Come Lie With Me (13 page)

“Who won, you or Serena?” he asked, smiling as he lay there, his eyes still closed.

“I think Serena did,” she groaned, stretching her tight muscles. “Shopping uses an entirely different set of muscles than weight lifting does.”

He opened one eye a slit and surveyed her. “Why not join me?” he invited. “As the old saying goes, ‘Come on in, the water's fine.'”

It was tempting. She looked at the swirling water, then shook her head regretfully as she thought of the many things that she needed to do. She didn't have time to relax in a whirlpool.

“Not tonight. By the way,” she added, changing the subject, “how did you talk Alberta into helping you with your exercises?”

“A mixture of charm and coercion,” he replied, grinning a little. His gaze slipped over the bodice of her dress; then he closed his eyes again and gave himself up to the bliss of the whirlpool.

Dione moved around the room, putting everything in place and preparing for the massage she'd give him
when he left the whirlpool, but her actions were purely automatic. Their conversation had been casual, even trivial, but she sensed an entirely different mood under the cover of their words. He was looking at her, he was seeing her, as a woman, not a therapist. She was both frightened and exhilarated at her success, because she'd expected it to take much longer before she got his attention. The intent way he stared at her was sending messages that she wasn't trained to interpret. As a therapist, she knew instinctively what her patient needed; as a woman, she was completely in the dark. She wasn't even completely certain that he wasn't staring at her with derision.

“All right, that's enough,” he said huskily, breaking her train of thought. “I hope Alberta's not going to hold a grudge against me, because I'm hungry. Do you think she'll feed me?”

“Serena and I will let you have our scraps,” Dione offered generously, earning a wryly appreciative glance from him.

A few minutes later he lay on his stomach on the table with a towel draped over his hips, sighing in contentment as her strong fingers worked their magic on his flesh. He propped his chin on his folded arms, the look on his face both absent and absorbed, a man concentrating on his inner plans. “How long before I'll be able to walk?” he asked.

Dione continued manipulating his legs as she considered the answer. “Do you mean until you take your first steps, or walk without aid?”

“The first steps.”

“I'll take a stab and say six weeks, though that's only a rough guess,” she warned him. “Don't hold me to it. You could do it in four or five, or it could be two
months. It really depends on how well I've planned your therapy program. If you push too hard and injure yourself, then it'll take longer.”

“When will the pain ease?”

“When your muscles are accustomed to your weight and the mechanics of movement. Are your legs still numb?”

“Hell, no,” he growled feelingly. “I can tell when you're touching me now. But after those cramps last night, I'm not certain I want to feel.”

“The price to pay,” she taunted gently, and slapped him on the bottom. “Time to turn over.”

“I like that dress,” he said when he was lying on his back and could stare at her. Dione didn't glance up, consciously keeping the flexing of her fingers in an unbroken rhythm. When she failed to comment he pushed a little harder. “You've got great legs. I see you every day, dressed in next to nothing, but I hadn't realized how good your legs are until I saw you in a dress.”

She quirked one eyebrow. That statement alone verified her suspicion that he hadn't been aware of her as a woman, not really. She half-turned her back to him as she rubbed her hands down the calf of his right leg, hoping that the vigorous massage would lessen any cramps he might have. When the warm touch of his hand rested on her bare thigh, under her skirt, she gave a stifled half scream and jerked up straight.

“Blake!” she yelped, pushing frantically at his hand in an effort to dislodge it from under her dress. “Stop it! What are you doing?”

“You're playing with
my
legs,” he retorted calmly. “Turnabout's fair play.”

His fingers were between her legs while his thumb was on the outside of her thigh, and she flinched from
the feel of his hand as her other leg instinctively pressed against him to halt the upward movement. Her face flushed brightly.

“I like that,” he said huskily, his eyes bright. “Your legs are so strong, so sleek. Do you know what you feel like? Cool satin.”

She twisted, trying to loosen his grip, and to her dismay his fingers slid even higher. She sucked in a lungful of air and held it, going still, her eyes wide and alarmed as she tried to still the flare of panic in her stomach. Her heart lurched drunkenly in her chest.

“Let me go, please,” she whispered, hoping that the trembling of her voice wouldn't be as noticeable if she didn't try to talk loudly.

“All right,” he agreed, a little smile moving his lips. Just as she began to sag in relief, he added, “If you'll kiss me.”

Now her heart was slamming so wildly that she pressed her hand to her chest in an effort to calm it. “I…just one kiss?”

“I can't say,” he drawled, staring at her lips. “Maybe, maybe not. It depends on how well we like it. For God's sake, Dee, I've kissed you before. You won't be violating any sacred vow not to become involved with a patient. A kiss isn't what I'd term an involvement.”

Despite her efforts to hold her legs together and trap his wandering hand, he somehow moved a little higher.

“It's only a kiss,” he cajoled, holding his left hand out to her. “Don't be shy.”

She wasn't shy, she was terrified, but she could still hold on to the thought that Blake wasn't Scott. That alone gave her the courage to lean down and touch her
lips to his as lightly, as delicately, as a breath of air. She drew back and stared down at him. His hand remained on her leg.

“You promised,” she reminded him.

“That wasn't a kiss,” he replied. The expression in his eyes was intent, watchful. “A real kiss is what I want, not a child's kiss. I've been a long time without a woman. I need to feel your tongue on mine.”

Weakly she leaned against the table. I can't handle this, she thought wildly, then stiffened as the thought formed in her brain. Of course she could; she could handle anything. She'd already been through the worst that could happen to her. This was just a kiss, that was all…

Though her soft, generous mouth trembled against his, she gave him the intimate kiss he'd requested, and she was startled to feel him begin to shake. He removed his hand from her leg and placed both arms around her, but he held her without any real force, only a warm sort of nearness that failed to alarm her. The hair on his bare chest was tickling her above the fabric of her sundress; the faintly musky smell of him filled her lungs. She became aware of the warmth of his skin, the roughness of his chin against her smooth skin, the light play of his tongue against hers. Her eyes had been open, but now they slowly closed, and she became lost in a world of sensation, the light only a redness against her lids, her senses of touch and smell intensified by the narrowing of her concentration.

That was what she wanted, she reminded herself dimly. She hadn't thought she would enjoy herself in the process, but the excitement that was beginning to course through her veins brought with it a warmth that could only be pleasure.

“God, you smell good,” he breathed, breaking the kiss to nuzzle his face in the soft hollow of her throat. “What perfume is that?”

Giddily she remembered all the perfumes she'd tried. “It's a mixture of everything,” she admitted in a bemused tone.

He chuckled and turned his head to claim her mouth again. This time the kiss was deeper, harder, but she didn't protest. Instead she kissed him back as strongly as he kissed her, and he finally fell back onto the table, gasping.

“You're taking advantage of a starving man,” he groaned, and she gave a spurt of laughter.

“I hope Alberta doesn't feed you anything,” she told him, and turned away to hide the color that she knew still tinted her cheeks. She fussed over several insignificant details, but when she turned back he wasn't paying attention to her. She disciplined her face into smoothness and helped him to dress, but there was a sense of determination about him that bothered her. It nagged at her all during dinner, where Serena entertained Blake with a wholly fictitious tale of their shopping trip.

What was he up to? She'd agonized over her scheme, gone to ridiculous lengths to put it into action, but somehow she still had the feeling that he was the one who was scheming, not her.

D
ione, may I talk to you? In private, please.” Richard's face was tight with strain, and Dione looked at him sharply, wondering at the bitterness that was so evident in his expression. She looked past him to the study door, and he read her mind.

“She's playing chess with Blake,” he said heavily, thrusting his hands into his pockets and moving to the doors that opened onto the courtyard.

Dione hesitated only a moment, then followed him. She didn't want anything to be said about her being in his company, but on the other hand, she knew that Richard wasn't going to make a pass at her, and she resented feeling guilty for being friendly to him. Serena had continued her efforts at friendship, and Dione found that she really liked the younger woman; Serena was a lot like Blake, with his directness, his willingness to accept challenges. Sometimes Dione had the uneasy thought that Serena could check on her more easily under the guise of friendship, but more and more it seemed that the thought came from her own wariness, not any premeditated action on Serena's part.

“Aren't things going well?” she asked Richard quietly.

He gave a bitter laugh, rubbing the back of his neck. “You know they're not. I don't know why,” he said wearily. “I've tried, but it's always in the back of my
mind that she'll never love me the way she loves Blake, that I'll never be as important to her as he is, and it makes me almost sick to touch her.”

Dione chose her words carefully, picking them like wildflowers. “Some resentment is only natural. I see this constantly, Richard. An accident like this really shakes up everyone connected to the patient. If it's a child who's injured, it can cause resentment between the parents, as well as the other children. In circumstances like these, one person gets the lion's share of the attention, and others don't like it.”

“You make me sound so small and petty,” he said, one corner of his stern mouth curving upward.

“Not that. Just human.” Her voice was full of warmth and compassion, and he stared at her, his eyes moving over her tender face. “It'll get better,” she reassured him.

“Soon enough to save my marriage?” he asked heavily. “Sometimes I almost hate her, and it's damned peculiar, because what I'm hating her for is not loving me the way I love her.”

“Why make her take all the blame?” Dione probed. “Why not put some of that resentment on Blake? Why not hate him for taking her attention?”

He actually laughed aloud. “Because I'm not in love with him,” he chuckled. “I don't care what he does with his attention…unless he hurts you with it.”

Shock rippled through her, widening her enormous eyes. In the dimness of twilight they gleamed darkly gold, as deep and bottomless as a cat's. “How can he hurt me?” she asked, her voice husky.

“By making you fall in love with him.” He was too astute, capable of summing up a situation in a glance. “I've been watching you change these last couple of
weeks. You were beautiful before, God knows, but now you're breathtaking. You…glow. Those new clothes of yours, the look on your face, even the way you walk…all of that has changed. He needs you now so intensely that everyone else is wiped out of his mind, but what about later? When he can walk again, will he still watch you as if his eyes are glued on you?”

“Patients have fallen in love with me before,” she pointed out.

“I don't doubt that, but have you ever fallen in love with a patient before?” he asked relentlessly.

“I'm not in love with him.” She had to protest the idea, had to thrust it away from her. She couldn't be in love with Blake.

“I recognize the symptoms,” Richard said.

As sticky as the conversation was when they were discussing Serena, Dione infinitely preferred it to the current line, and she moved jerkily away. “I don't have any sandcastle built,” she assured him, clenching her hands into fists in an effort to keep herself from trembling. “When Blake's walking, I'll move on to another job. I know that; I've known it from the beginning. I
always
get personally involved with my patients,” she said, laughing a little. That was all it was, just her normal intense concentration on her patient.

Richard shook his head in amusement. “You see so clearly with everyone else,” he said, “to be so blind about yourself.”

The old, blind panic, familiar in form but suddenly unfamiliar in substance, clawed at her stomach.
Blind
. That word, the one Richard had used. No, she thought painfully. It wasn't so much that she was blind as that she deliberately didn't see. She had built a wall between herself and anything that threatened her; she knew it
was there, but as long as she didn't have to look at it, she could ignore it. Blake had forced her on two occasions to face the past that she'd put behind her, never realizing what the ordeal had cost her in terms of pain. Now Richard, though he was using his coolly analytical brain instead of the gut instincts Blake operated on, was trying to do the same.

“I'm not blind,” she denied in a whisper. “I know who I am, and what I am. I know my limits; I learned them the hard way.”

“You're wrong,” he said, his gray eyes thoughtful. “You've only learned the limits that other people have placed on you.”

That was so true that she almost winced away from the thrust of it. Instinctively she pushed the thought away, drew herself up, marshaling her inner forces. “I think you wanted to talk to me about Serena,” she reminded him quietly, letting him know that she wasn't going to talk about herself any longer.

“I did, but on second thought, I won't bother you with it. You have more than enough on your mind now. In the end, Serena and I will have to settle our differences on our own, so it's useless to ask anyone else's advice.”

Walking together, they reentered the house and went into the study. Serena was sitting with her back to them, though her posture of concentration told them exactly what expression was on her face. She hated to lose, and she poured all her energies into beating Blake. Although she was a good chess player, Blake was better. She was usually wild with jubilation whenever she managed to beat him.

Blake, however, looked up as Richard and Dione
came in together, and a hard, determined expression pulled his face into a mask. His blue eyes narrowed.

Later that night, when she poked her head into his bedroom to tell him good-night, he said evenly, “Dee, Serena's marriage is hanging by a thread. I'm warning you: don't do anything to break that thread. She loves Richard. It'll kill her if she loses him.”

“I'm not a home wrecker or a slut,” she retorted, stung. Anger brought red spots to her cheeks as she stared at him. He had left the lamp on, evidently waiting until she told him good-night, as she usually did, so she could see exactly how forbidding he looked. Bewildered pain mingled with her anger to make her tremble inside. How could he even think…“I'm not like my mother,” she blurted, her voice stifled, and she whirled, slamming the door behind her and fleeing to her own room despite the sound of her name being called demandingly.

She was both hurt and furious, but years of self-discipline enabled her to sleep dreamlessly anyway. When she woke hours later, just before her alarm went off, she felt better. Then she frowned. It seemed as if her subconscious could hear the echo of her name being called. She sat up, tilting her head as she listened.

“Dee! Damn it to hell!”

After weeks of hearing that particular note in his voice when he called her, she knew that he was in pain. Without her robe, she ran to his room.

She turned on the light. He was sitting up, rubbing his left calf, his face twisted in a grimace of pain. “My foot, too,” he gritted. Dione seized his foot and forcefully returned his toes to their proper positions, digging her thumbs into the ball of his foot and massaging. He fell back against his pillow, his chest rising and falling swiftly as he gulped in air.

“It's all right,” she murmured, moving her soothing hands up his ankle to his calf.

She devoted her attention to his leg, unaware of the fixed way he watched her. After several minutes she straightened out his leg and patted his ankle, then pulled the sheet over him. “There,” she said, smiling as she looked up, but the smile faded as she met his gaze. Those dark blue eyes were as fierce and compelling as the sea, and she faltered in the face of his regard, her soft lips parting. Slowly his eyes dipped downward, and she was abruptly aware of her breasts, thrusting against the almost transparent fabric of her nightgown. A throbbing ache in her nipples made her fear that they had hardened, but she didn't dare glance down to confirm it. Her new nightgowns didn't hide a lot; they merely veiled.

Suddenly she couldn't withstand the force of his gaze, and she averted her eyes, her thick lashes dropping to shield her thoughts. His body was in her line of vision, and abruptly her eyes widened. She almost gasped, but controlled her reaction at the last second.

Jerkily she got to her feet, forgetting about how much the nightgown revealed. She'd accomplished her aim, but she didn't feel smug about it; she felt stunned, her mouth dry, her pulses hammering through her veins. She swallowed, and her voice was too husky to be casual when she said, “I thought you said you were impotent.”

It was a moment before her words registered. He looked as stunned as she felt, then he glanced down at himself. His jaw hardened and he swore aloud.

A hot blush suddenly burned her face. It was ridiculous to stand there, but she couldn't move. She
was
fascinated, she admitted, completely bewildered by her
reaction, or rather, her lack of it. As fascinated as a bird before a cobra, and that was a Freudian simile if ever she'd heard one.

“I must be psychic,” he whispered rawly. “I was just thinking that that little bit of nothing you have on would rouse the dead.”

She couldn't even smile. Abruptly, though, she was able to move, and she left the room as swiftly as she could without actually running.

That disturbing dryness was still in her mouth as she dressed, pulling out her old clothes rather than the clinging new garments she'd been wearing. There was no need to dress seductively now; that particular milestone was behind him, and she knew better than to play with fire.

The only problem was, she discovered as the days passed, that Blake didn't seem to notice that she'd reverted to her old clothes, her modest nightgowns. He didn't say anything, but she could always feel the blue fire of his gaze on her when they were together. In the course of therapy she was constantly touching him, and she gradually became accustomed to the way he'd wrap his fingers around her leg while she massaged him, or the frequency with which their bodies rubbed together when they were swimming.

Much sooner than she'd expected, he stood alone, not using his hands. He swayed for a moment, but his legs held and he regained his balance. He worked harder than any patient she'd had before, determined to end his dependency on the wheelchair. He paid for his determination every night with the torturous cramps that he suffered, but he didn't let up the killing pace he'd set for himself. Dione no longer organized his therapy; he pushed himself. All she could do was try to prevent him
from doing so much that he harmed himself, and soothe his muscles at the end of every workout with massages and sessions in the whirlpool.

Sometimes she got a lump in her throat as she watched him straining himself to the limit, his teeth clenched, his neck corded with effort. It would soon be over, and she'd move on to another patient. He was already an entirely different man from the one she'd first seen almost five months before. He was as hard as a rock, tanned the color of teak, his body rippling with lean muscles. He'd regained all of his weight, and possibly more, but it was all muscle, and he was as fit as any professional athlete. She couldn't analyze the emotions that quivered through her when she watched him. Pride, of course, even some possessiveness. But there was also something else, something that made her feel warm and languid; yet at the same time she was more alive now than she'd ever been. She watched him, and she let him touch her, and she felt closer to him than she'd ever thought possible. She
knew
this man, knew his fierce pride, the daredevil in him that thumbed his nose at danger and laughingly accepted any challenge. She knew his swift, cutting intelligence, the blast of his temper, his tenderness. She knew the way he tasted, the strength of his mouth, the texture of his hair and skin beneath her hesitant fingers.

He was becoming so much a part of her that, when she allowed herself to think about it, it frightened her. She couldn't let that happen. Already he needed her less and less, and one day in the near future he would return to his work and she would be gone. For the first time the thought of moving on was painful. She loved the huge, cool hacienda, the smooth tiles underfoot, the serene expanses of white wall. The long summer days
she'd spent in the pool with him, the laughter they'd shared, the hours of work, even the sweat and tears, had forged a bond that linked him to her in a way she didn't think she could bear.

It wasn't easy admitting that she loved him, but as the gilded fall days slipped past, she stopped trying to hide it from herself. She'd faced too much in the past to practice self-deception for long. The knowledge that at last she loved a man was bittersweet, because she didn't expect anything to come of it. Loving him was one thing; allowing him to love her was quite another. Her golden eyes were haunted as she watched him, but she threw herself into their remaining time together with a single-minded determination to gather all the memories she could, to let no shadows darken the time she had left. Like pieces of gold, she treasured his deep chuckles, the blistering curses he used whenever his legs wouldn't do as he wanted, the way the virile groove in his cheek deepened into a dimple when he would look up at her, elated, at every triumph.