The Bewildered Wife

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“Daddy, it’s just like Mommy,” Chelsea said.

He closed his eyes, wishing very much that she wouldn’t say that. He had worked so hard to get on with his life.

“You’re just saying that because it’s a storm, just like on…that night.”

“No, Daddy,” Chelsea said. “I’m saying that because…because she’s dead.”

Dean dropped the phone and leapt across the table, making the receptionist’s desk in the lobby in four seconds.

“Fire department will be out there in ten minutes,” Mrs. Witherspoon cried out to his shadow.

“Not soon enough,” he muttered.

He punched the elevator button with his fist, then decided to take the stairs. He hit the parking lot in less than a minute, leapt into his midnight-colored Porsche and skidded out onto the street.

Chelsea was so right, he thought, as he sped down the rain-soaked streets of Chicago. It was just like that long-ago night of violent tempers and recriminations. He remembered driving home, angered at…Well, those memories were too painful to go over.

He reached the house before the fire trucks—although, to their credit, he could hear the sirens from a distance.

He screeched to a halt at the point where the circular drive met the front colonnade. His three children cowered just inside the door.

“Are you all right?” he demanded, taking the steps three at a time and yanking open the beveled glass door.

“We’re all right.” Chelsea gulped. “It’s…it’s Susan.”

Though he wanted to pick up a howling Edward, to smooth Henry’s trembling lip, to brush away Chelsea’s tears, he knew he’d better go first to the body of his children’s nanny.

Besides, for the past two years, he had found himself totally unable to handle any of his children’s emotions.

“Now this, now this,” he muttered as he swept through the entrance hall, the living room, the library and out onto the breakfast room porch. Rain lashed against the French doors, and gurgling waters from overflowing gutters swept through the cobblestone courtyard.

He opened the back door and then he saw her. The inert body. Susan? He tried to remember any detail of the woman who had cared for his children for the past year.

But to him, she was the only nanny who had lasted, and there had been fourteen others who had left before her—some lasting no more than a day. He was hard on people, he knew that, and regret welled up in him as he realized that if he were only easier to work for, he might have had a full-time housekeeper, or maid—someone else besides the woman who came twice-a-week—to bring the dog in.

He took the steps two at a time and crouched down at her rain-soaked body.

He opened the palm of her hand, and nearly broke down in uncharacteristic tears as he saw she still held the metal clasp of Wiley’s chain.

He looked heavenward, wondering at a world in which there could be such random and senseless horror.

She had given her life for his children’s dog.

He rolled her over carefully, put his hand underneath her head and pulled her up into his arms.

Gently, so very gently. She deserved the deepest respect in death even if she had never, to his knowledge, had much respect accorded to her in life.

Hadn’t the agency said something about her not having had much of a family?

Well, maybe that’s the only thing that would make a nanny willing to put up with him.

He looked at the closed eyes, the pale skin with drops of rain like dewdrops on rose petals. He touched the budlike lips. He stroked away the wet, thick tendrils of golden hair. He knew it wasn’t right, but his eyes drifted to the swell of her breasts revealed by the rain-drenched T-shirt. She had been beautiful, in her own fresh and innocent kind of way.

He had never noticed. Never noticed at all.

He thought of the life that had been taken away from her, of all the opportunities that a sweet, gentle girl like her had lost. The future—the possibility of finding someone, of having children, of having a life.

All for Wiley, a twelve-year-old German shepherd.

All because of his own stupidity and hard-heartedness—there should have been someone else here to worry about the dog, someone else to help out around the house.

Hadn’t she just had a birthday? He searched his memory and realized that he hadn’t even been able to offer her a day off. Hadn’t even managed to get home in time for a shared dinner. Had delegated the purchase of her birthday present to Mrs. Witherspoon. He noticed the twinkling of the three-charm bracelet.

He shook his head sadly.

And then, suddenly, her darkly lashed eyes fluttered open. She looked up at him, smiled at first tentatively and then joyously. Those amber eyes he had never noticed before now seemed to him to be the most beautiful jewels he had ever seen.

Simply because she was alive.

She squeezed her arms around his neck and his first thought was that he would never, ever embarrass her by reminding her that she had acted most unnannylike by hugging him.

It was a shock—to both of them—and perfectly forgivable, Dean reminded himself.

Many people acted foolishly in the face of death.

“Darling,” she said. “Darling, I’m so glad you’re home.”

And she put her mouth on him and kissed him, really kissed him, while hail the size of Ping-Pong balls pelted the yard and the fire truck came to a screeching halt at the front steps of the Radcliffe mansion.

Chapter Four (#ulink_2e3b6d38-9f0c-5874-80bb-1b61aab64efe)

Three hours later, after a conference call made from the hospital lobby to reschedule the day’s meeting with the owner of Eastman Toys, Dean Radcliffe swept up the hospital staircase with an oversize bouquet of dazzlingly white and pink tea roses that had been dropped off by Mrs. Witherspoon.

He stopped at the fourth-floor’s nurses’ station.

“Susan…uh,” he said, snapping the fingers of his free hand as he struggled to remember the last name of his nanny. “Susan. She was brought in this evening. The emergency room nurse said she’d been transferred up here from the emergency room. It was a lightning accident. She was struck by lightning. Susan…uh…Susan…uh…”

Susan something or other.

He couldn’t remember her last name.

Had he ever known what it was?

When he had called the office, Mrs. Witherspoon hadn’t even known. And Mrs. Witherspoon knew everything, with the cool, unruffled efficiency of a computer.

He had told Mrs. Witherspoon to find someone, anyone from the agency who could take over this crisis. He ordered her to make arrangements to pay for Susan’s hospitalization and recovery. And a generous severance pay to help her if she didn’t want to return to work.

He hoped she’d want to come back.

The alternative would be a disaster because the agency had warned him many times that it was difficult to find anyone who would work for him at the Radcliffe Estate.

He shoved down the sensation that had haunted him for the past hours, a memory he had dodged by concentrating on the changing profit-loss ratios of Eastman Bears and stock option prices.

Still, the memory nagged at him.

She had kissed him.

She had grabbed him by the collar and kissed him in a way that was most un-Susan-like.

In a way that made him think of stars and fire-crackers and roller-coaster rides and trips to the beach. In a way that lingered on his lips like a caress, even now he could remember the feel. And when he had been most thoroughly kissed by her, she had pulled away and looked up at him with frank sensuality and the breezy confidence of a woman his equal. Straight into his eyes without a whisper of the deference he had unconsciously come to expect from the women in his life.

Not like the Susan he knew at all!

As the paramedics poured out onto the courtyard, he had picked her up, shielding her face with his jacket—but it hadn’t been the rain he had feared, it was the notion of strangers seeing her so…so naked and open and womanly and sensual.

When she was brought back to her right senses, she would be appalled.

She had obviously been very traumatized. Would never remember it and be very embarrassed if she were told about it.

Which he didn’t intend on doing.

He found himself staring into the eyes of the fourth-floor station nurse. And remembering Susan’s beautiful amber eyes, eyes that he had never before noticed.

“Susan,” he repeated more slowly, wondering if the feel of her name on his lips would ever be the same. The name didn’t sound quite so efficient and no-nonsense. The name Susan conjured up images of such intensity that he closed his eyes and counted to ten in an effort to get a grip on himself.

“Your wife, Mr. Radcliffe?” the nurse, a big blonde with a horsey jaw, supplied. “She’s resting comfortably. In room 403. Here, there’s some paperwork in her file. You’re supposed to sign two releases for the Cat scan we performed and…”

Dean opened his eyes to an inch-thick sheaf of forms the nurse had flapped down on the counter.

“No, no, no,” he said, the roses trembling in his arms. “She’s not my wife.”

“Not your wife?” the nurse questioned, frowning.

“Not my wife,” Dean confirmed, again reviewing his nanny’s very odd behavior. She had called him darling. She had kissed him. He touched his lips, where he thought he might still feel her kiss.

She must have been in some sort of shock.

Poor, poor Susan.

Now he was the one having problems.

An older man in a white jacket approached the nurses’ station. He leaned close to Dean.

“But, Mr. Radcliffe, your wife is in room 403. Recovering nicely,” he said. “The Cat scan indicated some problem areas, but considering the shock she took, we’re all quite amazed that she’s doing as well as she is.”

“She’s my children’s nanny,” Dean said brusquely, determinedly putting the memory of her kiss aside. “My wife…my wife…my wife is—was actually was a woman named Nicole and she’s…”

“Relax. You look entirely too agitated,” the man soothed. “Please, let me introduce myself. I’m Dr. Sugar. Sam Sugar. I treated your wife this evening in the ER. When she came in, her blood pressure was 80 over 40 and her heartbeat was erratic but essentially strong and we started with a potassium drip—”

“The woman who was brought in this evening is not my wife,” Dean interrupted.

“But it says right here that she’s your wife,” the nurse said, holding up the chart.

Her square-jawed stare made clear that as far as she was concerned, that ended the matter. Hospital forms were never wrong.

“She’s not my wife. Maybe there’s been some confusion,” Dean said. “She’s actually my children’s nanny. If she told you she’s my wife she’s very much mistaken.”

“Admitting on the first floor says she’s your wife,” the nurse insisted.

“Maybe it’s Braxton-Myers shock,” Dr. Sugar mused.

“What’s that?”

“Disturbance on the left lower ventricle of the brain,” Dr. Sugar explained. “People who have been struck by lightning often have very strange neurological responses.”

“Lightning made her think she’s my wife?”

“Most Braxton-Myers experiences are short-term,” Dr. Sugar reassured.

“How short-term?”

Dr. Sugar shrugged.

“Hours, days, weeks, sometimes a few months.”

“You don’t know when she’s going to stop thinking she’s my wife?”

“She’s very beautiful.” Dr. Sugar shrugged. “Wouldn’t be the worst thing to happen to a man.”

“I’ve never noticed whether any employee is beautiful or not,” Dean said coldly. “Least of all, the woman I hire to provide child care.”

But he had noticed—if only this evening. In the rain, her hair slicked back with rain, her face flushed like a tea rose and her eyes a clear, brilliant golden shade.