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“The young man was blinded—the glass cut the corneas of both his eyes. We think the blindness is temporary but the doctors can’t be sure.”
Blinded. Guilt gave her a sharp jab to her conscience. She’d been so devastated by her own problems, she sometimes forgot others were far worse off. “I am truly sorry, but I don’t understand why—”
“The young man is Jay Tolliver. I think you may remember him.”
It was almost as if the fire chief had struck her. The air left her lungs; her knees went suddenly weak. Fate had played an odd trick on her to have the boy—now a full-grown man—on whom she’d had a huge crush in high school be the one to rescue her after the earthquake. She’d known as an adolescent, as she knew now, it was not a relationship she’d ever be able to explore. Not because in the past she hadn’t cared. But because he’d barely acknowledged her existence. And now it was too late.
When she didn’t respond to the chief’s revelation, he said, “Jay tends to be a little macho. He’s out of the hospital but he won’t let any of us help him. He’s got this burr under his saddle that makes him want to be independent, even if it kills him. Almost literally. He’s determined to do everything he’s always done, despite the fact he can’t see.”
“I don’t see how I could—”
“Miss Lydell, after the earthquake Jay talked about you for days—even when his buddies gave him a hard time about it. If he would accept help from anyone, it would be you.”
Panic shot through her like a thousand-volt current.
She couldn’t! The fire chief was asking too much of her. For months she’d only gone out of the house to doctors’ appointments and then only when wearing dark glasses and a scarf to cover as much of her face as possible. Not that the medical profession had done her much good. Everything else she needed, she ordered by phone to be delivered. As much as she might like to help Jay…
She began to tremble. Dear God, she couldn’t! The thought of anyone seeing her. Pitying her. Or more likely being revolted by her appearance was too much to bear.
“I’m sorry….”
“He needs someone, Miss Lydell. I’m afraid—”
She shoved open the screen door and stepped out onto the porch. Into the afternoon sunlight. It took all of the courage she possessed to lift her face so the chief could get a good look. She had to make him understand so her own guilt wouldn’t rest so heavily on her shoulders.
“Do you really think anyone who looks like I do could help anyone else?”
Unflinching, she waited while the chief studied her.
“He’s blind, Miss Lydell.” He spoke quietly, persuasively, as a father would. “I don’t think he’ll care.”
Chapter Two
What in the name of heaven was the man doing?
Shortly after noon on the day of the chief’s visit, Kim pulled her car up to the curb in front of Jay’s house. It was a small wooden structure in a neighborhood of modest homes, each one featuring a porch with a swing perfect to enjoy on a warm summer evening. The front yard boasted a postage-stamp lawn, which Jay was now mowing.
Mowing with a power mower that was spewing exhaust and cut grass out the side.
Either Chief Gray was wrong about Jay being blind, or Jay was totally crazy. Not that he didn’t look thoroughly macho in his cut-off jeans, his legs muscular and roughened by dark hair, and a cropped stenciled T-shirt that revealed a washboard stomach. Just the thought of running her palms over that hard expanse of abdomen made Kim shiver. The reflective dark glasses he wore and a few healing cuts on his cheeks took nothing away from the sexy image he created.
Her only regret might be that instead of wearing his hair long enough to curl at his nape as he had in high school, he’d trimmed it far shorter, almost military in style. But definitely attractive.
Even in high school he’d held a special appeal for all the girls, dangerously so for Kim, who’d seen him as forbidden fruit—the bad boy who would be able to tempt her too much. Which hadn’t stopped her from spending a good many hours fantasizing over the aloof adolescent who didn’t seem to know she existed.
Some things never change, she thought as she adjusted the scarf she wore in public to hide the scarred side of her face. She got out of the car and slammed the door closed. With the mower roaring, he didn’t hear her. She walked into the yard, the scent of freshly mowed grass ripe in the air, then winced as Jay proceeded to mow right on past his property line and across his neighbor’s bed of yellow daffodils that under the warmth of the late February sun had just begun to bloom.
Two steps later, he turned the mower around and cut another swath back the way he’d come, clipping the flower bed again and leaving a narrow strip of uncut grass on his own lawn.
“Jay!” she shouted, jumping out of the way so he wouldn’t mow her down, too.
Jay shoved the mower into neutral, stopped and listened. He’d heard something—or someone. God, how he hated the eye patches that covered both his eyes making him dependent on his other senses, the oppressive darkness of being blind making him less than a man. Vulnerable in ways he hadn’t thought possible.
He tensed. “Is someone there?”
“Jay, it’s me. Kim Lydell. Turn off the mower!”
The familiar smoky, blues-singer’s voice of the TV newscaster sent a message directly to his groin. He killed the mower and turned his head in the direction he thought he’d heard her voice from.
“Kim? What are you doing here?” Over the years he’d had more than a few dreams about her, but never in the bright light of day—assuming he could have seen the sun, rather than simply feeling its warmth on his skin.
“At the moment I’m trying to save your neighbor’s flower bed.”
“Huh?”
“You managed to wipe out two big chunks of daffodils with that mower of yours. You want to try for some recently bedded pansies? The neighbor ought to love that.”
Of all the things he’d dreamed of Kim saying if and when they met again, a discussion of flowers hadn’t been the topic that came immediately to mind. “What are you talking about?”
“Jay, you mowed right on through the flower bed at the edge of property.”
“No, I didn’t. I paced off every foot of the grass before I began mowing. I wouldn’t—”
She shoved a slick handful of leaves against his chest, and he caught a faint floral scent. It could have been Kim’s sweet perfume, or the flowers she said he’d inadvertently trimmed. He wished it were the former.
“I messed up, huh?” he said. Worse than that, he’d done it in front of Kim Lydell, every guy’s fantasy newscaster. For the past four days, since the explosion, he’d been desperately trying to act as though everything was normal. Dammit, his blindness was temporary! And if the lawn needed mowing, he was damn well going to—
“I hope you have an understanding neighbor.”
“Yeah, probably.” Clarence and Essie Smith were both in their eighties and kept trying to adopt him, particularly since the accident. There was yet another in a long line of casseroles molding in his refrigerator while Jay tried to relearn cooking for himself blindfolded. At least he was getting pretty good at scrambled eggs, the middles only a little runny and the edges singed. God knew what the stove top looked like though. “So, besides rescuing the local flora and fauna, what brings you to this part of town?”
“I never got around to thanking you for the flowers you sent to the hospital…or for rescuing me, for that matter.”
He shrugged, wishing he could see her. But in his mind’s eye he pictured her collar-length blond hair curving softly against her jaw and eyes that special shade of blue that reminded him of springtime wild-flowers. “All in a day’s work.”
“The bouquet, too?”
“Yeah, well, I thought you might need a pick-me-up.”
“I did, more than you could know.” Her voice dipped to a low, husky note that was little more than a warm breath of air rippling across the hairs on his bare arms. “It was very sweet of you.”
“How are you doing since Paseo del Real’s little trembler?”
“Great, great. No problems at all.”
He caught a touch of agitation in her voice as if she didn’t want to talk about the earthquake and its aftermath. “So, I haven’t seen you back on TV yet.” Or in recent days, heard her, since he couldn’t see a damn thing.
“I’m, um, on a bit of a sabbatical.”
“Oh.” He wondered what the hesitation in her voice meant.
“So, are you going to invite me in for a glass of ice tea, or something?” she asked.
“Tea?” His forehead pulled tight as he did a mental inventory of his pantry. “I’ve got beer.” A beverage he could find in the dark.
“Even better.”
She hooked her arm through his and he felt the soft swell of her breast brush against his skin. Heat simmered through him, making him ache for her. “Guess I can leave the rest of the mowing till later.”
She laughed, warm and seductive. “I’m sure the neighbors will appreciate that.”
Her shoes made clicking noises on the walkway. High heels, he concluded. And there was a subtle rustle of fabric with each step she took. A silk skirt, he thought. Or maybe soft cotton. His fingers itched to touch the material, to feel the texture and imagine the vivid color—cornflower blue to match her eyes or bright salmon to set off her honey-blond hair.
The perfume was hers, he decided, the scent lightly riding on each molecule of air he breathed, and he inhaled deeply.
He sensed by the slight lift of her arm when she reached the porch steps. A beat behind her, he followed her up the stairs without falling on his face—a significant accomplishment these days as attested to by the tender scrapes on his shins.
Thank God the doctor said the eye patches would go in three more weeks or so. By then he’d have bruises on top of his bruises. Meantime, he wasn’t willing to sit around on his behind doing nothing. He wasn’t going to be a cripple.
With a minimum of fumbling, he opened the screen door for Kim.
She stepped past Jay into the house, her eyes taking a moment to adjust from bright sunshine to the dimmer light of the living room. An overstuffed couch and chair, worn but comfortable-looking, faced a small fireplace flanked by a bookcase on one side and a big-screen TV on the other. Magazines were stacked neatly on a coffee table along with a remote tuner and a half-finished mug of coffee that looked like it had been forgotten or misplaced several days ago.
A big tiger-striped cat eyed Kim curiously from the center cushion of the couch then rose, stretched and yawned.
“Make yourself comfortable,” Jay said. “I’ll get the beer.”
“Need some help?”
“Naw, I can manage.” He walked through the arched doorway of the dining room, swerved to miss the chair at the end of the table only to bump into a second chair. He swore.
Kim winced. “You sure I can’t—”
“Don’t worry. I’ve got everything under control.”
Kim got the distinct impression Jay was among the most stubborn men she’d ever met.
The cat eased off the couch, his bulk giving him the appearance of a yellow bowling ball with stubby legs, and followed Jay toward the kitchen.
Slipping her scarf off her head and looping it around her neck, Kim dropped her purse on the couch, deciding to follow the cat.
“What’s your cat’s name?”
“Cat.” He opened the refrigerator, an older model, and unerringly took two bottles of beer from the top shelf.
“Cat? That’s it?”
“He probably has another name but I don’t know what it is. He was a stray that just sort of moved in on me and he didn’t have a collar on or anything.” Closing the refrigerator door with his elbow, he asked, “You want a glass?”
“No, the bottle’s fine.” There was already a collection of unwashed dishes on the tile counter and Kim didn’t want to add to the clutter. “How long ago did he show up?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Three or four years ago, I guess.”
She stifled a laugh. “And you still just call him Cat?”
“That’s what he answers to.” He handed her the beer.
She took it firmly in her grasp so he’d know she had hold of it, and her fingers brushed his in the process. An electric warmth skittered up her arm in the instant before he released his grip.
“Thanks,” she whispered, startled by the powerful sensation of such a brief contact. She wished she could see his eyes behind his glasses, the distinctive copper-brown she remembered so clearly. Unfathomable eyes that gave away nothing. “I was sorry to hear about your accident.”
He paused in the middle of twisting the top off his beer. “A temporary problem. No big deal.”
Assuming, according to Chief Gray, that Jay didn’t manage to kill himself before he got his eyesight back. “I’m sure that’s true.”
He finished twisting the top off and took a swig. “I guess the explosion at the plastics company made the news, huh?”
“I wouldn’t know. I haven’t been watching TV much lately.”
“Then how did you—”
“Your boss dropped by to see me. Chief Gray thought—”
“The chief? Geez, what is this? A sympathy visit?” He whirled, his demeanor angry, and he marched across the room to the counter. “I don’t need your pity, Kim.”
She could understand that. The thing Kim dreaded most was seeing pity and revulsion in someone’s eyes when they saw her scars. “I dropped by to see if I could help you in some way, not to pity you.” He was too virile, too much of a man, to be the object of anyone’s pity, certainly not Kim’s.
“I don’t need your help, either. I’m getting along fine on my own, so you can finish your beer and be on your way.”
“I see.” She twisted off the bottle cap and took a sip. The cool liquid slid down her throat; his rejection left a bitter aftertaste.
In the silent kitchen, the cat nudged his empty dish with his nose, then padded across the room to wind his way between Jay’s legs. Ignoring the cat, Jay stared at a spot a little to Kim’s right, as if he didn’t quite know where she was standing but didn’t want to let on.
“I think your cat’s hungry. His dish is empty.”
“Right. I’ll take care of it.” Setting his beer on the counter, he opened a cupboard, and grabbed a box of Cheerios from a high shelf right next to a similar box of Friskies. Feeling his way with the toe of his tennis shoe, he found the cat’s dish, bent over and filled it to overflowing.
Kim pulled her lip between her teeth. “Does your cat always eat breakfast food?”
“What?”
Sniffing disdainfully, Cat didn’t appear impressed with the menu selection.
“You just filled his dish with Cheerios.”
“I didn’t—” He picked up one of the circles, smelled it and nibbled half. “He likes variety, okay?”
“The Friskies are in the box next to—”
