Read Online Take the Long Way Home by Judith Arnold - Free Book Online Page A

hurt too bad. God bless
morphine.” He ate some more. “I was out for the season, but after
my leg healed, I could have gone back to playing. The doctors,
though, and the nurses, the therapists—they were such amazing
people. I was in awe of them, in a way I’d never been in awe of
athletes. They worked miracles. They did something meaningful. I
decided I wanted to do something meaningful, too.”
    “That’s quite a turnaround,” she said.
    “It was crazy.” He smiled, remembering how
crazy everyone had thought it was. He’d had to start enrolling in
real classes, not the easy-A courses designed for football players.
He’d had to bust his ass studying. He’d had to give up his athletic
scholarship at the University of Michigan, although he’d managed to
change his legal residency to Ann Arbor so he could pay in-state
tuition, and fortunately, he’d qualified for need-based financial
aid.
    His parents had been shocked. His father,
especially, had taken enormous pride in Quinn’s gridiron prowess,
and both his parents had assumed he would wind up earning millions
of dollars in the NFL. They’d supported him in his decision to
change direction, but to this day, they still didn’t understand
it.
    The Michigan coach had been furious. His
teammates had been bewildered.
    Ashley had dumped him. She’d wanted to be
with a football star, not a drudge grinding it out in pre-med
courses, struggling through organic chem labs, pulling
all-nighters, and stressing over every B that should have been an
A.
    He’d been relieved to discover he actually
was pretty smart—not a scholar, not a genius, but he knew how to
learn. Years of football training had taught him discipline. Hard
work wasn’t exactly a new concept to him. But Ashley hadn’t wanted
him working hard at anything except whatever would lead to a career
in professional sports. She’d resented him for telling her he
couldn’t phone her every night because he had to study. She’d been
pissed off that he no longer had money to spend on her. When he’d
traveled from his parents’ new home in Maine to Brogan’s Point to
visit Ashley during the Christmas holiday that first year of
college, she’d broken up with him. Clearly, she’d wanted nothing to
do with some ordinary college student sweating bullets to make good
grades. She’d wanted a star.
    She’d found one, a nose guard from her own
school. They’d gotten married a week after graduation. They’d
gotten divorced less than a year later.
    Apparently, she’d come around to thinking
that a doctor was almost as prestigious as a professional football
player. Somehow, she’d found out that he was now a graduate of
U-Michigan’s medical school, doing his residency at Mass General,
and he was once again good enough for her.
    He’d loved Ashley once. Maybe he could love
her again. After she’d ended things with him and he’d immersed
himself in pre-med studies, he hadn’t had much time to socialize.
He’d lacked the time and energy for love. He’d had a few drive-by
relationships, but nothing significant, no one who came close to
replacing her in his heart.
    When Ashley had contacted him a month ago,
he’d been surprised. What they’d once had was now ancient history.
He’d had no illusions that they would pick up where they’d left
off, but he’d been curious.
    Just as he was curious about Maeve Nolan.
She might have been a freak back in high school, but they weren’t
in high school anymore. She intrigued him. She was courageous
enough to open her own shop, and enough of a magician to fill that
shop with an aroma that could be bottled and sold as an
aphrodisiac. And unlike Ashley, she’d never broken his heart.
    He chewed his sandwich, watching her as she
watched him. It occurred to him that she expected him to say
something more than that abandoning the within-reach dream of a
professional football career for the far greater challenge—for him,
at least—of pursuing a medical career had