Do You Take This Rebel? by Sherryl Woods

It’s bound to bring up a lot of very painful memories.”
    “Stop it,” he said, clasping her hand in his. “I’m the one who came over here, remember? Nobody understands better than I do what you’re going through, but I’ll say it again, the odds are in her favor. And stop worrying about the expense. Just put it out of your mind. I don’t cared who she’s seen already, we’ll see to it that she has the best surgeon and the best oncologist around.”
    “We?” she echoed.
    “Of course I’m going to help.”
    “But why would you do that?” she asked, genuinely bewildered by the offer.
    “Because she’s your mother,” he said simply. “Besides, for a time she was the closest thing I had to a mother, too. It hurt to lose her, when I lost you. I don’t want either of us to lose her forever.”
    “Oh, God,” Cassie whispered as the panic rose inside her again. “We’re not going to, are we?”
    “Not if I can help it,” Cole said with grim determination.
    Cassie felt some of the tension leave her body. It was as good as a promise, and at one time she had trusted Cole’s promises with total confidence.
    There might be a million things left for them to work out where the past was concerned, but just for tonight she wanted to believe in him again. Because he was all that stood between her and despair.
     
    He shouldn’t have promised Cassie that her mother would live. Cole paced his office, portable phone in hand, as he waited for yet another so-called expert—men who were recommended by friends—to deliver an opinion about Edna Collins’s chances of survival. He’d spent the day looking for guarantees, but so far none had been given.
    He told himself he was doing it as a courtesy to a woman who’d once been kind to him, but he knew better. He was doing it for Cassie. He’d recognized that bleak expression on her face, that panic she hadn’t been able to keep out of her eyes. He’d seen it reflected time and again in the mirror years ago.
    While his father had ranted at the doctors and cursed God, it had been left to Cole to pray, to sit and hold his mother’s increasingly frail hand as she slipped farther and farther away from them. No matter that Cassie was older than he’d been, no matter what he thought of her, he didn’t want her to go through that, not if he could help it.
    “Why are you mixed up in this?” his father asked, his gaze speculative. “Edna Collins won’t take kindly to your interference.”
    “What would you know about Edna Collins? You always looked down on her.”
    “I did not. She’s a fine woman. I just thought her daughter wasn’t the right woman for you—not back then, anyway.”
    “And now?”
    “Now I’m maintaining an open mind.”
    “Not likely,” Cole muttered. “But whatever your agenda is, Dad, keep it to yourself. Cassie and I were over and done a long time ago, and you know precisely why that is. You did your damage, and it’s too late to fix things.”
    He needed to convince his father of that, if only to keep him from meddling and ruining whatever chance Cole might have to patch things up. This time no one would have an opportunity to interfere.
    “It’s never too late as long as there’s breath in your body,” his father said fiercely, clearly undaunted by Cole’s remark. “If there’s a second chance for the two of you, don’t be bullheaded and waste it.”
    Was there a second chance? Cole wasn’t certain yet. A part of him wanted there to be. To be sure all of the old feelings—that quick slam of desire—were as powerful as they’d ever been, stronger, in fact, now that they were a man’s, not a boy’s.
    Funny how at twenty he’d thought he was so mature, so grown-up. Yet he’d let himself be manipulated andcontrolled. He’d given up one thing he wanted for another, never asking if the price was too high. Only later, when he’d realized Cassie was gone for good, did he consider the cost.
    And then it had been too