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“Thank you. Thank you for being my friend. I’m glad it was you on call that night.”
His smile was achingly endearing. “Just doing my job, ma’am.”
“And I’m just doing mine, so don’t forget about that donation,” she reminded him, with another of those practiced smiles that she knew could charm him out of a generous contribution.
“The check’s in the mail,” he promised with a shake of his head, then chuckled when her playfully muttered, “Oh, I’ve heard that one before,” chased him out the door.
Helena watched the door close slowly behind him. Alone, she let down her guard, dropped all pretense of bravery and hung her head like the coward she feared she’d become.
She’d said all the right things, made all the right noises. While Justin wasn’t altogether convinced that she was all right, she felt she had convinced him that after spending most of January and all of February in the burn unit, she was bursting to get out of here.
The truth was that the thought of leaving terrified her. Yes, the isolation had been, in some ways, like a prison—but it had also been a refuge. As long as she was here, she didn’t have to face the public. She didn’t have to face the press.
As long as she was here, she didn’t have to face the fact that she had left the world a whole, perfect person—and that she would be returning to it profoundly diminished.
A few minutes later, a light rap on the door brought Helena’s head up from the simple task of buttoning her blouse. At any rate it used to be simple. Now, getting any assistance from her left hand was an exercise in pain and frustration.
Squeezing her eyes tightly, she composed herself. These resurgent and pathetic bouts of self-pity simply had to stop.
“Please come in,” she called cheerily. “I’m decent. At least I’m getting there. Although you might find the air in here a bit blue.”
When Anna von Oberland-Hunt walked into the room, Helena manufactured a sheepish grin for the elegant princess.
“You know, Anna, when I was a little girl, my mother was always threatening to ship me off to Australia to some obscure penal colony for foul-mouthed little hellions.” She gave a self-deprecating shrug. “I’m thinking, in retrospect, it might not have been a bad plan. No doubt, if she’d been here just before you arrived, she’d have thought she should have followed through and sent me packing.”
“If she were here,” Anna said gently, “she would have offered to help. I’m a poor substitute, but if there’s anything I can do, just say the word.”
Helena shook her head to combat the renewed threat of tears that Anna’s kindness fostered. “It’s these cursed buttons.” She sighed in exasperation. “It’s rather like starting from scratch, isn’t it? One two, buckle my shoe…three four, what’d they invent these blasted buttons for?”
“I’m so sorry, Helena. I should have thought of that when I selected your clothes.”
“Oh, please. I already feel that I’ve taken horrible advantage of you. Don’t make me feel worse by apologizing for your kindness.”
A look that passed between them underscored Helena’s gratitude for all that Anna and Greg had done—right down to retrieving her luggage from the authorities and selecting lingerie in the form of camisoles and teddies so she wouldn’t have to deal with the impossible task of wrestling with a bra. Hooks, and now it seemed buttons, were currently beyond her.
Yes, she owed Anna and Gregory Hunt. The invitation they’d extended for her to stay with them was one she appreciated for both its kindness and its diplomacy. Given the strained relations between Anna’s homeland of Obersbourg and Helena’s of Asterland—a result of Helena’s late cousin Ivan Striksky’s disgraceful and failed plot to force the princess to marry him—their offer was generous beyond measure.
“It looks like you could use a little help right now,” Anna offered kindly.
“A lot is more like it,” Helena admitted. “And I’m past being too proud to accept it until I can manage better on my own.”
If she could ever manage better. Tears welled up again. She blinked them back. Damn and blast it. She’d begun to think that someone had surgically removed her spine when she was under anesthetic. Worse even than dealing with her new limitations was fighting this crippling depression. She would not give in to it.
She met the princess’s eyes as Anna made quick work of the pearl buttons on the dove-gray silk blouse that matched Helena’s slacks. Not for the first time, she admired Anna’s beauty and grace. She thought of the times that their paths had crossed. Theirs had been a passing acquaintance even though she’d often thought they would make fine friends. Now she was sure of it.
“I hope I won’t have to impose on you for much more than a month. I need to stay close to the medical complex until the graft is more stable. Then, there’s this pesky thing.” She tapped the temporary boot cast that was nearly hidden beneath her loose-legged slacks. “This, at least I can walk in and remove from time to time until I lose it for good.”
“You have something major to look forward to then.”
“Truth to tell,” Helena confessed, needing to take the focus away from herself, “I am so looking forward to seeing Casa Royale. An honest-to-goodness Texas ranch. How exciting.” Rallying another smile for Anna’s benefit, she confided with a teasing lift of a brow, “This cowboy thing is…well, it’s fascinating, isn’t it?”
Another rap sounded on the door.
“Ladies?” a deep masculine voice intoned. “How are we doing in there?”
Helena’s eyes were twinkling when they met Anna’s. “Speaking of fascinating…”
Helena laughed when Anna answered her wicked grin with one of her own.
“Actually, we could use your help, Gregory.” Anna eyed Helena’s wheelchair with a dubious scowl as her husband walked into the room. “I’m not sure how to make this thing work. Or for that matter, how to get you into it, Helena.”
“That part, I can manage,” Helena assured them, then proved it by easing carefully off the bed. In halting steps, she maneuvered into the chair.
Greg Hunt was quick to kneel down in front of her, support her cast and adjust the leg and foot brace on the chair.
“Goodness, you’re very good at that dropping to one knee business.” Helena’s eyes sparkled as she watched his dark head bent over her leg. “Makes one wonder if Anna pulls rank on occasion and has you kneeling to the crown.”
A totally male, totally engaging grin stole across his darkly handsome face. “A loyal subject always knows when to step and when to fetch where the princess is concerned.”
Anna looked from Greg to Helena and back to Greg. She smiled sweetly. “Having fun?”
“Always, darling.” He stood and dropped a kiss full of promises on her brow then turned back to Helena, who was quietly envying the love they shared. “All set?”
“Absolutely.” Helena told herself it wasn’t a lie. She was ready to do this, and she held on to that belief right up until a racket in the hallway had them all turning their heads.
Greg strode swiftly to the door and looked outside. He turned back with a scowl. “Looks like it’s show time. The press are on the floor—and they’re salivating.”
Helena had been anticipating this. She’d been preparing for it. And she’d thought she was ready. Her racing heart said she wasn’t. The rush of dizziness confirmed it.
The press had tried to feed on her for her entire life. She’d always known how to handle them, had always maintained control. She’d treated them like the predators they were, using her looks to hold them at bay as a lion tamer used a whip and chair.
In a stunning moment of truth, she realized that no matter what she’d thought she could do, she couldn’t hold them off now. Not in this condition. She most definitely could not control them. She wasn’t that strong. To her mortification, she realized that she wasn’t that brave. Without her full arsenal to draw from, they would rip her to shreds.
She met Greg’s eyes, determined he’d see neither her shame nor her fear as the noise in the hall escalated to an electric buzz in anticipation of the feeding frenzy she knew it would become.
“You know,” she said, drawing on her reserves to keep her voice steady, “I really don’t think I want to do this today. It’s so pedestrian and, well, tacky—this spectacle they would make of something as uneventful as my release from the hospital.”
Greg and Anna exchanged a concerned glance.
“I mean—can’t we just make them go away somehow?” she suggested with a regal calmness her racing heart worked to undercut.
Her breath caught when the door swung open, and it suddenly seemed it was going to happen with or without her permission. She steeled herself, closed her eyes, and waited for the first verbal blow to land.
Instead of a chorus of demanding voices, one voice—a gruffly velvet, Texas drawl—rang out, clear, composed, and in total control. “It seems we’ve got a situation out here.”
If possible, her heartbeat quickened, not with fear but with relief as she looked up and into a pair of forest-green eyes that burned so furiously and so fiercely that she would have flinched if she hadn’t recognized them.
It was Matthew Walker. Her tall, green-eyed Texan. On the heels of that shock, came another. Neither her memory nor her dreams had done justice to this magnificent man in a silver-gray Stetson, slim dark slacks and crisp white shirt who had just burst back into her life like an avenging angel intent on slaying Lucifer himself if he had to.
He glanced first at Anna then at Greg before his gaze settled, with grim intensity, on her.
She didn’t stop to ask him why he was here. Didn’t think to question whether it was odd or out of the ordinary. She only knew that he’d come. And because he’d come, she knew that everything would be all right.
“Well,” she said, praying that neither her relief nor her panic affected her voice, “it would seem the cavalry has arrived. How wonderfully John Wayne of you.” Like her tone, her smile was carefully contrived to convince everyone—including herself—that this was all one grand adventure. “So tell me, darling, how, exactly, do you intend to save the day?”
Three
The quick plan Matt had hatched to get Helena out of the hospital without being bombarded by the press was simple and effective—if reliant on a little sleight of hand. After pressing the call button to summon a nurse—who, upon hearing him out, was not only game but also excited by the prospect of a little intrigue involving a princess and the daughter of an earl—they set it in motion.
As expected, when the door to Helena’s hospital room opened and Greg, with Anna by his side carrying Helena’s overnight bag, wheeled the chair out into the hall, the paparazzi swarmed like piranhas around the woman bundled from head to toe in a hooded bathrobe.
Inside the room, Matt and Helena listened to the commotion. Matt watched her face and told himself he wasn’t indulging in the look of her after a month of watching her from a distance. As he’d intended, she’d never been aware that he’d been standing guard. Just as she hadn’t needed the extra stress of knowing she faced a potential threat added to her already difficult recovery, he hadn’t needed the complications that getting to know her better would surely bring.
From the moment he’d met her, his physical reaction to her had been far too intense. His interest, much too strong. Just because he was finally face-to-face with her, just because her eyes were a deeper shade of blue than he’d remembered, the silk of her hair as lustrous as spun gold, her face and body the epitome of a heroine in a romantic novel, it didn’t mean he was going to change his game plan now.
All he had to do was get her safely away from the hospital, settle her at the Hunts under the 24/7 guard he’d arranged, and he’d be back to business as usual. And yet, he couldn’t take his eyes off her.
She said nothing as she sat on the edge of the bed, but the tight set of those beautiful full lips betrayed her tension. The solemn-eyed intensity of her gaze, never wavering from the closed door, spoke volumes about nerves that were strung drum-tight as the reporters’ voices reached them from the hall.
“Lady Helena! Look up! Lady Helena! Over here! Give us a smile for the public who wants to know how you are.”
She flinched at the sound of her name, and he couldn’t help it. He reached out. Touched a hand to her shoulder, gave it a reassuring squeeze as Greg’s voice boomed down the hall.
“Back off, Herkner,” Greg growled at the reporter from the American Investigator, a sleazy tabloid that put the other rags to shame in the exploitation department. “Give the lady a break. And give the other patients on the floor a break, too. Let us get her out of the building and she’ll give you a few words and a chance to shoot some photos.
“Or don’t back off,” Greg baited, the dare in his voice unmistakable, “and we’ll let the ER docs practice a little triage on your ugly face. Your call, of course.”
Matt looked toward the closed door, very much aware of the history between Willis Herkner and Greg Hunt. The reporter had hounded Anna during the Striksky affair. Obviously, Greg held a grudge. More obviously, Herkner was hamburger if he tested those particular waters.
When the racket quieted to a hushed din, telling Matt his plan was working and Greg and Anna were leading the press from the floor, he turned back to Helena.
She was pale and shaken and trying valiantly to keep herself together.
He hunkered down in front of her. “Hey…you okay?”
She worked over-hard to gather her composure and grace him with a look that tried to make a lie of the fact that she was far from all right. “Of course, darling,” she said in that cool, regal tone that dismissed his concern as unnecessary. “It’s just such a bother, isn’t it?”
“And then some,” he agreed, trying to get a read on her, knowing there was more going on behind those brilliant blue eyes than she wanted him to see.
“Look,” she said, all starch and breeding and a bit of impatient prima donna that didn’t quite ring true, “I don’t know why you’re here. And frankly, I don’t care. Just get me out of here. Please,” she added with enough entreaty that he knew she wasn’t as blasé about all of this as she’d like him to think.
He tipped his fingers to his hat brim and because he felt she needed one, he gave her a reassuring smile. “At your service, my lady.”
She smiled then, too. A real smile, not one he suspected she’d used on the public to hide everything from boredom to pain to fear.
“What’s next?” she asked after a steadying breath.
“What’s next is that we sneak you out the rear entrance without catching anyone’s attention.”
And that was going to be no easy feat. He’d been afraid that her release would come to this. The media circus it created wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was that her visibility increased her vulnerability. He wasn’t about to give anyone but the people he trusted access to her.
All he needed to do was transport her safely out of the hospital and deliver her to the Hunts. Greg was a fellow Cattleman’s Club member and Matt knew she’d be safe with him and Anna at their ranch until the mystery behind the jewel theft and Riley’s murder was cleared up, and he was certain she was out of danger.
She’d also be out of his line of sight at the Hunts’. Maybe then, she’d be out of his mind, too. Right, and a cactus didn’t have needles. Regardless of where she was in proximity to where he was, he was afraid he’d be seeing those big baby blues for a long time to come.
He drew a deep breath, got back to business. They had to get moving. He eyed her cast. “Can you walk in that thing?”
“I suppose that would depend on your definition of walk. Hobble might better describe it,” she admitted with something close to an apology in her eyes.
He stood. “Hobble’s not going to cut it, I’m afraid.” He scrubbed a palm over his jaw, gave her a considering once-over. “So we improvise.”
Careful of her injuries, he scooped her from the bed and into his arms. She felt good there. Too good. So good, he knew he had to do something to get his mind off the sudden, unplanned intimacy.
“Whoa,” he teased and settled her more securely against his chest. “Not exactly a featherweight, are you?”
Actually she was a sleek and silky armful. His heart kicked into overdrive—not so much from the exertion as from the softness of her breast snuggled hot and full against his chest. It was not the reaction of choice, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to dwell on it. What he was going to do was make the lady relax. Another one of those smiles wouldn’t be too tough to take either.
With staged effort, he shifted her higher in his arms and made a big show of being staggered by her slight weight.
“It’s the cast,” she assured him with a tight little scowl and looped her left arm around his neck. “And the case,” she added, referring to the clear plastic case she cradled in her lap that appeared to be filled with the home-going medical supplies.
He grunted for good measure. “If you say so.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake, get over it. I thought you cowboy types were supposed to be big and strong and well…heroic.” She glared down that titled little nose of hers in such a regal, aristocratic attempt to look huffy it was all he could do not to laugh.
“Begging your pardon, Lady Helena, but I’ve bulldogged steers that weighed less than you.”
She forced a tight smile, but her eyes held absolutely no trace of amusement. “That just makes my day, doesn’t it? I’ve been compared to a lot of things but never livestock. How charming.”
He grinned, but, still aware that she was far more nervous about this business than she was letting on, made sure she understood she could count on him. “It’s going to be all right. You can trust me, okay?”
When those expressive eyes held his gaze, and she softly murmured, “I do,” a long-repressed Tarzan gene made him want to beat his chest and carry her off to some vine-covered treetop hideaway. Since, for more reasons than one, that wasn’t an option, he gave her a quick wink instead and headed for the door.
The hall was devoid of reporters as they slipped cautiously out of the room. He shook off the floor nurse’s offer of another wheelchair and carried Helena to the bank of elevators marked Staff Only. Once at ground level, he negotiated a series of twists and turns as he carried her through the hallways to the rear exit.
“You seem to be rather good at this skulking business.” She tightened her arm around his neck. “Makes one wonder if there might be a bit of a shady past one might need to get a bit nervous about.”
He ignored the warmth of her, the woman scent of her and concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. “Old American saying—One shouldn’t look a gift rescuer in the mouth.”
She gave a delicate little sniff. “Oh, by all means, rescue away. You’ll get no resistance from me.”
He smiled. “Here’s where we see just how good a sleuth I really am.” He rounded the last corner and the rear exit came into sight. “It’s show time. Cross your fingers, countess. We’re going to make a run for it.”
“I’m not a countess,” she said breathlessly as he shouldered through the revolving door and sprinted down the steps.
“Close enough.” He looked both ways and made a break for the parking lot. “My pocket,” he said, striding along the asphalt. “See if you can fish my keys out of my pocket.”
Bad idea, he realized belatedly as her small, seeking right hand stole down, felt around for his trouser pocket opening and finally slipped inside. He suppressed a groan as the warmth of her fingers connected with his hip, then his thigh, then, oblivious to what she was doing to him, accidentally brushed something else that threatened to stand at immediate attention.
