Donovan's Child

by Christine Rimmer

  It didn’t matter, he tried to convince himself. Whatever they found to chatter about, it had nothing to do with him.

  He reviewed, for the second time, the work Abilene had done the day before. He made notes on her progress, notes on what she ought to get accomplished that day. And also notes on what she should be tackling in the next week. She was doing well, was actually a little ahead of where he’d hoped she might be at this time.

  The truth was that she continued to thoroughly impress him, with how quickly she learned, with her dedication to the work. In fact, she could probably afford a Sunday morning at the Chula Mesa Diner with Luisa.

  Not that he would ever admit that to her face.

  She came in at ten forty-five. He felt a rising apprehension at the sight of her, in narrow gray slacks, a coral-colored checked shirt and a jacket nipped in at the waist. Her hair was windblown, her cheeks a healthy pink. He wanted to ask her if she’d had a nice time with Luisa.

  But that would have been too friendly. He tried to be careful, not to get friendly with her.

  Plus, he really didn’t want to know about her breakfast with Luisa. He had a strong intuition that his name had probably come up. Maybe more than once. And he just didn’t want to hear what those two might have said about him.

  “Ready to work?” He rolled toward her.

  She nodded, but didn’t say anything as she slipped in behind the drafting table.

  He circled the table and glided in beside her. That close, he could smell the light, tempting perfume she wore. She reached up, smoothed her hair. He found himself staring at the silky flesh of her neck, at the pure line of her jaw.

  She slid him a look, frowned. “What is it?”

  He cleared his throat. “I have notes, a lot of them.”

  “Well, all right then.” Her voice sounded…what? Careful? Breathless? He wasn’t sure. She added, “Let’s get started.”

  He had dual urges—both insane. To ask her if everything was all right. To run the back of his finger down the satin skin of her neck, and to feel for the first time with conscious intent, the texture of her flesh.

  Seriously. Was he losing his mind?

  They went to work.

  An hour later, he left her to continue on her own. He checked on her at three, then changed into sweats and went down to the gym where he worked out on his own, a long session with the free weights and then another, equally long, of simple walking, back and forth, with the aid of the parallel bars, sweating bullets with each step.

  His legs really were getting stronger. Recently, he’d found he was capable of standing long enough to make use of a urinal, even without a nearby wall or a bar to brace himself with. It was milestone of which he was inordinately proud.

  At five, he returned to the main floor. He dropped in on her again before he went to clean up, because it was getting late and he was afraid she’d have left the studio if he took the time to shower first.

  She was still there. “Just getting ready to wrap things up for the day,” she told him. That green-golden gaze ran over him. “Good workout?”

  “Yes, it was.” He felt sweaty and grungy, and he probably smelled like a hard-ridden horse. But he should have thought of that before he came wheeling in here without a shower. “Let’s see how you’re doing….”

  She showed him what she’d come up with in the past hour and a half. They briefly discussed what was going well. And what wasn’t quite coming together.

  They agreed that they had a good handle on the arrangement of space now. But they’d also decided the design had to speak of fun, of possibility. Probably of flight. That, they had begun to think, was the eventual parti: early flight.

  Somehow, they needed to get the theme of flight into the facade and the main entry, so that when parents and children and teachers came to the center every day they felt a sense of uplift, that anything could happen in this special place, that they, the children who grew and learned there, could do anything they set their young minds to accomplishing.

  This was the central idea for the structure. And that meant they needed to get a serious grip on it soon, since the rest of the complex would be likely to change, once they found the true heart of the project.

  “Soon,” he said, affirming what they both knew needed to happen. “I know you’re going to find it soon.”

  She was straightening her workspace by then. “Well, probably not tonight. Right now, I think I could use a long, hard swim.”

  He had a sudden, stunning vision of her, emerging from the courtyard pool, all wet and gleaming, the water sliding off her body in glittering streams.

  “Uh. Yeah,” he said stupidly. “A swim. Good idea. Clear your head.”

  She regarded him. It was a strange, piercing sort of look. He almost wondered if she could see inside his mind, if she knew that he had watched her, in her blue tank suit, out in the courtyard, when she thought she was alone.

  Well, if she did suspect him of spying on her, she could stop worrying. He would never do such a thing again.

  “See you at dinner,” she said, still eyeing him in that odd way—or at least, so it seemed to him.

  “Yes,” he answered distractedly. “See you at dinner.”

  And she left him.

  He made himself stay behind in the studio, which was one of the few main floor areas without a view of the courtyard—and the pool. He went to his desk and he pushed his computer monitors out of the way, and he spent an hour sketching, plugging away at the facade problem.

  At six-thirty, no closer to any kind of solution than he had been when he started, he went back to his own rooms to shower before dinner.

  The lights in the courtyard were on by then. And before he turned on any lights in his sitting room, he went to the glass doors and gazed out.

  The pool was deserted—which he had known it would be.

  And he felt disappointed, that she wasn’t still out there, after all—a feeling he knew to be completely reprehensible.

  He whirled and rolled through his bedroom, and the wide-open double doors to the bathroom, where he tore off his sweats and used the railings he’d had installed months ago, to get into the open shower and onto the bathing stool waiting there.

  Twenty minutes later, he was clean and dressed and on his way to the dining room.

  Abilene was already there, in a simple long-sleeve black dress, standing at the doors that looked out on the courtyard. She turned when he entered.

  In her eyes, he thought he saw questions. His guard went up.

  But then she smiled. And all she said was, “There you are.” Now she seemed almost happy to see him.

  And he was glad, absurdly glad. That she hadn’t asked any questions. That she had smiled.

  They went to the small table that Olga had set for them. He wished he could stand up, step close to her, pull back her chair. Such a simple gesture, but not something he could do. Not yet, anyway.

  And possibly, not ever.

  She sat. He wheeled around the table and took the waiting place across from her. Olga had lit the candles, and already served the soup. And the wine was there, opened.

  He poured. For Abilene. And then for him. He raised his glass. She touched hers to it. They sipped. Shared a nod.

  Ate the soup.

  Olga appeared with the salads. She took their empty bowls away, refilled their wineglasses. And vanished again.

  They ate the salad, sipped more wine.

  The whole dinner was like that. He didn’t talk. Neither did Abilene.

  But he felt…together with her, somehow. In collusion. Connected.

  And that made him wonder, as he had more than once that day, if he might really be losing his mind somehow, slipping over the edge into some strange self-delusion.

  On the mountain, in the snow cave, alone with his pain, he’d known he was going mad. He was crazy. And he was going to die.

  On the mountain, he understood everything. He talked to Elias.

  He was re
ady to go.

  And there had been peace in that, a kind of completion.

  When they dragged him back to the world, peace became the thing that eluded him.

  Until tonight, for some unknown reason. Tonight, in the quiet of the dining room. Sharing a meal with Abilene.

  It ended too soon. She got up, smiled again at him, said good-night.

  “Good night,” he answered, and watched her go.

  The room seemed empty without her. Yet another sign of his current slide into total insanity.

  Tomorrow, he promised himself, in the bright light of morning, the world would right itself. He would be the man he had become in the past year. Self-contained. Wanting no one. Needing no one.

  Alone.

  In her rooms, Abilene changed into the old pair of sweats and worn T-shirt she usually slept in. She brushed her teeth. And then she paced the floor for a while.

  What had just happened, in the dining room?

  She had questions for Donovan. And she’d fully intended to ask them. She had planned to be delicate about it. And respectful. But really, there was so much she wanted to know.

  And she’d accepted that Luisa was right. If she wanted answers—about whether Donovan had been married, about his wife, if there had been one, about the child he had lost—well, it was only fair that she ask the man himself.

  But then she’d turned from the doors to the courtyard to find him sitting there, so gorgeous, so self-contained, so guarded….

  And she couldn’t do it. She didn’t even want to do it, to pry into his mind and his secret heart. To ferret out the answers he didn’t want to share.

  All she wanted was to be with him.

  Simply. Gracefully. For an evening.

  To share a meal with him, if not as a friend, at least as a temporary companion, a guest in his house. She was grateful to him, she realized, for teaching her so much, for guiding her at the same time as he prodded her forward. For demanding so much of her, for never letting her off easy.

  For being such a fascinating man.

  So she had done exactly what she wanted. She’d shared a quiet meal with him.

  And now she paced her sitting room, feeling edgy and full of nervous energy, not understanding herself any better than she understood him.

  Eventually, she gave up wearing a path into the hardwood floor. She got out her cell and called home, called her mom, and her sister, Zoe, who was just back from her honeymoon.

  Yes, she was tempted to ask Zoe if she would speak with Dax, try to find out from him if he knew that Donovan had had a son. But she didn’t. She reminded herself that Donovan was the one she should ask about the child.

  If she ever asked anyone at all.

  She called Javier to see how things were going with him—and then ended up going on and on about the design for the children’s center, about the idea for the facade that still wasn’t coming together, about how much she was learning from Donovan. As always, he encouraged her and he asked all the right questions.

  By the time she hung up with Javier, it was after ten. She got into bed and turned off the light and told herself that she was glad she’d decided not to hound Donovan anymore about his past, about his secrets, about his private life.

  From now on, she would do the job she had come here to do, period. She would be pleasant at dinner, in a thoroughly surface sort of way. And in three weeks, she would leave this house and the solitary man who lived here. She would build a special children’s center and get a great job with a top firm.

  And if she ever thought of Donovan McCrae again, it would be with simple gratitude for the opportunity he had given her.

  Donovan woke at ten after six Monday morning with the facade, vestibule and welcome area of the children’s center clear in his mind.

  He could see it. He understood it. He knew how to build it. He had it, damn it.

  He knew how it should be.

  He needed to draw it, fast. And then he needed for Abilene to see it. He couldn’t wait to show it to her. This was the breakthrough they’d been waiting for.

  After today, it was all going to fall into place. And fast. Even faster than it had up till now.

  He sat bolt-upright in bed, threw back the covers and swung his legs to the side, unthinking. His feet hit the floor and he leaned forward to stand.

  The arrows of shimmering pain brought him up short. He looked down at the deep grooves of scar tissue, scoring his thighs, the flesh over his knees, which were now made of metal and plastic, and lower, to his skinny, wasted calves.

  He tossed back his head and laughed out loud.

  It was the first time since the fall down the mountain that he’d actually forgotten there was a problem with his legs.

  After that, he took it a little slower. But not a lot. He was a man with a mission, and the mission was to get the concept in his head down onto paper, to take what he’d discovered and to show it to Abilene.

  What he’d discovered. Sometimes an inspired design element felt like that: like a discovery. Not as if he’d created it at all. But as if it had been waiting, whole and ready, for him to finally see it.

  He rang Olga and asked her to bring him coffee in the studio. And then he threw on some clothes and wheeled at breakneck speed out of his rooms and down the hall.

  In the studio, he turned on some lights to boost what natural light there was from the skylights and the clerestory windows, so early on a gray winter morning. He got out large sheets of drawing paper and soft pencils and he went to work.

  It came so fast, he could barely keep up with it, his hand moving, utterly sure, across the paper, every stroke exactly right, no hesitation. Just a direct channel to the idea that was waiting, so impatiently now, to reveal itself.

  When he finished, he looked over and saw that Olga had come and gone, leaving the coffee he’d asked for, along with a couple of Anton’s killer cinnamon rolls. He took time for a cup, ate half a cinnamon roll.

  By then, it was after seven. And there was no way he could wait any longer. Even if Abilene came to the studio early, it could still be an hour before she put in an appearance. Before he could show her what he had.

  He couldn’t do it, wait that long.

  So he gathered the drawings—the one of the facade, the one of the entry interior and the one from the floor of the welcome area, looking up. He rolled them, snapped a band around them, laid them across his thighs and went to find her.

  Often she would grab breakfast in the kitchen, so he wheeled there first and stuck his head in. Anton stood at the stove stirring something that made his stomach growl.

  “Abilene?” Donovan asked.

  “Haven’t seen her yet today.”

  “Thanks.” And he was off down the interior hallway.

  He reached the door to her sitting room and braked sideways to it, gave it a strong tap, called, “Abilene?”

  She didn’t answer.

  He knocked again. Nothing.

  Was she still in bed? If so, she needed to get up. Now. She needed to see this and she needed to get herself together and get to work.

  He tried the doorknob. It turned.

  So he pushed the door inward. “Abilene?”

  Still no answer. She must be a sound sleeper.

  Too bad. It was imperative that he get her up, that he share with her what he’d found out. She was going to be so happy, so relieved. It was all coming together, and it would be a really fine piece of work, something they could both be proud of.

  He wheeled over the threshold and into her private space. The bedroom door, in the far corner to the left as he entered, was wide open, so he went for it, rolling the length of the sitting room and then into her bedroom.

  The blinds were drawn against the morning light, the bed unmade. And empty. The bathroom door, directly across from the door to the sitting room, stood open. The light was on in there. And he could hear the unmistakable sound of the shower running, feel the moisture in the air…

  He bac
ked and turned, approaching the bed. He saw the black dress she’d worn the night before, laid across the bedside chair. Saw her cell phone on the nightstand, beside a half-full glass of water, and a framed snapshot of a bunch of good-looking, smiling people. He picked it up, that picture, for a closer look.

  Her family. They stood out in the country somewhere, in front of a weathered cabin. Father and mother. Seven broad-shouldered brothers. Abilene—but younger, her face a little rounder than now. And another girl who resembled her.

  Carefully, he set the picture back exactly where he’d found it.

  He knew where she had to be, of course. Had known when he saw the light from the bathroom, heard the sound of the water running in there. He knew he should wheel around, roll into the sitting room, and on out the way he had come.

  But he didn’t wheel away. All he could think was that she had to see what he had to show her.

  He backed up, turned his wheels toward the sound of running water, and rolled on through that open bathroom door.

  Chapter Seven

  She was in there, as he had known she would be.

  In the shower. The doorless, open shower.

  Wearing nothing but the slim, smooth perfection of her own skin, facing away from him, her head tipped up to the shower spray, eyes closed, soap and water sheeting down over her pink-tipped breasts, her concave belly, her gently curving hips, her perfect bottom, her long, lean thighs.

  He stopped the chair without a sound.

  And he watched as she turned her body in a gentle, side to side swaying motion, rinsing herself, letting the spray carry the bubbles away. He saw her from the back, and then in profile, and then full front.

  At first, it was the same as when he watched her in the pool. A pure appreciation of something so beautiful, so smooth—her skin flushed, steamy; the secret shadow beneath her arm as she slicked her wet hair back. The soft, round curve of the side of her breast.

  But in seconds, everything changed. It became more than just about the perfect picture she made, more than the slim, womanly shape of her, more than the frothy dribble of bubbles sliding down sleek, youthful skin.