by Diana Palmer
Dirk, watching, smiled at the look on her face. “Dana, how would you like to drive up to Savannah with me tomorrow and see the city?”
She jerked her eyes up, astonished at the unexpected invitation. She wasn’t the only one, because Gannon’s eyes darkened menacingly.
“I can’t spare her,” Gannon said shortly.
“She’s been here for several weeks, dear,” Lorraine reminded him, “without a single day off. Don’t you think she deserves a little recreation?”
Gannon’s jaw tautened. “She’s been out driving with me, hasn’t she? Walking?”
“Really, Mrs. van der Vere, it’s all right…” Dana began softly.
“No, it isn’t,” Dirk broke in. “She isn’t slave labor.”
Gannon made a rough sound. “All right, take her with you,” he said harshly. “If she thinks she needs a day away from me, I can’t stop her.”
He was making her feel guilty, and she didn’t like it.
“She does need a day away from here,” Lorraine seconded. “She’s young, Gannon; it must be terrible to be shut away from the world like this.”
“But it isn’t…!” Dana tried to say, but Gannon’s deep voice drowned her words.
“Go, then,” he said bitterly. “I don’t need you, Miss Steele, and that’s a fact. I never have.” He tossed his napkin aside and almost knocked over his chair, getting to his feet. “Excuse me, I’ve lost my appetite.”
Dana was painfully aware of the two pairs of eyes watching her, but she was too disheartened to put her thoughts into words. She felt as if she’d betrayed the big Dutchman, and it wasn’t a feeling she liked. Perhaps she was getting too close to him and a day away would do her good. After all, this job was temporary. He might regain his sight any day and she’d return to Ashton.
That thought disturbed her very much. She went walking on the beach at dusk, dragging her feet in the sand, her eyes troubled as they sought the horizon across the ocean. Her disorderly mind kept going back to that warm, slow kiss they’d shared the night before, and the strange new feelings it had kindled in her. She couldn’t remember ever wanting a kiss to begin again, not with any other man. But, of course, Gannon was an experienced man. She hugged her arms across her chest. She had to stop thinking about it nevertheless. She was his nurse, nothing more; she couldn’t afford the luxury of getting emotionally involved with him. He was just passing time, but Dana was far too moral a woman to yield to temptation. Besides that, she didn’t want him getting too close. It was a trap that would rob her of her peace of mind, that would make her vulnerable. She didn’t trust emotions anymore. Especially she didn’t trust her own. Her life, since her mother’s death, had dissolved. She felt totally alone, and a part of her liked that aloneness. It would protect her from any more wounds; it would protect her from being hurt again.
“Dana! Wait up!”
She whirled, the wind catching her loosened hair, to find Dirk running along the beach toward her. He was wearing jeans and a knit shirt, and he was barefoot.
“You’re fast, lady,” he chuckled, sticking his hands in his pockets as he fell into step beside her. “What are you doing out here all alone?”
“Enjoying the view,” she admitted. He was easy to talk to, and she smiled. “Isn’t it just great? Sea breeze, all that ocean out there, and peace and quiet along with it. People tire me sometimes. I like solitude.”
“Don’t mind your own company?” he teased lightly. “You’re a rarity. Most people can’t stand to be alone.”
“Your brother seems to like it well enough,” she mused, glancing up at him. “Is it only since the blindness?”
“Exactly. Oh, he’s been a lone wolf most of his life in that he lives as he pleases.” He frowned. “But he’s never cared for solitude like this. There were always…friends with him,” he added, and she wondered if he meant to say women instead of friends.
“We’re all different,” Dana sighed. “It’s a good thing too. Imagine how dull it would be if we all thought alike?”
“There’d be fewer wars,” he reminded her.
“Yes, but creativity would go down the drain.”
“As you say.” He pursed his lips and looked down at her. “Is he making much progress?” he asked.
She let her shoulders rise and fall. The comfortable jeans and sweat shirt she was wearing felt wonderful in the cool air. “I thought so until tonight. I really don’t think it’s a good idea that I go to Savannah with you—not if it’s going to upset him like that. It’s been a struggle just getting him out of the house.”
He nodded. “I can imagine. But you mustn’t let him make you into a puppet, Dana. He can do that, I’ve watched him.”
“I won’t. But he does pay my salary, and his track record with his nurses isn’t super, I’m told.” She lifted an eyebrow. “If he throws me out, who’ll be brave enough to take my place?”
He winced. “What a horrible thought. Mother told me she begged your supervisor not to tell you everything about Gannon. She was afraid you wouldn’t come.”
Dana laughed. “I might not have. But once I got here, I wouldn’t have left for the world. He challenged me, you see.”
“If you want a real challenge,” he said dryly, “you ought to wander into his study right now. I barely escaped with my skin intact.”
“What did you do to irritate him?” she asked.
He chuckled, watching the ocean begin to darken as the sun set. “I breathed,” he murmured. “He’s thumping around the room, knocking over furniture and cursing everything from the color of the sky to the carpet that keeps tripping him up.”
She drew in a slow breath. “Should I go in and see if I can calm him before your mother jumps off the balcony?”
“I see you’ve figured Lorraine out very well,” he observed. “She’s very nervous when he’s in a temper—and he hasn’t been any other way since the accident.”
“At least you believe as the doctors and I do: that it’s all a matter of making him realize he hasn’t lost his sight permanently.”
“Oh, I agree, all right. But Gannon’s the one who has to be convinced. And, lady,” he added with a grin, “that is going to be a full-time job, and not without hazards.”
“I’ve already found that out,” she said with a sigh.
“Won’t you change your mind and come with me?”
She looked up at him thoughtfully. “If you’ll take Mr. van der Vere along, too, I’ll come.”
He lifted his eyes helplessly to the sky. “What a horrible thought.”
“Will you?”
He looked down, his head cocked, his eyes twinkling. “For you, lovely lady, anything.”
“Not so lovely,” she murmured, touching the scar.
“It hardly shows,” he argued. “And it’s healing. You’ll be left with hardly a memory of it in a few weeks.”
“I suppose.”
“Is that why you came here?” he asked quietly, stopping to watch her expression. “To hide your scars?”
She stared at the sand under her own bare feet. “I suppose I did, in a way. My mother died in an accident a few months ago, you see. She’d been drinking, and I let her drive….” Her shoulders lifted and fell. “I got a few scars and I had a concussion, but everyone seems to feel that I killed her.”
“Do they?” he asked thoughtfully, “or is it guilt that’s punishing you?”
Her eyes flashed. “Guilt?”
“Your eyes are tortured, Miss Steele,” he said softly, studying them. “You’re very young to try to live with that much guilt. I’m a fatalist myself. I believe that the hour of death is preordained.”
She swallowed. “Is it?”
“Such things are best left to theologians and philosophers. But it seems to me a horrible waste to let guilt destroy your life along with your mother’s. Was she a happy person?”
She shook her head. “My parents had divorced, my father had remarried and Mandy found it rough trying to live by herself.�
� She stuck her hands in her pockets. “She couldn’t cope. She wanted me to come back home, to take care of her.” She laughed bitterly. “I couldn’t even take care of myself….”
He caught her gently by the shoulders and turned her to face him. “Try living in the present. You can’t change what was.”
She felt her lower lip tremble. “The guilt is eating me alive.”
“Then stop feeding it,” he advised. “Stop hiding.”
She searched his kind eyes. “Have you ever thought of becoming a psychiatrist?” she asked, forcing lightness into her tone.
One corner of his mouth curled up. “I studied psychology for three years before I decided I liked electronics better and transferred to a technical college,” he confessed.
She burst out laughing. “I should have realized,” she said. “You could probably do your brother more good than I have, you know.”
“He won’t listen to me or talk to me,” he said, shaking his head. “But he’ll listen to you.”
“Only when I yell.”
“It’s a start. You really want to take him to Savannah? Okay. But you tell him. I’m not going back in there to save my life,” he chuckled.
“I find that blatant cowardice,” she murmured.
“No doubt. I call it self-preservation.” He strode back down the beach beside her. “Have you told him—about the scars?”
“No,” she said simply. She swallowed. “You…won’t tell him?”
He glanced at her. “You’re making too much of them, you know,” he said softly. “You’re a lovely woman. But if you don’t want him to know…”
“It’s not for any special reason,” she said quickly. “It’s just that, well, he doesn’t need to know, does he?”
He turned away before she could see the tiny smile on his face. “No, of course he doesn’t.”
They walked quietly back to the house, and Dana gathered all her nerve before she knocked at the door of Gannon’s study.
“Come in” was the harsh reply.
She opened the door, to find him sitting in his big armchair with tumbled furniture all around him, a black scowl on his face and a smoking cigarette in his hand.
“Who is it?” he asked shortly.
“It’s me,” Dana said.
The scowl blackened. “Back from your daily constitutional?” he asked sarcastically. “Did my brother go with you?”
“Yes, he did,” she said coolly. “It was quite a nice change, to walk and talk without yelling.”
He snorted, taking another draw from the cigarette. “Can you find me an ashtray?”
“Why?” she asked innocently, noting the pile of ashes beside the chair on the carpet. “Are you tired of dumping them on the floor already?”
“Don’t get cute. Just find me an ashtray and bring it here.”
She didn’t like the silky note in his voice, but she got the ashtray and approached him warily.
“Where are you?” he asked, cocking his head and listening intently.
She set the ashtray softly on the arm of the chair and moved back. “Back here,” she replied then. “Your ashtray is next to you.”
He muttered something. “Afraid to come too close? Wise woman.”
She shifted from one foot to the other. “It’s my time off,” she reminded him, “but I wanted to ask you something.”
“I know it’s your time off,” he said curtly. “You remind me every day exactly how much you have and when you want it, so why the poor little slave girl act over the supper table? Playing on Dirk’s sympathies? I might warn you that my brother is something of a playboy: he likes skirts.”
“He’s a nice, kind man, and you ought to be half as blessed with his good humor,” she threw back.
“Shrew!” he accused, sitting up straight. His face hardened; his eyes darkened. “If I could see you, you’d be in considerable trouble right now.”
“What would you do, take me over your knee?” she asked.
His nostrils flared. “No, I wouldn’t risk breaking my hand.”
“How discerning of you,” she murmured.
His eyes searched in her direction, and something wicked flared in them. “I think I’d rather kiss you speechless than hit you.”
She couldn’t help it. She flushed like a budding rose, gaping at him. Her knees felt strangely weak as the words brought back vivid memories.
“No comment?” he murmured. “Have I shocked you? Or would you rather forget that last night in my arms you responded like a woman instead of a shrew?”
“I’m your nurse, Mr. van der Vere, not…!” she began.
“You’re a woman,” he interrupted, “and somehow I think that fact has escaped you for a long time. You have the feel of fine porcelain, as if you’ve never been touched by human hands. Is it part of the shield you wear to keep the world at bay? Are you afraid of feeling too much?”
“I’m afraid of being accused of unethical conduct,” she returned. “You aren’t the first man who’s made a pass at me, Mr. van der Vere, and, sadly, you probably won’t be the last. Sick men do sometimes make a grab for their nurses if the nurses are young and not too unattractive.”
“The unattractive bit wouldn’t matter to a blind man, would it?” he asked shortly.
“The blindness is temporary,” she said firmly. “The doctors have told you that. Your sight will return; there’s no tissue damage—”
He cursed roundly. “There is!” he shot back. He got to his feet and almost fell in his haste.
She rushed forward without thinking and helped him regain his balance, only to find herself trapped in his arms before she could move away.
“Mr. van der Vere,” she said with controlled firmness, “please let me go.”
But his fingers tightened, and a look of sudden pain washed over his features as her small hands pressed helplessly against his warm, broad chest. “Dana, don’t push me away,” he said softly.
The quiet plea took the fight out of her. She stared up at him, hating what he made her feel, hating her own reaction to it. But how could she fight him like this?
His big hands ran up and down her arms. “I wish I could see you,” he said harshly.
“There’s nothing uncommon about me. I’m just an ordinary woman,” she said quietly. “I’m not a beauty; I’m plain.”
“Let me find that out for myself,” he said, letting his hands move to the sides of her face. “Let me feel you.”
“No!” She tried to move away, but his hands were too strong.
“What is there about my touch that frightens you?” he asked harshly. “I won’t hurt you, I promise.”
“It isn’t that…!”
“Then, what?” His face contorted. “Am I such a leper? Does my blindness repel you…?”
Her eyes closed; her lower lip trembled. There was nothing for it now: She was going to have to tell him the truth or let him feel it, and she didn’t think she could bear that. She didn’t want him to know that she was disfigured.
“I’m…there’s a scar,” she whispered shakily, her eyes closed so that she missed the expression on his face. “Down my left cheek. A very long one.”
His hands shifted, and he found the scar with its puckered surface and traced it from her temple down past her ear, traced it with fingers that suddenly trembled.
Her eyes closed even more tightly. “I didn’t want you to know,” she whispered.
“Dana.” He searched her delicate features with warm, slow fingers, tracing her eyebrows, her eyes, her nose, her cheeks and, finally, her trembling mouth.
“It’s like a bow, isn’t it?” he whispered, drawing his forefinger over the line of her mouth. “Do you wear lipstick?”
“No,” she admitted. “I…I don’t like it.”
“Firm little chin, high cheekbones, wide-spaced eyes…and a scar that I can barely feel, which must hardly show at all.” He bent and brushed his mouth over the scar with such tenderness that her eyes clouded and tears escaped fro
m them.
“Don’t cry,” he whispered.
She swallowed. “You make it seem so…so small a thing.”
“It is. Beauty is more than skin deep—isn’t that what they say? You have a lovely young soul…and a stubborn spirit that makes me gnash my teeth, even though I respect it.” He lifted his head. “Dana, I’d give a lot to taste your mouth again. But that wouldn’t be ethical, I suppose, and we must above all be ethical.”
She smiled at his cynicism. “Yes, we must,” she murmured. She disentangled herself gently from his hands and he let her go with a sigh. “Now, about going to Savannah…”
His face darkened and he scowled. “I do not want you to go….”
“Oh, Dirk and I aren’t going alone,” she assured him. “We’re taking you with us.”
He blinked. “What?”
“We thought the ride would do you good,” she murmured. “Help your disposition, as it were. Blow the cobwebs away.”
He chuckled softly, then loudly, and she loved the masculine beauty of his face when it relaxed. “I can think of something that would do my disposition a lot more good than a drive,” he murmured, tongue in cheek.
She cleared her throat and moved toward the door. “You just sit here and think about that. I’m going.”
“Coward,” he said silkily.
“Strategic retreat,” she corrected. She paused at the doorway. “Thank you for what you said about the scar, Mr. van der Vere.”
“My name is Gannon,” he reminded her. “I’d…like to hear you say it.”
“Gannon,” she whispered, making a caress of it. She turned away from his set features. “Good night.”
She barely heard his own “Good night” as the door closed behind her.
Chapter Six
Dana had never seen a city like Savannah, having spent most of her life around Ashton. She was overwhelmed by the history of the sprawling city, and when she and Dirk and Gannon had lunch at an eighteenth-century pirate inn, she almost swooned.
“Pirates really stopped here?” she asked in a whisper, staring around at the homey interior, which was crowded with lunch guests.
“According to legend, they did,” Gannon murmured. “If I remember correctly, you can see the ocean from the window, can you not?”