Nantucket Romance 3-in-1 Bundle (67 page)

“I’m afraid there’s more bad news.”

Kate braced herself. “My column?” If she lost her syndicated column, what would she have left?

“I’m afraid so,” Ronald said. “I’m sorry.”

Not my column.
She’d already lost
Glamour
, but the column had been her baby forever. It was how she’d become Dr. Kate. She’d helped thousands of readers, and now it was gone. She remembered all the hours she’d spent reading letters and formulating answers. She remembered all the letters she’d answered privately because column space prevented her from answering all of them, and some of the letters seemed too desperate to ignore.

“We’ll get through this, kiddo. Let’s give it more time. Maybe your book sales will pick up again.”

Kate grasped onto hope. “Is that what Pam said?”

If anyone would know, it would be Pam. Her publicity experience allowed her to read the public better than anyone.

“No, she didn’t say that. But you’re too good at giving advice to be holed up in some office. It’s your calling, your gift, and we can’t give up just yet.”

It felt like it was over. She could write all the articles and books she wanted, but if readers didn’t trust her anymore, what did it matter?

Kate hung up and put the salad on the table as her dad entered with a plate of sizzling steaks. They served themselves and began to eat. Kate hardly tasted the food.

They were halfway through the meal before her dad spoke. “You’re quiet.” He speared a chunk of meat and put it in his mouth.

Kate told him about Ronald’s phone call and the apparent effect the scandal had on her career. “It’s not looking good, Dad.” That was an understatement.

He set his knife and fork down. “Look, Kate. I realize it must be devastating and maybe even humiliating for your wedding fiasco to be public knowledge. But your goal has always been to help troubled relationships. Ever since you were a little girl, you were helping people solve problems. You don’t need fame or notoriety or even a book contract to achieve that.”

Kate swallowed the bite of salad. He was right. She had enjoyed helping couples in counseling. However, it was more logical to prevent the impossible relationships than it was to fix them. And no one sought counseling until there was a problem. That’s why writing relationship books made sense.

But lately, Kate wondered if she knew anything about relationships at all. Everything that made sense in theory was more complicated in real-life application. Case in point: Lucas.

Her stomach clamped down on the food she’d eaten, and she pushed her plate away, the sirloin half-eaten. A week ago, she’d realized her night with Lucas hadn’t resulted in a pregnancy. She’d expected profound relief. Instead she’d gone to her room and closed the door before having a good cry. What was wrong with her?

“What’s really wrong, Kate?” Her dad’s brown eyes were an antique reflection of her own.

“My career is falling apart. Isn’t that reason enough to be depressed?”

Her
dad sliced the steak with the serrated knife and placed it beside his plate. “Is that why you don’t eat? Why you stare off into space for minutes at a time? Why your eyes are so sad all the time?”

Kate’s head throbbed. She’d had a constant headache since she’d left Nantucket. Like her body was having withdrawal from the island.

Or from Lucas.
She stifled the thought.

She stood and carried her plate to the sink. “I’d rather not talk about it.” She didn’t even want to think about it, but her mind never cooperated. She tried to put it behind her, but her thoughts returned to the island, to Lucas, like waves to a shoreline.

“It’s that Lucas, isn’t it?”

Kate gave him a warning look. He’d never been one to pry, and she hoped he didn’t start now.

“Don’t look at me like that. You’ve been moping around here for—”

“I am not moping.”

“—three weeks, and I may be a man, but I know lovesick when I see it.”

Kate gave a wry laugh. “Lovesick?” She pulled the sprayer from the sink and ran water over her plate. “It was an arrangement, Daddy, remember? You were there. You read the papers.”

Her dad’s chair scraped the ceramic tile as he stood. “And I saw the look in that boy’s eyes on your wedding day.” He held out his plate.

Kate pulled it from his hands. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Is it?”

She sprayed the salad dressing and A1 Sauce off the plate while her father cleared the table. Her father had imagined what he’d seen on Lucas’s face.

“Anyway,” Kate said. “It could never have worked. We were different as day and night.”

“Opposites attract, you know.” He leaned around her to wet a dishrag and went to wipe down the oak table.

“It’s not like that. We have nothing in common, Daddy, and I’m not going to spend the rest my life arguing like—” She stopped, realizing she was crossing a line. Who was she to criticize her parents’ marriage?

“Like your mom and me?” Her dad finished the thought.

Kate loaded the two plates back to back in the dishwasher and shut the door. The crestfallen look on her dad’s face exacerbated her regret. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

He nodded slowly. “No, that’s fair.” He leaned against the kitchen counter across from her, bracing his hands against the ledge, reminding her of the way Lucas had stood so many times.

“I’ve always wondered how much you remembered,” he said.

She remembered more than the yelling. She remembered the time her dad had dumped sacks of her mom’s new clothes out the front door. She could still see the new dresses, tags still attached, strewn across the spring green lawn. “When two people are so different, conflict is inevitable,” Kate said.

Her dad shook his head. “Your mother and I weren’t so different.”

“Oh, come on, Daddy. She was a spender; you were a saver. She was messy and disorganized; you were a neat freak. She wanted to go places; you wanted to stay home.”

“Is that what you think? That our marriage fell apart because we were too different?” Her dad drew in a deep breath, exhaled, then straightened and walked toward the living room. “Come sit, Kate.”

She followed her dad into the room and sat on the center of the sofa, opposite his recliner.

“Your mother and I had a good marriage in the beginning,” he said. “But soon, we began to disagree about a lot of things. At the time, I thought I was right about everything. I thought it was smart to control the money the way I did. I told myself I was looking out for our best interests. And I thought the house had to be kept a certain way. Your mom liked things neat too, but my standards were high. Unfeasibly high.”

“Mom was a clutter bug.”

“Not initially. The things I did drove her crazy. The way the labels on food packages had to be turned facing front, the way the towels had to be folded in thirds and hung in the center of the towel rack, the way our lives had to run by the clock, down to the second. It all became too much for her.”

“You weren’t the problem, Daddy. It was her. I remember. She was a spendaholic. She used to go out and shop and buy new furniture, new clothes, when we didn’t have the money—”

Her dad tilted his head and gave a sad smile. “Your mom never liked to shop. She didn’t care about new clothes or new furniture. She did it because she was angry with me.”

“Why?” Kate shook her head, trying to make sense of it. “Why would she be angry with you?”

“You know what OCD is?”

“Of course. Obsessive-compulsive disorder. I’ve counseled a couple clients who—” Kate stopped, letting it soak in.
OCD
. “You, Daddy?”

“I didn’t know it at the time. Your mom was after me for years to go and get checked. She insisted something was wrong, but I thought she was being critical. As the years went by, she got angrier and angrier. I wanted the house impossibly neat, so she made sure it wasn’t. I wanted to control the money, so she spent it. I wanted to be punctual, so she dawdled.”

Her dad pinched the crease in his pants, mechanically, following it down the thigh. “I didn’t see any of it at the time. Of course, her actions made me furious, and we had terrible arguments. Unfortunately, you heard a lot of them. It was a vicious cycle that would’ve been broken if I’d just been able to see that I had a problem.”

How could all of Kate’s assumptions about her parents’ marriage have been wrong? So much of what she advised stemmed from what she thought she’d learned from her childhood.

“One day, when you were eight or nine,” he said. “I walked by your bedroom and heard you playing. I stopped and listened. Barbie was screaming at Ken, and Ken was yelling at Barbie. You were holding them face-to-face, and as you were talking in your angry little- girl voice, your mouth was all screwed up, your brows drawn together. I realized you thought that’s the way families behaved. You thought that was normal.”

Kate had spent a lot of time playing with her Barbies. When you were an only child, you learned to make believe. “I don’t remember that.”

Her dad folded his hands across his stomach. “It was then that I began to wonder if your mother and I would be better off apart.”

Kate had thought it was her mom’s decision. She’d been angry with her mom for months. But even though she’d blamed her mom—the woman was her caretaker, the one who fixed her French toast in the morning and made sure her favorite jeans were washed—Kate couldn’t conceive of leaving her home. Even when her mom started drinking.

“When did you find out about the OCD?” Kate asked.

“Not until years later. You were nearly in college by then. None of the women I had dated could tolerate my behavior for long, and I finally opened my mind to the possibility that it was me.”

Kate wasn’t naive. She knew it took two people to nurture a relationship and two people to ruin it. But how had she gotten things so twisted around? Her mom had never set her straight, had never said a bad thing to Kate about her dad, even after they divorced. Instead, her mother drowned her sorrow in alcohol.

“I’m sorry about how I handled my marriage to your mom, Kate. I’m sorry you didn’t have a better childhood.”

Kate’s eyes stung. “I appreciate that, Daddy. I know it’s hard to make a marriage
work under the best circumstances.”

“I did love your mom. You know that.”

“I know.”
Does he know Mom went to her grave loving him?
Mourning him?
Sometimes it was better not to know.

“I’m not very good at this stuff,” he said. “But I love you, too, you know.” He squeezed his hands together so tight, the tips of his fingers whitened.

Kate didn’t remember ever hearing those words from her father. She’d known he loved her, but hearing them was a balm to her aching heart.

“I love you too, Daddy.”

Sometimes there’s nothing you can do
but put one foot in front of the other.

—Excerpt from
Finding Mr. Right-for-You
by Dr. Kate

Chapter Thirty

Lucas dipped the tack cloth in mineral spirits and wiped the sawdust from the oak pie safe. One more coat of polyurethane and it would be ready for Sydney. He was eager to be done with that job. The day before she’d come into the shop to check on his work, even though he’d told her it wouldn’t be ready for two more days. She’d closed the distance between them and caressed the unfinished piece with her slender fingers as if it were a man’s arm instead of a hunk of wood.

“Very nice, Lucas. You have a certain touch.” She smiled slowly.

He put space between them, wiping his hands on the rag. He’d done everything he could to make it clear he wasn’t interested. He tried to show professional courtesy without stepping one inch past that line. For the life of him, he couldn’t see why she continued to pursue him when there were probably a dozen men who’d be willing to buy whatever she was selling.

The phone rang, and Ethan called him. “If you’ll excuse me . . .”

“Well,” Sydney said, “I’ll check back in a couple days then.”

Now Lucas ran the cloth along the edges of the cabinet doors, taking care to remove every speck of dust so it wouldn’t mar the finish. There was only one woman he couldn’t get from his mind, and it wasn’t Sydney.

Lucas glanced at the calendar hanging cockeyed from a prong on the pegboard. October 21. Today would have been their four-month anniversary. If Kate were here, he might’ve bought her a bouquet of daisies and taken her to Cioppino’s for lobster. Afterward, they would’ve gone home, and he’d have put on her favorite classical CD and kissed her on the corner of her lip, right where—

Cut it out, Luc. You have got to move on.
How many times had he relived moments of their time together? Especially the last night.

He’d tried to stay busy. He worked well into the night until he was too tired to do anything but shower and fall into bed. It was easier that way. He was tired of pitying glances from friends and neighbors. He could imagine what they were thinking.
Poor Lucas. First he
lost Emily; now he’s lost Kate. Tsk, tsk, tsk.
But no one brought up Kate, as if the very mention of her name would shatter him.

Everyone wondered where she was, though, including the media, some of whom had come to the island, hoping for an interview. Was it any wonder he spent his days holed up in his shop? Even here, he hadn’t escaped the phone calls. Ethan intercepted them, and at least now the calls were coming farther apart.