BLIND DATE
Robyn Anders
Published by BooksForABuck.com
at Smashwords
Copyright Rob Preece 2000-2012
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Dedicated to my friend John, and all the men and women of the world who have been injured by land mines. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people or situations is coincidence.
Chapter 1
Amy Halprin didn't like the bench press much. Two hundred pounds of stranger sitting on her ribs just as she was about to start her set didn't make her like it any better. Even if he was awful good looking.
"Hey, blind man, why don't you watch where you're going," she gasped out as soon as she could recover her breath.
"Sorry," the stranger replied as he got off her. "I was working that machine." His voice sounded like ice grating on the sidewalk. Anything but truly sorry.
She glared at him, then wished she’d kept her eyes to herself.
He looked like he'd just stepped off the pages of Men's Fitness Magazine: Air Force Academy T-shirt, expensive running shoes left casually untied, and those muscles. My, those muscles.
The effect was marred, or maybe enhanced, by several deep scars on his arms and up one of his cheeks. They gave him a sinister look, like a pirate or something.
One scar extended across his face all the way to mirrored sunglasses. The shades, totally out of place in the dim Dallas health club, made Amy wonder whether he thought he was a movie star. Or maybe he was still recovering from a Friday night hangover?
All in all, the man looked more than a little threatening. There was no telling what might happen if she ran into him in a dark alley. Not that thinking about running into him somewhere, alone, wasn't a little titillating.
It would have helped if he would smile. Unfortunately, from the expression on his face, she could tell that smiling was about the farthest thing from his mind.
He’s trying to be intimidating, Amy decided. Well, she was used to intimidation and knew how to fight back. "If you were using it first, it's funny that I ended up on the bottom."
He shrugged his impressive shoulders. "I was between sets so I got a drink of water."
"The sign says circuit trainers have first priority," Amy reasoned. "But even if we didn't, you have a lot of nerve sitting on me just because I was in your way."
"Hey, Mark," a voice boomed. Another body builder type, this one even more developed than her assailant, threw an arm around the man who'd had sat on her. "I need you to spot me. I'm going to try to beat my personal best."
The new man led her assailant, Mark, off to the testosterone dominated free-weight section.
Amy frowned after him but Mark was oblivious to her glare.
He was, she decided, exactly the type of man her mother would pick out for her. Handsome in a rugged way. Not pretty, but awful nice to look at. Obviously a jock, but not overbuilt the way many bodybuilders end up. He even had an education. That is, unless he had picked up the Air Force Academy shirt at a garage sale somewhere.
Since her younger sister had married a doctor, her mother had focused all of her considerable planning and matchmaking on Amy. After Amy had finally given up her dream of pursuing a career on the woman's pro basketball circuit and settled down teaching P.E. at a private girls school, her mother had taken to throwing every single man she could find at her. It would have been funny if it hadn't been so humiliating. Considering some of the choices her mother had thrown at her, she wasn’t in high demand.
Amy lay back on the bench, took the bars in her hands and inhaled, getting ready. Visualize the lift, she reminded herself. Definitely don't visualize that dangerous face.
Just as she was about to lift, voices from the free weight room caught her attention, distracting her nearly as much as when Mark had sat on her.
"All right, Frank, you can do it," Mark encouraged. His voice was still sexy but with his friend, he actually sounded supportive. Not at all the man he had shown himself to be a few moments ago.
Ignore them, she instructed herself. Unfortunately, Amy was never much good at taking advice, even from herself. She sat and watched through the doorway of the free-weight room.
Frank grunted, shoved at the weight, lifted it about three inches off the supports, then gave a shout and moved it up another inch. Then slowly, despite Frank's efforts, it began to slide down toward his chest.
Mark moved in, taking the bar in both hands. "It's all right, Frank, you'll get it next time. Now let's rack it up. Work with me on this."
The bar bent under hundreds of pounds of steel weights as the two men moved synchronously, slowly shifting the bar toward its support.
A couple of other lifters saw what was happening and joined the two. "You guys all right?" one of them asked.
"Yeah," Frank said. "Mark just saved my life with that spot. I couldn't hold the weight. Guess I shouldn't have had that second beer last night."
"Or the third, fourth, or fifth," one of the others said.
"Hey, good job, Mark," a builders said. "But then you seem to have a way with the smooth touch. I liked the way you moved in on that blonde, by the way. Don't know that I'd have the nerve to actually sit on one, but that way they sure can't run away."
He turned to the other men. "You guys see the way Mark scouted out that action."
Amy got busy adjusting her weight lifting gloves. She couldn't help hearing the rough laughter that followed the man's vulgarity.
"Hey, so I wasn't watching where I was going," Mark said.
“Like you ever do.”
"I'll tell you what,” Frank said. “There are more than a few of us who would have paid to be in your shoes, or your seat, just now."
"Are we going to lift weights, or are you guys just going to sit around and talk about chicks?" Mark asked.
"Talk about chicks," half a dozen male voices answered.
"Well you can do that without me. I'm hitting the showers."
****
Mark cranked the steaming hot water a couple of notches hotter and let it pound on his muscles. He'd always enjoyed weightlifting, but since his injury, it had become one of the few sports in which he was able to compete on roughly equal terms.
Finally he snapped off the shower and returned to his locker.
The usual crowd of bodybuilder types hung around in the locker room. He didn't mind. Some of them might be a little too caught up in their own looks, but at least they accepted him for who he was. Unlike the rest of the world, which often treated him as if he were so fragile that he'd break if anyone even said the wrong thing.
"I wasn't kidding about the blonde," Jeff told him.
His friends must have come in while he'd been on the shower.
"She just comes in here and does her workout," Jeff continued. "Complete ice princess. I've never seen her say word one to anybody. But I guess you pinned her down, right? And I saw her talking to you. Awesome move."
Mark didn't join the laughter. He couldn't even manage to find his way around the weight machines without almost crushing a woman. From her voice, he knew she'd been young and healthy. But what if he'd sat on an older woman? He could seriously injure someone.
"It's not like I singled her out. I told you I wasn't looking."
"That's the best part," Jeff replied. "Here all of us were wondering how to start a conversation with
her and you did it all without even trying."
Mark opened his locker and felt for his slacks. "Was she really pretty?"
"Pretty? Nah, not her. Not unless you happen to like twenty-something blondes with legs that don't stop and hair down to their waist. Oh, and did I mention a body build for love?"
"Don't forget that cover girl face," Frank commented.
Mark didn't have to be a genius to detect the sarcasm. On the other hand, the guys had been known to play some pretty nasty tricks. Male humor, he knew from years of experience, wasn't always particularly subtle.
Still, what did he care about looks? What he dreamed about was a woman who could treat him like a man without being fixated on his blindness. Like that woman out there had. He'd messed up and she'd laid into him. Unlike most everyone he met, she'd treated him exactly as she would a sighted man, not trying to protect him from her anger with the mistaken concept that the injury to his eyes might also have softened his head.
Maybe she was out of his league, but that attitude attracted him in a way no amount of sympathy and pity ever could.
He paused, his shirt half-buttoned, as an idea took hold of him. What the hell. "Will you guys do me a favor?" he asked.
Five minutes later, a crowd of bodybuilders, all trying to be discrete and hidden, each sounding something like an Asian water buffalo wallowing through a rice paddy, had strategically placed themselves around the gym.
They'd checked with the health club staff and made sure the blonde hadn't vanished while Mark was in the shower, then waited for her to emerge from the woman's locker room.
The wolf whistle was his signal.
He continued his conversation with the girl who handled check-in, letting her bring him up to date on countless details that seemed centered on the high school football game she'd gone to the previous evening.
"Hey, the juice machine is broken again," Jeff called out. The second signal. The blonde would be passing the entrance desk.
"I'll talk to you tomorrow, Chrissie." Mark adjusted his sunglasses.
"See you, Mark," she chirped.
An icy chill grasped his stomach for an instant. What if this supposed blonde were really a kid like Chrissie? The guys would think that hysterical.
"I guess she is cute," Chrissie observed reluctantly. "But she's pretty old. I bet she's at least twenty-five."
Mark ignored Chrissie's hint that he might be interested in someone younger, say around eighteen, and headed for the door.
He'd walked this route so many times he left his cane folded, carried in the same hand as his workout bag.
The plan was to open the door for the blonde, apologize for sitting on her, then ask her if she'd let him buy her a cup of coffee.
A solid thunk as he swung open the door sent that plan into shambles. Time to improvise.
"What?” Even though she was mad, her voice had that sexy southern drawl he couldn’t help finding appealing. “Did someone pay you to make my day miserable?"
He'd found the right woman all right, but smacking the door into her head hadn't been the smoothest approach. She must have walked faster than Chrissie had when they had rehearsed the plan.
"Sorry. Again. But hey, you mean I can actually get paid for doing this?" he asked.
"You tell me," she shot back. Obviously she didn't share his sardonic sense of humor.
Still, he said he was looking for a woman who would let him know what she thought. So far, the blonde was the first woman since he'd stepped on that land mine in Bosnia who'd treated him like a man rather than an invalid. Of course he would prefer to be treated like a decent man rather than a complete schmuck. Still, with time that might be arranged.
He dropped the glib lines, since they weren't working anyway. "Tell you what, let me make it up to you by buying you a cup of coffee."
He could feel her hesitation. Something, maybe the way she caught her breath, the rustle of her clothing. Something. She was going to say no. Well, his ex-fiancée had warned him no self-respecting female would be interested in an incomplete man like him. Why should this woman be any different?
"I've got to--oh, what the heck. Why not? At least it'll get my mother off my case."
That wasn't the motivation he was looking for in a date. Still, he'd asked her and he wouldn't just walk away even if he didn’t like her reasoning. Later, if there was a later, he'd find out about this mother thing.
"You the one who called for a cab?"
John picked Mark up at this time every day. Every day he seemed surprised to see that Mark had been the one who'd called. Oh, well, he was a good driver and that was a lot more than most of the taxi drivers in North Dallas could claim.
"I'm the one," Mark answered. "Know a good place to get coffee around here?"
"Hey, is this a setup or something?" the woman asked.
John ignored her question. "The bookstore down the street has a coffee bar if you want something a little fancier than take-out at 7-11.
"Let's go," Mark said.
He held open the door for the woman, then walked around the cab.
****
Amy was pretty sure this was a mistake. If Mark had already called a taxi, that little accident at the door must have been planned and coordinated. She'd thought she was getting an awful lot of attention from the gang of musclemen standing around near the entryway. Maybe this lunk of a man sat on women and opened doors in their face as his pickup move. He was attractive enough that it probably worked most of the time.
Well, it wouldn't work with her. Still, she was a big girl and could take care of herself. And why not have that cup of coffee? She could always tell him to get lost afterwards.
At least she'd be able to tell her mother she'd tried. Surely she could manage to spend half an hour with Mark. If worst came to worst, she could shut off her ears and just look at him. Lots of men a lot less attractive than Mark had graced her dreams in the past. Too bad he was such a jerk.
She slid all the way over in the back seat of the cab to let him get in while he went around back to dump his workout bag in the trunk.
Just as she got her seatbelt fastened, the door nearest her opened and Mark started to climb in.
"Don't you ever look where you're going?" she called out to him, pressing against his back to prevent him from sitting on her for the second time that day.
Mark froze, then climbed back out. "No," he answered coldly. "As a matter of fact, I never watch where I'm going."
Slowly he reached up and removed his sunglasses.
Part of the scar had been hidden by his shades. It zagged up his right cheek, then cut across his eyes and nose.
Sightless eyes stared at her.
"I'm blind. I thought you knew that."
Amy froze. Of all the insensitive, rude, and downright nasty things she'd ever done, this had to take first place. It took the wind right out of her snappy rejoinder
"Uh, do you want me to slide back over?"
"I'll go around."
They each huddled in their respective corners while John the cab driver broke the silence by telling them about a fare he'd had the previous night who hadn't been able to speak any English. John's story might have been amusing, but Amy wasn't sure since his Russian accent made it so hard to follow.
Finally he pulled into the parking lot of the neighborhood bookstore.
Amy waited to see if Mark would open the door for her but he sat there like a bump on a log.
"Are you ready?" she asked. "Or were you planning to sit here all night?"
Mark turned to face her.
For an instant, she was afraid he would snarl at her. "Sorry. I thought we were at a stop light."
"Oh, Jeeze. I blew it again." She felt like a complete heel. She'd been insulting him, thinking all sorts of unkind thoughts about him, and he was doing the best he could with a terrible handicap.
"I'm not looking for sympathy."
She recognized his need for independence but wished he didn't have to take it
out on her quite so directly.
"Okay. Well, we're here. So let's go." And get this over with, she silently added.
Mark opened his door and pulled what looked like a bundle of thin white pipes from his pocket. With a flip of his wrist faster than her eye could follow, he opened the object into a white cane.
"Put it on your tab?" John the driver asked.
"Same as always," Mark replied.
He walked around the car, then opened Amy's door for her.
She stepped out. "I've never spent any time with a blind person before," she confessed. "Should I let you go first or what?"
Obviously she hadn't said the right thing. His face showed frustration and just a little impatience.
"If you think I'd slow you down, you can offer me your arm."
He reached for her.
She flinched away from him. He had moved too quickly for her body to assimilate what he had told her. Unfortunately, she flinched just enough so his hand missed her arm and settled neatly over her breast.
He pulled his hand away as if she had burned him. "That wasn't--"
"I know," she interrupted.
"Never mind. I don't need your help."
"Don't be silly. We can do this."
She reached out and grasped his left hand putting it firmly on her upper arm. "There."
Her body still tingled from that touch. Of course she'd had a more than a few young men reaching for her breasts when she'd been in college. In the cheap motels where they put up members of the Woman's Basketball League, there always seemed to be a swarm of scum ready with a paw and grope. Never, however, had her body tingled like it did now. Even his grasp on her arm, firm, yet as gentle as if he were afraid of cracking an egg, had to be raising her temperature.
She stepped up as she reached the curb, then cringed, waiting for him to fall.
Somehow, though, he seemed in sync with her body, and made the step with her.
"Is it true," she asked him, "that losing one sense make all of your other senses more acute?"
He shook his head. "Some of the guys I've met, guys who were blind from birth, seem to have exceptional senses of smell or hearing. That didn't work for me. I just had to learn to pay attention all the time."
Blind Date Page 1
