Everything I Need, page 4
It wasn’t that there was anything special about a tube of toothpaste, for God’s sake. It was just that it seemed critically (and also inexplicably) important for him to leave something behind with her. Something to hold his place until he could return.
Whatever.
So he’d picked a fight with her, a fact that seemed abundantly clear in hindsight.
He had not expected the lovely Dr. Harrison to read him like that.
To disarm him. To inflame and enthrall him.
But that was what she did, wasn’t it? He couldn’t stand the idea of leaving her and not witnessing some clever thing she might do or say. Was driven mad by the possibility that their circumstances might keep him, one way or the other, from learning everything he possibly could about this fascinating woman.
The upshot?
A surging wave of emotion had overtaken him to the point where he’d pounced on her. Just taken her up against the counter like a rock star and a groupie shagging in the bathroom of some drug-fueled club.
The best sex of his life.
Hers, too, from the look of it.
He regretted nothing. Maybe he should, but he didn’t.
He clenched his fists, his hands all but trembling with the remembered feel of her vibrant body, and shook his head at himself.
What the bloody hell had happened to him since he met that woman?
“It was…” He wasn’t in the habit of baring his deepest personal feelings to Baptiste, who’d never been known for his sensitivity and who, along with their other boarding school friend, Domenico “Nick” Rossi, had always been keen for a laugh at Anthony’s expense. But, on the other hand, he also wasn’t in the habit of meeting a woman who blew his mind in the best possible way. And if Baptiste couldn’t understand Anthony’s current turmoil, who on earth would? “It was surprisingly difficult to leave her earlier. I don’t know how you manage it with Samira.”
Baptiste sipped his wine again, shooting him a steady look of quiet empathy that went a long way toward soothing Anthony’s frayed nerves.
“I haven’t really handled it. And now you understand why I hadn’t gone home in so long.”
Oh, Anthony understood, all right. He understood perfectly.
“Perhaps I owe you an apology for giving you so much shit, mate.”
“Not at all.” Baptiste unleashed that dazzling smile of his, all sparkling eyes and Gallic charm. “I enjoy knowing how terrible you feel. That’s enough for me.”
“Well, you’ve always been a prick.”
“Perfectly true,” Baptiste said, laughing as he finished his wine and picked up his pen again. “I cannot continue to hold your hand. I have work to do before we land. If we’re finished…?”
Anthony wished that they were, but another embarrassing confession—there seemed to be no end of them tonight—refused to stay silently inside his mouth.
“I want a real chance with her. D’you understand? It would be one thing if we lived in the same town and spent time together and she decided that I’m an unmitigated arse and she never wants to see my face again. That’s fair. I’d have no one to blame but myself.” Even at this early stage, it seemed abundantly clear that he wouldn’t be the one putting the brakes on things. He was already so far gone that the idea seemed laughable. “But if this distance thing ruins it, or the press finds out and makes her life unbearable…”
He trailed off, both possibilities making him quietly insane.
Baptiste nodded. “Yes, well, you can sit there and wallow in nightmare scenarios that haven’t happened yet, or you can look at it the right way.”
Anthony pricked up his ears. “And what’s that, pray tell?”
“It will have to be a very special woman to take you on. And who have you ever met that’s more special than Melody?”
Anthony froze, stunned by this sudden jolt of clarity and equally stunned that it had come from Baptiste, of all people.
“Well, other than Samira, obviously,” Baptiste added. “Samira is the most special. But Melody is a close second.”
Anthony barked out a startled laugh, his black mood lifted. Just like that.
What would he do without this man?
“You’re my brother,” he told Baptiste. “You know that?”
“Yes, yes,” Baptiste said idly, flapping a hand as his ears turned red and the flight attendant returned with their dinners. “Let’s eat. You Brits are so exhausting.”
4
Dr. Muhammed turned the light off with a decisive click, swung the high-powered lamp away from the examining table and looked at Melody with that determinedly upbeat and gentle expression that had never boded well for Melody during the entirety of their decades-long relationship.
Melody’s heart sank as she waited for the verdict.
“I think we’ve done as much as we can do, Mel,” Dr. Muhammed said. “Your skin doesn’t have the elasticity we’d need for any additional procedures. I’m sorry.”
Melody knew what this meant—she was a medical professional and she’d been dreading this conversation for half her life, after all—but she had to ask the question anyway.
“So this is as good as it’s ever going to get?” she asked, touching the thickened skin of her jawline.
Kindly smile from Dr. Muhammed. “This is the best I can do for you at this point, yes.”
Translation: this was as good as Melody’s face would ever look because Dr. Muhammed was the best plastic surgeon in the business. From here on out only a wizard with a magic wand could improve Melody’s appearance.
Melody nodded and slid into her role as Good Little Patient. She kept her chin up, blinked away even the whiff of tears or a wobbly chin and plastered a smile on her face, infusing it with as much cheerful indifference as she could muster. Meryl Streep might be the best film actress of her generation, boy, but she had nothing on Melody when it came to inhabiting a persona here at the hospital, where bad news was frequently the order of the day.
“It’s fine,” she said quickly. “I understand.”
The rational scientific part of her did understand. There was a limit to what modern medicine and even the best experts could accomplish. Melody had come to the end of the road following years of painful skin grafts, surgeries and the occasional infection complication. No big deal. The world was littered with better people than Melody who had slammed headfirst into nastier brick walls than this.
Was this fatal? No. Was Melody in pain? Not anymore, thank God. Did the scar affect her quality of life? Not unless you counted her epically expensive ongoing search for the best makeup concealer on the market.
Plus, Dr. Muhammed had warned her the last time that they might be nearing the end, so Melody had had some inkling that she needed to get her mind right and temper her expectations. That being the case, she shouldn’t have entertained quite so many daydreams about, for example, taking impromptu selfies with her friends without worrying whether her bad side was showing.
Oh, but there was much more to Melody’s incipient glumness than that.
Why? Because when she should have been wallowing in the afterglow of the best sex of her life, she’d instead foolishly spent a good chunk of last night, after Anthony left, looking him up online. That was demoralizing enough to send her shaky self-esteem plummeting to the depths of the nearest gutter. Why? Because it raised the unanswerable question:
What could a wealthy and handsome war hero prince of England possibly have in common with a fledgling pediatric surgeon from Upstate New York?
More to the point, what could he want with her out of all the women in the world, any one of whom would happily line up for princess auditions?
Yeah, she knew the undamaged part of her face was pretty. She had nice eyes. And she was smart and accomplished enough to hold her end of the conversation at a dinner party.
But, come on. Her?
It was one thing when Anthony was there with her, looking at her with those rapt blue eyes. At moments like that, when they laughed or had sex together, it seemed plausible that they enjoyed each other enough to generate a foundation strong enough to support some kind of a relationship.
But it was something else entirely to know that he was far away doing God knew what back in his regular world while she was here in hers.
Then there was his insane wealth.
She’d researched the castles, palaces, mansions and cottages where he’d grown up and realized that even the least of those put the lovely upper middle-class house where she’d grown up to shame. And it absolutely blew her mind to realize that his royal ass had probably never touched the seat of a non-luxury car. His suits and shoes? Probably all custom, whereas her clothes were all Macy’s sales rack with the occasional secondhand store designer steal thrown in. Plus, she spent her days off cleaning and vacuuming her place and wishing she had a housekeeper. He probably had a housekeeper. Or several.
Just to throw the final nails into the coffin of her postcoital glow last night, she’d continued with the Anthony Scott online research and read everything she could about his varied and extensive dating history. Not Hugh Hefner territory, mind you, but still active enough to give a regular, un-Botoxed and un-augmented woman like herself a moment’s pause.
Anthony’s past loves included a steady stream of English roses, models, actresses and assorted others with flawless faces and nary a bad angle for a nearby camera to snag on. No scarred or black women, though, although there had been a shot of someone whose skin was slightly darker than all the others’, so perhaps she’d been ethnic.
Or simply the victim of a heavy-handed spray tan.
Each new piece of information had been a pinch to Melody’s ego, yet she’d sat at her computer for hours like some sort of twisted emotional Augustus Gloop from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, bingeing on every tidbit she could discover about her new boyfriend (their mutual exclusivity made Anthony her boyfriend, didn’t it? She’d have to verify that before she embarrassed herself), no matter how obscure the tidbit and no matter how sick it made her.
Last night’s bottom line?
It wasn’t pretty, folks.
In addition to the whole distance thing, the money thing and the British royal family member thing, each of which was more than enough for the average woman to digest, Anthony had spent his life dating anti-Melodys. Not a science-y or bookish girl in the bunch.
Had all the research been a bad idea? Well, yeah. The worst. Duh. But it had been her first opportunity to research Anthony after learning he was a prince. How could she pass that up? She couldn’t.
Now here she was, paying the painful price. Her only comfort? The grim knowledge that she wouldn’t be the last curious little cat to succumb to a nosy impulse only to regret it later.
So her morale had already been hovering somewhere below sea level when she arrived at the hospital this morning.
And now this.
“You’re allowed to be disappointed, Mel,” Dr. Muhammed said.
Melody stiffened her spine.
“What’s to be disappointed about? We’ve both treated people who’ve been burned way worse than I was. We’ve treated kids who get into terrible accidents and suffer through surgeries and treatments and then die anyway. And kids who turn up with some terrible disease and die before their second birthday.”
“Mel...”
“My scar is not a tragedy. It’s a blip, if that. Especially when I think about where I started out and how far I’ve come. How far you’ve brought me. Hell, I wouldn’t even be a surgeon but for you. And now I get to work here at the hospital with you? Practice with you?” Melody shook her head in true amazement. “I have nothing to be disappointed about.”
Dr. Muhammed rubbed Melody’s thigh the way she always did, her repressed smile demonstrating a wealth of quiet emotion and pride.
“You’re strong and stoic. That’s why you’ve always been my favorite patient. Nothing gets to you.”
Wow. See? Melody was a much better actress than she gave herself credit for. She felt the edges of her smile slip and propped them back up with a couple of two-by-fours and some duct tape.
“I’m no saint. I’m just trying to keep things in perspective.”
“And you’re shaping up to be a phenomenal doctor. I’m so proud I had anything to do with it.”
“Thanks,” Melody said with a flush of pleasure.
“I can refer you to a colleague of mine in LA for another opinion, if you’re interested. He might be willing to try—”
Melody held up a hand to stop her.
“I seriously doubt that anyone other than Hermione Granger with her wand can do anything that you can’t do. And I don’t know how I feel about someone else cutting on my face at this late date.”
“Up to you. Why don’t you think about it?”
“Eh,” Melody said, shrugging.
Dr. Muhammed nodded. Tapped Melody on the thigh, which was her permission to hop down from the examining table.
“Why don’t you make an appointment in six months or so? We’ll keep an eye on things and see how you’re doing.”
“Great,” Melody said, the strain of keeping her plucky smile in place making her cheeks ache. Do not cry, Mel. Do. Not. Cry. “And thanks. For everything.”
They came together for a hug and a squeeze. Melody kept her gaze lowered as they pulled apart, hurried out of the examination room and reception area as quickly as she could and blew out a breath as she hit the medical office building’s main corridor for the long and winding walk to the hospital.
Time to see her own patients.
Do not cry, Mel. This can’t hurt you. Nothing will hurt you if you don’t let it.
She would not fall into a funk about her face.
She would not mope around like a lovesick Cinderella, wondering when and if Anthony would follow up his got home safe text with a phone call. She had more dignity than—
Her phone buzzed in her pocket.
Oh, was that Anthony?
She locked down her impulse to jump and squeal, but the girlish simper proved impossible to control.
She dodged a technician pushing a cart and darted into the nearest waiting area, her heart doing a sudden flamenco dance as she pulled out the phone and her ear buds—
Oh, for God’s sake.
The display revealed the self-assured grin of her slightly older sister and only sibling, Carmen.
Otherwise known, in Melody’s mind, if no one else’s, as Princess Perfect.
She made a derisive sound. Poor Anthony. If and when he ever got a load of Carmen in all her gorgeous perfection, he’d be sorry he hadn’t held out for the better sister, wouldn’t he?
The phone rang a couple more times while Melody wrestled with her ambivalence.
On the one hand, she and Carmen theoretically loved each other and liked to touch bases when they could. They’d been playing phone tag for a week or more while Carmen lived the perfect life of a New York City dermatologist to the ladies-who-lunch Upper East Side crowd and counted her money and Melody, meanwhile, had struck up her new relationship with Anthony.
On the other hand, Melody’s time was short at the moment, her morale was temporarily low and nothing would smack it down faster than a few passive-aggressive comments from the woman who, more often than not, bested Melody in everything while also getting on her last nerve.
It was bad enough that the caller wasn’t Anthony, but Carmen? Now?
Melody cursed and tried to think of a way out of answering.
Familial duty won by a nose by the fourth ring.
“Hey, girl,” Melody said, keeping her voice upbeat. “I’m about to run patients. How are you?”
“You won’t believe this,” Carmen said with the breathy excitement that always presaged her latest triumph, from being named captain of the high-school cheerleading squad (Melody had never made the team) to being led past the velvet rope and dozens of envious gawkers into the latest hot Manhattan club. “Leonard got an endorsement from the outgoing senator.”
“He did? That’s great!” Melody said with genuine pleasure. Leonard was Carmen’s politically ambitious lawyer boyfriend. While Melody had always felt he was sort of a douche who wasn’t quite right for her sister, Carmen had always fawned over him as though he was a young Jack Kennedy looking for his future first lady. And if Carmen was happy, Melody was happy for her. Generally. “Is he excited?”
“He’s thrilled. Trust me. We’ve got a fundraiser tonight. Wait’ll you see my dress. It’s Stella McCartney. Royal blue. You’ll love it.”
“Awesome,” Melody said, checking her watch and wondering if she had time to swing by the coffee bar for a little pick-me-up. She could probably manage it if they wrapped up the conversation quickly, which seemed like a real possibility. Only five or six more details about Princess Perfect’s mesmerizing exploits before Carmen remembered that a conversation should be two-sided, asked a pro forma question about Melody’s life and announced she had to hang up before listening to any answer that took longer than a sentence or two. “Make sure you send me a pic.”
Hah. Good one. Carmen never went to the bathroom without sending out several status updates.
“And we got approved for the apartment,” Carmen continued. “Upper West Side. Six blocks from the park. But the kitchen needs a redo. So that’s a pain in the ass. But they’re saying they can do it in eight weeks or less, which’ll give me a chance to get mine listed. Not that anyone ever brought in renovations on time, but anyway...”
Melody stifled a yawn. “Well. Better to get it done before you move in.”
“I know, right? Leonard is having the plans drawn up, so that’s not on my plate. Thank God. And in a complete segue...I think he’s about to propose!”
Leonard had been about to propose for roughly the last five years and two presidential administrations.
“Yeah? Did he drop a clue, or...?”
“Yeah. The clue is we’re buying this expensive-ass apartment together. He’s going to want his personal life settled before the primaries. And people love a love story. But I may have to rethink my plan to have a summer wedding. We’ll never be able to get anything for next summer.”
