Double Jeopardy (10 page)

“Damn dog gets all the perks.” He took a step toward her and then couldn’t resist reaching out and coaxing her into his arms. He touched her curly hair, brushing it back from her face. It had looked wiry, but instead it was silky to the touch. She was almost the same height as him; he had maybe an inch on her.

He leaned toward her, hoping against hope that she wouldn’t draw away.

She didn’t, so he kissed her, careful to keep it light, a getting-to-know-you sort of kiss, tasting, testing, gentle.

She didn’t throw herself into his arms the way he half wished and didn’t expect, but she didn’t pull away, either. The kiss lasted longer than he’d dared hope for, and her full lips were sweet and voluptuous and, after a moment, eager. He felt like groaning with relief. He pulled her closer, slid his arms around her waist and fitted their bodies together, and the kiss deepened, intensified. His heartbeat followed suit.

He felt himself grow rock hard, wanting her.

She couldn’t help but feel it. She drew back, her eyes startled, her expression vulnerable. He caressed her swollen lips with the ball of his thumb.

“
I really do have to go now, Ben.” There was the slightest tremor in her voice.

“
Wait a moment. I’ll get my shoes and Grendel’s leash and we’ll walk you to your car.” He couldn’t remember where the hell he’d left his shoes, to say nothing of the leash. He couldn’t remember much of anything except how kissing her had felt.

“Oh, you don’t have to come down with me. That’s not necessary.” She was flustered.

“But it is. My mother taught me a gentleman always sees a lady to her pumpkin.” He located his shoes in the pile of sports gear. Now, where in hell had he abandoned the leash?

“Grendel, leash.” And Grendel, smart dog that he was, unearthed it in a comer of the kitchen and came trotting over with it. “Humor us here, okay? We’re doing hero training.”

Ben pulled on the trainers, tied the laces, snapped the dog’s leash in place and took her hand in his, threading his fingers through hers. Her skin was a little rough, and she had calluses on her palm. He lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed it, pleased when she shivered.

In the elevator, he surprised himself by saying, “Is there someone special in your life, Sera?”

“As in, do I have a lover?”

He liked that about her, her directness. “Yeah.”

She shook her head. “I don’t seem to be marvelous at the man-woman thing. I do
Hello, Nice to know you, Goodbye.”
She gave him a challenging look. “What about you?”

“I’m alone.” He stared straight into her eyes. “Only for a couple months recently. But what I had with her is over. Truth is, I’m not much good at long-term, either.” He hesitated, wondering why he felt compelled to tell her again. “I was married once, a long time ago. I was a terrible husband.”

She just nodded.

He wanted to ask her if she’d take a chance on short-term with him, but he decided not to. They’d do the decorating thing and see where it led. He was aware of the way she drew a little closer to him when they reached the noisy street. A loud argument was taking place between three men who’d had way too much to drink. He liked feeling as though she wanted him to protect her. Grendel growled, and the men moved a few steps away.

Her car was small, white, not new, messy, filled with sketchbooks and bits of carpet and other stuff he couldn’t identify. He held the door for her, and waited until she’d turned the corner at the light before he and the dog walked slowly back toward his building.

CHAPTER SIX

“Hey Gemma, how’re ya doin’?”

Visiting hours were almost over for the day. Gemma was sitting in the only comfortable chair in the room, a worn armchair. Being up made her woozy.

She turned slowly toward Jack Kilgallin and listlessly waggled her fingers.

Not being able to talk was awful. Not the worst part of all this by far, but bad enough. Her mother had just left, and Gemma was exhausted. Maria insisted on being cheerful no matter how bitchy Gemma got.

She hated herself for being nasty to her mother, but the pain was making her crazy. She was counting the minutes until the nurse arrived with her medication. Her head ached; her neck was on fire from the tracheotomy tube. Dr. Ben had decided it should stay in until after the reconstruction; apparently her nose would have to be packed, and with her jaw wired breathing could be a problem. Having to live with the trach was just one more major irritation in a series that were becoming increasingly hard to tolerate.

She longed for the drowsiness of the drug, for the numbness it brought. She wanted to be drugged, lost in lala land so she didn’t have to feel. She’d let the nurse administer the shot and then she’d close her eyes and welcome the oblivion of drugged sleep.

Whatever they gave her was a little like smoking grass but way more powerful. She wished Jack wasn’t such a tight-ass; she’d ask him to bring her some grass instead of those flowers and magazines and CDs and stuff; she could probably inhale it through the lousy tube in her throat.

But she knew better than to even ask. Jack didn’t do grass, or much of anything else except the odd beer. She’d found that out when she’d dated him.

She’d invited him to take her to a party where things were happening, and he’d refused pointblank.

“That crowd’ll get you into big trouble, Gemma.” He’d sounded like her father, for cripes sakes. Yet for one nanosecond, it had felt so good to have Jack taking care of her.

He’d been right about her friends. They weren’t exactly loyal; she’d found that out in here. They’d come to visit her exactly once, right after the accident, and she’d had the awful feeling it was for the kick of seeing how bad she looked.

But then, what could she expect? She wasn’t exactly the life of the party anymore. Would she ever be again? The constant fear surged inside her, making the blood pound in her ears.

“It’s really hot out there, even this late in the evening,” Jack was saying. “I guess summer’s finally here.”

He put the new magazines on the bedside table and set the jar clumsily stuffed with tulips and freesia on the windowsill. He always brought something.

“How you feelin’, Gemma?” He reached for the pad of paper and pencil she used to communicate and handed them to her.

Suicidal. Sick to death over this whole mess. Mad as hell that it happened to me. Bored and sore and fed up and scared shitless. But she didn’t write any of that down; she couldn’t reveal herself that openly to him. Instead, she just scrawled a careless
Okay
and tossed the pen aside. The poor bastard felt bad enough without her twisting the knife.

She wished he’d just give it a rest, though. This coming by every spare minute, dashing up at his lunch break, stopping by again in the evening like this. It was plain as anything that Kilgallin was eaten up with guilt. He needed to get a life.

Still, to give him credit, he’d apologized only once, the first day she was conscious enough to understand what was going on. He’d cried then, which had shocked her silly. Big, tough Jack Kilgallin in tears?

Since then, he hadn’t had much to say. But he’d never really been the verbal type. She’d gone out with him only twice, and it seemed a long time ago now. He hadn’t had a lot to say then, either. The thing she remembered about dating Jack was the raw physical attraction between them. She hadn’t slept with him, no credit to her; he’d stopped before things had gone that far. She would have slept with him, though; they’d nearly devoured each other once they’d started kissing. The chemistry had been astounding. But he wasn’t a party man, and that had ended it for her.

She still liked him, however, in spite of his outdated attitudes. So when he’d apologized about the accident, she’d scribbled a note telling him that what had happened was nobody’s fault, that she didn’t blame him, although for the first week or so that was a total lie.

She did blame. She blamed her father for hiring her on the crew in the first place; she blamed the hospital for wanting a new unit built; she blamed herself for being in the wrong place at the wrong time; she blamed Jack for not paying more attention to what the hell he was doing. She blamed everybody.

When she’d come out of the blackness enough to fully understand what a total mess her face was, she’d wanted to die. She’d wanted to curse, shout, scream, but of course none of those was an option; the sounds she made with her jaw wired and this tube in her throat were disgusting, subhuman.

At least they matched the way she looked. The only time the blackness eased a little was when Dr. Halsey was around. He was the sole person who really understood how she felt, Gemma decided. Everybody else went on about how glad she should be that she’d survived the accident, how well she was coming along, how much better she looked; didn’t they have eyes in their heads? She was a monster, and she knew it.

The first time Gemma got hold of a mirror she truly wished she’d died in the accident; she’d rather be dead than spend the rest of her life with that for a face. Nobody except Sera would talk about how she looked. Good old Sera was honest to a fault.

“It’s pretty much a mess, Em,” she’d admitted when Gemma had pressed her for a comment. “But it won’t always be this way. Doc Halsey’s gonna fix it. It’s strictly temporary. You’ve gotta keep that thought in your head every minute. Six weeks from now I’ll bet you won’t even know you’d ever been in an accident.”

Those assurances were scant comfort when they came from Sera; her sister wasn’t exactly a medical genius.

But coming from Dr. Ben, they actually made Gemma feel a little better. She’d asked if she could call him Dr. Ben, and he’d laughed and said of course, she could call him whatever felt right. She liked and trusted him, and for some weird reason she didn’t even mind him looking at her; there was something about his matter-of-fact manner that convinced her he saw beyond the devastation of her face. He made her feel safe; he gave her hope; he wasn’t fazed one tiny bit by her mask of Frankenstein. He’d seen it all before, and he understood. More than that, he cared.

“It’s tough to have to go through this, Gemma,” he told her. “But you have to think of your injuries as lasting only a few months out of a long lifetime. Just endure. You’re going to be pretty again. I guarantee it.”

He’d grinned at her and given her a roguish wink, and for one instant she’d felt like her old self again, attractive, flirtatious, able to charm any man she wanted.

“Because you and Sera are identical twins, I can do the repair ideally, so trust me on this, okay?”

And then he’d explained in detail, with sketches, exactly how he was planning to give her back her face. She couldn’t believe him at first when he said he and his colleagues could do the whole thing in one long operation. Or that there’d be no incision.

"The surgery is done through the palate and the nose.” He’d shown her the original X rays and the CT scan, which indicated exactly where and how the bones were broken.

“We’ve already repaired your jaw. That’s one big job already completed.” He showed her on the scan where the breaks had been, then pointed to her cheekbones, nose. Even she could see scattered bits of fractured bone.

“I’ll just put all this back together like a puzzle. With computer imaging, I know exactly where the pieces should go, and as I’ve said, having your sister as a model helps immensely. It’ll take six weeks or more before the swelling and bruising go down, but right after the operation you’ll start to look like yourself. Just keep staring at your sister and telling yourself that’s the face you’ll have again, the intriguing face Sera and Gemma Cardano share.”

She’d asked him if he’d sign a promissory note saying that she’d come out okay, and he’d laughed.

She’d smiled, too. He was the only one who could make her feel like smiling these days.

As much as she trusted him, now that the operation was only a day away, she was petrified. Any sane person would be at the thought of eight hours, maybe even more, under anesthetic, with no real guarantees except Ben’s word that she’d come out human in appearance, never mind the way she used to be. Just as Dr. Ben said, Sera was her lifeline; it wasn’t what her sister said or did these days that helped. It was simply that by looking at Sera, Gemma knew how she ought to look.

She’d been in hospital only eight days, but it felt like an eternity. She’d had a lot of time to think, and she’d reluctantly admitted to herself that she hadn’t been blameless in what had happened to her; out late the night before, she was hung-over when she’d come to work that fateful morning.