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He was lying on his back, his legs positioned a little awkwardly, as if he’d tried to move them during the night. He opened his eyes, and Dione saw the flare of panic in them. He twitched and tried to sit up, groping at his legs; then he remembered and fell back, his face bleak.
How often did that happen? How often did he wake, not remembering the accident, and panic because he couldn’t move his legs? He wouldn’t do that for very much longer, she determined grimly, going over to sit on the bed beside him.
“Good morning,” she said again.
He didn’t return the greeting. “What time is it?” he snapped.
“About six o’clock, maybe a little earlier.”
“What’re you doing here?”
“Beginning your therapy,” she replied serenely. He was wearing pajamas, she saw, and wondered if he were able to completely dress himself or if someone had to help him.
“No one’s up at this hour,” he grumbled, closing his eyes again.
“I am, and now you are. Come on; we’ve got a lot to do today.” She rolled the wheelchair to the side of the bed and threw the covers back, revealing his pitifully thin legs clad in the pale blue pajamas. His feet were covered with white socks.
He opened his eyes and the anger was there again. “What’re you doing?” he snarled, reaching out an arm to whip the covers back over himself again.
He didn’t want her to see him, but she couldn’t permit any modesty to interfere. Before long she’d be as familiar with his body as she was with her own, and he had to realize that. If he were ashamed of his physical condition, then he’d simply have to work to improve it.
She snatched the covers away again, and with a deft movement scooped his legs around until they were hanging off the side of the bed. “Get up,” she said relentlessly. “Go to the bathroom before we get started. Do you need any help?”
Pure fire sparked from his blue, blue eyes. “No,” he growled, so angry that he could barely speak. “I can go to the bathroom by myself, Mama!”
“I’m not your mother,” she returned. “I’m your therapist, though the two do have a lot in common.”
She held the chair while he levered himself into it; then he shot across the room and was in the adjoining bathroom before she could react. She laughed silently to herself. When she heard the lock click she called out, “Don’t think you can lock yourself in there all morning! I’ll take the door off the hinges if I have to.”
A muffled curse answered her, and she laughed again. This was going to be interesting!
By the time he finally came out she had begun to think she really would have to take the door down. He’d combed his hair and washed his face, but he didn’t look any more pleased with being awake than he had before.
“Do you have any underwear on?” she asked, not making any comment on the length of time he’d spent in the bathroom. He’d timed that very nicely, stalling as long as he could, but coming out just before she did something about it.
Shock froze his features. “What?” he asked.
“Do you have any underwear on?” she repeated.
“What business is it of yours?”
“Because I want your pajamas off. If you don’t have any underwear on, you may want to put on a pair, but it really doesn’t matter to me. I’ve seen naked men before.”
“I’m sure you have,” he muttered snidely. “I have underwear on, but I’m not taking my pajamas off for you.”
“Then don’t. I’ll take them off for you. I think you learned yesterday that I’m strong enough to do it. But those pajamas are coming off, the easy way or the hard way. Which is it?”
“Why do you want them off?” he stalled. “It can’t be so you can admire my build,” he said bitterly.
“You’re right about that,” she said. “You look like a bird. That’s why I’m here; if you didn’t look like a bird, you wouldn’t need me.”
He flushed.
“The pajamas,” she prodded.
Furiously he unbuttoned the shirt and threw it across the room. She could sense that he would have liked to do the same to the bottoms, but they were a bit more difficult to remove. Without a word Dione helped him back onto the bed, then pulled the garment down his thin legs and draped it over the arm of the wheelchair. “On your stomach,” she said, and deftly rolled him over.
“Hey!” he protested, his face smothered in the pillow. He swept the pillow aside. He was shaking with fury.
She popped the elastic waistband of his shorts. “Calm down,” she advised. “This will be painless this morning.”
Her impertinent little gesture made his temper flare so hotly that his entire torso flushed. Smiling at his response, she began to firmly knead his shoulders and back.
He grunted. “Take it easy! I’m not a side of beef!”
She laughed. “How delicate you are!” she mocked. “There’s a reason for this.”
“Like what? Punishment?”
“In a word, circulation. Your circulation is terrible. That’s why your hands are cold, and why you have to wear socks to keep your feet warm, even in bed. I’ll bet they’re icy cold right now, aren’t they?”
Silence was her answer.
“Muscles can’t work without a good blood supply,” she commented.
“I see,” he said sarcastically. “Your magical massage is going to zip me right onto my feet.”
“No way. My magical massage is mere groundwork, and you should learn to like it, because you’re going to be getting a lot of it.”
“God, you’re just loaded down with charm, aren’t you?”
She laughed again. “I’m loaded down with knowledge, and I also come equipped with a thick hide, so you’re wasting your time.” She moved down to his legs; there was no flesh there to massage. She felt as if she were merely moving his skin over his bones, but she kept at it, knowing that the hours and hours of massage that she would give him would eventually pay off. She pulled his socks off and rubbed his limp feet briskly, feeling some of the chill leave his skin.
The minutes passed as she worked in silence. He grunted occasionally in protest when her vigorous fingers were a little too rough. A fine sheen of perspiration began to glow on her face and body.
She shifted him onto his back and gave her attention to his arms and chest and his hollow belly. His ribs stood out white under his skin. He lay with his eyes fixed on the ceiling, his mouth grim.
Dione moved down to his legs again.
“How much longer are you going to keep this up?” he finally asked.
She looked up and checked the time. It had been a little over an hour. “I suppose that’s enough for right now,” she said. “Now we do the exercises.”
She took first one leg, then the other, bending them, forcing his knees up to his chest, repeating the motion over and over. He bore it in silence for about fifteen minutes, then suddenly rolled to a sitting position and shoved her away.
“Stop it!” he shouted, his face drawn. “My God, woman, do you have to keep on and on? It’s a waste of time! Just leave me alone!”
She regarded him in amazement. “What do you mean, ‘a waste of time’? I’ve just started. Did you really expect to see a difference in an hour?”
“I don’t like being handled like so much putty!”
She shrugged, hiding a smile. “It’s almost seven-thirty anyway. Your breakfast will be ready. I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry.”
“I’m not hungry,” he said, and then a startled look crossed his face and she knew that he’d just realized that he was hungry, probably for the first time in months. She helped him to dress, though her aid managed to send him off into a black temper again. He was as sullen as a child when they entered the elevator that had been installed especially for him.
But the sullenness fled when he saw what was on his plate. Watching him, Dione had to bite her lip to keep from laughing aloud. First horror, then outrage contorted his features. “What’s that mess?” he roared.
“Oh, don’t worry,” she said casually. “That’s not all you’re getting, but that’s what you’ll start off with. Those are vitamins,” she added in a helpful tone.
They could have been snakes from the way he was staring at them. She had to admit that the collection was a little impressive. Alberta had counted them out exactly as Dione had instructed, and she knew that there were nineteen pills.
“I’m not taking them!”
“You’re taking them. You need them. You’ll need them even more after a few days of therapy. Besides, you don’t get anything to eat until after you’ve taken them.”
He wasn’t a good loser. He snatched them up and swallowed them several at a time, washing them down with gulps of water. “There,” he snarled. “I’ve taken the damned things.”
“Thank you,” she said gravely.
Alberta had evidently been listening, because she promptly entered with their breakfast trays. He looked at his grapefruit half, whole wheat toast, eggs, bacon and milk as if it were slop. “I want a blueberry waffle,” he said.
“Sorry,” Dione said. “That’s not on your diet. Too sweet. Eat your grapefruit.”
“I hate grapefruit.”
“You need the vitamin C.”
“I just took a year’s supply of vitamin C!”
“Look,” she said sweetly, “this is your breakfast. Eat it or do without. You’re not getting a blueberry waffle.”
He threw it at her.
She’d been expecting something like that, and ducked gracefully. The plate crashed against the wall. She collapsed against the table, the laughter that she’d been holding in all morning finally bursting out of her in great whoops. His hair was practically standing on end, he was so angry. He was beautiful! His cobalt blue eyes were as vivid as sapphires; his face was alive with color.
As dignified as a queen, Alberta marched out of the kitchen with an identical tray and set it before him. “She said you’d probably throw the first one,” she said without inflection.
Knowing that he’d acted exactly as Dione had predicted made him even angrier, but now he was stymied. He didn’t know what to do, afraid that whatever he did, she would have anticipated it. Finally he did nothing. He ate silently, pushing the food into his mouth with determined movements, then balked again at the milk.
“I can’t stand milk. Surely coffee can’t hurt!”
“It won’t hurt, but it won’t help, either. Let’s make a deal,” she offered. “Drink the milk, which you need for the calcium, and then you can have coffee.”
He took a deep breath and drained the milk glass.
Alberta brought in coffee. The remainder of the meal passed in relative peace. Angela Quincy, Alberta’s stepdaughter, came in to clear the mess that Blake had made with his first breakfast, and he looked a little embarrassed.
Angela, in her way, was as much of an enigma as Alberta was. She showed her age, unlike Alberta; she was about fifty, as soft and cuddly as Alberta was lean and angular. She was very pretty, could even have been called beautiful, despite the wrinkling of her skin. She was the most serene person Dione had ever seen. Her hair was brown, liberally streaked with gray, and her eyes were a soft, tranquil brown. She had once been engaged, Dione would learn later, but the man had died, and Angela still wore the engagement ring he’d given her so many years before.
She wasn’t disturbed at all by having to clean egg off the wall, though Blake became increasingly restless as she worked. Dione leisurely finished her meal, then laid her napkin aside.
“Time for more exercises,” she announced.
“No!” he roared. “I’ve had enough for today! A little of you goes a long way, lady!”
“Please, call me Dione,” she murmured.
“I don’t want to call you anything! My God, would you just leave me alone!”
“Of course I will, when my job is finished. I can’t let you ruin my record of successful cases, can I?”
“Do you know what you can do with your successful record?” he snarled, sending the chair jerking backward. He jabbed the forward button. “I don’t want to see your face again!” he shouted as the chair rolled out of the room.
She sighed and lifted her shoulders helplessly when her eyes met Angela’s philosophic gaze. Angela smiled, but didn’t say anything. Alberta wasn’t talkative, and Angela was even less so. Dione imagined that when the two of them were together, the silence was deafening.
When she thought that Blake had had enough time to get over his tantrum, she went upstairs to begin again. It would probably be a waste of time to try his door, so she entered her room and went straight through to the gallery. She tapped on the sliding glass doors in his room, then opened them and stepped in.
He regarded her broodingly from his chair. Dione went to him and placed her hand on his shoulder. “I know it’s difficult,” she said softly. “I can’t promise you that any of this will be easy. Try to trust me; I really am good at my job, and at the very worst you’ll still be in much better health than you are now.”
“If I can’t walk, why should I care about my health?” he asked tightly. “Do you think I want to live like this? I would rather have died outright on that cliff than have gone through these past two years.”
“Have you always given up so easily?”
“Easily!” His head jerked. “You don’t know anything about it! You don’t know what it was like—”
“I can tell you what it wasn’t like,” she interrupted. “I can tell you that you’ve never looked down at where your legs used to be and seen only flat sheet. You’ve never had to type by punching the keys with a pencil held in your teeth because you’re paralyzed from the neck down. I’ve seen a lot of people who are a lot worse off than you. You’re going to walk again, because I’m going to make you.”
“I don’t want to hear about how bad other people have it! They’re not me! My life is my own, and I know what I want out of it, and what I can’t…what I won’t accept.”
“Work? Effort? Pain?” she prodded. “Mr. Remington, Richard has told me a great deal about you. You lived life to the fullest. If there were even the slimmest chance that you could do all of that again, would you go for it?”
He sighed, his face unutterably weary. “I don’t know. If I really thought there was a chance…but I don’t. I can’t walk, Miss Kelley. I can’t move my legs at all.”
“I know. You can’t expect to move them right now. I’ll have to retrain your nerve impulses before you’ll be able to move them. It’ll take several months, and I can’t promise that you won’t limp, but you will walk again…if you cooperate with me. So, Mr. Remington, shall we get started again on those exercises?”
Chapter Three
He submitted to the exercises with ill grace, but that didn’t bother her as long as he cooperated at all. His muscles didn’t know that he lay there scowling the entire time; the movement, the stimulation, were what counted. Dione worked tirelessly, alternating between exercising his legs and massaging his entire body. It was almost ten-thirty when she heard the noise that she’d been unconsciously listening for all morning: the tapping of Serena’s heels. She lifted her head, and then Blake heard it, too. “No!” he said hoarsely. “Don’t let her see me like this!”
“All right,” she said calmly, flipping the sheet up to cover him. Then she walked to the door and stepped into the hallway, blocking Serena’s way as she started to enter Blake’s room.
Serena gave her a startled look. “Is Blake awake? I was just going to peek in; he usually doesn’t get up until about noon.”
No wonder he’d been so upset when I got him up at six! Dione thought, amused. To Serena she said blandly, “I’m giving him his exercises now.”
“So early?” Serena’s brows arched in amazement. “Well, I’m certain you’ve done enough for the day. Since he’s awake early he’ll be ready for his breakfast. He eats so badly. I don’t want him to miss any meals. I’ll go in and see what he’d like—”
As Serena moved around Dione to enter Blake’s bedroom, Dione deftly sidestepped until she once more blocked the door. “I’m sorry,” she said as gently as possible when Serena stared at her in disbelief. “He’s already had his breakfast. I’ve put him on a schedule, and it’s important that he stay on it. After another hour of exercise we’ll come downstairs for lunch, if you’d like to wait until then.”
