of Samantha and that dream wedding she’d described.
As she’d talked, he’d found himself wanting to give her that. He wanted to be the man at her side when the sun slid over the horizon in a brilliant orange glow. He wanted to be the one starting a future with her.
And that had scared him to death. How on earth had he come so far so fast? Was this some kind of crazy Castle spell? Had he forgotten he didn’t believe in love? Had his memories of the pain it could cause faded, after all? He needed to figure all of that out, and he needed time and space to do it.
Not too much time, though. In his heart, he knew he couldn’t leave Samantha in suspense for long. Her own doubts would creep in, and what they’d found could be tainted, maybe even destroyed, if she thought he’d never make the necessary leap into the future she so clearly envisioned.
So, today, he’d have his space. Maybe tomorrow, too. And then he’d know, though how he expected to find certainty amid his own doubts was beyond him.
“You okay?” Pam asked, regarding him worriedly from the doorway to his office.
“Great,” he said, standing up. “Who’s next?”
Pam hesitated, then said, “Before you see your next patient, you probably need to see this. It may come up.” She handed him the local weekly. “Front page.”
He stared at the image of Samantha in his arms at Boone’s bachelor party, that awful cake behind her, then read the caption describing her as a stripper. He muttered a colorful expletive.
“I’ve already had a couple of people call to ask about that,” Pam said. “I thought you should know there could be repercussions. You know how some people are, always eager to spread a little dirt.”
Ethan didn’t want to believe his nurse could possibly be right, but he knew better. And if not for him, this kind of publicity could be very bad for Samantha’s plans to establish a new career here in Sand Castle Bay. He wondered how long it would take her to decide that this wasn’t the place for her after all.
“I can’t deal with this now,” he muttered.
“It’ll blow over,” Pam said in an attempt to reassure him. She regarded him worriedly. “Maybe I shouldn’t have shown it to you.”
“No. I needed to see it,” he told her, then added briskly, “Now let’s get started. We have a busy morning.”
“You don’t want to give Samantha a call?”
“Later,” he said tersely.
Pam looked as if she wanted to argue, but instead she sighed, handed him a file, then rattled off the information on the patient’s vitals that she’d gathered already. Ethan nodded, then plastered a smile on his face as he opened the examining room door.
From that moment on, his morning went exactly according to plan, with not a spare moment to be found. Only one problem. Samantha managed to creep into his head just the same, along with this new complication that seemed likely to doom their relationship. He’d always been a local golden boy, thanks first to his high school sports success and later to his war hero status. But he’d seen the flip side. He knew the damage negative press could do in a small town. Samantha, despite her relationship to Cora Jane, wasn’t a local. Folks wouldn’t cut her the same kind of slack they might cut him. And if that killed her plans for a new professional future, where would that leave the two of them?
Maybe it was time to admit defeat after all, cling to his last shred of pride and set her free to go back to New York where she belonged, where a story like this would barely register on anyone’s radar.
That was definitely the smart thing to do, the safe thing, he concluded.
But his heart didn’t seem all that happy about the decision.
* * *
Samantha showed up at the emergency clinic at lunchtime with a picnic basket filled with all the things her grandmother assured her were Ethan’s favorites. She’d begged off from the lunch at Castle’s, eager to share her news about her father’s property with Ethan. Her head was reeling, filled with exciting possibilities for the renovations.
When she walked in the door, she was greeted with a smirk by the receptionist at the front desk.
“You must be Samantha,” the twentysomething woman said. A name tag indicated she was Debra. “You don’t look like a stripper.”
Samantha paled. “I’m not a stripper. Where did you get that