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What did he look like now, beyond the blurred, broad-shouldered silhouette she’d been able to glimpse?
She had a sudden, powerful shaft of memory, from the first time they’d met, six years ago, and for a few blessed moments, the memory managed to override the migraine.
In her mind, she was back in the E.R., examining a child complaining of stomach pain, adding up the symptoms and thinking it didn’t look good. Even though the pediatric E.R. beds were in a separate area from the general beds, she could still hear the commotion nearby. A detoxing addict had turned abusive and violent. This one was apparently stronger and more persistent than most.
She finished her exam, and promised the parents that the senior doctor would be there soon to order some tests, then she left to return to the pediatric medical floor on level six …
And there was Daniel, strong-shouldered and intentionally intimidating in his uniform, responding to a call for security. She passed him just as he reached the knot of people caught up in the addict’s drama—passed him close enough to almost brush his arm, which was flexed big and hard beneath the dark gray shirt. Close enough to see the control and determination in his face.
Some security guards didn’t look like that. They looked as if they enjoyed the prospect of wielding power and force a little too much. They practically grinned in anticipation as they approached a potentially violent scene. Daniel, in contrast, seemed calm, businesslike, implacable.
Incredibly good-looking, too, in a way she didn’t usually notice, with his angular features and well-shaped head, close-cut dark hair and matching stubble, deep-set black eyes and powerful size. Until that point, she’d always gone for very smart, cerebral men, liking their intellect before she noticed their body.
Daniel was different, that first day and every day afterward.
Daniel was so, so utterly different from Kyle, the ex-husband whose last name she’d still been using back then. She was powerfully aware of it from the very first moment, when he glanced sideways at her and then ahead to the scene that awaited him.
She couldn’t help the turn of her head in his direction, couldn’t miss the moment when their eyes met, heard him say to the addict a moment later, “We’re done here,” and then that was it. She reached the swing door that led out of the E.R., pushed it open and left. The backward swing of the door blocked out sound and sight. She never learned the aftermath of the addict’s behavior, and the child with stomach pain turned out to have leukemia, which eventually went into remission and then cure.
Her first sight of Daniel Porter was the thing that stayed with her, and she must have given something away in her face or her body language … She must have been more naked than she knew. Because he began to smile at her when they passed each other in a corridor or met up at a desk. Soon, he was saying hi and pausing to talk.
The conversations grew longer, and he didn’t seem in a hurry to bring them to an end, even though the subject matter was usually pretty trivial and sometimes he seemed to find talking a challenge or an effort, and then one day—
Yeah.
A drink. A meal. Bed.
She was so horribly on the rebound at that point, from the ugly unraveling of her marriage. Kyle had remarried so quickly, it had felt like a studied act of revenge. Maybe it was. Kyle was like that. She would never have taken him back, and she wondered about the new wife, but still her emotions from the breakup were raw.
Maybe the reason she’d responded to Daniel so strongly was purely that he seemed so polar opposite to her ex, in so many ways.
But you couldn’t make a relationship work when it was based on choosing the opposite to what you’d had before. And with the painful timing, it could never have worked with Daniel, no matter what kind of a man he’d been. They’d both been crazy even to try.
Chapter Three
Was Scarlett asleep?
Daniel wasn’t sure.
She hadn’t moved or spoken for a while now, and her breathing was very even. It was almost three o’clock, and Andy should be back with the prescription pain medication any minute. The TV was spewing out another crime show rerun. He preferred hospital shows for when he needed to unwind in front of a screen.
There was a symmetry about it, he realized. Scarlett was a doctor and liked TV crime. He was a cop and liked TV medicine. Neither of them wanted to revisit their working environment in their time off.
Healthy.
Something in common, too, in an upside-down kind of way.
Only problem was that this particular TV crime show was killing him with its implausibility.
He tried to find in Scarlett’s face and body the same woman he’d known six years ago, but couldn’t, and maybe that was good. She’d been quite defiantly blonde back then. Now her hair color was a natural golden brunette, but that wasn’t the biggest difference.
Where were the big, liquid, intelligent brandy-brown eyes and the sensitive, full-lipped mouth? The softness and curves? Lost in fatigue and stress and weight loss and pain. He’d eventually recognized her, but only just, and even now he couldn’t put his finger on what had finally clicked. Not her voice.
Something harder to define.
Something—and this appalled him, when you got down to it—that had its source in his memories of her body when they’d made love. The way she’d closed her eyes and surrendered so totally to the moment. The way she’d moved. The way she’d been possessed by the strength of their physical connection to the same degree she was now possessed by the blurred vision and pain.
They’d only been involved for a few weeks, but he hadn’t known sex like it before or since.
He hadn’t known certainty like it before or since, either.
Hell, what kind of an admission was that? What did it say about his life? Was this why he hadn’t said anything to her about their past acquaintance? Because he was afraid that his memories of their time in bed, and his memories of how she’d made him feel, would color his voice and she would hear it? Because if they talked about the past, then she might guess how much he’d never gotten her out from under his skin?
How could you say a calm, casual, “Remember me?” in a situation like this?
Better—way better—to let it go and say nothing.
For now, at least.
Scarlett began to feel human again when the stronger pain medication kicked in at around six o’clock. Andy had brought the pharmacy bag into the house, grabbed his overnight bag and left for the city almost at once. After she’d taken the medication, Daniel had left for the store, and now she could hear that he was back. He still had the key from under the flowerpot, and when he let himself back in the house, she heard the rustle of the shopping bags.
He closed the door behind her, put down the bags and came through into the living room, to Scarlett’s couch. “What can I do for you next?” He sounded like a cop, again. Voice deep and clipped. No words wasted. No hesitation or doubt.
“Find another crime show before I murder one of those designers …”
He didn’t laugh. Well, okay, she wasn’t being that funny. Humor was all in the timing, and hers had disappeared along with her vision. She heard him pick up the remote and start channel surfing, stopping at the first show he came to. She listened to it for a moment, then they both spoke at the same time.
“Sorry, I can’t handle—” from her.
From him, “Sorry, do you mind if we—?”
“Please,” she agreed. “Switch.”
“Sitcom?”
“One with an audience, not canned.”
“Let’s see what we have here … And then can I heat you some soup?”
“Please.”
She managed to sit and sip soup from a mug, in between bites of toast that Daniel had rested on a paper napkin, and when she opened her eyes the multiple images had resolved down to two, the blurriness was lessened and the light didn’t hurt anymore. She still couldn’t see clearly, but the progress felt good.
Daniel came and took the empty mug from her hands without her having to ask.
“Thanks. I’m feeling a lot better, painwise, even if the vision still isn’t that great.”
“You’re looking better. Way better color.”
“The soup really helped.”
“I can heat you some more.”
“Actually, yes, another mug.”
“More toast, too?”
“Please. It’s really settling my stomach. How come you’re so good at this?” she blurted out.
There came a long beat of silence, then, on a reluctant growl, “My mom was sick for a long time. From when I was a kid.”
A shock ran through her. He’d never told her that, six years ago. Never once. Not hinted at it, or—
Nothing.
She’d worked out that he’d had a challenging history—well, he’d ended up rubbing her face in it, with deliberate anger—but she hadn’t known about his mom. He’d never told her enough about anything, back then, and it shocked her that he hadn’t breathed a word about something this huge.
“She died a few months ago,” Daniel added, in answer to the question Scarlett hadn’t found a way to ask. “It was a good thing, by that point. She was glad to go.”
She apologized awkwardly, as if it was her fault that she hadn’t known. Maybe it was. Maybe he would have told her about his mom’s illness when they’d come up here, if—
Yeah. If a few things.
If she hadn’t been so obviously on the rebound. If her ex hadn’t left her with so much emotional baggage. If she hadn’t been so scared of the strength of her physical response to Daniel, when her whole life her bright mind was the thing she’d been taught to rely on. If she’d had more trust—because she hadn’t trusted even the good things about him, back then, let alone the obvious differences between them.
And if they hadn’t spent so much of their short time together in bed.
“It’s okay,” he said, and the words covered all sorts of bases, and allowed them both to let the subject go.
Silence wasn’t comfortable, though. She scrabbled around in her woolly mind for something to say, but Daniel managed it first. Very polite. “Your brother has done up the house great.”
“It’s gorgeous, isn’t it? He didn’t do all of it. The previous owner had made a good start. I’ve seen some photos from the 1970s when it was a dump. Badly subdivided, with cheap paneling everywhere, and dark brown paint with mustard-yellow appliances and flooring.”
“I remember that kind of color scheme. Actually our refrigerator was avocado-green.”
“You’re not that old!”
He laughed. “Some people don’t manage to buy a new appliance or repaint a room for quite a while after the fashions change.”
“True.” She held her breath. It was the kind of conversation topic that would have deteriorated into an argument six years ago, hinging on his underprivileged background—living with bad paint—and her well-paved path through life—regularly updated decor. She would have said too much, made it all too complicated, while he would have said barely anything at all, but with a sense that there was enormous emotion lying underneath.
Would he turn it into an argument now? Or one of the white-hot, simmering silences she’d hated?
After a moment, he laughed again. “Funny how you can turn memories around.”
“Yeah?”
“I hated those paint colors when I was a kid. Now they’re an anecdote. A war story.”
“Kids today think they have it tough,” she mimicked. “We had to live with avocado-colored refrigerators.”
“What is it they say? What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
“It surely does!”
They talked a little more, never openly confronting the fact that they knew each other, but letting it say itself in a reference here and there. Daniel held himself back, the way he always had. Scarlett gave a little more, and felt a zing of triumph every time she got something from him in return.
She thought that they couldn’t have related to each other like this in any other situation. It was only happening because she couldn’t see, because he’d had to help her, and because there had been that first ten or fifteen minutes when it wasn’t clear whether they both realized that they’d met before.
After a while, the conversation petered out in a natural kind of way. They watched—or in her case listened to—TV in silence, while she measured the passage of time in sitcom units and listened to Daniel’s occasional gruff gurgle of laughter.
She liked it when he laughed. It was a warm and very physical sound, reassuring and hopeful. Laughter created companionship every bit as much as conversation. Maybe more. She laughed along with him a couple of times, and his laugh touched her like a soft blanket or the palm of a comforting hand. She wished the sitcoms were funnier, so that the laugh would come more often.
Four and a half of them went by, which meant that it must be around nine. They’d spent most of an evening together and barely said a word, and yet she felt her emotions settling to a deeper place, a better place than she would have thought possible, with regard to this man.
For the past six years she’d felt a churn of uncomfortable memories and feelings any time she thought of him. She’d second-guessed everything she’d said and done, and everything he’d done, too. Maybe she hadn’t needed to feel that way. Maybe none of it had been as bad as she’d thought, on either side.
Well, huh.
She let the thought sit, didn’t know what she wanted to do about it.
Time for more medication, and the bed awaiting her upstairs. He brought the pills to her, with a glass of water, and she gulped them down. From experience, she knew that it didn’t do to let the pain take hold again between doses. The medication was most effective if she stayed strictly to the four-hour interval.
“Thanks, Daniel.”
“No problem. Going up now?”
“That’s the plan.” She stood.
And swayed.
Light-headed rather than actively dizzy, maybe because she’d been lying down for so long.
Daniel was there almost at once, grabbing her by the elbows and then, in case this wasn’t enough, stepping right up to her so she could grasp two fistfuls of his shirt and lean her weight into his chest. When she took a staggering step sideways, he kept her on her feet, and then the lightheadedness subsided and she felt almost normal, apart from her sight.
He put his arm around her waist and engulfed her hand in his and it felt good, even though she couldn’t even see him, she had no idea what he really looked like now. Not in detail. If he had lines starting to form around his eyes and mouth, or if his hairline was receding, but he felt so good, and he smelled so good, too, like sandalwood and mint and clean laundry.
“I could make you a bed on the couch, if it’s too hard for you to get upstairs,” he said.
“I want a real bed. It’s worth going up for.”
“Yeah, a real bed is always good.”
The words dropped into the air and seemed to hang there. She remembered the big, puffy four-poster at the bed-and-breakfast. She remembered the bunk bed in the doctors’ on-call room at the hospital, when Daniel had wedged a chair under the handle of the door.
She remembered her own bed at home in her parents’ Manhattan apartment. She’d gone back there to live after her separation from Kyle and had stayed on there through her demanding internship year, until she had more time to find the right place on her own.
Mom and Dad had been away for the weekend. Daniel had looked around at the high ceilings, the oil paintings on the walls, the windows with a distant view of Central Park, and couldn’t hide that this level of privilege was new to him and troubled him. What did it say about their differences?
