by Diana Palmer
“Do you mind if we all desert you?” Sandra asked. “If he’d let us sit with him, I’d certainly do my share.”
“I know that,” Maggie said with a smile. “I don’t mind, really.”
“A labor of love, my dear?” Sandra asked in a tone soft with understanding.
Maggie, unembarrassed, nodded. “I’d better get this upstairs before he wakes,” she said, indicating the tray. “I hope I can get him to eat something, even if it’s just a piece of toast.”
“Well,” Randy remarked, “if he’ll do it for anyone, it’ll be for you.”
“I hope you’re right,” she returned. “See you all later.”
She fitted herself into the big armchair by his bed and nibbled at a piece of toast while she drank her coffee. He began to stir, his powerful legs flexing, and the covers went flying as he stretched.
“Maggie?” he murmured, turning his head toward the chair.
“I’m—I’m here,” she managed to say, fighting to keep her eyes on his face.
One corner of his mouth turned up. “What color is your face?”
She cleared her throat. “How about some coffee and toast? I brought a pot and several buttered slices, and some jam.”
He tugged the covers back up to his waist and sat up, propping back against the pillows. “I’d love the coffee, and one piece of toast, but without jam. I still feel a little weak. Have you been here all night?”
“Yes,” she said, fixing his coffee and putting it within his reach, along with a piece of toast. She told him where it was and went back to her chair to watch him sip and nibble. “Randy’s going to get your prescription filled and bring it back at lunchtime. The doctor said you didn’t have to start them until tonight.”
He finished his toast and swallowed his coffee. “I feel rusted,” he remarked with a hard sigh. “Run me a tub of water, Maggie, and help me into it. And have the maid change these sheets, will you?”
“I’ll change them,” she said. “If you could wait until Randy gets home.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “Embarrassed? There’s nothing left that you haven’t already seen. You’re a big girl.”
“Yes, I am, but—”
“Haven’t you ever seen a man without his clothes before?”
“In books,” she grumbled.
“Not in the flesh?” he teased. “My God, what a shock it must have been.”
“Saxon, can’t you wait until Randy gets back?” she asked.
He drew in a slow breath. “Maggie, I feel as if I haven’t bathed for weeks, can you understand? I just want a tub of water. If you’re too damned inhibited to help me, I’ll manage alone.”
“You make me sound like a prude,” she grumbled. “All right, I’ll help you. I don’t suppose I could be any more shocked than I already am anyway.”
“There’s nothing shocking about nudity,” he said. “Anyway God must not have thought so, because he made us originally without complete wardrobes.”
“I suppose so,” she admitted reluctantly. “But people can make something disgusting out of it.”
“Like pornography?” he asked. “Yes, I know. They take an act of love and make an act of degradation out of it. But between people who love each other, Maggie, it becomes an expression of something more than desire. Just as bodies become more than objects of depravity.”
She got up, smoothing down her T-shirt. “I’m shy with you,” she confessed. “It’s something I can’t help, I don’t have the experience to pretend sophistication.”
“I’m glad you haven’t,” he said quietly. “I don’t want you to get that kind of experience with any man except me.”
She cleared her throat. “I’ll run the water.”
His soft laughter followed her like a relentless wind.
When she’d filled the big tub and turned on the whirlpool, she arranged towels and washcloths and went back to get him, her heart in her throat.
He tossed aside the covers and stood up, unembarrassed even when she hesitated, and he must have known that she was looking at him.
“Care to get close enough to lend me your hand?” he teased.
“Of course.” She took his fingers in hers and led him into the big blue-tiled bathroom. “Sorry, I was just reviewing an anatomy lesson,” she added with a mischievous smile.
“Disappointed, Maggie?” he asked softly.
She lowered his hand to the side of the big tub. “I’ll bet they absolutely swoon when you undress,” she murmured.
“Why don’t you climb in here with me?” he asked after a minute, his voice taut and coaxing all at once.
“Well...”
“It’s a big tub,” he remarked. “You couldn’t have had time to bathe this morning...”
Just the thought of being that close to him took her breath away, but she had just enough sanity left to refuse.
“I’ll...have mine later,” she breathed. “I—I had one before I left yesterday anyway.”
“Coward,” he accused silkily. He climbed into the tub and stretched out. “God, that feels good! Maggie, how about soaping my back, since you won’t get in with me?”
She took the cloth and lathered it, sitting on the edge of the tub and trying not to feel the sensuous maleness of his muscular body as she drew it over his broad back and shoulders.
“Here,” he murmured, drawing her hands around to his chest, leaning back with a contented sigh to let her soap it as well. Somewhere along the way, the cloth got lost, and her fingers were drawn to him like moths to a flame. Her breath caught; her heart seemed to be trying to climb up her throat as she explored the hard contours of his torso in a silence that blazed with excitement.
“Come in here with me,” he breathed roughly. “I won’t do anything you don’t want me to do.”
Her mind rebelled at the suggestion, even as her fingers were fumbling with her top and her jeans, and she was telling herself that this was insane, insane! But her body trembled with wanting, asserting itself for the first time in her life, demanding what it needed to survive.
She eased down into the warm water with him, feeling her skin slide against him, his powerful, hair-roughened thigh against her own, his arm reaching out to draw her close at his side.
“You see?” His voice was rough, ragged. “Maggie, you see?”
The words didn’t make sense, but then they had nothing to do with what was happening, and they both knew it. Inevitably he turned, turning her with him so that her body was drawn fully against the length of his, and she felt the silken brush of flesh on flesh for the first time in the smooth warmth of the bathwater. Her legs entwined with his, trembling, her body tautened as her arms went around his shoulders and her breasts flattened against the soapy hair on his chest.
“Now,” he groaned. His arms trembled as they drew her closer, and his mouth moved down to crush hers. The water swallowed them up to their necks, and under its churning surface she could feel his hands touching her as no man ever had before, exploring her, gentling her for what was surely to come.
“But...but we can’t,” she managed in a choked, half-whispered moan, trembling all over at the long sweet contact with his body.
“Why not?” he breathed, his tongue probing, darting past her teeth into the dark softness of her mouth, his hands gently lifting her hips and touching her thighs.
“Here?” she cried, but she was clinging, arching, and all at once there was such a terrible urgency as she felt him move her, ease and surge against her, and her mouth bit into his, her nails wounded, her voice cried out wildly in the sudden silence as the world darkened and reddened and spun away in a shimmer of fiery explosions around her and pain became a kind of terrible sweet necessity...
Maggie had always heard that men lost interest once their appetites were satisfied, but Saxon held her and brushed soft, tender kisses all
over her face until she was calm once more. His fingers moved against her cheeks, her mouth, her neck, and he murmured things she barely heard at all, her body still racked by the aftermath of a pleasure that defied description.
“I thought...it was supposed to hurt,” she murmured into his shoulder, feeling a little chill, as the water was just barely lukewarm.
“It did,” he murmured at her ear. “You just didn’t care,” he added with a smile in his voice.
She drew back a little, embarrassed. “It’s so strange, that you can want, need, pain in small doses. Why?”
“I don’t know either, darling,” he confessed quietly. “I only know that in all my life, there’s never been anything like this, with anyone. I’m only just beginning to understand why the French call lovemaking ‘the little death.’”
“It was that, wasn’t it?” she breathed, leaning forward to brush her mouth softly against his, loving the hard warmth of it, loving the feel of his body next to hers.
He drew in a deep breath, his hands going to her shoulders, an odd kind of concern in his scowling expression. “Maggie, we’d better get out of here. The water’s going cold.”
“Oh, yes—yes, of course,” she stammered. She struggled out, grabbing up a towel to wrap around herself and handing a larger one to him. They dried themselves in a stiff silence, and she walked back in the bedroom ahead of him to get a pair of pajama bottoms. She handed them to him and turned away to dress herself. When he finished, she led him back to his bed.
“I’ll dry your hair, if you like,” she volunteered in a dull tone.
“No,” he sighed. “It’s all right, I’ve gotten most of the water out of it. You’d better dry your own.”
“I—I’ll do that.” She searched for something to say, but she was oddly shy with him now; she felt nervous, uncertain. He seemed to regret what had happened, and she turned away, still trying to reconcile her body’s demanding hunger with her own reticence. She hadn’t believed people could lose control of themselves so easily, so completely. Now it had happened, and the thought suddenly occurred to her that she could be pregnant. She hadn’t even thought about the consequences—not once! All her upbringing, all her principles, had fallen to the wayside because of her unquenchable desire for a man who’d wanted nothing more than a body. And now he was regretting it, and so was she, but it was too late.
She dried her hair and spent several minutes in her room, trying to compose herself enough to go back. But the longer she waited, the more impossible it seemed. How could she face him after that wild abandon? In the bathtub! How could she ever face him again? Her eyes closed. Her body was already beginning to feel bruised from the porcelain. They must have been out of their minds!
Well, at least Saxon knew now that he was still a man, despite his blindness, she thought bitterly. And since he had what he’d wanted from her since she came back here, he probably wouldn’t want her again. Had it been desire? Or had he been jealous of Bret—so jealous that he felt he had to assert his mastery over her? Or were there deeper, darker reasons? Was it revenge for what that misplaced byline had caused, revenge for the blindness that his subconscious blamed her for causing?
The thought paralyzed her. At the time she’d thought it was out of love. She’d convinced herself that the endearments he’d whispered, the ardent commands that led her into the sweet wildness of emotion, had been purely out of love. But now she had doubts. Couldn’t any woman have pleased him, despite what he’d said? Couldn’t he have attained that pleasure with anyone? After all, Maggie thought, men were structured to enjoy sex regardless of their partners—weren’t they?
The longer she hesitated, the bigger the doubts grew, until she convinced herself that what had happened was nothing more than a sordid excursion into animal pleasure, a mistake that never should have happened.
She moved out into the hall just as Randy came down it.
“Randy, would you change the sheets for Saxon?” she asked hurriedly. “I’ve got to go out for a few minutes...”
“Oh, sure,” he agreed with a pleasant smile. “Did you get any rest?”
“I slept a little, I just need some fresh air, that’s all,” she assured him. “Thanks a million.”
She darted down the staircase, grateful that there was no one in sight, because she was crying.
She wandered around out on the grounds for hours, brooding, hating herself, hating Saxon. There was only one thing to do. Go home. Now. Before, out of some horrible circumstance, she wound up in his arms again. Once could be excused on the grounds of temporary insanity, but twice would be unforgivable.
She wrapped her arms around her, feeling the cold as never before. She went back into the house and up the staircase, feeling like a prisoner going to the guillotine.
She knocked at Saxon’s door, jumping when she heard the harsh “Come in!”
She opened the door and moved hesitantly into the room. He was under the sheets, smoking a cigarette, his face dark and lined heavily.
“Who is it?” he asked.
“Maggie,” she said hesitantly.
A remarkably elated expression crossed his broad face; his eyes seemed to kindle as they turned toward the sound of her voice.
“Maggie!” he breathed. He held out his free hand. “Honey, come here.”
She moved closer, but she wouldn’t take the outstretched hand. She avoided it as if it were a red-hot poker.
“I’ve—I’ve been thinking,” she said.
“So have I,” he admitted, reluctantly drawing his hand back to clench it on the covers. “Maggie, we’d better get married.”
Of all the things she’d expected him to say, that was the last, the very last. She stood gaping at him as if he’d offered to eat one of the curtains at the window.
“Why?” she blurted out.
He took a draw from the cigarette, looking impatient and terribly irritated. “Because you could be pregnant,” he said bluntly. “Or hasn’t that occurred to you? I was too far gone to think about protecting you.”
She caught her breath. “That’s not the best reason to get married,” she said quietly, forcing her voice to be calm, to deny what she wanted most in all the world—to be Saxon’s wife.
“What would be a good one then?” he asked harshly.
“Love,” she returned. “On both sides, Saxon, not just one.”
He seemed to freeze, to become rigid. His hand on the bed clenched until the knuckles were white, but her eyes were on his face and she didn’t see them.
“You don’t think love could come naturally?” he asked after a minute.
“I think we’d be crazy to take such a chance,” she said sadly. Her eyes closed.
“And then, too, I’m blind,” he ground out. “Not the greatest prospective husband in the world.”
“That has nothing to do with it!” she protested. “Saxon, if you had your sight, none of this would even have happened, don’t you realize that? You wouldn’t have been jealous enough of Bret to seduce me, or so hungry for a woman that you lost your head. You wouldn’t have—have wanted me!” Her voice broke, and with a tiny cry she whirled and ran for the door.
“Maggie, you crazy little fool!” he burst out. “Maggie!”
But she didn’t stop, couldn’t stop. He didn’t love her. It was only guilt that made him suggest marriage, because he thought she might be pregnant. She couldn’t let him trap himself into a marriage he didn’t want. Without love it would never be enough. And if he fell in love with someone else, and found himself tied to her, it would have been more than she could bear.
She ran down the stairs, her eyes blinded by tears, vaguely aware of footsteps behind her. She stopped on the bottom step as she heard Saxon calling her.
She looked up to see him on the top step, his hand clutching at the banister.
“Saxon, no!” she screamed a
s his hand missed. “No!”
But the warning came too late. He went headfirst down the stairs with a horrible thud, tossing and pitching. She rushed toward him, but she wasn’t in time to break the fall. She felt her own head knock against a step as she helped to stop his descent, but she held on, praying that it would be enough to spare him more pain.
They came to a tumbled heap at the bottom of the steps, sprawled over each other. She dragged herself up and looked at him. He was unconscious; his eyes were closed, his face white and devoid of expression, and there was blood at his right temple.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE NEXT FEW hours went by in a blur. Maggie must have screamed because when she looked up, Randy and Sandra were bending over Saxon, and Lisa was holding her close to keep her from throwing herself on Saxon’s unconscious body.
She could barely tell them what had happened, her voice incoherent through tears, her eyes riveted to Saxon, her hand clinging to his until the arrival of the ambulance, which seemed to have taken an eternity. She rode with him in it, never leaving his side until they took him into the emergency room.
Finally Dr. Johnson came out to speak to the family, with a long technical description of what had happened.
“The most important thing,” he concluded, holding Sandra’s trembling hands tightly as the others gathered around him, “is that, because of the fall, the shrapnel has shifted. It’s still not operable, but—with any luck at all, my dear—when Saxon recovers, he’ll be able to see again.”
Sandra caught her breath, and Maggie’s face lighted up. He might be able to see! If that happened, perhaps he could even forgive her for this, for putting him in the hospital...
Tears rolled down Maggie’s cheeks. If only. If only! She wouldn’t mind giving him up if it would mean having him sighted again. She wouldn’t mind losing him forever, as long as he could feel whole again. It would be worth anything!