by Cindy Gerard
Regardless of the intimacies they had shared, she suspected the answer to those questions was no. He was a kind man. A generous man, an unselfish lover. But he didn’t love her. He hardly knew her. Still, she felt she knew him, and she knew that he cared. Caring, however, didn’t translate to love. It translated to compassion and, in their case, a glorious and mutual lust.
Yet, as he sat there, waiting for whatever she chose to tell him, she knew that he would understand. Just as he understood her need to expose not only her feelings, but her fears.
How could he know her so well? How could he know what she didn’t? That she needed to talk about this, but that fear had kept her from it. Fear and an anger that she’d never understood until he’d made her acknowledge it.
She looked past him, out the window and into the darkness and decided to take that first step. “I may never regain the use of my hand. I may never walk again without a limp.”
There. She’d said it. And it hurt every bit as badly as she’d known it would.
Beside her, she heard his long exhalation of breath. “I’m sorry.”
She forced a smile. “Me, too. Sorry for the truth of it. Sorry that it took this long for me to accept it. They’d told me that from the beginning. Today, they made me a believer.”
Dr. Chambers and Dr. Harding had been kind but graphic as she’d sat listening to the same words she’d heard over and over since the accident. She’d finally been forced to really hear what they were saying.
“With the exception of the donor site on my thigh, most of the burn scars on my leg and arm will fade, the rest can be repaired with cosmetic surgery,” she went on, recalling their words. “The muscle tone will gradually return, but the break, well, there was irreparable damage. My hand—plastic surgery after a year or so can improve, but not replicate, what it had once been. Therapy will help me regain some of the use of my fingers but it will be a long painful process.”
“Again, I’m sorry,” he said softly. When she said nothing, he filled the silence with affirmation. “None of it changes who you are.”
She looked up at him. “Well, then, there’s the crux of it all, isn’t it?” She fussed with the folds of his robe. “You asked me a very insightful question earlier tonight. You asked me who I was. You asked me if I knew who I was. Well, you know what? I don’t know. I really don’t know anymore. Sometimes…sometimes I wonder if I ever did.”
She was grateful that he didn’t try to correct her. She was grateful for his silence that allowed her to formulate the words she’d needed to say for a very long time.
“Up until the plane crash,” she began hesitantly, trusting him to understand what was just becoming clear to her, “I had always known my purpose. I’d been born to waltz through a charmed, storybook life like a dancer playing to a series of packed houses and standing ovations. I’d been conditioned to believe that the only thing I’d ever needed to trade on was my looks. In fact,” she added, unaware that her voice had turned bitter, “it was all that had ever been asked of me. ‘Smile for the camera, Helena. Pose for the world. Show them how beautiful you are.”’
She reached for her wine, sipped, stared into the rich burgundy depths. “And I delivered. I played the role and played it well. The mix worked for me. Not only had I been perfect, I’d been perfectly happy. At least I thought I was.”
“And now..?” he prompted, after a silence that rejected everything that she had thought.
She looked past him, into the night. “And now,” she said, hearing the defeat in her voice but unable to disguise it, “I will never be perfect again.”
She met his searching eyes, then looked away from the compassion there and confessed what she had only recently admitted to herself. “I find myself wondering if I ever truly was.”
The panic started to build again, but this time she didn’t hold it in. “It scares me to death…this realization that my entire identity had been wrapped up in what I looked like. What image I maintained. How shallow is that? And now, how ironic to find, in that sorry assessment, that I was never really perfect after all.”
She looked at him, at the compassion in his eyes. “And if I was never really perfect, then it makes my entire life a lie, doesn’t it?” she concluded, more frightened than she’d thought possible by the implications of that statement. “Not a harmful lie, but an empty one, like an empty promise.”
He was quick to defend her. “You forget. I know too much about you to accept that your life has been an empty promise, Helena.”
She smiled at the kindness and sincerity of his words. “But don’t you see, it’s starting to feel that way. I…thought I knew why I did what I did. I thought I was happy. But then, I’d never really stopped to analyze it. I’m wondering now if the reason I never looked any deeper was because I was frightened of the answer even then.”
She laughed, but with no humor. “God forbid that I’d actually take time for a moment of self-assessment or to delve into that frightening realm of self-discovery. God forbid that I ever asked myself if there was something more to me than what anyone had ever asked me to be.
“What if you were right?” she asked abruptly. “Earlier, when you were baiting me—and I know you were baiting me, Matthew—but what if you were right? What if everything I’ve done until this point was for reasons that were as shallow and superficial as…as a jet-setting daughter of a titled earl?”
He only sat, silent, supportive, listening. She combed her fingers through her hair, fought for the words. “Was that all I was? Was that all there was to me? Shouldn’t there have been more? Shouldn’t there be more?”
She drew in a deep breath, let it out. “I guess I’ll never know now, will I? Isn’t it odd? My looks had always defined me, and suddenly I find that quite appalling.”
She pushed the sleeve away from her hand, stared at the damage. “And now, now I have something new to define me.”
She hated the weakness that had tears welling up in her eyes. “I don’t want people to look at me and compare me to what I was, when what I was was no less marred than what I am now.”
“You are not marred, Helena. You never were. You could have used your position and your beauty for your own personal gain. Instead, you used it to help others.”
She nodded slowly. “Oh yes, there is that, isn’t there? But now I’ll never know what truly motivated me, will I? After all, what I did was all I was equipped to do.
“What am I equipped to do now, Matthew?” she asked, hating the plaintive note to her voice.
“Give it some time. Give yourself some time and you’ll find out a lot about yourself if you look deep enough.”
She smiled and couldn’t keep the cynicism from her voice. “Ah. So I should look at my scars as an opportunity.”
“Better that than as a defeat.”
“But it’s defeat that I feel.” The words were out before she could stop them. “For two months I’ve fought it. What if I never get past it?”
“Again—you haven’t given yourself enough time. You aren’t giving yourself enough credit.”
She didn’t know. She just didn’t know anymore.
“In the meantime,” he took her hand and drew her onto his lap, “why don’t you just let yourself get used to the new you, who happens to be someone that I like very much. No,” he said, cupping her face in his hands, “you need to think about what you’ve just said.”
His gaze dropped to the lapels of her robe where it gaped open. “And I need to do this.”
His hand slipped inside.
She shivered, then leaned into his touch as he filled his palm with her breast.
“What you do to me,” she whispered, as he lifted her, then shifted her until she was straddling his lap and her arms were looped loosely over his shoulders.
“What do you want me to do to you?” Eyes locked with hers, he slowly undid the belt at her waist. Slower still, he peeled the robe from her shoulders. It pooled like a deep blue sea at his feet.
&nb
sp; “Touch me,” she uttered on a sigh while she went to work on his belt.
“Like this?” He repositioned her again so there was nothing between them but skin. His erection pressed against her, hot and heavy.
“Yes,” she said on a breathless whisper as he lifted her yet again, then brought her down until the tip of his arousal just penetrated her feminine folds.
“More?”
“Umm. More.”
He gripped her hips, pulled her down until he was buried so deeply inside her that she felt him touch her womb.
His eyes on hers, he covered her abdomen with the flat of his palm, pressed. She moaned and clenched around him, her head thrown back, her back arched as she rocked against him, utterly consumed, totally lost to anything but the moment and the magic that only this man could conjure.
He’d been awake for a while. Watching the morning sunlight play across her face while she slept. Indulging in her fragrant warmth beside him, her silken length tangled in his sheets.
It had been a long time since he’d awakened with a woman in his bed. Longer still since he’d wanted to. And when Lois’s voice bleated into the silence like a foghorn, he wasn’t sure if he was relieved that the spell Helena had woven was broken, or disappointed he hadn’t had time to be drawn in a little deeper.
“Matthew Walker, are you gonna sleep all day?”
A glance at the clock on the bedside table beside the intercom told him it was closing in on 8:00 a.m. A glance at the woman who had bolted to a sitting position beside him told him she was closing in on panic.
Her hair was a wild drift of golden silk, her blue eyes startled and still brimming with sleep. She looked frantically around her as if she expected to see Lois peeking up at them from under the bed.
Grinning, Matt reached behind her to punch a button on the intercom. “Good morning to you too, Lois,” he said, leaning back on an elbow and taking his time looking over the bare-breasted vixen who had belatedly clutched the sheets to her chin and was looking for all the world as if she’d been caught stealing the family jewels.
“You sick?” Lois demanded.
“No, ma’am.” He tugged Helena back down and bent over her, pressing a kiss to the tip of her nose. “Just feeling a little lazy. As a matter of fact,” he said, nipping lightly at her chin, “I was thinking about having breakfast in bed.”
Lois made a snorting hurmph. “You want breakfast in bed, you’d better start sleeping in the kitchen.”
Helena stifled a laugh against his throat, then grinned up at him. He couldn’t help it. He bent his head and kissed her, long and slow and thorough.
“Matthew. What’s going on up there is what I’d like to know? The countess hasn’t been down for breakfast either.”
He brushed his thumb along her jaw. “She had a rough day yesterday,” he said, having long ago given up on convincing Lois that Helena was not a countess. “I’ve been helping her with a little physical therapy.”
He smothered Helena’s gasping laugh with a pillow then sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. “How about you throw some coffee and muffins on a tray and I’ll come down and deliver it to her?”
“How about you do that,” Lois returned tartly. “But you mind your manners with that lady. Make sure you got everything buttoned and tucked before you give her the shock of her life. She’s delicate, she is, and not used to the—”
“Lois. Trust me, okay? I know how to treat a lady.”
Behind his back, the lady in question swung a pillow that hit him in the head.
“I’m going to take a shower now,” he interrupted when Lois started into a diatribe about no-account pups who wouldn’t know a lady if one took and invited them to tea. “I’ll be down in about fifteen or twenty. Good-bye, Lois,” he ended pointedly and punched the mute button.
“Therapy, now is it?” Helena asked with a demure smile as she tucked a pillow behind her head.
He stood beside her, unabashedly naked, growing aroused just from the look of her all snug and rosy between his sheets. “Well, I for one, definitely found some therapeutic value in what we did last night.”
“And again this morning,” she added with a pretty blush.
“And let’s not discount the healing powers of a hot shower.” He scooped her into his arms and carried her into his marble and mirrored bathroom.
“Oh,” she said as he set her on her feet and reached in to turn on the spray in a shower stall that could have easily held four people. “By all means, let’s not forget about that.”
The smile left his eyes when he pulled her in behind him and shut the glass door. Beneath the pulsating mist of multiple showerheads, he bathed her.
Helena’s heart swelled with a love so big it hurt. With tender care, he shampooed her hair, paid special attention to the burns on her arm, carefully soaped every inch of her damaged left hand, bent down on one knee to press his mouth to the donor site on her thigh, to caress the surgical scars on either side of her ankle.
“If I could kiss away your pain, I would do it.” He rose to his feet and drew her against him.
“You have,” she whispered against his shoulder. “You will never know how much you have.”
She took the soap from him then, smoothed the rich lather across the beautiful breadth of his chest, along the rock-hard plains of his abdomen and lower, where she took him in her hand, then knelt and took him in her mouth.
“Helena,” he ground out her name between clenched teeth as the warm spray poured over them like rain.
“Let me,” she whispered against his tumescent flesh as he knotted a hand in her wet hair. “Just let me.”
She took the power then, she took control, and she showed him with her touch the love she couldn’t risk putting into words.
Matt stood in the library, watching Helena through the window. She sat on the terrace in the sun, a book lying open on her lap, a glass of Lois’s iced chamomile tea, untouched, on the table beside her.
A warm midday breeze caught her hair, lifted it away from her face. The Texas sun had painted her cheeks a becoming pink. And a pain that he felt as if it were his own had tightened her lips, traced fine lines around her eyes.
She wasn’t aware that he watched her. In fact, she would be appalled that he’d caught her in this unguarded moment when she was so vulnerable and so open to discovery.
Something in his chest tightened, built to a dull ache as she stared hard at her left hand as if willing the fingers to move into something more than a loose, unnatural fist.
They’d only been lovers for two nights and yet he could read her thoughts, feel her disappointment. She was a wild and generous lover. At night, in his bed, she would shed her inhibitions and become everything she wanted to be. Everything a man could ask for.
But during the day, no matter how hard she tried to hide it, her injuries ruled who she was. It was as she’d confessed to him that first night they’d made love. She didn’t want to, but she was letting them define her. She struggled to overcome it daily. In silence. In solitude. She hadn’t opened up to him since that night. He hadn’t pressed. As he wanted to now.
Instead, he fought the urge to go to her as her shoulders sagged in defeat. Even at this distance he could see that she had closed her eyes against the tears she refused to shed.
He turned away, feeling like an intruder to a very private and very personal struggle. She could only do this on her own. She could only be what she gave herself permission to be. He couldn’t fight that battle for her. He didn’t have that right.
He eased a hip onto the corner of a desk, cupped his jaw in his palm and reminded himself of a few cold, hard facts. He was her lover, but he wasn’t in love with her. Oh, he could easily fall over that edge. He could willingly step over the cliff and take the headlong tumble. But he wouldn’t. For her sake as well as his, he would keep his heart out of the equation, because, as tempting as it was, he could not let himself love Helena Reichard.
It wouldn’t wo
rk. She had a life in Europe she would eventually go back to. He had High Stakes—and the memory of a woman he had once loved, but not enough to make her happy. Granted, he’d come to discover that Helena was nothing like Jena, but the dynamics remained the same. She was born to shine in a world of the socially elite and as soon as her confidence returned, she’d settle comfortably back under that spotlight. He was born with an aversion to the limelight and would never be comfortable there. Their lifestyles simply did not mix.
He also wanted her happy—and if he asked her to stay, to make High Stakes her home, eventually she’d grow tired of Texas. And she’d grow tired of him. Then neither of them would be content.
So, he was willing to settle for what they had, while they had it. In the meantime, he wanted her healed. And he didn’t know how much longer he could take seeing her like this. It was a start, but it wasn’t enough that she’d identified and accepted that she was letting herself be ruled by her injuries. She needed to start making efforts toward dealing with them.
She wouldn’t talk to him about the physical therapy that she did by herself behind her closed bedroom door. She wouldn’t admit to the pain even though, as now, he could see it in the fine lines of strain around her mouth. Little by little, he could see it taking a firmer hold on her. Little by little, he could see her giving up and giving in to the idea that she was physically limited in what she could do.
Maybe she was limited. Then again, maybe she simply needed someone—or something—other than herself to help her set some new limits.
He rose and turned back toward the window. She’d picked up the book, was trying to lose herself in it, but the way she slowly closed it and stared off toward the horse barns told him she hadn’t been successful. Just as he hadn’t been successful putting the skids on an idea that had hatched last night after she’d fallen asleep.