A tingle of warning raced along her spine. ‘Don’t,’ she whispered. Lee’s hand moved to the back of her head and cupped it, his fingers tangling in the cascade of her hair.
‘Why do women say “don’t” when they mean “do”?’ he said softly.
The tingle grew stronger. ‘Please, Lee. This is wrong. I don’t want you to…’
‘Come here,’ he whispered, drawing her to him. ‘That’s it. Just relax. Just…’
His mouth brushed hers, lightly at first, then harder. She caught her breath as his other arm went around her.
‘Danielle,’ he said, ‘Danielle—I thought about this all week, about kissing you and touching you…’
She gasped as his hand slid to just below her breast. His fingers moved lightly, gently, the tip of his thumb grazing her nipple as it drifted over her thin cotton shirt.
‘Don’t,’ she said again, ‘Lee, please don’t.’
Her eyes shut as his hand moved on her again. All the sensations she’d ever imagined were passing from his touch to her flesh; she could feel her nipple tightening, budding against his questing fingers.
Lights danced behind her closed lids. Lee, she thought, Lee…
‘Yes,’ he murmured, and she realised she’d somehow said his name aloud. ‘Yes,’ he said again, as her hand lifted and spread on his chest.
He groaned as his mouth dropped to hers. His kiss almost stopped her heart. She felt herself heating, opening, like the seed of some primordial plant that needed fire to flower.
‘Lee,’ she sighed, and her hands moved up his chest to his face, moved across his features as if she were blind and needed her hands to see. She whispered his name again, and then she wound her arms around his neck and raised herself to him.
Lee murmured something. Suddenly, his hands bit into her arms. She heard the rasp of his breath, and then he put her from him.
Her eyes opened slowly. ‘Lee?’ she whispered.
In the faint light from the inn, she could see only his eyes. They were dark, almost black, glittering with an emotion she couldn’t define. A muscle knotted in his cheek.
‘Get out of the car,’ he said.
Danielle drew in her breath. ‘What?’
His face twisted. ‘Get out, damn you!’ He reached past her and shoved her door open. ‘Did you hear me, Danielle? I said…’
The look in his eyes, the anger in his voice, terrified her. Had he done this to humiliate her? No, she thought, no.
‘Get out!’
She stumbled out of the door, almost falling to her knees in her hurry to get away. Lee stared at her.
‘There’s a phone inside.’ His voice was sharp. ‘Call Wexler and ask him to send a car for you. Do you understand?’
She shook her head as she backed slowly away. ‘No,’ she whispered, ‘I don’t understand. You—you can’t have done this just to—just to…’
He laughed then, a terrible, raw sound that Danielle knew she would remember for the rest of her life.
‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘you don’t understand, not one damned bit, and that’s the trouble.’
He pulled the door closed and it slammed loudly, and then the engine roared to life and the car shot on to the road.
Later, she would remember that eyewitnesses to tragedies always said things seemed to happen in slow motion. But it wasn’t so; everything that came next happened with terrible speed.
There was a curve just beyond the inn. The car reached it just as an old tractor, emerging from a hidden road, suddenly appeared in its headlights. The horrible sound of tyres grasping desperately at the road’s surface echoed in the night, and the headlights began to swing in erratic arcs as the car veered sharply towards the precipice that flanked the narrow road.
For a heart-stopping instant, it seemed to hang delicately on the edge, the headlights waving an urgent plea, and then slowly, almost primly, the car toppled and vanished into the dark.
CHAPTER SIX
DANIELLE swallowed the last of her coffee, crumpled the paper cup, and tossed it into the waste bin. The sound was unnaturally loud in the early-morning silence of the hospital waiting room and she looked quickly at Valerie, who lay curled on a peeling vinyl sofa.
But her cousin slept on, undisturbed, and Danielle breathed a sigh of relief. The last thing she wanted was to have to deal with Val’s hysteria again.
‘They’re giving him blood?’ Val had shrieked when the emergency room nurse had offered an update on Lee’s condition. ‘I don’t want to hear about it. I’ll faint, I know I will!’
And when the orthopaedist had appeared to explain that the fracture in Lee’s right ankle would require a steel plate and pins, she’d slumped into a chair and lowered her head to her knees.
‘Please,’ she’d whispered, ‘spare me the details.’
Danielle had followed the doctor into the hall, eager for the ‘details’. They were proof that Lee was alive, that he hadn’t died the way Eddie had.
The accident had brought back all the memories of that terrible evening.
She was supposed to have met Eddie at six, but she’d been late. And not even for a very good reason—she’d been late because she’d stood around talking with her students after the French Club meeting instead of hurrying to keep her date. That was why Eddie had been standing on the pavement outside the restaurant when a car had come around the corner too fast on the rain-slicked road and…
Eddie had been dead when she’d reached him. Lee, thank God, had been alive. She had no idea how she’d got to him: one minute, she had been on the road and the next, she had been on the steep slope of the embankment, cradling Lee in her arms, begging him not to die, even though she’d known he couldn’t hear her.
Lee had been unconscious, his dark lashes lying like soot against his cheeks, blood welling across his temple, dark crimson against the unnatural pallor of his skin. And his foot had been bent at an angle so impossible that she’d felt a sudden clench of nausea in her belly.
But none of that had been as important as the steady rise and fall of his chest. He was alive. Alive! Danielle had laughed through her tears and bent her head to his, whispering her joy to him, as if he could, by some miracle, hear her.
She’d refused to give him up to the ambulance attendants.
‘You can ride with him,’ one said finally, his French so thick with the accent of Provence that at first she misunderstood. In desperation, the man finally threw his hands to the sky and motioned her to the rear of the ambulance, and she nodded and climbed inside.
When they reached the hospital, the emergency room nurse had to ease her from Lee’s side.
‘You must let the doctors do their work,’ she said softly, putting her arm around Danielle’s shoulders.
She stared at the woman, her expression fierce. ‘He has to live,’ she said. ‘Do you understand?’
‘I will bring coffee to you in the waiting room, mademoiselle. Perhaps you wish to notify someone of the gentleman’s accident?’
Danielle stared at her. ‘I—I don’t know…’ Val, she thought suddenly, and she nodded. ‘There is someone. I suppose I should…’
Val arrived in a breathless rush. ‘Danni, how is he?’
‘He’s alive, that’s all I know.’ Danielle’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I saw it happen.’
Valerie stared at her. ‘You saw it? I don’t understand.’
Danielle bowed her head. ‘He—he noticed me watching the crash this afternoon—the stunt, you know, the one on the set. I—I got upset; it reminded me of—’
‘Get to the point,’ Val snapped.
‘We drove to Noble. And Lee parked outside an auberge. We talked, and then—and then…’
Valerie’s breath hissed. ‘And then?’ she prompted.
Danielle’s face lifted slowly to the other woman’s. Val was watching her through eyes gone cold and dead.
Dear God in heaven! What was she saying? She couldn’t tell Valerie what had happened—that Lee ha
d tried to make love to her, that she’d melted in his arms, that somehow her compliance had angered him or repelled him so much that he’d driven off in a rage and—and…
‘Well? I’m waiting, Danni. What happened?’
Danielle drew in her breath. ‘I—I decided I wanted to go back to Ste Agathe,’ she said, the evasive answer bitter on her tongue. ‘Lee said he was going to drive on. I got out of the car and…’
But Valerie had stopped listening. ‘Your dress,’ she said. ‘It’s covered with blood. Why didn’t you ask me to bring you a change of clothing?’
Danielle had glanced down at herself in surprise. ‘I—I didn’t realise…’
Her cousin had shuddered delicately. ‘The sight of blood makes me ill.’
As it turned out, so had the mention of surgery or broken bones. It had been a relief when Valerie had finally curled into a corner of the waiting room sofa.
‘Wake me when there’s news.’ She’d yawned, and promptly fallen into a deep sleep.
Now, hours later, Danielle watched Val’s peaceful face and wondered how she could sleep while Lee—while Lee…
Quickly, she walked to the window and stared out. Dawn was just breaking over Nice; streets that would soon be crowded with tourists stretched, deserted, towards the sea. She could see no one except a man and woman, still in party clothes, slowly strolling arm in arm, wishing the hours of the night never to end.
But that was impossible. Time was a river; there was no way to stop its flow. Oh, but if only you could! Closing her eyes, Danielle pressed her forehead to the cool glass. How wonderful it would be to go back to this afternoon and wipe the slate clean, erase everything that had brought Lee to that terrible moment when his car had skidded off the road.
‘Mademoiselle Nichols?’
She spun towards the doorway. A man in green sterile clothes smiled wearily as he walked into the room.
Danielle stepped forward. ‘Yes?’
‘I am Dr Bonet,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘I am—how do you say?—a surgeon of orthopaedics, n’est-ce pas?’
‘Yes,’ she said again. Stupid, she thought. Ask him how Lee is. Ask him if he’s all right. ‘Yes,’ she whispered, clasping his hand and looking into his face, letting her eyes ask all the questions there were.
Dr Bonet cleared his throat. ‘Monsieur Bradford is a very strong man, mademoiselle. He is in excellent health.’
‘Is he?’ What was he saying? Lee was lying somewhere inside this hospital, his leg broken, his face bleeding…
The doctor smiled gently. ‘What I mean to say is that it is good that he is in such fine condition, do you understand? It gives him the strength he needs now, to withstand the trauma he has suffered.’
Danielle drew a ragged breath. ‘Dr Bonet, please—how is he? Is he…is he…?’
The vinyl sofa creaked as Valerie rose to her feet. ‘What she’s trying to ask,’ she said in an impatient, sleep-roughened voice, ‘is whether Lee’s in one piece.’ Her heels tapped as she crossed the floor towards them. ‘Well? Is he?’
‘His leg, as you know, is broken at the ankle. And he has torn the medial collateral ligament—he has sustained damage to his knee.’
‘But he’ll be all right?’ Danielle’s voice trembled.
‘He has come through the worst of it—the surgery, the loss of blood—quite well.’ Bonet paused, then pursed his lips. ‘The knee is a difficult injury to treat. As for the ankle…’ He shook his head. ‘There was much shattered bone. The joint—’
Val held up her hand. ‘But you fixed all that, right? What about his face? My cousin said there was a gash. Is it bad?’
‘We took some stitches.’
‘How does he look?’ Val said quickly. ‘Will he need plastic surgery?’
The doctor’s eyebrows rose. ‘No, I think not. There may be a scar, but not a serious one.’ He paused and looked from one woman to the other.
Danielle wet her lips. ‘Then—then he’s going to be all right?’
Bonet looked at her. ‘None of his injuries are life-threatening, mademoiselle.’
The words, so quietly spoken, brought tears of happiness to her eyes.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered, and she laughed softly as she brushed the back of her hand across her lashes. ‘Thank you so much, Doctor.’
‘We have only done what we could, mademoiselle.’ Bonet seemed to hesitate. ‘That is all science can ever do, n’est-ce pas?’
‘I want to see him.’ Val stepped forward and brushed past Danielle impatiently. ‘Where is he?’
‘He is still in Recovery. He should be in his room in an hour or so. If you wish to wait…’
‘Yes,’ Danielle said quickly. ‘Of course we’ll wait.’
‘Well, I can’t wait, Danni.’ Val pushed back her sleeve and glanced at her watch. ‘They’re shooting an important scene today. Barney’s notified everybody to be on the set promptly at eight.’
Danielle stared at her cousin. ‘Don’t you want to be here when Lee awakens?’
Valerie shrugged her shoulders. ‘Well, sure I do,’ she said, giving Bonet a quick smile. ‘But the doctor just said he’s fine—isn’t that right, Doctor? Didn’t you say Lee’s going to make it?’
The surgeon shifted his weight from one foot to the other. ‘Oui.’
‘And his face won’t be scarred or anything. Right?’ Bonet nodded, and Valerie threw out her arms. ‘So, what more is there to say? Lee’s going to be OK.’ She smiled. ‘And that’s great news. Barney will want to hear a first-hand report from me.’
‘Lee might want to see a familiar face when he comes to,’ Danielle said softly.
‘Lee’s a pro. He knows that the show has to go on.’ Val glanced at her watch again. ‘I can just about make it, if I leave now. What are you going to do, Danni? Do you want a lift or…?’
Danielle shook her head. ‘You go ahead. I’ll hang around for a while.’
Val’s smile was gently pitying. ‘Sure. You do that. I’ll come by later, after they wrap up the shoot.’
Danielle waited until the staccato tap of her cousin’s heels had faded down the corridor, and then she turned to Dr Bonet.
‘Could you ask someone to let me know when they bring Lee down from Recovery?’ She smiled slightly. ‘I’d just like to know he’s…’
The doctor took her elbow. ‘Permit me to take you to his room, Mademoiselle Nichols. Your wait will be more comfortable. And I am sure your friend will be glad to see a familiar face.’
Danielle shook her head. ‘No,’ she said quickly, ‘I—I don’t think he’ll want to see me, Doctor. I—’
‘Surely he will want to see the young woman who clung to him so—tenaciously—is that the right word?—all the way to the hospital.’ Bonet smiled kindly. ‘Mademoiselle. Awakening after trauma is always difficult. Awakening in a strange place, seeing no face you know, hearing a tongue other than one’s own—all that must be quite hard to bear, n’est-ce pas?’
She nodded her head with reluctance. ‘Yes, I suppose.’
‘Bien. Come. I shall show you to your friend’s room.’
The doctor’s tone suggested there was nothing more to discuss. With a sigh of resignation, Danielle permitted him to lead her down the corridor.
* * *
‘…over to the side. Get over, damn you! I’m losing it. Dammit, I can’t…’
The rising sound of the husky, fear-roughened voice brought Danielle awake all at once. The room was striped with shadow, and a single light illuminated Lee’s bed.
The magazine she’d tried to read hours earlier fell from her lap as she got to her feet and moved towards him. He was quiet now, asleep, but she knew he was still dreaming. She could see the movement of his eyes beneath his closed lids. There was a thin beading of sweat on his forehead.
She glanced at the clock on the wall near the door. How could she have slept so long? Hours had gone by since Lee had been wheeled into the room, his face ashen, tubes snaking into his arm, one l
eg wrapped in plaster and the other locked in what looked like a medieval torture device.
‘He is still asleep,’ one of the nurses had whispered in French. ‘It may be quite some time before he awakens fully.’
Danielle had nodded, then settled in to wait. Someone had been kind enough to bring her coffee and something to read, but she’d had eyes only for Lee. He’d groaned softly a few times, and once his eyes had snapped open, only to close sightlessly again. The morning had dragged by, and the afternoon, and she’d found herself growing drowsy, nodding off, until finally…
‘Danielle?’
Her heart turned over. Lee’s eyes were open and fixed on her face.
‘Lee.’ She drew a deep breath, then let it out in a rush. ‘How do you feel?’
‘As if I’ve been run over by a truck,’ he said. His mouth twisted, and she realised he was trying to smile. The smile became a grimace, and his breath hissed between his teeth. ‘Bad joke,’ he whispered.
‘Are you in pain? I’ll get the nurse. The doctor left orders—’
‘No. No nurse. Not yet.’ He grimaced again. ‘I feel as if my mouth’s stuffed with cotton.’
‘Yes. They told me you’d be thirsty. Here—you can have a little water. Let me help you.’
Gently, Danielle put her arm around his shoulders and supported him as he drank. After a few seconds, he took his mouth from the straw and fell back against the pillows.
‘Thanks.’
She nodded. ‘Val—Val was here most of the night. She said to tell you—’
‘I’ve been trying to count pieces,’ he said. He cleared his throat and turned his face towards her. The smile that was not a smile drifted across his mouth again. ‘All my parts seem to be here. Right?’
‘Yes. You broke your ankle, and you banged up your knee…’
His eyes closed wearily. Danielle stood watching him, and then she carefully pushed back her chair and began tiptoeing from the room.
‘Where are you going?’
The Ruthless Billionaire’s Redemption Page 8