by Liz Flaherty
“How bad?” Her answer would determine his. That was fair, wasn’t it?
“I don’t know yet.”
He helped Promise with the sheets while she told him what she knew. When they reached the end of the clothesline and stood with the final piece of bedding between them, she said, “I do need two things from you.”
“Which are?” He hiked an eyebrow and leered at her. Keep it light, Campbell. If she cries, you’ll end up howling with her, and you’ll be even less help than you are anyway.
“In addition to not telling Steven, I mean. I’ll tell him in my own time when I know more.” She laid the sheet on top of the clothesbasket, patting it into place. “Just in case things go wrong—they won’t, but every hospital release in the world tells you they can—make Steven understand that I’ve done this my way. No one else’s.”
“I can do that, if he lets me live long enough.” He picked up the basket and walked beside her toward the house. “And?”
She spoke so softly he had to bend his head toward hers to catch the words. “If anything happens to me, be there for Grace.”
He snorted. “As if she’d ever need—”
Her hand, long and slender and tipped with the medium-length, nicely rounded nails you expected schoolteachers to have, rested on his arm. “Promise, Dillon.”
He sighed. “Promise.”
“No, you have to do it right.”
“What?”
She explained, he promised “right,” and they were standing on the stoop laughing when Grace backed through the door and nearly knocked Dillon over.
“Oh.” She straightened, holding a basket of wet laundry. “Sorry. Don’t step in the geraniums, Dillon, or I’ll be forced to hang you from the clothesline for herbicide. Prom, Maxie’s got a headache. I got her to lie down, but she’s fussing about it. Would you read to her for a while? She always likes that.”
“Sure.” Promise took the basket of dry clothes from Dillon and whisked into the house.
Grace walked past him toward the clothesline. She was clad in the overalls and tank top that seemed to be her uniform for hot days. Dillon stood, still holding the door open, and stared after her. For a woman with no hips, she certainly did have a way about her walk. He didn’t know whether it was her long stride or the way she held her shoulders or the tilt of her head, but it was certainly…something. Then he lifted his eyes. Good God, what had she done with her hair?
“You’re letting flies in, Dillon,” she called over the bedspread she was hanging up. “I hope this sucker dries,” she muttered. “Mrs. Willard and her night air.”
Dillon closed the door and went over to where she stood. He helped her pin the heavy bedspread to the line, then put his hands on her shoulders, turning her as he had Promise only moments before so that he could see the tousled cap of bronze-tipped curls from all angles. Unable to stop himself, he raised a hand and ran it through her hair, finding it as silky as it appeared.
“Beautiful,” he murmured.
She started, then shook her head, but he stopped the movement with a hand on her face. Lord, he loved how her skin felt. “Oh, yes,” he said softly. “Not only the hair, though it is, but the reason you got it cut. Are there no limits to friendship, Grace? Will you shave your head when Prom loses her hair?”
“You know.”
He nodded. “Will you?” He stroked her cheek with his thumb, feeling the slick spot that was the scar her father had left there. He wanted to touch his lips to the mark.
Well, there was another thought he didn’t want to examine too closely.
“No.” She pulled away, bending to retrieve the bedspread. “Unless she needs me to.”
The last words were mumbled, but Dillon heard them anyway. He sauntered away, smiling.
Beautiful? Grace stood in front of the mirror and stared curiously at herself. No, not by any means. But—she reached up to fluff the hair drying into soft curls on top of her head—better. Undeniably better.
Lights were on in the cottage in the trees, and she wondered what Dillon was doing. Then her gaze fell on the gazebo with its torn screens and rotting floor and her stomach twisted into a knot that felt like a fist pushing its way to the outside. A shudder rippled through her and she clutched the windowsill for support.
He said beautiful. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Papa. She stroked her arms firmly with the palms of her hands, as though brushing away the bruises Robert had left there more times than she could count. Less often after he’d cut her face with his ring, but often enough she still expected to see dark spots on her skin.
She was restless. Enlivened. Part of it was the adrenaline fed by her fear for Promise. But another part was the attractive haircut, the memory of Dillon’s thumb stroking her cheek and his voice saying softly, “Beautiful.”
The echo of that voice still fell on her ears when she reached for the oversize T-shirt she wore to bed. She immediately put it back down and donned a dress Faith had given her. No more than a slip of thin cotton knit in a dark cranberry color, its neckline scooping low both front and back, it fell to her ankles without binding anywhere. Not only was it comfortable, it made her feel sort of…sexy.
Grace’s cheeks burned at the turn her thoughts had taken, then she got mad for blushing and wondered if she had any nail polish around. She’d just paint her toenails, so there. It wasn’t like there was anything wrong with sexy, was there?
Downstairs, she poured a glass of wine, even though it was only Monday night, and slipped quietly through the kitchen and porch doors into the backyard. She stood for a moment, undecided what to do now that she was out here, and frowned in disappointment when the first drops of rain began to fall.
Unwilling to relinquish the freedom of being outside alone in the dark, she walked around the side of the house to the seldom-used front porch. Her mother’s beloved rattan furniture was still there, but she settled into the padded swing that faced Lawyers Row. She sat sideways, dropped one foot to set the swing in motion, then drew her knees up.
Dillon’s soft whistle preceded him around the house. He stepped onto the porch, carrying a wine bottle and a glass, and sat uninvited on the other end of the swing. His thigh brushed her bare toes and she made to draw away, but his hand clasping her foot stopped her retreat.
“How’s Maxie’s headache?” he asked, kneading the foot with a rhythmic motion. His thumb found the nail of her big toe and stroked over the polished surface. Again and again. Slowly.
Grace’s entire body turned to gooseflesh. “Better. She went to sleep early. Jonah sat with her, massaging her temples. Promise tried to tell me he was crazy about her, but I didn’t think so. Maybe I was wrong.”
“Love takes back roads sometimes.” His voice sounded hollow, and when she tried to meet his eyes, she couldn’t. What back roads had he traveled? And how had he been hurt on those travels?
They sat in silence that was both companionable and fraught with awareness, sipping wine and—once—clinking their glasses in an unspoken toast.
“Tell me about where you’ve been,” she said suddenly. “What you’ve seen.”
“No.” He softened the refusal with a tickle on the arch of one of her feet, then reached to refill her glass. “You tell me. Tell me what’s happened to Grace Elliot since her date for the prom didn’t show up.”
“Nothing. I’m the same as I was then.” She was, mostly. The damage had been done long before prom night. “And I haven’t been anywhere, so I like to hear about where other people have gone.” And I like to hear your voice. It makes me feel…
Even in her thoughts, she couldn’t put into words how the sound of his voice touched her. How it stroked over her skin like tenderness. How it strengthened her spirit to the point that facing another day was something to be anticipated instead of dreaded. Her tongue loosened by the wine, she said, “Please.”
He told her about England and Ireland, making her see thatched roofs and pubs in narrow lanes and more shades of green than
she could imagine. He skipped over France because he said he hadn’t liked it there and spoke with admiration of free-spirited Australians, adopting horrendous accents in the telling that made her smile.
The wine bottle was nearly empty when he said, “That’s the end of the travelogue.”
“No, it’s not.” She reached, turning his face so he could no longer avoid her eyes. “You haven’t mentioned Iraq.”
He hesitated. “Didn’t you see enough of war living with Robert Elliot all those years?”
“That was cold war, and it’s over.” Though she shivered as she said it.
“War’s over for me too.”
“No, it’s not.” It’s back there in the guesthouse in that book you’re writing—I’d bet my big toe on it.
“The soldiers were so bored most of the time,” he began, “and yet the fear was something you could taste. Fear and sand and strangeness. You could sense courage, and a feeling of rightness. I stayed longer, dug deeper, listened harder. I saw more than I had ever seen before.” He lifted his glass to his lips and drained it.
The pain was thick in his voice, even in the grip of his fingers on her foot. Without taking the time to think about it, she laid her hand on his.
When he clasped her wrist to pull her to him and fold her into his arms, she didn’t pull away, nor did she stiffen. His heart beat strong and steady under the hand she rested on his chest, and she stroked with light, hesitant touches. She wanted to give comfort, but didn’t know how.
He held her so tightly it hurt, but at the same time sensation flowed blissfully through muscles and into places she’d known she had but hadn’t given all that much thought to recently. It was like a salve on the omnipresent worry over Promise’s illness. Grace sat quiet in Dillon’s arms and realized for the first time in her life that sometimes the giving of comfort leads to ease for the comforter.
She realized something more too. That there was heat wherever he touched her. With the heat, came longing. It started in her toes, still warm from the touch of his fingers, and rumbled through her body to rest low in her abdomen. Even as she settled more comfortably into his embrace, she blamed the sensations on the dress, the unaccustomed varnish on her toenails, the haircut.
But it was more. It was more.
She’d managed not to say one word about herself, Dillon realized with wry amusement as he let himself into his cottage. He put the wine bottle in the refrigerator and his glass in the sink, then wandered to the computer. He read the words he’d written after supper, but was unable to connect with them. They were just black marks on a light gray background.
He lifted the cordless telephone from its cradle and punched in the memory code that was Steven’s number. He wouldn’t be there, but at least Dillon could leave a message and Steven would call back at some ungodly hour of the—
“Dr. Elliot.”
“Would that be Dr. Steven Elliot of cardiology fame? Nah, couldn’t be. Not answering his own phone at ten o’clock at night.” Dillon sat in his desk chair, leaning back so that he could see the light in Grace’s window.
“Hey, Campbell.” Steven sounded exhausted. “What do you want?”
“Glad to hear your voice too. Bad day, Doc?”
“The worst.” Steven’s sigh reverberated over the wires. “This racket wouldn’t be so bad if people didn’t die on you, you know it? And you go back over it and over it and over it and are never certain there wasn’t something you missed.” Then—his voice suddenly alert—he demanded, “Why the hell are you calling me? Is something wrong over there?”
Yeah, the woman you love is having major surgery and I can’t tell you about it.
“I haven’t smacked Grace or run away with Prom or anything like that yet.”
“Prom’s okay?”
There was a new note in Steven’s voice. Alertness? Concern? Dillon sat up straight. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know.” Steven punctuated his words with a yawn. “Something just doesn’t feel right. She decided not to go to England to house-sit, even though she loves England. She wouldn’t come here for a few weeks, even though we haven’t had much time together since her Christmas break.”
“Whose fault is that? Maybe she didn’t want to sit in your apartment for the twenty hours a day you’re off being the Caped Crusader of Cardiology.”
“Oh, very alliterative, Campbell.”
“I try.”
“Yeah, well, I’m too damn whipped to play word games with you. Did you need something?”
“I’ve got a question for you.” Dillon did. He’d just now thought of it. “How big a fit is Grace going to throw if I have central air conditioning installed in the main house?”
“Major. As in cutting off your testicles and nailing them to your door.”
“That’s kind of what I thought.”
“Why are you worried about air conditioning? She’s survived the heat for thirty-some years. I think she even likes it, and Promise is there voluntarily. It must not bother her, either.”
Dillon thought of Promise, sitting on the back porch with sweat beading on the pale skin above her upper lip, and pondered calling Steven names. Lots of names to undermine his manhood and intelligence. He curbed the desire to jerk a knot in his friend’s tail and said, “Well, Maxie and Jonah live there too. They’re both way up in their sixties, and the heat’s hard on them.”
Steven yawned again, the sound irritatingly loud over the telephone. “Tell you what, O Great Worrier about Destitute Old People, if you get the air conditioning installed, I’ll pay for it. That way, it’ll be your sorry ass Grace comes after, and you’ve got more time and patience to deal with her than I have. Promise will be comfortable, Maxie and Jonah will be comfortable, and I’ll be the guy in the white hat.”
Dillon held the phone away from his ear and counted to ten, thinking if Steven were here, he’d probably have to beat the hell out of him. “Deal with” Grace, indeed. Who did her pompous ass of a brother think he was? For a cardiac-surgeon-of-national-acclaim, he didn’t seem to know squat about the human heart. Most especially the big one that beat behind the small breasts of his own little sister.
“I’ll think about it,” he told Steven in clipped tones, added that he’d talk to him later and hung up without waiting for a response.
He turned off his desk lamp and leaned back in his chair again, eyeing the rectangular light from what he knew to be Grace’s room. He saw her walk past the window. Once, twice, three times. If she’d taken any comfort from their embrace on the front porch, it had obviously worn off. She paced the floor like an expectant father.
It had worn off for him as well, he realized, and turned his attention to the words of Chapter Seven that showed on the computer screen.
“I don’t write love scenes, just sex scenes,” he’d once explained to an eager college newspaper reporter. Love scenes belonged in romance novels and there was nothing wrong with that. They were wonderful, escapist things and he read them now and then himself. But in his books, the hearts of the protagonists were never involved, thus his scenes about lust and its consummation were about sex only. They were concise without being clinical, non-emotional without being cold, sensitive without being tender. He was a critic-proclaimed expert at writing sex scenes.
But in Chapter Seven of his latest novel, on a steamy night in eastern Tennessee, Dillon wrote six pages about love in the Biblical sense between his angst-ridden hero and a woman who entered his life wearing bib overalls and a tank top.
He didn’t fully realize until the next morning, when he came out of the bedroom in his boxer shorts and sat down in front of the computer, all that had changed.
Despite his best efforts, he’d written a love scene.
Chapter 7
In the morning, as often occurred after one of her blinding headaches, Maxie’s mind wandered. She sat at the kitchen table in a filmy pink peignoir, her face fully and garishly made up. Her cottony blond hair was pulled into a cluster of cur
ls at the top of her head that exposed rather cruelly the gray roots at her forehead and temples and the pink scalp that showed through the thinning locks.
“I’ll have eggs Benedict,” she announced grandly, “and this juice isn’t fresh-squeezed. You know I never touch anything else.”
“There are no fresh eggs this morning, Miss Tyler, and I’m sorry about the juice. We seem to be out of oranges too. But the crepes are lovely and light.” Grace didn’t know how to make crepes. She set a plate of pancakes in front of Maxie, praying the one-time actress wouldn’t call her on the difference.
“Where is that driver?” Maxie’s voice was querulous. “He knows I’m due on the set by eight. That director gets so testy when anyone’s late and I just can’t bear to be shouted at today. Why, oh, why did I contract to do this soap opera when I know I belong on the stage?”
“You don’t have any scenes today, Miss Tyler,” Jonah said smoothly. “Remember, your character’s in a coma this month. They already filmed you lying in bed. Looking lovely, I might add.” His eyes twinkled as he watched her, and Grace stopped what she was doing to watch.
So this is love.
The back door opened and Dillon came in. Maxie rose and swept—as well as one with arthritic hips can sweep—across the room. “Rafe, darling, what are you doing here? You’re due on the set—even if I have been furloughed for the present due to that ridiculous coma they’ve written in.”
Dillon didn’t miss a beat, although he cast Grace a wild look over Maxie’s powder pink shoulder. He took the older woman into his arms and held her lightly. “I won’t work without you. It’s just not the same.”
She laid her head against his chest. “Such a dear. Now, come in and have some breakfast. My housekeeper isn’t much of a cook, but she does have a way with crepes.”
Grace scowled at Dillon. Don’t you dare laugh. But the sight of Maxie in his arms brought to mind how he’d held her the night before. How they’d held each other. She remembered the heat and was warm again.