middle-aged.

  “Don’t try to change the subject.”

  She wanted to tell Cara. Her secret, all her secrets, felt too big to contain. She tugged her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, rested her chin there.

  “Ana, my life is so boring. Tell me something interesting.”

  Whatever else you could say about this crazy day, it hadn’t been boring. She hesitated, tried to decide what she could and couldn’t tell her sister. She unfolded herself again to look at Cara. “Do you remember I told you the new guy at the high school is a creep?”

  “Yeah.” There was a gleam in Cara’s eye now. She loved gossip, loved the crazy in other people.

  “He guessed, or figured out, that I don’t have documents.”

  “Oh, shit!” Cara sat up straighter. The gleam in her eye had turned to panic.

  “Don’t worry, don’t worry. It’s not a big deal.” Damn. Ana regretted telling her. As terrifying as it was for Ana to imagine being sent back to D.R., it was a million times worse for Cara. Because of the kids. If Cara were ever deported, she’d have to choose between leaving her kids and asking them to leave behind everything that had ever mattered to them.

  “He’s not going to do anything about it,” Ana said, with more confidence than she felt. Though she was pretty sure it was true. Ed was a bully, which meant that he was probably a coward. Even if that wasn’t true, there was no point in freaking Cara out. “He was just trying to get in my pants.”

  “¡Cabron!”

  “But the story ends happily.”

  “You kneed him in the cojones?”

  Ana laughed. “I would have. But I didn’t have to. It was better than that.”

  “What’s better than that?”

  “I yelled ‘Get your hands off me,’ and some dad overheard and opened the door and said”—she imitated Ethan’s low voice as best she could—“ ‘Is there a problem?’ ” Ana could see him, avenging angel, resplendent with copper-brown hair and blazing green eyes.

  “Nice!” Cara’s eyes were wide with appreciation.

  “Yeah.”

  “Was he hot?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Tall, big”—she indicated the expanse of his shoulders—“like a very professional, clean-shaven Viking.”

  Cara eyed her suspiciously. “White.” Her sister was all too familiar with her yanqui fetish.

  Ana sighed. “Of course.”

  “Girl, you are such a troublemaker. Why can’t you just quit it with the border crossing?”

  “I’m not going to do anything about it. He’s just”—she couldn’t think of what she wanted to say in Spanish, so she temporarily lapsed into English—“aesthetically pleasing. No crime in looking.”

  “You should have learned your lesson from what happened with Walt.” Her sister’s voice was flat.

  “I did learn my lesson.”

  “I sure hope so. Because I don’t want to scrape you off the floor again.”

  Ana felt the old ache, the wound Walt had inflicted when he disappeared overnight from her life. When he refused to even take her calls. “Believe me, I am never going to make that mistake again.”

  She’d planned to tell Cara the whole truth, that she’d accepted a tutoring job with Ethan, but now she hesitated. She knew exactly what Cara would say to that. Plus, it would put Cara in the awkward position of having to keep the information from Ricky, who would flip out if he knew that she was working in an all-male household. He barely tolerated her tutoring in Beacon.

  Cara’s eyes stayed narrow, fixed on Ana. “Why do I feel like there’s something you’re not telling me?”

  This was the problem. It was usually a lost cause, keeping secrets from Cara. Her sister knew her too well.

  “Spit it out!”

  “I’m going to tutor his son in Spanish.”

  “No! No way! Ana!”

  “We need the money.”

  Cara sighed. “It’s not worth it. Stay away from him. Find another tutoring job.”

  “That might not be so easy. Ed says if I don’t sign the CORI he’ll drop me from the Recommended Tutors list. I get all my jobs off that list. I have to take this.”

  “I don’t care. You can’t work for him. You’re going to end up sleeping with him, and it’s going to be Walt all over again.”

  “Not all guys are assholes like Walt.”

  Cara groaned. “You’re going to sleep with him.”

  “I’m not! Jesus, give me a little credit!”

  Ana clamped her mouth shut as she heard one of the bedroom doors open. Her nephew Marco appeared in the doorway of the living room. He was taller than either his mother or his aunt, built lik
e a tank. He leaned his scruffy head against the door frame. “Mamá. I need a check for five hundred bucks. For driver’s ed.”

  They’d all been waiting, saving, for this moment for months. Driver’s ed was the holy grail. When Marco could drive—legally, all aboveboard—their transportation problems would be over. No more cabs. No more expensive three-transfer bus rides.

  Cara frowned. “I thought you said four-fifty.”

  “They had to raise the price this year.” There was apology in Marco’s voice.

  Ana got up from the couch. She ruffled Marco’s hair as she went by, and he didn’t even duck out of reach. He was such a teddy bear—her favorite. “We need the money,” she said over her shoulder to her sister as she walked toward the girls’ bedroom. “And I can take care of myself.”

  “Like hell you can,” Cara called after her.

  Chapter 4

  Monday afternoon, Ana rode the Beacon shuttle to the Hansen house. The shuttle was one of the luxuries of her life, a free, by-appointment ride the denizens of Beacon had arranged for the convenience of its teenagers and its senior population. It struck her as one of the more vivid illustrations of the difference between life in Hawthorne, where public transportation was as impersonal as the city’s high-rise apartments, and life in Beacon, where most of the neighborhoods resembled the one they now drove through.

  Each house had stepped off the set of Desperate Housewives—elegant Colonials, freshly painted, shutters on the windows. The picture of suburban perfection. Many had elaborate play sets, swimming pools, custom-built tree houses. All had acres-wide lawns. A park for every child, his own swimming pool, his own fortress, his own country club. So different from her world.

  Ethan’s house was a biggish Colonial with a sprawling front yard, a two-car garage, and a long flat driveway. Ana had worked in houses in Beacon that were bona fide mansions, so she knew Ethan’s house wasn’t one, but compared with her teeny-tiny apartment, it sure seemed like it. She rang the doorbell. The button was cracked, but the bell still tolled charmingly, a four-note refrain.