The Magnificent M.D. (18 page)

Her smile was more dazzling than the morning sun outside. She didn't have to answer. Her kiss said it all.

O
ld-timers still called it the Bancroft House, though anyone who had come to New Hope within the past seven years called it the Bancroft-Prentice place, the place where the three Prentice kids played kick ball with their friends, built a tree house with their father, splashed in a wading pool on summer days with their mother and took over the playhouse.

Their father, once a heart surgeon, now did research into atherosclerosis in an office he built on the grounds, and commuted once a month to Portland where he gave a seminar at the medical school there. No matter how busy he was, he always made time for surf fishing with his six-year-old son, Matt. And their mother, once a bed and breakfast proprietor, now was a full-time wife and mother.

 

“You know you're even more beautiful than you were at eighteen,” Sam told her one glorious summer day, com
ing up behind her on the wide verandah and wrapping his arms around her.

“That's because I got everything I ever wanted,” she said, leaning back against him. “What about you? I dragged you back here to live. Are you ever sorry?”

“Sorry? Sorry I left that mausoleum I lived in? That job that was leading me to an early grave? You know the answer to that.”

“I don't mind hearing it again.”

“Okay, here goes,” he said, lifting her hair off her nape to brush his lips across her soft skin. “You saved me from a life of loneliness. You taught me to love and trust and to give. You made all my dreams come true—a house, a family, a wife. The most gorgeous, sexiest—”

She turned in his arms. “Okay,” she murmured, blushing as if she were seventeen again. “That's enough.”

“Wait, there's more,” he said. But she cut him off with a kiss. Sam was no more resistible now than he'd been when she first met him or when she married him. For a man who'd never known love, he had found an amazing capacity for giving and receiving it. From the community, from his children and from her.

He lifted her off her feet and spun her around, and in the distance the laughter of their children echoed across the sprawling grounds, reminding them both to always follow your heart, because the heart has its reasons….