by Diana Palmer
“Layn here,” he growled. “And when he’s engaged to you! He might consider your feelings. Lorraine told me what she said to you in town!”
“He doesn’t know what she said,” she told him quietly. “I didn’t think it was necessary to tell him. I can handle Layn myself.”
“So you think,” he returned darkly. “She’d cut you into ribbons, and you know it. She’s been after Gannon for a long time, despite the fact that she ran after the accident. I’ve always thought it was as much because she thought he’d blame her as because she didn’t want to be around a blind man.”
“Did he love her very much?” she asked.
“I don’t know my brother that well. He’s very good at disguising his feelings.” He shrugged. “But they were together most of the time until he was blinded.”
She felt sick all over. And now it was starting again: she was going to lose him. And there was nothing she could do. She didn’t have the weapons to fight a woman like Layn.
“Maybe it really is business,” she said softly.
“Maybe cows will run computers,” he scoffed. “Don’t kid yourself, honey; they don’t need to meet here on a Sunday to do something they could manage over the phone.”
Tears sprung to her eyes, but she blinked them away, too proud to let him see how hurt she was.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I shouldn’t have said that. It could be innocent….”
“You don’t have to tell me something I already know,” she said softly. “He doesn’t love me; he said as much.”
“But you love him very much.”
She nodded. “Fortunes of war,” she laughed bitterly. “The first time in my life, and it had to be a man like Gannon…. If only I were beautiful and worldly and sophisticated!”
“You wouldn’t be the girl you are,” he corrected. “I like you as you are. So does he.”
“Like,” she agreed. “Not love. And it wouldn’t be enough, eventually. It’s just as well. I’ll be sad for a while, but I’ll get over him.”
“Will you really?” he asked, eyeing her.
She turned away. “Let’s go look for sand crabs. They fascinate me, the way they dive into the sand to hide. Look, there’s one…!”
He watched her with sad eyes, wishing there was something he could do to ease the pain she was trying to hide. But he was as helpless as she was.
Dana had been hoping that the other woman wouldn’t show up until after she and Dirk and Lorraine had left the house on Sunday. But as luck would have it, Layn was on the doorstep before Lorraine had finished dressing.
“Well, hello, darling,” she told Dirk as he answered the door. She was resplendent in a sea-blue dress with white accessories and a matching scarf tied over her hair, looking the fashion plate she was.
Layn’s eyes darted past him to Dana, and she gave the other girl’s simple white sundress and sandals a distastefully quick appraisal.
“I’m not too early?” Layn murmured.
“Of course not, darling,” Dirk replied with sweet sarcasm. “Gannon’s waiting for you in his study. The rest of us are off to Savannah for the day.”
Layn looked faintly shocked. “Leaving poor Gannon all alone with me?”
“We could load a gun for him before we leave,” Dirk suggested.
Layn only laughed. “You might load one for me,” she murmured, glancing at Dana. “Since he’s been keeping company with the little saint, he may be desperate for some wicked company.”
Dana’s eyebrows lifted. “Think so? I’ll have to remember to polish my halo more often.”
Layn became angry when she couldn’t get a rise out of Dana, then whirled on her heel and stalked off into the study.
Dirk was trying to smother his laughter and failing miserably. “You wicked lady!” he burst out.
Dana only shrugged. “Well, she asked for it. Shall we wait for Lorraine in the car?”
But just about that time Lorraine came quickly down the stairs to join them, and they left without even a goodbye to Gannon.
It was a long day. Dana, despite the fact that she enjoyed visiting Katy and Maude, spent most of the hours brooding on what was going on back at the house. Was Layn right? Would he be so desperate for a woman that he’d make a dead set at her? Was he tired of Dana’s repressive ways? Was he trying to find a way out of the engagement? Why else would he have flaunted Layn in front of her?
They stopped at a restaurant for lunch, and while Lorraine was creating a salad at the salad bar, Dirk leaned forward earnestly.
“Worried?” he asked softly. “You’ve hardly smiled all day.”
Dana smiled faintly. “Yes, I’m worried. How can I compete with somebody who looks like Miss Dalmont?”
“Easily, since Gannon can’t see her,” he replied brutally.
“That’s not what I meant. He’s seen her; he’s never seen me.” She toyed with her napkin. “Besides that, he’s not a saint. I must be a drag to him….”
“He adores you. It’s even obvious to someone as thick-skinned as myself.” He reached over and touched her hand. “Come on, spill it.”
She lifted her shoulders. “I think he’s trying to make me leave.”
He frowned. “Why?”
“It’s not something I can explain. But ever since he went back to the doctor, he’s been distant with me. I can’t get close to him.” She looked up, worry shadowing her eyes. “They told him his sight was very likely to return—something about the shrapnel that they wouldn’t tell me. What if he’s beginning to see again?” she groaned. “Compared to Layn, I’m so ugly—and he loved her! Now she’s back and he’s asked her to dinner….”
He caught her hand in his and held it gently. “You’re not ugly. You’re a lovely woman, and any man would be proud to marry you. Even me, the confirmed bachelor, if I thought I had a chance.”
She blinked, not believing him.
“Think I’m kidding?” he mused. “I’m not. There’s a quality in you that I’ve never seen in another woman, and I like it very much. If Gannon didn’t have a place in your heart, I’d give him a run for his money.”
She blushed softly and lowered her eyes on a smile. “Thank you. You don’t know what you’ve done for my crushed ego.”
“I wasn’t flattering you.”
“Yes, I know.” She lifted her eyes again. “He wants Layn, you know.”
He sighed wearily. “Yes.”
“I won’t hold him to a promise he made in a moment of weakness. The minute his sight is restored, I’m going home to Ashton,” she said firmly.
“You might consider fighting for him,” he reminded her.
“With what?” She laughed. “I don’t have potent weapons, and even if I did, I wouldn’t use them. I’m not the type. No, he’d have to love me. And he’s already admitted that he doesn’t. It would be a very empty kind of relationship—don’t you think?—if all the love was on one side.”
He nodded solemnly. “I suppose so. Dana, if you do go home, I’d like to see you again.”
She smiled. “I’d like that too.”
He grinned. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Tell me about your work.”
They started discussing the advances in medicine when Lorraine joined them, and then the talk switched to flowers and gardens for the rest of the meal.
Gannon was alone when they returned to the house; he was preoccupied. He let Dana bring his meal and they sat in a cool silence for a long time while he finished it and asked her to pour him a second cup of coffee.
“Did you have a nice day?” he asked absently.
“Oh, it was lovely. Katy and Maude send their love.”
He laughed bitterly. “Just what I need.”
She paled, turning her attention to the coffee cup. “Did you get your business straightened out?”
He leaned back in the chair with the cup in his hands. “Yes. Layn’s very lovely, isn’t she?”
“Very,” she agreed.
“Poised, sop
histicated…with an excellent business head. The kind of wife a businessman could depend on to help him accomplish his goals,” he added; his point seemed to have been made deliberately. He sipped his coffee. “What was she wearing?”
“Blue,” she said, staring into her own cup. “Sea blue.”
He chuckled. “One of her favorite colors. I remember a bathing suit she used to have, when I took her to Nassau….” His face clouded and he stopped abruptly, swinging forward in the chair. “Can you take dictation?” he asked suddenly. “I need to write some letters, and I’m not fast enough with the computer yet. Can you type?”
“Yes to both,” she said agreeably. “I’ll be glad to help you.”
“Yes, I know,” he said under his breath, and looked as if he were hurting inside. He leaned back wearily in his chair and closed his eyes. “It doesn’t help the situation.”
She moved closer to the desk, studying his lined face. “Gannon, is your sight returning?”
He made a curt movement, his sightless eyes opening on darkness. “What?”
“Are you beginning to see again?” she persisted. “I know something’s happened—I can feel it. You’re…you’re very distant lately.”
He laughed harshly. “Am I? And why do you suppose I am?”
She studied her feet. “Layn’s very beautiful,” she said quietly.
He sat breathing steadily, deliberately. “Yes.”
“And you…you cared for her before you were blinded.”
“That too.” He cocked his head, listening. When she didn’t say anything more, he seemed to slump. “She blamed herself, you know,” he said finally. “She was driving the speedboat. It’s taken her all this time to come to grips with it and realize that I didn’t blame her.”
Dana didn’t believe that for a minute, but she kept quiet. More than likely, the knowledge that Gannon’s sight was returning had a great deal to do with Layn’s sudden interest in him.
“We’re very different, aren’t we?” she asked softly. “You and I, I mean. From different backgrounds, different worlds.”
He was listening intently, his face shuttered. “Yes, we are,” he said. “And I hate to say it, Dana, but when I…regain my sight, that difference is going to become even more apparent. I travel in circles you’ve never touched, full of wild living and unconventional people.”
She watched him with a heart that felt near breaking. “And, too, there’s Layn, isn’t there?” she prodded. “Layn, who would fit very well—does fit very well—in that kind of world?”
His face tautened. “Yes.”
She lifted her hands to her waist and clasped them there, very tightly. “Gannon, about the engagement…”
“Not today,” he said curtly, as if the words were being dragged out of him, as if he hadn’t meant to say them. “We’ll discuss it some other time. Get that pad, please. Layn’s driving me down to Savannah the day after tomorrow for a meeting about that expansion I mentioned at the shipyard. I’ll be gone most of the day, and I need to have this correspondence out of the way before we get there.”
“Yes,” she said quickly.
She turned and almost ran from the room, feeling as if something inside her had died. He wanted out. If she’d been blind herself, she’d have sensed it today, when he spoke so lovingly of Layn and seemed to hate the very thought of regaining his sight because he was tied to a woman he only needed because he was blind. And when he could see, he’d only want Layn….
By the morning Gannon was about to go off with Layn, Dana was more than ready to have the luxury of a day without his company. He was taciturn and curt and he began to pick at her as he had in the early days of their acquaintance. The engagement, while still apparently in force, was never referred to, and he treated her as his nurse, not his wife-to-be.
“I asked you to get Al Pratt on the phone half an hour ago,” he snarled at her just before Layn arrived. “Have you even tried?”
“Yes, I have,” she said coldly. “He wasn’t in. I am not a miracle worker; I can’t produce people at a second’s notice.”
“You might be a little more diligent,” he accused.
“I took my training in medicine, not business,” she reminded him coldly.
“You have a sharp tongue,” he growled.
“Yours is sharper, and you have no patience anymore,” she shot back. She felt herself begin to slump. “It’s a good thing you’re going out,” she said wearily. “Perhaps being with Miss Dalmont will improve your temper.”
His nostrils flared. “Perhaps it will. At least she tries to please me once in a while, miss.”
So might I, if I knew what you wanted of me, she thought miserably. She moved away from him, her nurse’s uniform making clean, crisp sounds in the silent room. She’d started wearing it again, because it made her feel more comfortable. He was treating her like his nurse, not his fiancée, after all, so what did it matter?
His head rose suddenly. “What’s that noise?” he asked sharply.
“Sir?”
“That rustling sound….”
“My uniform,” she said coldly.
He actually seemed to blanch. “I thought you were wearing street clothes now.”
“I came here as, and still am, your nurse,” she reminded him with dignity. “Is it surprising that I feel more secure dressed to fit the part?”
He stood quietly, breathing deliberately. “We’re engaged,” he said.
She laughed softly, bitterly. “No, sir,” she told him. “That was a bit of fiction. An impulsive, quickly regretted and impossibly answered proposal that would be best forgotten by both of us.”
“You don’t want to marry me?” he asked, something odd in his tone.
“No, sir, I don’t,” she lied, her voice carrying a conviction that was not in her heart. “As we’ve already agreed, our worlds are too different ever to mix. And when you have your sight again, the last thing you’ll want or need is a scarred, plain little…”
“Stop it!” he burst out, white in the face.
She caught her breath at the violence in the harsh words, at the expression in his blank eyes. But before she could say a word or question him, there was a loud knock at the door, and she went quietly to answer it.
Layn gave her a lazy, cool appraisal. “Back in chains, I see,” she said pleasantly, chic in a white linen suit with a pale pink silk blouse. “Where’s Gannon?”
“In his study, of course. He’s expecting you,” Dana said quietly.
“Do show me in,” came the amused reply.
As if she needed showing. But Dana complied. There was no fight left in her.
“Miss Dalmont is here,” Dana said to Gannon’s rigid back.
He turned, staring toward the sound of her voice. “Layn?”
“Right here, darling,” she cooed, going to him. She reached up and kissed him, and to Dana’s amazement his arms went around her and he returned the kiss with a hungry fervor that was faintly embarrassing.
“What a nice greeting,” Layn gasped when he let go. “Just like old times!”
“You smell delicious—just like old times,” he murmured. “Ready to go?”
“Whenever you are.”
Gannon took Layn’s slender hand while Dana stood and watched them, hurting all the way to the heels of her comfortable shoes.
“You aren’t taking your little nurse, I hope?” Layn asked.
Gannon flushed darkly and seemed about to say something, but stifled it. “No, Dana isn’t coming with us,” he said instead.
“Thank goodness,” Layn murmured fervently. “Come, Gannon, the car’s just outside. I hope we won’t need an umbrella, because I didn’t bring one. It’s getting very dark and stormy-looking out.”
“Dana?” Gannon hesitated.
She swallowed, full of hurt pride and rejection. “Yes?”
He seemed to flinch. “Don’t go out on the beach alone, will you? There are storm warnings out today.”
“I won’t,�
� she promised quietly.
“I wish I could believe you,” he said under his breath.
She didn’t bother to reply, standing aside as he went out the door with Layn. Dana closed it behind them, just before she burst into tears.
“You’re very quiet this afternoon,” Lorraine remarked just before dinner that night as they sat together in the living room while thunder and lightning raged outside. “Does the storm bother you?”
Dana shook her head. “Not at all.”
“Gannon’s going out with Layn does, though, doesn’t it?” the older woman probed gently. “Oh, Dana, if I only understood my stepson…”
“It’s all very simple,” Dana told her. She looked up with sad, quiet eyes. “He wants me to break off the engagement. He’s done everything but toss me out the window to get his point across.”
“But why?”
“His sight is coming back,” she said, sure of it now. “He told me quite bluntly that I wouldn’t fit into his world—the world he lives in when he has his sight. I could only belong in a world we made together, out of darkness. Layn is back and he wants her. And who could blame him?” she added bitterly. “She’s perfect, so sophisticated and worldly…”
“So selfish and shallow,” Lorraine countered angrily. “Your exact opposite in every way. It isn’t like Gannon to succumb to that woman after the way she’s treated him. He’s much too proud. And he cares for you. It’s in the way he speaks to you, the way he listens for your step and the way his face lights up when you walk into a room. No, there’s something else, I’m sure of it.”
But Dana wasn’t convinced. Gannon’s hunger for Layn had been all too obvious in the kiss she’d seen them share, and his manner with Dana had convinced her that all he wanted now was to be rid of her.
“When he comes back tonight,” Dana said quietly, “I’m going to break off the engagement. It’s what he wants, and now it’s what I want too. If I’m right, he’ll get back on his feet that much faster because he has Layn to look forward to.”
“Dana, I wish you’d wait—just a little longer,” Lorraine said softly.
“There’s no point. If he felt as I did, it would be different. But I have no right to build my happiness on his sorrow. I won’t.”