Читать книгу Kiss Your Prince Charming - Jennifer Greene, Jennifer Greene - Страница 9

Two

“And how’s my gorgeous hunk doing today? Running around the halls naked again? Seducing all the nurses? Giving all the doctors hell?”

Greg’s pulse stopped dead, then suddenly bolted faster than a runaway horse. For almost a month now, Rachel had visited at the same time every evening—but tonight she wasn’t expected. And because he’d been so positive she wasn’t coming, he had no time to mentally brace. For one vulnerable minisecond, the sound of her voice made his heart dip into that wild, wicked well of forbidden waters.

But that was just because he was in love with her.

By the time he turned his head to face her and started cranking up the bed to a sit-up posture, naturally he’d squashed the inappropriate emotion. It wasn’t that hard to do, not anymore, particularly when he risked losing Rach altogether if she ever discovered how he felt about her. She was the princess to his frog. That’s just the way it was, which he’d accepted ages ago. Still...after a man had been cooped up all day in a tediously monotonous hospital room, Rachel was like a burst of vital, vibrant stinging life.

Raindrops spattered everywhere as she stripped off her trench coat, revealing the suit and heels she’d worn to work. Knowing Rach, the suit couldn’t have cost much, but she had this way of wearing clothes that made everything look expensive and sharp. Not flaunty. She didn’t go for flashy styles that showed off her figure, yet typically this outfit was a subtle feast for his eyes. The suit was a soft cherry-red, with a slim skirt that palmed the curve of her fanny and a short jacket that bared a spot at her neck for jewelry. She did like her beads. Temporarily her tawny hair looked wind-tousled and shaggy—the way he liked it best—and framed a small face with giant blue eyes, an itsy nose and a generous, wide mouth. Rach hated the label of “cute,” but man, she was. Darling. Cute. Irresistible. Words Greg never used on a woman, vocabulary he never used at all. Except for her. In the privacy of his mind.

“I’ve been giving everybody hell,” he assured her. “One of these days, I figure it’ll work and they’ll throw me out of this place. But I didn’t expect to be venting any bad temper on you tonight. Didn’t you get the message on your answering machine? I called to tell you not to come.”

“Yeah, I got your message about the weather. I just ignored you, big guy. What, did you think I’d melt if I drove in a little rain?”

It wasn’t raining “a little.” A harmless drizzle had started around noon, putting a shine and glisten on all the orange and gold autumn leaves, but by nightfall, the friendly little rain had turned into a gusty, moody storm. If and when all that water iced up, the roads would turn into a skating rink. “You’re supposed to listen to the advice of your elders,” Greg said sternly.

Her peal of laughter was infectious. “You don’t get credit for being a mere three years older than me! And yeah, I know the roads may freeze, but the temperatures aren’t supposed to drop that low until midnight. The nurses’ll toss me out long before then.” She kicked off her wet heels and padded closer to the bed in her stocking feet, her gaze narrowed as she studied him. “Well, I can’t tell if they put you through any fresh torture today. Are you in pain?”

“Nope, I’m fine, really.”

She rolled her eyes. “You always say that. And I think all those white bandages are mysterious and sexy and all, but I’m awfully sick of not being able to see your face, Stoner. I can’t tell when you’re lying. I can’t tell when you’re hurting or happy or anything else....”

As far as Greg was concerned, the only good thing to come from the accident were the bandages. Yeah, they were annoying, but at least Rach couldn’t see his expressions. For a whole month now, he could look at her without worrying about giving away his true feelings for her.

“But you’re finally at the end of this torture setup. I know you have to be feeling raw after the surgery yesterday, but this is the last time the plastic surgeon plans to cut you, yes? Didn’t he promise? No more? So if you just heal from this sucker, you’re home-free. I don’t suppose they let you have solid food today?”

“No. And I’d rather have a cheeseburger right now than a million bucks. But at least that’s the only blackmail they’re still holding over my head. The minute I can keep down some solid food, I get to bump this pop stand and go home...only, that’s tough to pull off when nobody’s willing to bring me anything but a liquid dinner.”

Her soft eyes swam with sympathy. “Now, Stoner. You know the broken jaw thing was the toughest problem, but you’re on the total mend track now. It won’t be that much longer.” She shot him a teasing diamond-watt grin. “Although I’m not sure I’m going to recognize you when this is all over. A whole new face is only part of this. You’re practically down to skin and bones. No love handles. Only half of you to hug. We’re talking about a woman’s dream—you’ve lost so much weight that you’re going to need a giant shopping trip to buy all new clothes.”

Temporarily he couldn’t wince—but he wanted to. “You call that a dream? I call it a nightmare. I’d rather have chicken pox than shop. I’d rather eat liver. Hell, I’d rather do anything.”

Rachel perched a hip on the bed and pulled the hospital tray table between them. A deck of cards appeared in her hands. “Well, from the goodness of my heart, I’ll help keep your mind off your troubles. You prepared to lose the rest of your life savings tonight?”

“Are you gonna fleece a poor, disadvantaged invalid again?”

“Yup. In fact, while you’re on this losing streak, I think we should up the ante to maybe a dime a game instead of just a nickel.”

“There goes my retirement,” Greg said plaintively, and was rewarded with her rich throaty chuckle.

Rach shuffled with the flashy style of a Las Vegas hustler and then dealt the cards. He cheated so she’d win—but no more than three out of four hands. If she won them all, Greg figured she’d guess something was fishy, particularly since he was a comptroller and should have had some skill with numbers.

His bumbling ineptitude didn’t seem to trouble her, though, possibly because she loved winning. And since he loved watching her win, Greg considered them even. Tonight, besides, he really couldn’t concentrate on the cutthroat canasta game.

His ribs still screamed when he laughed. The broken arm itched. And in the beginning, the bandages swathing his head had aroused his sense of humor—he did look like a mummy in training—but they also constricted his sight and movement and he was sick of them now. What the plastic surgeon had cut—and recut—on his face over the last weeks had involved constant bruising and swelling, and their rebuilding his jaw had been the worst. He couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, could never just let down and relax because there was always some kind of pain nagging at him.

But he forgot all that while Rach was here.

Thunder boomed outside. Rain slashed against the windows, running down the glass in silver ribbons. Against that black night, Rachel’s skin looked pearl-soft and luminous, like a treasure a man felt compelled to protect—even if her eyes were full of the devil and she was unrepentantly trying to sneak a peek at his cards. “Are you saving aces over there, Stoner?”

“Like I’d tell you.”

“I think you are.” Again she peered into his eyes as if she could see the truth there. “You know I’m at a disadvantage because I can’t see your face, when you can see mine. So I think it’s only fair that you give me a hint whether you have an ace or two.”

“Fair? Fair! You’re talking to a man who’s lost for four nights running. I’ll tell you whether I have aces when hell freezes over.”

She sniffed. “Okay. When you get home, I was going to make you a big fat steak on the grill with French fries, because I thought that’d taste good after all the meals you’ve had to drink from a straw. But if you can’t even give me a teensy little hint—”

“God. You play just like a girl. Sneaky. Manipulative. Making low-down blackmail threats—”

“Yeah. So what’s your point?”

He let out an exhausted sigh. “I have aces. Is that what you wanted to know?”

“Uh huh.” She promptly dispensed a deuce—and a female-rascaly grin at the same time.

They kept playing...but Greg’s mind couldn’t help spinning back to the day he’d met her. She was full of frisky sass now, but not that day. That afternoon she’d reminded him of a kitten drenched in a storm. Miserable, huddled into herself, eyes shell-shocked and lost—but just like a cat, she spit and clawed if anyone tried to help her. Particularly anyone male.

She’d been married to Mark for seven years.

Two seconds after meeting Rach, Greg was inclined to murder the guy—and he didn’t even know the whole story then. The details had drifted out over time. She’d still been wildly in love when her Sacred Mark walked out. She had no idea there was another woman in the picture. She had no clue there was even a problem. They hadn’t argued. He hadn’t complained. She was under the impression their sex life was superb.

From the start of the relationship, Rach had dropped out of college to put her True Love through school. Then she’d worked two low-wage jobs while the spineless jerk was getting around to sending out résumés. Her turn to finish college somehow never happened. Mark-O just had a lot of needs—like the right clothes and wheels suitable to a certain status, then the right house in the right neighborhood, and naturally he couldn’t sacrifice any fishing or hunting trips with his pals.

Greg figured that Rach had had plenty of clues early on. She just hadn’t wanted to see that her Sacred Mark was a selfish, immature jerk. Actually, to a point, Greg didn’t think that particularly mattered. If she loved the guy, then she did.

But what killed Greg—what fried him upside and down the other—was that the son of a bitch had broken her heart. Mark had obviously been the only guy she ever loved, ever knew intimately. His chasing another woman had the same effect as ripping the heart right out of her. The day she’d moved next door, she’d had nothing—a checkbook with a couple hundred dollars, no job, no plans, and a little rented U-Haul heaped with impractical, sentimental junk that she couldn’t even sell, much less wear or eat.

Greg had never felt it happen before. His heart, doing the slam-bam-alakazaam thing. His hormones, suffering instant delirium His nerves, trying to electrocute him with the lightning-bolt voltage.

Of course she wasn’t for him. Greg recognized that right off. Look what happened when King Kong pined after the blonde. When Romeo started moping after a Capulet. When Bogart got obsessed with a married woman in Casablanca. When a guy fell in love with an mappropriate woman, nothing ever followed but a heart-gashedin-two and disaster. There was love and there was love. If you had the wrong kind, best you bite the bullet, shut up and just try to value what you did have.

“I’m out.” Rachel—the fragile, withdrawn, vulnerable woman he’d fallen in love with—snapped down her last card and then wiggled her fingers. “Gimme, gimme, gimme. Thirty whole cents. Am I good or am I good? You might as well admit it, Stoner. I buried you. I trounced you deep. I beat the pants off you.”

“You’re the worst winner I ever met, ” he grumbled, and dug in the bedside table for his wallet. “You ever hear of the word humble?”

“What’s to be humble for? I won, I won, I won.”

He couldn’t grin because of the bandages. He couldn’t laugh because of the sore ribs. But he wanted to do both. As he forked over her thirty cents, he savored how much she’d changed from two years ago. For a while, Greg had his doubts she’d ever recover from the blows that creep had inflicted on her.

One of the rehab staff—a buxom nurse named Maeve—cocked her head through the doorway. “Well, if this isn’t typical. Visiting hours are over. The whole floor’s quieted down. All my good patients are behaving themselves. And then there’s you two.”

Rachel chuckled, but she also swiftly scooched off the bed. “I’m sorry. And I promise, I’m leaving right away.” The nurse had barely disappeared before she added to Greg, “I’ll give you a chance to earn back the loot tomorrow.”

“You’d better,” he said with the tone of the longsuffering.

With a cheeky grin, she started searching for her shoes and found them lying cockeyed under the chair. “You know what?”

“What?”

She pushed on the shoes, then grabbed her trench coat. “Every day you’ve sounded stronger, Greg, but tonight was the first time that you really, really sounded like yourself. I realize you’re not quite ready to climb K-2, and those bandages still make you look like one of those Egyptian pharaoh mummies. But I think they just might let you out of here soon.”

“That’s exactly what I told the doc this morning. It’s time to throw me out. Tomorrow wouldn’t be too soon for me.”

“I don’t blame you for being impatient. If I’d been cooped up this long, I’d be going just as nuts. But this started out almost as scary as the Humpty Dumpty story, Stoner. They had a lot of pieces to put back together.” She cinched the belt on her trench coat and then clipped toward him. “Just for the record, I am going to make you that steak and French fries as soon as you get home. You just have to stay cool a little longer and do what the docs tell you, okay?”

She bent down. He saw her wispy bangs, the faint spray of freckles on her nose, her soft mouth. He knew she was going to kiss him. Before the accident, she’d never touched him, but she’d pulled this kiss-good-night routine fairly often since he’d been in the hospital.

Now, like those other times, her lips had to search for a spot to kiss because almost everything above his neck was covered with white gauze.

Now, like the other times, her blue eyes flashed on his first. For two years Rach had been allergic to men, never went out, never gave a guy a chance to hurt her. Greg was positive that he’d earned her trust, yet still she needed to do that affirming quick eye study to remind herself that he was different—a proven friend, not a predator, not a male where sex or intimacy was an issue.

Now, like the other times, she seemed to decide it was okay to express an honest affectionate gesture with him...and did. Her lips touched down, softer than satin, gentler than a sigh. He caught the faint drift of the spicy scent she wore, saw her silky blond hair sweep down in pale, fine curls, inhaled the rustle of girl clothes and the pure delicate femaleness of her. And the first time she’d kissed him, all he had to do was brace because it was all over in two seconds.

But now, like the other times, Rach seemed to unconsciously stretch it out. Past two seconds.

Past five.

Past the point of a good-night-smack between pals, although Greg was meticulously careful not to touch her, not to move, not to breathe.

When she finally lifted her head and straightened up, her eyes flashed on his again, then swiftly shifted away like a nervous gambler’s. Color streaked her cheeks. Her hands restlessly tightened a belt that was already securely tied.

“You really need to get out of here.” Greg covered the sudden awkward silence. “I’m going to worry about your driving on ice if you don’t get home.”

That coaxed back her natural smile again. “I’m going, I’m going.” She snatched up her purse and hiked toward the door. “Give the nurses hell, I love you and sleep good, okay?”

Once those orders were delivered, naturally she whisked out of the room before he could respond. For a few seconds longer he could hear her heels clicking down the hospital linoleum, and then she was gone. Greg sank against the pillow and squeezed his eyes closed. It was worrisome. Not just her recent habit of kissing him, but her brand new habit of leaving him with that light, blithe, “I love you.”

Only a few moments passed before Maeve ambled back in. “Hi, darling’. Your company finally gone?”

“Yes.”

“As many visitors as you get, she’s my favorite. Such a sweetie. And cute as a button.” Efficiently Maeve wrapped his arm in the blood pressure cuff, then did the temperature and the pulse routine. “I got a secret for you. Dr. Webster says we can try you on real food tomorrow. And if that goes okay, you’ll be out of here in a matter of days. Now I’ve got some juice and couple of pills for you....”

Greg sipped the juice, ignored the pills, and when Maeve had moved on to badger the patient in the next room, he twisted to a sitting position and slowly stood up. He made it the five steps to the window, but the sensation of dizzy weakness was exasperating.

All the broken parts on his torso were healing fine. It was his face that had kept him trapped in the hospital all these weeks. From the broken jaw to the reconstruction surgeries, he’d been drinking dinners for weeks now. He could do physical therapy, but he simply could not build up strength when his diet maxed out at soft foods like tapioca.

Bracing both hands on the windowsill, Greg scanned the rain-slick parking lot below, hoping to spot Rachel. Headlights blinked and glared, but it was too dark to identify any cars, even anything as distinctive as her classic-survivor yellow VW. He was about to give up and step away, when he caught his mirror reflection in the glass pane.

The tall, lean man in the reflection was stunningly—eerily—unfamiliar. Yeah, he’d always been tall, but even from childhood, he’d been chunky and stoop-shouldered. Now his body felt like a stranger’s. The new lean build and straight posture just didn’t feel like him, and he was increasingly edgy about the mystery face under the bandages. The plastic surgeon had repeatedly promised him that the reconstruction surgeries had gone “fabulous” and he was going to look great. Truthfully, Greg didn’t care what he looked like, as long as he didn’t have scars that would scare children or draw attention to himself.

But suddenly he did care.

Something was happening between him and Rachel. Something new, something different. Something threatening. She just wasn’t behaving the same around him. Sooner or later Rach was always going to realize that she wasn’t allergic to men anymore, that Sacred Mark hadn’t wounded her for life, that sleeping alone wasn’t any fun for grown-ups. Greg had loved helping her. Loved feeling a part of her healing. Loved knowing he was one of the few men in the universe that she trusted.

But once he got home from the hospital, he just wanted to feel sure their next-door friendship went back to the way it was. He was the frog. She was the princess. Everything had always gone well between them as long as Greg never tried coloring outside those lines.

Slowly he turned around, then went through all the stiff contortions it took to get himself ready for bed and covered up again. Once the lights were off, he stared at the black ceiling, remembering Randall Conrad, the class bully in fourth grade. Greg had taken one beating from the bully and never told. Then another beating. It seemed that was around the time he started wolfing down extra snacks, playing the bumbling brain, making good-natured jokes no matter what anyone said to him. Randall had quit hounding him. Nobody had really picked on him after that.

In fact, girls had always liked him. Greg couldn’t remember a time when he didn’t have close female friends. He didn’t threaten women. Didn’t inspire them either— but Greg knew himself incapable of doing that. By age thirty-two, naturally he’d had some serious relationships. If none had ended in marriage, none had ended badly or cruelly, either. They just seemed to fizzle out like champagne left uncorked. Personally, he never thought sex was worth all the hoopla. He seemed to bore the lovers he’d chosen, almost as badly as they’d bored him. He’d like to marry sometime. He’d like kids, like a family. But just to have another body in the house was no justification to pursue something where Greg had already proven to be mediocre.

Unlike the old song claimed, one wasn’t the loneliest number. Two was. Being with someone you really didn’t want to be with was not only exhausting, but the most painful brand of loneliness.

Greg was pretty sure Rachel felt nothing but sympathy for him. He was also pretty sure she had no clue he was in love with her. Her sympathy should die a natural death once he got home and back to normal life again, but he treasured their friendship and worried doing anything to screw it up.

The second he met Rachel, he’d known she wasn’t for him. He had money. He had brains. But he’d never had the kind of zesty style and people skills and innate guts for life that she had. She’d shoot him for using the word class but there it was. It’d be like trying to pair a Chevy with a Jag. A guy could admire a Jag. Could lust after it. Could look. But a grown man with character knew better than to touch something that couldn’t belong to him.

Greg sighed heavily and closed his eyes. Most of his life he’d been invisible, the kind of guy who faded into the woodwork and no one noticed. Other men liked attention. Not him. And right now all he wanted was to be home again—back to his work, back to his life, back to being comfortably invisible. Especially with Rachel.

A week later, Rachel rapped on Greg’s back door, and when no one answered, she twisted the knob and poked her head inside. “Stoner! It’s me, Rach! Are you here?”

“Yeah, I’m back here in the den.”

Shaking her head with impatience, she stomped inside and closed the door. Technically Greg was still on a medical leave of absence, but there was no telling him that. When the hospital finally sprang him four days ago, he’d had a co-worker bring him work from the office ever since. He was always in the den working on the computer. Reminding him that he still had a doctor’s mandate to take it seriously easy fell on deaf ears.

Quickly she peeled off her pea coat and tossed it on a kitchen chair, automatically glancing around the room. No crumbs cluttered the red-tile counter; no dishes were stacked in the white porcelain sink. Old-fashioned glass cabinets revealed neatly stacked plates, and the long oak table held a nauseatingly tidy pile of mail and magazines. Personally Rachel didn’t trust anyone who didn’t leave a shameful mess somewhere—it just wasn’t human—but Greg was a friend. One had to forgive a friend a few revolting habits.

Momentarily, though, she only glanced around the kitchen to ascertain how he was doing today.

The dimwit wouldn’t ask for help if his life depended on it, so Rachel had to rely on clues. He’d been working too hard ever since coming home from the hospital, but Stoner was too much of a hard-core perfectionist to ever leave a mess unless he were exhausted or in pain. Today, his spotless kitchen reassured her that he was feeling good.

Pushing off her shoes, she padded in stocking feet down the wainscotted hall and through the living room. His decor always struck her sense of humor. Greg had told her that Stoners had built the family home in the 1890s, and some furnishings were obviously heirlooms from that elegant Victorian period—like the mahogany breakfront and a burgundy crushed-velvet rocker and the rich Oriental rugs. And then there were Greg’s choices. Futuristic minimalist. A spear of a lamp, a lapis lazuli slab for a coffee table, a giant wall-size TV and entertainment center, futons for seating. The furnishings were backdropped by old fashioned stuccoed walls and fancy copper-carved ceilings.

Rachel was unsure whether Greg didn’t realize that nothing went together or, worse, that he thought it did. A wolf had to have a better sense of style that he did. The French doors at the far end of the living room opened onto his study.

She paused in the study doorway. The closed wooden blinds sealed out the midday sun and made the room murky-dim. All she could really see was Greg’s back, hunched over a glowing computer monitor, his fingers clicking on the keyboard. He was wearing his favorite Green Bay sweatshirt—which was so decrepitly frayed that it should have seen a trash bin up-close-and-personal years ago—and he was obviously concentrating hard. One look, and a lump filled her throat.

She’d loved him as a friend for ages now, but feelings had hugely and drastically changed since his car accident. Maybe it was watching him cope with so much pain. Maybe it was all those nights in the hospital, the way he teased her, the way he cheated at cards so she’d win, the way they so easily laughed together.

Somehow she had just never looked at Greg as a man before. She’d seen him as a brainy, overweight nerd, because that was how he’d always made such a point of billing himself. And more privately she’d thought of him as a gentle giant, because that’s how he’d been with her—a neighbor, a friend, a fixer of fuses and a stealer of cookies and an unbeatable listener. She’d seen Greg in lots of roles. All of them wonderful.

But until the accident, she’d just never thought of him as a sexual being. A sexual single male human being.

Rachel wasn’t positive she wanted to see him that way. To risk screwing up the best friendship she’d ever had troubled her. But in the silence of her heart, she couldn’t deny that just being in the same room with him aroused emotions that had never been there before.

“Hey, slugger. You’ve got a doctor’s appointment today. Did you forget?”

Greg didn’t turn his head, didn’t lift his fingers from the keyboard. “I didn’t forget. The appointment’s at one.”

She came up behind him, her hands instinctively molding around his shoulders and neck. As she might have expected, his muscles were all knotted up. No question he’d been sitting here a long time. She started kneading, careful not to touch the bandages wrapped around his head. “And do you know what time it is right now, Stoner?”

“I dunno. Nine? Ten? God, that feels good, don’t stop.”

“It’s noon.” Her fingers dug and probed, trying to relax the knots in his neck. She’d have volunteered such a back rub for any ailing friend—male or female—only Rachel knew it wasn’t the same. Not with him, not anymore.

As if her female hormones had suddenly come awake after a two-year hibernation, she felt conscious of the warmth and scent of his skin, of her sensitized response to everything male about him. And that was wonderful, but also unnerving. She might have missed sex, but she really hadn’t wanted to touch a man in all this time. And because Mark was the only man she’d known—no matter how much he’d hurt her—she’d just never anticipated touching any man intimately but him, either. Now, suddenly, she could imagine all kinds of disastrously wild and inappropriately naked things. With Greg. And once her mind started dripping those ideas, it seemed the leak just kept getting bigger.

“It can’t be noon,” Greg corrected her.

“Yeah, it is—12:02, actually. I don’t know how you could possibly forget a red-letter doctor’s appointment like this one—finally you’re getting those bandages off your face after all this time—”

“I didn’t forget. It’s just I started working after breakfast—”

“And lost track of the time, I know.” The knots had eased, which obliterated the judicious excuse she had for touching him. She dropped her hands. “If you want some company,” she said casually, “I could drive you to the doc’s. Friday’s my home day at work, but I’m all caught up, so taking off a couple hours this afternoon is no problem.”

“Nah. Thanks for offering, Rach, but really, that’d be crazy for you to waste your time sitting in a doctor’s waiting room. There’s no pain or anything like that involved where I’d have trouble driving alone.”

“I know you have some trouble with visibility because of the bandages—”

“Yeah, I do. But it’s just a fifteen minute drive there, and then these confounded bandages are off for good. I’ll be fine, really.” He still hadn’t turned around and faced her, because he was still saving and messing with disks and then exiting the computer.

And she hesitated. If Greg didn’t want her help, then he didn’t. But she was still concerned about his going to this doctor’s visit alone. Even for a man as unvain and totally oblivious to appearances as Greg, this afternoon was a huge traumatic thing.

The plastic surgeon had said over and over that the reconstruction surgeries had been successful...but Greg still really didn’t know what he was going to look like. The doctor had given him computerized pictures approximating his new face, but that was it. Because he never talked about it, Rachel suspected Greg was just being Greg—a man who never thought much about looks. And maybe it was going to be that easy, but she wasn’t convinced anyone could go through a traumatic change of appearance and not feel unsettled. She just wanted to go with him, to be there, to show him positively that she didn’t give a royal damn what he looked like and he’d always be Greg to her.

But now he finished exiting his computer and spun around. “Well, if you aren’t a sight for sore eyes....”

She grinned. Okay, so the jeans were a little baggy and her yellow sweatshirt had seen better days. “I was raking leaves this morning. I think every tree on the block dumped its leaves last night—and mostly in my yard and yours. Actually, I was thinking about raking your leaves after mine—”

“I can do my own.”

“Quit with the pride nonsense, Stoner. Just because you’ve got the cast off your arm doesn’t mean you have any strength yet—either in your arm or your ribs. You’re not up for heavy physical work and you know it. But for the record, I was going to put on a decent sweater if you’d let me drive you to the doc’s office so you wouldn’t be ashamed to be seen with me—”

“I couldn’t be ashamed to be seen with you in this life, Rach.”

Maybe, but she couldn’t talk him into letting her drive him, so she skedaddled home to give him time to get ready and go. She noted him leaving around 12:40 while she was putting together a cheese-and-tomato sandwich for lunch. As of one o’clock, she couldn’t sit—she was too worried about the outcome of this doc’s visit and what Greg might be thinking when the bandages came off—so she yanked on her old barn jacket and headed outside again with a rake.

Her yard was finished by one-thirty, and she unlatched the white rail fence gate into his. Between a century-old walnut and several maple trees in the back, his yard was a sea of apricot and russet leaves—way more than he could possibly handle alone. The leaves crunched and crackled under the pull of her rake. She made little piles. And then bigger piles. And still Greg didn’t come home, not by two o’clock, not by two-thirty.

Her muscles were screaming by then, but how could she leave? If she stopped by later, Greg could think she only wanted a look at his face. As long as she kept raking, she had a legitimate excuse for being here. And finally, just before three, his black Volvo pulled into the driveway. She had already straightened, had already locked a welcome-hello smile on her face, when he climbed out of the car and faced her.

Her intention was absolute. No matter what Greg looked like, she wanted to say the right thing, the supportive thing—whatever it took to make him believe she was natural with his new appearance.

But “Oh my God” slipped out of her mouth before she could stop it. She was prepared for scars. She was prepared for him to look really different. She was prepared for Greg to need some help coping if the physical changes were disturbing.

But the look of his face was still a total and complete shock.