Nothing But Trouble (27 page)

Rebecca wished she'd known so she could have
been there for her friend. Offered some kind of…well,
something.

"You said he cheated on you…" Rebecca tried
to recall Courtney's words. "But he told you they'd broken up
before he met you."

Courtney nodded. "Yeah. He told me Melissa
was just a few weeks away from her due date, but she didn't look
all that big to me. Instead of nine months she looked more like
five or six months." She lifted her shoulders in a tired shrug. "If
he hadn't been honest with me about a baby on the way, how do I
know he wasn't being honest about other things?"

Rebecca's brows lowered. "So, you think he
was two-timing you with this woman?"

"Why not?"

"Okay, at the risk of playing Devil's
Advocate, some women don't get very big when they're pregnant. I
mean, Lacy was huge with the twins. But with Abigail, she was
tiny."

"I know, and the whole cheating thing may
have been said out of anger more than anything else. But I can't
overlook the fact that he kept a very important part of his life a
secret from me." She pinned Rebecca with a desperate look. "How can
you say you love someone and keep something like that from them?"
Tears spilled over Courtney's lashes and ran down her cheeks.
"Rebecca, I loved him so much," she said through her tears. "I feel
like I've been robbed, like something was stolen from me."

"I'm so sorry," she said, swallowing past the
lump in her own throat. How could Courtney have kept this to
herself for the past three years? How could she stand do go through
this alone?

Rebecca tried to fight off her own tears as
her friend silently wept; wept for the man she'd loved and lost,
wept for the life she used to have before everything had turned
upside down in one night. Courtney was so much stronger than people
gave her credit for. Her entire life, everyone underestimated her,
and continually pegged her as the flighty younger sister who had no
direction.

The truth was Courtney was stronger than
anyone Rebecca knew. Her strength made Rebecca feel like a fraud,
because she was always pretending to be this independent woman who
had her shit together.

She was on the verge of losing her medical
license and kept giving her heart away to a man she couldn't
have.

Rebecca rubbed her hand over Courtney's hair
until her sobs subsided. She wiped her nose with the edge of her
sleeve. After a couple of sniffs, she looked at Rebecca with
red-rimmed eyes.

"Whatever happened to Grant?" Rebecca
asked.

"When he came to see me at the hospital, I
told him I never wanted to see him again. I found out from his
sister a few weeks later that he and Melissa had moved to Kentucky
and got married."

"Oh, Courtney, I'm sorry."

"It's just as well," she said as though it
were no big deal. "The relationship wouldn't have worked with
another woman in the picture."

"But you still love him."

One corner of Courtney's mouth turned up. "I
broke up with him because I was mad at him. Not because I stopped
loving him."

"And you never hear from him? I mean, he
never came back to try and win you back?"

Courtney shook her head. "I see his sister,
Emily, sometimes, but she never mentions him. I think she pities my
poor broken heart."

"Courtney, I wish you would have confided in
me. I hate that you've gone through all this alone."

"No, it's okay. The months following my
accident were a very dark time for me. I needed time to heal both
emotionally and physically before I could let people in."

"You do seem a lot happier. Like you're at
peace with yourself." Even if she was different, Courtney was happy
with her life and that was all that mattered.

"It's been a long uphill battle, but I'm
getting there."

R.J. was still
ignoring her.

Rebecca checked her phone when she left
Courtney's house the next morning. No text messages, no missed
calls.

More than a week had passed since she'd seen
him. More than a week since she'd heard his deep voice and had felt
him moving inside her. Up until now, Rebecca had never realized how
much she enjoyed their banter, how much she looked forward to
seeing him.

The urge to place another phone call was so
strong, that she actually pulled her phone from her purse and
started to dial his number. But would that make her the typical
needy woman who whined about not being called after a one-night
stand? Because, in all honesty, that's what they'd had.

Just one hot night of lying beneath him,
feeling his strong body pinning her to the bed as he stroked deep
inside her.

And wasn't that what R.J. did? Didn't that
make her no better than every other woman he'd been with? Roll
around between the sheets for a few hours, then move on to the
next.

She'd become exactly what she'd always told
herself she was better than. And it was no one's fault but her
own.

All morning Rebecca had been unable to clear
her head, to keep these thoughts from poisoning her mind. So she'd
taken her frustration out on her bathroom walls, stripping the
paper with a wicked vengeance. She ran the scraper over the paper
so hard that her knuckles had started to ache. Her shoulders burned
and sweat dripped down her backside. When she was finished with her
project, she'd have a new bathroom, but her heart would still ache.
That sick feeling in the pit of her stomach and the squeezing
sensation around her heart would still be there. No amount of
wallpaper stripping would heal her internal struggle.

Her fear over her uncertain future. How much
she missed R.J., and not just sharing a bed with him. She missed
his smartass comments, how he always found an excuse to touch her
and the way he looked at her. He made her feel special, beautiful,
and wanted. Even when he infuriated her, she still couldn't get
enough of him.

And the bastard was ignoring her.

Rebecca loosened a section of paper and
ripped it off the wall so hard, that she swayed on the
step-stool.

Calm down
.

She did not need to go falling down off a
step-stool and breaking something. Lord knew, she had enough
problems right now.

The front door opened, then slammed shut. She
could only guess it was her mother, who'd come back to probably do
a load of laundry or shower.

"Rebecca, is it true?" her mother demanded in
a tone that told Rebecca she was to answer or else.

"Hi Mom," she said from her spot on the
stool. Instead of getting down or turning around, she ran the wet
sponge over the top layer of wallpaper.

Her mother's shoes crunched over the scraps
of paper on the floor. "I just heard from Jane that her daughter,
whose son is a patient of yours, said the practice was shut down.
Something about fraud.
And
that Dr. Gross was arrested."

"Yep," she said instead of playing dumb or
apologizing. She didn't have the strength to do either.

"That's all you're going to say?" Patsy
wanted to know.

Rebecca sighed and dropped her sponge in the
bucket. She was hot, stressed out, and hadn't slept in several
days.

"It's true, Mom," she agreed when she'd
climbed down to the bathroom floor.

"People are saying that Dr. Gross is dead.
That someone killed him, or that he left town and killed himself."
Worry lines bracketed her mother's mouth.

Rebecca had known that keeping this from her
mother would only create more of a problem. But she hadn't wanted
to worry the woman. Plus, she didn't even know the full extent of
what was going on, or what was going to happen.

"That's a bit extreme, don't you think?"
Rebecca said. Dr. Gross dead?

Patsy placed her hands on her hips. "You know
how news spreads in this town. A friend tells a friend, and
everything gets lost in translation. Besides, I should have heard
it from you," she pleaded as she placed her hands on Rebecca's
shoulders.

Her mother was completely right. It had been
wrong of her to keep her parents in the dark. What's more,
Rebecca's secretive ways had likely hurt her mother's feelings. In
the past, she'd always told her mother everything, even about men.
The older woman wasn't going to understand why Rebecca had kept
this one thing a secret.

"I'm sorry I didn't tell you," she admitted
to her mom. She kicked aside a pile of discarded wallpaper. "I was
having a hard time processing the information, and it happened so
fast. I think I was kind of in denial."

"Honey, that's perfectly understandable. But
you can imagine my shock when one of my best friends tells me my
daughter's practice got shut down because of fraud."

"I know―"

"Just tell me you had nothing to do with it,"
her mother demanded.

"Of course I didn't," she shot back
immediately. How could her mother even ask that?

Patsy sighed and leaned against the bathroom
counter. "I'm sorry for asking. But Jane heard some people say that
you and Dr. Gross were partners in some kind of fraud."

What?

How could anyone who knew her think she'd do
something like that? And where in the world had anyone gotten that
idea? Unless someone had started that rumor on purpose.

Two people came to mind with that
thought.

Danielle and Dr. Gross — the two people who
had everything to lose if charges were filed.

Could it be that Danielle leaked Rebecca's
name to the DEA in order to detract attention away from Dr. Gross?
So that her meal ticket would still be intact to service her
needs?

The idea made perfect sense to Rebecca. And
someone whose mind was muddled by drugs wouldn't be thinking
coherently. A druggie would do everything they could to get their
next fix, and that didn't always apply to the hard stuff. Addiction
was addiction no matter what the substance. The only thought on a
substance abusers mind was getting their hands on more drugs. If
Dr. Gross went to jail, where would Danielle go? Who would she turn
to?

The two of them needed Rebecca to take the
fall, and it was clear neither one of them cared if she went down
in flames.

The whole idea made her sick to her stomach.
What had she ever done to deserve this?

"Honey, just start from the beginning," her
mother asked. "Tell me everything that's happened."

Rebecca took a deep breath, knowing her
mother would break down in tears at any moment at the thought of
her baby girl in pain. Patsy was an emotional woman who often went
from hot to cold in a moment's notice, a trait she'd passed down to
Rebecca's sister.

As she recounted the confusing and
complicated story, her mother remained composed, only flattening
out her lips at certain parts. Rebecca gave her mother as much
information as she could, fully expecting the older woman to
collapse in hysteria.

"I'll kill that son of a bitch," Patsy stated
when Rebecca finished speaking.

"Mom," she chastised. Her mother
never
cursed.

"Don't you tell me to calm down. I ought to
go over there and give him a piece of my mind."

Rebecca watched as her mother paced from the
shower back to the counter. "You can try, but you won't find
him."

Patsy shot her daughter a look. "So it's true
about him leaving town?"

"I went over there already, and they weren't
home. A neighbor told me she'd seen them packing up their car and
leaving late the night before."

"Well, I'll be damned if I'm going to let you
take the fall for him."

"There's no
letting,
Mom. This is one
of things times where there's nothing you can do."

"There has to be something I can do," she
stated with conviction that had Rebecca smiling.

Say or do anything you want to Patsy
Underwood. But mess with her kids, and she'll bring down the wrath
of God Almighty Himself.

"Mom, I appreciate your concern," Rebecca
started. "But this is one of those times where you aren't going to
be able to help me. I have to just be patient, wait this out and
testify against Dr. Gross if I have to."

Patsy's eyes widened. "You think it'll come
to that?"

"I have no idea. All I know is that they shut
the practice down, then came back with warrants and took all our
patient files." Lord, to think of all that personal information out
there, being seen by uncaring, unsympathetic eyes… it was enough to
send a cold shiver through her.

Her mother placed a hand on Rebecca's arm.
The touch was comforting and brought back a flood of memories of
her childhood. Her mother holding her in a warm embrace when
Rebecca fell off her bike and scraped her knee. Telling her the
other kids could go screw themselves when they laughed at her
daughter's braces.

Her mother's support brought the unwanted
sting of tears to her eyes. Dammit, she'd done enough crying and
didn't have the strength to expel any more emotion.

"A friend of a friend knows Melinda Gross. I
might be able to have one of them call her to find out where they
are."

Rebecca shook her head. She didn't want her
mother involved in this. "No, that's okay―" She stopped short when
she remembered something that might be of help. "I need to go out
for a while and clear my head," she told her mother. "I'll be back
later."

"Okay," Patsy said in an uncertain tone.

Her plan was a long shot, but it was the only
thing she could think of to locate Dr. Gross's whereabouts. She
grabbed her purse from the front door and didn't bother to clean
herself up. She didn't really give a damn about the scraps of paper
stuck in her hair or the wet glue that had been slung on her
thighs.

Once in her car, Rebecca fished her cell
phone from her purse, then backed out of the driveway.

Lacy answered on the third ring. "Hello?" she
said. One of the kids screamed in the background. "Mason, give that
back to your brother," she chastised her son. "Sorry. They play so
quietly, and as soon as they see a phone pressed to my ear, all
hell breaks loose."