Bound by a Promise

by Diana Palmer

  She floated the cruiser and silently watched Cambridge as he raised his husky frame and staggered down the pier to his cabin. She was crying so hard she could hardly think straight, and the words that she wanted to call out to him stuck fast in her throat. Her first impulse was to dock her boat in Cambridge’s pier and follow him up to his cabin. But then as she floated nearer, she saw several people meeting Cambridge at the door. Their sounds of surprise and concern drifted across the lake as they crowded around him and ushered him within. Then the door closed and she could only assume that in the excitement, no one had noticed her boat, just a short distance from the dock.

  The thought of facing the injured Cambridge was bad enough, but she simply wasn’t able to summon the courage it would take to face both him and his crowd of friends. At least she was sure now that he would be well taken care of. She floated the cruiser beside the pier and into the boat house, locking it up. Then she went into the cabin and threw herself down on the couch. She held her face in her hands and allowed her tears to run freely. If only Maude were here, she thought….

  When the tears finally passed, she sat up and dried her eyes and tried to decide what to do. Should she call Cambridge and ask how he was and try to explain, to apologize? Should she report the accident to the lake patrol? Should she call a doctor? What if he’d been hurt worse than she thought? It was a hard knock, and a lot of blood…what if he died? She felt panic like a sick lump lodge deep in her throat. If he died, she’d be guilty of murder!

  But if she gave herself in, and he wasn’t badly hurt at all? What if he hadn’t known it was she who hurt him, wouldn’t he prosecute her without hesitation, knowing how reckless she’d already been with the boat? And if she was in jail, there’d be no way to help her father out of debt!

  Her mind flashed with activity. No one witnessed the accident. She wasn’t known on the lake, only Cambridge had even seen her enough to recognize her. Of course, he’d have recognized the boat, possibly, even if he hadn’t identified Kate. But the boat was nothing special, and he didn’t know Kate’s name, after all.

  She licked her lips nervously. Still, what if he was badly hurt?

  She lifted the phone and waited for the dial tone. By a stroke of luck she didn’t expect, Cambridge’s number was listed. She dialed the number. She had to know, even it if meant going to prison. She had to make sure he was going to be all right.

  A soft, feminine voice answered the phone. “Hello?”

  Kate swallowed, and tried to disguise her voice, to deepen it. “Is Mr. Cambridge in?” she asked in what she hoped was a calm, businesslike tone.

  “No, he’s been taken to the hospital,” came the easy reply. “An accident. We think he must have fallen and hit his head on something. He was bleeding pretty badly, but he was cursing pretty badly, too, so Bob and I think he’ll be okay. Is this Pattie?”

  With closed eyes and a shuddering sigh, Kate hung up. He was alive. He was all right. She hadn’t killed him, thank God. But there in the back of her mind, she remembered what Maude had said about the industrial magnate—that he made a ruthless enemy, and he always got even. Would he, somehow, make her pay for what she’d done? Did he know that it was her fault, would he hunt for her?

  She didn’t go outside again. There were plenty of groceries in the pantry and she could last indefinitely if she had to. She was terrified that if she went on the beach, he might be there, he might recognize her. Even hidden like this, she dreaded the day when a knock on the door would come, or the phone would ring, and she’d be forced to pay for her carelessness. She felt like a condemned criminal. But her own guilt was punishing her more than any court could.

  When the phone finally did ring, several days later, she jumped like a thief. She let it ring four times before she summoned enough nerve to lift the receiver.

  “H…hello?” she whispered.

  “Miss Summers? Miss Kathryn Summers?” a woman’s voice queried.

  “Yes,” she managed, her eyes closing with something akin to relief. It was all over now.

  “I have a telegram for you from Miss Maude Niccole in Paris,” the woman said cheerfully, and Kate’s heart stopped, then started beating again. “Father doing well. Stop. Must stay for few weeks. Stop. Close cabin and go home for present. Stop. Will explain in letter. Stop. Love, Maude.”

  Kate thanked the operator and hung up, feeling lost and alone and afraid. Did she dare go home and expose her father to the possible consequences of her actions? He had a bad heart, and any shock could cost him his life.

  What if Garet Cambridge came looking for her and had her prosecuted, could her father bear the shock when he learned what his daughter had done? He’d raised her to care about other people, to be responsible for herself. Was the way she was acting responsible? She sighed. There was only one thing left to do. The thing she should have had the courage to do in the first place. She was going to have to go to Cambridge and tell him the whole story and throw herself on his mercy—if there was any in him. Which she doubted.

  Like a lamb heading for the gate to the slaughterhouse, she braved the outside world and strode reluctantly along the beach in her white shorts and top, her eyes downcast as she counted rocks along the shoreline and dreaded the inevitable.

  She was so lost in thought that she was almost on top of the big, dark figure before she stopped with a gasp, almost colliding with him in the process.

  He turned and she found herself looking straight into Garet Cambridge’s dark green eyes, and her heart froze in her chest.

  “Excuse me,” she managed in a husky whisper, her voice unnaturally tight as she strained for the right words. “I…”

  “My fault,” he replied with deadly calm. He raised a smoking cigarette to his chiseled mouth and took a long draw. “I can’t see you.”

  She gaped at him incredulously, at the unseeing green eyes, the unblinking gaze of the blind as he stared straight ahead.

  “Your…eyes?” she managed. The world was falling in on her.

  “An accident,” he replied. “They tell me I fell. I’ll be damned if I remember anything about it except a blinding pain. Is it dark yet?”

  She shook her head dazedly and then, realizing that he couldn’t see the gesture, she said, “No, not yet.”

  He sighed wearily. His dark face was drawn, heavily lined, as if he’d known a great deal of pain in recent days. Kate choked back a sob, the realization of just exactly how much damage she’d done hitting her all at once. She’d blinded him!

  “I like this time of day,” he said conversationally. “The peace of it. It’s a damned far cry from horns and traffic and gaudy music.”

  She studied him quietly. “Do you…do you come from a place like this?” she asked softly, hoping he wouldn’t recognize her voice. Although, she thought, he hadn’t really heard it enough to recognize it.

  A mocking smile curled his lips. “In a sense, I live in the city. You?”

  “I grew up on a ranch,” she murmured.

  “A cowgirl?” he asked.

  She laughed. “More of a milkmaid,” she admitted, surprised at this very human side of the man she’d hated by reputation, by previous contact.

  “Well, milkmaid, what are you doing on the lake?”

  Paying for every sin I ever committed, she thought shakily. “I’m having a holiday with a friend,” she said.

  “Male or female?” he asked with a half smile.

  “Female, of course,” she told him indignantly.

  The smile widened. “There’s no ‘of course’ about it these days,” he replied. “Has your life been that sheltered?”

  “In a way,” she nodded. “Rural people…I suppose we aren’t very worldly.”

  “How rural are you?”

  “Texas,” she grinned involuntarily.

  “What part?”

  “Near Austin,” she said quickly, without thinking, and could have bitten her tongue for it.

  “Your family are in cattle, I take it?” he a
sked carelessly.

  “My father,” she corrected, “has five hundred cows, most of which he’s already had to sell off because of the drought. I’m not well-to-do,” she added flatly. “When I was little, it was all Dad could do to keep me in shoes and sweaters.”

  “Touchy, aren’t you?” he asked pleasantly.

  “Yes,” she admitted, wrapping her arms around her as if she felt a sudden chill. “What do you do for a living?” she asked with practised carelessness.

  His dark face clouded, his unseeing eyes narrowed. He took a long draw from his cigarette. “I…was a pilot,” he said finally.

  She gaped at him. He was lying to her, deliberately it seemed, too. Why?

  “What kind of planes did you fly?” she probed gently.

  He smiled. “Untested ones.”

  “You were a test pilot?” she asked, and it suddenly came to her that he tested the very planes he designed; a dangerous undertaking for a man with his wealth, and unnecessary.

  “That’s it.” He drew a deep breath. “Needless to say, I won’t be doing it any longer. I’m in the market for a new profession.”

  “Is there…can you do something besides fly?” she asked, studying the tall, brooding figure beside her as she dropped down onto a fallen tree and watched him.

  “I thought I might do a book on airplanes,” he replied. He laughed softly. “By God, I’ve had enough experience with them to tell a few tales.”

  “From test pilot to writer?” she teased softly. “Can you write?”

  He turned toward the sound of her voice and looked down his nose in her general direction. “I can do damned near anything that pleases me, Miss,” he replied coolly. “You’re an impertinent brat, aren’t you?”

  “How do you know I’m a brat?” she returned.

  “Your voice. You sound as if you’re barely out of your teens.”

  “Well, I am,” she retorted, shaking back her pale hair. “I’m twenty-two, almost twenty-three.”

  He lifted his cigarette to his lips. “Twenty-two,” he murmured softly. “What a magic age that was. All the world to pick and choose from, and no barriers at all in the way.”

  “It isn’t exactly like that,” she replied.

  “Wait until you reach my age, little one, and tell me again.”

  She studied the dark, leonine head with its sprinkling of gray hairs that turned silver in the fading sunset light. “I didn’t realize you were such a relic,” she murmured with careful irony. “Goodness, I’d never have guessed you were actually in your fifties.”

  Both dark eyebrows shot up. “What?!”

  “Well, you said…”

  “I’m forty, damn it!” he growled. “And I can still run circles around men half my age!”

  She didn’t doubt it, that muscular physique didn’t have a spare ounce of flab on it. He was strong, and it showed in every line.

  “On foot, or on a motorbike?” she asked conversationally.

  “Damn you,” he laughed, a deep, pleasant sound in the stillness, that was only broken by the lap of water at the shore’s edge.

  “No manners, either, I see,” she teased.

  His eyes narrowed, glittered at the sound of her voice. “Women have been drowned for less.”

  “By you?”

  “I’ve never been tempted like this before,” he told her.

  “Maybe I’d better go before you get violent,” she suggested.

  “That might not be a bad idea. Is it dark?”

  She glanced toward the horizon. “Very nearly,” she said, watching the sun go down in flames behind the silvery lake, the silhouette of tall pines.

  “It isn’t wise for a young woman to wander around here in the dark,” he cautioned.

  “What about you?” she asked as she turned to go.

  His eyebrows went up. “I don’t really expect that a would-be attacker would mistake me for a woman,” he said bluntly.

  Looking at the big, husky body, she seriously doubted it, too, and the idea tickled her so that a soft laugh broke from her lips.

  “What are you snickering at?” he demanded.

  “The thought of anyone mistaking you for a woman.”

  He chuckled softly. “I see your point. Go home.”

  “But, can you find your way back…?”

  “Why? Are you afraid I’ll trip over my feet and fall in the lake?” he asked.

  “It gets very deep very fast they say,” she replied.

  “I’ve only been like this for a little over a week,” he told her quietly, “but I’m not helpless. I may burn a few holes in my chair, and I run into door facings and step on the dog’s tail, but I…what’s so damned funny?”

  She forced herself to stop giggling. “It’s the way you put things,” she told him. “I’m not laughing at you, but…oh, the poor dog!”

  “Oh, the poor dog, hell! He’s a 130-pound gray shepherd, and he’s got the disposition of a rattlesnake with a can tied to his tail.”

  “Anyway,” she persisted, watching his face, “you don’t have anybody to get you home, and no cane…”

  “I have a houseboy named Yama who’ll be out here on his knees with a flashlight and a net, dredging the lake, if I’m not back by dark,” he replied smoothly. “Very handy, is Yama. Not at all like some of my faithful few who turned tail and ran when they were told that I couldn’t see.”

  “They couldn’t have been very faithful,” she observed. “Do…do you know if you might regain your sight?”

  He drew a deep breath and she stiffened, tensed, waiting for the answer. “There’s a chance,” he replied. “A very good one, that my sight will return normally, without surgical intervention. But how soon…no one knows. It could be days, or weeks, or months—or never. It was a hard blow, however it happened, and a tremendous shock to the optic nerve.”

  She swallowed. “Can you see at all?”

  He smiled wistfully. “Dark blobs. A few shadows.”

  She blinked back tears. She couldn’t cry, she didn’t dare. “Well, I’d better go home.”

  “How far is it?” he asked suddenly.

  “Just down the beach,” she said carefully.

  “What’s your name?” The question was sharp, quick.

  “Kate,” she replied. “Kate…Jones,” she added untruthfully, to throw him off the track. “Well, goodbye….”

  “Kate!”

  She turned. “Yes?”

  “Come tomorrow.”

  The request shocked her—if it was a request. He’d made it sound like a royal command. Getting too close to him now could be horribly dangerous. But when she saw the quiet anguish in his face that peeked for an instant out of the impassive mask he wore, she couldn’t refuse.

  “Here?” she asked in a thin voice.

  “At the cabin. About nine in the morning. I’ll have Yama set breakfast for two. How about it?” he added gruffly, as if he wasn’t used to making requests and hated even the idea of asking for anything.

  “Can I have bacon?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  “How about coffee?”

  “Done.”

  “Maybe a bagel with dark honey and hand-crushed mangoes?” she teased.

  “Keep it up and all you’ll get is the coffee,” he returned.

  “Coffee’s better than nothing, I suppose. Good night.”

  There was a pause as she started off down the beach. “Good night…Kate,” he said softly, and the words echoed along behind her like some ghostly echo.

  She slept for the first night in days, relieved that there was even a chance he might recover, even while she was torn by regret and guilt for having done this to him. He was so different from what she’d expected, and plainly reluctant to tell her the truth about himself; that he owned a gigantic corporation, that he was wealthy enough to satisfy almost any material hunger he possessed. It was almost as if he were playing some kind of game…could it be that he knew who she was? She shook her head. No, he wouldn’t have been
friendly, he wouldn’t have invited her to breakfast, if he’d known she was the reckless woman who cost him his sight and so much pain.

  She was still worrying over it the next morning when she went to the front door of his spacious beach house and knocked.

  A small, slender Oriental opened the door with a smile and welcomed her.

  “Come in, come in,” he said with only a trace of an accent. “Mr. Cambridge been pacing floor since seven. He waits for you on porch, please go ahead. Breakfast is on its way.”

  She thanked him with a smile and followed the direction he’d pointed out onto a screened in porch with a magnificent view of the lake.

  Cambridge was there, his hands locked behind him, wearing white Bermuda shorts and a white knit top that displayed his dark, muscular arms to a distinct advantage. He seemed to be staring out at the lake, but she knew, full well, that he wasn’t seeing it.

  “Good morning,” she said hesitantly.

  He turned quickly, his blind eyes searching, as if by looking hard enough he might be able to find her.

  “Good morning. Won’t you sit down?”

  She helped herself to the chair across from what was obviously his. “I like your porch,” she told him.

  “So do I. The screens keep the mosquitoes away,” he chuckled.

  “It’s so peaceful here,” she murmured, closing her eyes so that she could hear, even better, the whisper of wind through the tall pines, the soft lapping sound the water made against the shore.

  “That’s why I like it,” he replied. “Yama, I’m starving to death out here!” he bellowed toward the kitchen.

  “No need to shout, I come as quickly as possible,” Yama fussed, bringing in a tray laden with food and a huge pot of coffee. He began to arrange it on the table. “Always, you nag, but if I bring the food when you say, you always complain eggs not done enough, bacon not crisp enough….”

  “How would you like a nice, fat raise, Yama?” Cambridge asked through narrowed blank eyes.

  Yama’s lean face brightened. “That would be very nice, sir.”