скачать книгу бесплатно
“They weren’t botched. They were just highly experimental.”
“Yes, and that experimental treatment reduced my chances of seeing again to nil.”
“Not nil.”
“Five percent. There’s not much difference. Especially when they say that even if the operation were a success I’d still never be able to drive, or fly, or sail. That there’s too much trauma for me to do what I used to do.”
“And your answer is to sit here shrouded in bandages and darkness and feel sorry for yourself?” she said tartly, her voice growing closer.
Kristian shifted in his chair, and felt an active and growing dislike for Cratchett. She was standing off to his right, and her smug, superior attitude rubbed him the wrong way. “Your company’s services have been terminated.”
“They haven’t—”
“I may be blind, but you’re apparently deaf. First Class Rehab has received its last—final—check. There is no more coming from me. There will be no more payments for services rendered.”
He heard her exhale—a soft, quick breath that was so uniquely feminine that he drew back, momentarily startled.
And in that half-second he felt betrayed.
She was the one not listening. She was the one forcing herself on him. And yet—and yet she was a woman. And he was—or had been—a gentleman, and gentlemen were supposed to have manners. Gentlemen were supposed to be above reproach.
Growling, he leaned back in his chair, gripped the rims on the wheels and glared at where he imagined her to be standing.
He shouldn’t feel bad for speaking bluntly. His brow furrowed even more deeply. It was her fault. She’d come here, barging in with a righteous high-handed, bossy attitude that turned his stomach.
The accident hadn’t been yesterday. He’d lived like this long enough to know what he was dealing with. He didn’t need her telling him this and that, as though he couldn’t figure it out for himself.
No, she—Nurse Hatchet-Cratchett, his nurse number seven—had the same bloody mentality as the first six. In their eyes the wheelchair rendered him incompetent, unable to think for himself.
“I’m not paying you any longer,” he repeated firmly, determined to get this over and done with. “You’ve had your last payment. You and your company are finished here.”
And then she made that sound again—that little sound which had made him draw back. But this time he recognized the sound for what it was.
A laugh.
She was laughing at him.
Laughing and walking around the side of his chair so he had to crane his head to try to follow her.
He felt her hands settle on the back of his chair. She must have bent down, or perhaps she wasn’t very tall, because her voice came surprisingly close to his ear.
“But you aren’t paying me any longer. Our services have been retained and we are authorized to continue providing your care. Only now, instead of you paying for your care, the financial arrangements are being handled by a private source.”
He went cold—cold and heavy. Even his legs, with their only limited sensation. “What?”
“It’s true,” she continued, beginning to push his chair and moving him forward. “I’m not the only one who thinks its high time you recovered.” She continued pushing him despite his attempt to resist. “You’re going to get well,” she added, her voice whispering sweetly in his ear. “Whether you want to or not.”
CHAPTER TWO
KRISTIAN clamped down on the wheel-rims, holding them tight to stop their progress. “Who is paying for my care?”
Elizabeth hated played games, and she didn’t believe it was right to keep anyone in the dark, but she’d signed a confidentiality agreement and she had to honor it. “I’m sorry, Mr. Koumantaros. I’m not at liberty to say.”
Her answer only antagonized him further. Kristian threw his head back and his powerful shoulders squared. His hands gripped the rims so tightly his knuckles shone white. “I won’t have someone else assuming responsibility for my care, much less for what is surely questionable care.”
Elizabeth cringed at the criticism. The criticism—slander?—was personal. It was her company. She personally interviewed, hired and trained each nurse that worked for First Class Rehab. Not that he knew. And not that she wanted him to know right now.
No, what mattered now was getting Mr. Koumantaros on a schedule, creating a predictable routine with regular periods of nourishment, exercise and rest. And to do that she really needed him to have his lunch.
“We can talk more over lunch,” Elizabeth replied, beginning to roll him back out onto the terrace once more. But, just like before, Kristian clamped his hands down and gripped the wheel-rims hard, preventing him from going forward.
“I don’t like being pushed.”
Elizabeth stepped away and stared down at him, seeing for the first time the dark pink scar that snaked from beneath the sleeve of his sky-blue Egyptian cotton shirt, running from elbow to wrist. A multiple fracture, she thought, recalling just how many bones had broken. By all indications he should have died. But he hadn’t. He’d survived. And after all that she wasn’t about to let him give up now and wither away inside this shuttered villa.
“I didn’t think you could get yourself around,” she said, hanging on to her patience by a thread.
“I can push myself short distances.”
“That’s not quite the same thing as walking, is it?” she said exasperatedly. If he could do more…if he could walk…why didn’t he? Ornio, she thought, using the Greek word for ornery. The previous nurses hadn’t exaggerated a bit. Kristian was as obstinate as a mule.
He snorted. “Is that your idea of encouragement?”
Her lips compressed. Kristian also knew how to play both sides. One minute he was the aggressor, the next the victim. Worse, he was succeeding in baiting her, getting to her, and no one ever—ever—got under her skin. Not anymore. “It’s a statement of fact, Mr. Koumantaros. You’re still in the chair because your muscles have atrophied since the accident. But initially the doctors expected you to walk again.” They thought you’d want to.
“It didn’t work out.”
“Because it hurt too much?”
“The therapy wasn’t working.”
“You gave up.” She reached for the handles on the back of his chair and gave a hard push. “Now, how about that lunch?”
He wouldn’t release the rims. “How about you tell me who is covering your services, and then we’ll have lunch?”
Part of her admired his bargaining skill and tactics. He was clearly a leader, and accustomed to being in control. But she was a leader, too, and she was just as comfortable giving direction. “I can’t tell you.” Her jaw firmed. “Not until you’re walking.”
He craned to see her, even though he couldn’t see anything. “So you can tell me.”
“Once you’re walking.”
“Why not until then?”
She shrugged. “It’s the terms of the contract.”
“But you know this person?”
“We spoke on the phone.”
He grew still, his expression changing as well, as though he were thinking, turning inward. “How long until I walk?”
“It depends entirely on you. Your hamstrings and hip muscles have unfortunately tightened, shortening up, but it’s not irreparable, Mr. Koumantaros. It just requires diligent physical therapy.”
“But even with diligent therapy I’ll always need a walker.”
She heard his bitterness but didn’t comment on it. It wouldn’t serve anything at this point. “A walker or a cane. But isn’t that better than a wheelchair? Wouldn’t you enjoy being independent again?”
“But it’ll never be the same, never as it was—”
“People are confronted by change every day, Mr. Koumantaros.”
“Do not patronize me.” His voice deepened, roughened, revealing blistering fury.
“I’m not trying to. I’m trying to understand. And if this is because others died and you—”
“Not one more word,” he growled. “Not one.”
“Mr. Koumantaros, you are no less of a man because others died and you didn’t.”
“Then you do not know me. You do not know who I am, or who I was before. Because the best part of me—the good in me—died that day on the mountain. The good in me perished while I was saving someone I didn’t even like.”
He laughed harshly, the laugh tinged with self-loathing. “I’m not a hero. I’m a monster.” And, reaching up, with a savage yank he ripped the bandages from his head. Rearing back in his wheelchair, Kristian threw his head into sunlight. “Do you see the monster now?”
Elizabeth sucked in her breath as the warm Mediterranean light touched the hard planes of his face.
A jagged scar ran the length of the right side of his face, ending precariously close to his right eye. The skin was still a tender pink, although one day it would pale, lightening until it nearly matched his skin tone—as long as he stayed out of the sun.
But the scar wasn’t why she stared. And the scar wasn’t what caused her chest to seize up, squeezing with a terrible, breathless tenderness.
Kristian Koumantaros was beautiful. Beyond beautiful. Even with the scar snaking like a fork of lightning over his cheekbone, running from the corner of his mouth to the edge of his eye.
“God gave me a face to match my heart. Finally the outside and inside look the same,” he gritted, hands convulsing in his lap.
“You’re wrong.” Elizabeth could hardly breathe. His words gave her so much pain, so much sorrow, she felt tears sting her eyes. “If God gave you a face to match your heart, your heart is beautiful, too. Because a scar doesn’t ruin a face, and a scar doesn’t ruin a heart. It just shows that you’ve lived—” she took a rough breath “—and loved.”
He said nothing and she pressed on. “Besides, I think the scar suits you. You were too good-looking before.”
For a split second he said nothing, and then he laughed, a fierce guttural laugh that was more animal-like than human. “Finally. Someone to tell me the truth.”
Elizabeth ignored the pain pricking her insides, the stab of more pain in her chest. Something about him, something about this—the scarred face, the shattered life, the fury, the fire, the intelligence and passion—touched her. Hurt her. It was not that anyone should suffer, but somehow on Kristian the suffering became bigger, larger than life, a thing in and of itself.
“You’re an attractive man even with the scar,” she said, still kneeling next to his chair.
“It’s a hideous scar. It runs the length of my face. I can feel it.”
“You’re quite vain, then, Mr. Koumantaros?”
His head swung around and the expression on his face, matched by the cloudiness in his deep blue eyes, stole her breath. He didn’t suit the chair.
Or the chair didn’t suit him. He was too big, too strong, too much of everything. And it was wrong, his body, his life, his personality contained by it. Confined to it.
“No man wants to feel like Frankenstein,” Kristian said with another rough laugh.
She knew then that it wasn’t his face that made him feel so broken, but his heart and mind. Those memories of his that haunted him, the flashes of the past that made him relive the accident over and over. She knew because she’d once been the same. She, too, had relived an accident in endless detail, stopping the mental camera constantly, freezing the lens at the first burst of flame and the final ball of fire. But that was her story, not his, and she couldn’t allow her own experiences and emotions to cloud her judgment now.
She had to regain some control, retreat as quickly as possible to professional detachment. She wasn’t here for him; she was here for a job. She wasn’t his love interest. He had one in Athens, waiting for him to recover. It was this lover of his who’d insisted he walk, he function, he see, and that was why she was here. To help him recover. To help him return to her.
“You’re far from Frankenstein,” she said crisply, covering her suddenly ambivalent emotions. She rose to her feet, smoothed her straight skirt and adjusted her blouse. “But, since you require flattery, let me give it to you. The scar suits you. Gives your face character. Makes you look less like a model or a movie star and more like a man.”
“A man,” he repeated with a bitter laugh.
“Yes, a man. And with some luck and hard work, soon we’ll have you acting like a man, too.”
Chaotic emotions rushed across his face. Surprise, then confusion, and as she watched the confusion shifted into anger. She’d caught him off guard and hurt him. She could see she’d hurt him.
Swallowing the twinge of guilt, she felt it on the tip of her tongue to apologize, as she hadn’t meant to hurt his feelings so much as provoke him into taking action.
But even as she attempted to put a proper apology together, she sensed anything she said, particularly anything sympathetic, would only antagonize him more. He was living in his own hell.
More gently she added, “You’ve skied the most inaccessible mountain faces in the world, piloted helicopters in blizzards, rescued a half-dozen—”
“Enough.”
“You can do anything,” she persisted. His suffering was so obvious it was criminal. She’d become a nurse to help those wounded, not to inflict fresh wounds, but sometimes patients were so overwhelmed by physical pain and mental misery that they self-destructed.
Brilliant men—daring, risk-taking, gifted men—were particularly vulnerable, and she’d learned the hard way that these same men self-destructed if they had no outlet for their anger, no place for their pain.
Elizabeth vowed to find the outlet for Kristian, vowed she’d channel his fury somehow, turning pain into positives.
And so, before he could speak, before he could give voice to any of his anger, or contradict her again, she mentioned the pretty table setting before them, adding that the cook and butler had done a superb job preparing their late lunch.
“Your staff have outdone themselves, Mr. Koumantaros. They’ve set a beautiful table on your terrace. Can you feel that breeze? You can smell the scent of pine in the warm air.”
“I don’t smell it.”
“Then come here, where I’m standing. It really is lovely. You can get a whiff of the herbs in your garden, too. Rosemary, and lemongrass.”
But he didn’t roll forward. He rolled backward, retreating back toward the shadows. “It’s too bright. The light makes my head hurt.”
“Even if I replace the bandages?”
“Even with the bandages.” His voice grew harsh, pained. “And I don’t want lunch. I already told you that but you don’t listen. You won’t listen. No one does.”
“We could move lunch inside—”
“I don’t want lunch.” And with a hard push he disappeared into the cooler library, where he promptly bumped into a side–table and sent it crashing, which led to him cursing and another bang of furniture.
Tensing, Elizabeth fought the natural inclination to hurry and help him. She wanted to rush to his side, but knew that doing so would only prolong his helpless state. She couldn’t become an enabler, couldn’t allow him to continue as he’d done—retreating from life, retreating from living, retreating into the dark shadows of his mind.
