Heart Conditions (The Breakup Doctor Series Book 3) (23 page)

twenty-seven

As early as I arrived to Lakes Park, when I pulled into the same parking area where, weeks ago, I’d picked up Jake, Ben’s greenish-gray SUV was already snugged into an end spot closest to the grills and picnic tables.

The park was otherwise empty except for one lone figure out in an open grassy area to the left where the city often offered outdoor concerts and shows. A man was bent over something on the St. Augustine grass—a kite, I realized when I saw him start to run, facing backward, the old-fashioned diamond-shaped paper kite lofting up a dozen feet into the air before arcing around and diving back to the ground.

I heard the sound of a car door and yanked my gaze back to Ben’s vehicle, where one long, jeans-clad leg was exiting the driver’s-side door. I drove closer as he stood and turned, hearing my engine.

His face was tight, I saw through the windshield, but as he watched me park the harsh shadows bracketing his eyes and mouth softened; then he simply looked confused. By the time I stepped out on my side he was bending to look into the window, and I could see the smile that touched his mouth.

“Who’s this?” he asked as I came around.

“This,” I said, leaning close to open the passenger door, “is Winston.” My new companion stepped gracefully out, already leashed, and sat regarding Ben. “We met a couple of weeks ago, but we just claimed each other yesterday.”

He straightened, turning to me.

“You got a dog?”

I angled a smile down at my new companion. “I did. I wasn’t sure I was ready…but then I was.”

Ben kept his gaze on me for a long moment, then looked back down at the dog. “It’s nice to meet you, Winston,” he said directly to him.

The dog raised one black-and-brown paw as if offering it to be kissed, and I laughed.

“Wow! You’ve already trained him?” Ben asked, leaning down to take his paw for a shake before releasing it.

“I can’t take any credit. He came to me as a perfect gentleman.”

As Ben scratched his ears, Winston leaned obligingly against his hand, but stayed planted where he was. “He’s so well-behaved. Kind of the anti-Jake,” he said with a slight laugh, but then he sobered, glancing up at me. “I guess that’s why you picked him.”

“No. He picked me.” I glanced over to Ben’s SUV. “I thought it might do him some good to meet Jake, actually. I think Winston’s a little afraid to let go. Worried that if he isn’t perfect I might not want him.” Affection for this creature I’d known for such a short time flooded me. There was a reason we’d ended up together. “I thought Dog Beach might be a bit much ’til he’s a little more used to his new life, but I hoped Jake could show him how to let loose a little.”

Ben grinned. “That’s sort of his forte. I’ll let him out.”

As soon as he did Jake went wild, nearly pulling Ben back around the vehicle to investigate this new friend, and then bunny-hopping in a semicircle around Winston as he barked excitedly in his face. Winston simply gazed off into the tree line, as if pretending none of it were happening.

“See what I mean?” I said. “I’m afraid he’s a little
too
good. He doesn’t let himself be a dog.”

Ben shook his head. “Actually, I think this is how an adult dog trains a puppy—or a crazy dog,” he said, glancing fondly at Jake. “Sort of how a parent ignores a child’s tantrum. Want to walk them and see what happens?”

Ben’s mom had taught me that packs integrated by migrating together, and that the surest way to introduce two dogs was by taking them for a long walk. At the thought of her sad expression the night she and Ben had seen me with Michael, regret panged my chest. There had been a pretty big part of me that had wanted to claim Adelaide forever, for all the warmth and easy affection she’d once lavished on me that my own more reserved mom didn’t.

But that was okay, I reminded myself. Maybe I could be friends again with Adelaide too. One day.

We headed off toward the trail that ran through the melaleuca and oak and banyan trees ringing the park, Winston and I in the lead and Jake and Ben following close behind. As we walked, Jake kept his head pressed close to Winston’s rear end, dipping it frequently to catch the other dog’s back leg in his jaws and nibble like it was a chicken bone, trying to entice Winston to engage.

Which he finally did, rearing around with a growl and a show of teeth that made my heart stutter a beat before he turned blithely to trot on beside me.

“Whoa,” I said, pulling him back to my side. “Sorry. I didn’t think he was aggressive, but I can—”

“Doggie politics,” Ben said behind me. “If he’d wanted to hurt Jake he would have. Let’s see if they work it out.”

When the path opened a bit wider Ben came up alongside me, and after a few moments Jake fell into step on his other side, so that both dogs flanked the two of us. We walked for a long time like that, the only sounds our feet and paws scraping against the dirt trail, the soft flutelike notes of a nearby mourning dove, and a chorus of random bird tweets as background.

Ben looked over at me and winked. “Maybe Winston’s the best thing that ever happened to Jake. Look how calm he is.”

Jake was walking alongside Ben, facing straight ahead, not pulling or yanking the leash for a change, executing a near-perfect “heel” I’d never seen any indication he had in his repertoire.

We walked until we reached a little bridge that crossed a small stream and led deeper into the park, a bench set in the clearing in front of it under a peeling red gumbo-limbo.

“Let’s sit for minute and see how they do now,” Ben suggested.

As soon as we stopped, Jake shot straight over to Winston, and this time my dog touched noses with him, then sat and let Jake thrust his nose into his ear, checking things out. After a moment Winston got up and moved away, coming closer to me, and Jake dropped his giant body to the ground with a sigh, his head on his paws, gazing at Winston with distant longing. But he stayed put.

“Not bad,” I said to Ben, who had settled beside me on the bench. But my grin melted away as soon as I realized how close he was sitting. So close I could feel the warmth of his leg radiating against mine. So close that if I shifted just the tiniest bit, I’d be leaning against his shoulder as though we were lovers.

I turned my head back toward the dogs in front of us and closed my eyes for a moment. I could handle this.

Ben’s voice rumbled up into the silence. “When you said you wanted me to meet someone, I thought you meant your ex-fiancé.”

My eyes opened. “You…Oh,” I said, realizing how my words must have sounded. “And you came anyway?”

He raised a shoulder, watching as Jake inched closer to a disinterested Winston. “You asked me to.”

“Oh.” My heart pinched again. Why would it be awkward for him? As far as Ben was concerned, he and I were friends. It was only me who was still wrestling deeper feelings.

This was going to be harder than I thought. Did Michael have the right idea after all—to put some distance between us until he could be around me without this pull of longing that was threatening to choke me?

I took a breath and then swallowed away the tightness in my throat, determined to try. “He’s leaving, actually,” I said in an admirably steady voice.

“Leaving?”

I nodded.

“Town. Turns out…well, he wanted to try again with the two of us.”

“I see.” Ben’s voice was devoid of inflection, but I didn’t trust myself to look at him. “And you?”

I shrugged, still facing forward. “That’s why he’s leaving. I didn’t.”

“Oh.” The single syllable floated up toward the trees and was lost amid birdsong. “Why not?” he asked after a time.

I slid a quick glance toward him to try to read his expression, but he was looking at the dogs too, neither of us facing the other.

Here was where a friendship with Ben butted up against limitations. If this were Sasha I’d spill everything—how even if I’d wanted them not to, my feelings for Michael had died, at least in that way. And how, as desperately as I wanted them to, my feelings for Ben had not.

But I wasn’t in love with Sasha. With Sasha I wouldn’t be risking my dignity by telling her how I felt—and I wouldn’t be risking her happiness by loading her up with guilt over all the things she didn’t feel for me anymore when she was happily in love with someone else.

It wasn’t fair to tell Ben all of that. Not when he had no idea that I was still mired in emotions for him that he’d long since left behind. Not when it was my decision and my actions that had set that ball rolling in the first place.

So all I said was, “He’s not the person I want to be with.”

I didn’t wait for an answer to my comment—I only had so much willpower, and if we kept sitting here in the romantic, isolated cathedral of trees that surrounded us, I’d be lying across Ben’s lap any second now, wailing out my feelings like a Hallmark special and begging him to love me back. Instead I stood, and Winston got to his feet as well. Jake scrambled up as he did, surging toward my dog, but Winston fixed him with a scaly eye, and Jake’s butt plopped back down on the ground.

Ben was smiling. “I may have to borrow your dog now and then. I think he’s good for mine.”

“Sure,” I said, rallying a buddy-buddy
Anytime, pal
grin. “Ready to go back?”

Ben stood, looking oddly at me. “I am.”

We walked back the way we’d come, Jake’s nose to Winston’s tail like Hannibal’s elephants, Ben and I walking in amiable silence through the sunlight-dappled forest—until he broke it.

“Pamela got the Doctors Without Borders job,” he said conversationally.

I tried not to whoosh out air, but I heard it escaping me in a hiss. I’d known this was coming, and here it was.

“That’s great!” I said, my voice sounding creaky and thin with no breath behind it. “You guys are going to have a…a life-changing experience together.” It actually hurt to swallow past the lump in my throat, but I pushed it down and stretched a smile onto my face. “I really wish you the best, Ben. You deserve to be happy.” My steps felt like the march of a wooden soldier.

“I told her no.”

Again the air left me in a rush, and this time I stopped, bending over and grabbing my knees to catch my breath as if I’d taken a basketball in the stomach.

“Brook! Are you okay?” Ben was at my side in a second, a hand on my back. Winston’s black nose came into my field of vision, popping his head around to make sure I was all right, while Jake thrust his face into my private regions as if trying to prop me up from behind.

“What?” I eked out.

His hand was warm on the small of my back, and I shivered as his fingers moved ever so slightly across the bare skin where my t-shirt rode up. “Africa. I’m not going.”

My heart started to thud. I was misunderstanding him. I had to be. “Long-distance dating’s going to be hard,” I fished, unwilling to believe what I thought my ears were hearing and make a fool of myself yet again.

“Yes,” he agreed, and my heart flopped limply to the bottom of my chest cavity. “Except that we’re not dating anymore.”

This time I sort of collapsed to the dirt into a cross-legged sit. Jake naturally took this as an invitation to lapdoggery, draping himself across my right thigh, while Winston lay pressed against my left. Bolstered by doggie bookends. Ben looked down at me calmly as I sat on the forest floor, staring up at him. “What?” I croaked.

He was watching me like a scientist eyeballing a lab monkey. “We broke things off the night you surprised us in the kitchen.”

“Two
weeks
ago?” I yelped. And then: “Because you wouldn’t go to Africa with her?”

“That was part of it,” he admitted. “But not all of it.”

“Then…why?” My heart thudded, afraid to hope.

He lowered himself beside me on the mulched path, watching me steadily the whole time. “She wasn’t the person I wanted to be with,” he echoed my words.

Goose bumps took over every inch of my body as his words sank in. Followed by an unexpected wave of affront.

“Were you going to tell me that?” I demanded.

The skin bracketing his eyes crinkled in amusement. “Eventually. Not while you were dating your ex, probably.”

“I wasn’t dating him! It was
you
I wanted!”

“How was I supposed to know that? You never said.”

“Because I was trying to respect
your
relationship! You were happy, and I didn’t want to screw things up for you or make you feel guilty by telling you that I didn’t want to move on with anyone else because I’m still in love with
you
,” I accused.

His eyebrows shot upward. “You are?” he said.

“And anyway, I thought it wasn’t any of your business,” I plowed on, feeling my cheeks catch fire. “I thought you didn’t care.”

A grin crept over his face. “I lied.”

Slowly he reached one hand over and brushed the backs of his fingers against my cheek, my heart trip-hammering in my chest. Then he reached farther, into my hair and to the back of my neck, and pulled me in toward him, over Jake’s oblivious prone body between us, angling his own body closer.

His lips on mine were warm and soft and achingly, wondrously familiar.