Unbroken Vows

by Frances Williams

  What did she know of his life anyway? He was having a hard enough time trying to figure it out himself. He didn’t even know who the hell he was anymore. The navy had given him a sense of purpose that had formed the bedrock of his life. What purpose did he serve now? Seeing how many laps he could force out before exhaustion drove him back to his empty house?

  He hardened his jaw.

  His house was empty because he wanted it that way. He was alone because he chose to be alone.

  No one had ever spoken to him as she had yesterday. Everyone—with one excruciating exception—had been so damn sympathetic and kind, so damn pitying. At least the beautiful doctor sure as hell didn’t pity him. He should feel grateful to her for that. What he felt instead was fury at himself for allowing her to get under his skin.

  He hobbled down to hit the water.

  The insomnia that kept his eyes glued open last night he was accustomed to. It was those damn pictures of Cara Merrill that kept flicking through his mind that bugged him. He could still see her as she looked standing on the dock, the breeze from the lake ironing the thin blouse and pants against her body, outlining those alluring breasts, that fabulous figure. The woman could bring a rock to life.

  He quickly clamped off that train of thought. He wasn’t man enough to risk putting the theory to the test.

  She’d walked away from him yesterday without bothering to look back even once. That annoyed him. Especially since he only knew it because he’d kept his eyes on her until the trees hid her from view.

  But then, why the hell should she have given him a parting glance? He’d turned her down flat. What’s more, he didn’t give a damn if he never again received any glances whatever from an attractive woman.

  This one not only was damnably attractive, she was damnably determined. He still resented her for disrupting his self-imposed solitude, but demonstrations of tenacity, of sheer guts in anyone had always impressed him. He’d always liked formidable women. Why not? He’d once prided himself on being called formidable.

  Not lately. Every faltering step he took drove the proof of his painful deficiency deeper into his soul. Only in the buoyant, forgiving water where his almost useless leg didn’t matter could he come close to forgetting that weakness.

  The woman sure didn’t intimidate easily. He couldn’t help but smile at the remembrance. In the water yesterday, he’d shot her the black look that had scared the hell out of hundreds of new SEAL recruits. Under it that female reporter who’d shown up here a few months ago turned tail and ran. Cara Merrill blinked. But she’d stood her ground.

  She annoyed him, all right. But more than that, she piqued his interest. Curious. It had been a very long time since he’d reacted to anyone or anything with more than indifference.

  He gave up on trying to work in his usual number of laps and headed for shore.

  Up on the deck he slapped his wet towel over the railing.

  She wouldn’t quit. The decisive set of her lovely mouth when she left told him that. Damn. Nothing for it but to see her again, and take another shot at persuading her to give up this harebrained scheme. She could spend the rest of her life looking for that jerk and never find him.

  He snatched up the small white business card from the table where it had lain overnight, and grumbled into the house.

  He walked out of his room a half hour later, shaved and dressed in the custom-tailored dark gray slacks and the designer black silk sport shirt he’d bought back in the days when he cared what he looked like. He hoped he looked civilized enough to venture back into the real world for a few hours.

  He hesitated for a moment before hoisting himself into the pickup. Until now, he’d used the vehicle only to run down to the general store. Someone always came to pick him up for trips into Richmond to see his doctor. On the long drive to Baltimore, working the clutch might be hard on his leg.

  “The hell with it,” he said out loud and pulled the door shut. If he’d gotten to the point where he couldn’t even drive himself off this damn mountain, it was time he packed it in.

  So much for heroics. By the time he reached the medical office, his leg was locked in one long agonizing cramp from the effort of stamping down on the clutch. He stumbled through the door doubled over and grasping his left thigh.

  A stethoscope looped around her neck, Cara was speaking to the nurse at the reception desk. She took one look at him and her blue eyes flared wide. She was at his side in a heartbeat. He didn’t object when she pulled one of his arms over her shoulder and slid her arm around his waist to tow him past the waiting patients into the examining room.

  “Good Lord, Commander. What have you done to yourself? Sit down there.” She pointed to the high examining table.

  His teeth clenched against the torture in his leg, he dropped to the edge of the table.

  She ran her hands down his leg, assessing the problems she could feel beneath the lightweight gabardine. “Severe muscle spasms of both thigh and calf.” Without letting go of his leg, she hooked a foot around the low, wheeled examining stool and pulled it over. She sat down and carefully removed his black moccasin to gently flex the foot and begin to unknot corkscrewed muscles. Bracing his foot against the crook of her shoulder, she probed his calf.

  “How did this happen?”

  “I drove in—from the house—” he gasped out, his breathing ragged. “I ran into trouble with the—with the stick shift.” He gripped the sides of the table with white-knuckled hands. “Stupid of me to drive myself—all this way. But from time to time—1 try to pretend—that I’m still the man I used to be.” He couldn’t help the grunt of pain as her fingers found a particularly tender spot.

  “Sorry.”

  She worked her way up to the bunched cords of his thigh. It felt like forever until the soothing warmth of her hands and their expert kneading of his twisted flesh eased the worst of the pain and quieted his screaming nerves. A big relief when he was able to take a more or less normal breath and release clenched stomach muscles.

  “Just a small reminder, lady,” he said, finally able to speak without choking out his words. “You’re the one who wanted me to go galloping off to South America with you. Look at me. I can’t even drive for a couple of hours without ending up in your emergency room.”

  “Over three hours, David,” she countered quietly. “And I’ll bet it’s been a while since you’ve driven so far.”

  She stood up and kicked the stool out of the way. “Now that you can move without too much pain, scoot back on the table and lie down.” She gave his chest a gentle push. “Let’s get these pants off you.” She flipped open the hook closure on his waistband and took hold of the zipper tab. He grabbed her wrist to pull her hand away.

  “Oh, for... Come on, David. I’ve loosened up the muscles some, but massage will be much more effective if done directly on the affected limb.”

  That “affected limb” to her, was a repulsive mass of scarred flesh to him. Doctor or no doctor, there was no way in the world he was going to expose his ravaged body to her. “No need. It feels better already.”

  She shot him an exasperated look. “I am a doctor, Commander Reid.”

  Maybe so, but white coat or no, the lovely vision he saw in front of him was all woman. And he’d already undergone one searing lesson on how a woman reacted to the sight of him. He wasn’t eager for a second. “But you’re not my doctor.”

  “I sure don’t envy whoever is your doctor. You probably drive him nuts.”

  “So he says.”

  “At least lie back so I can get at that leg a little more easily.”

  She pulled out the table extension and supported his damaged leg as he shoved himself carefully to the top of the table and gingerly lowered his back to the paper-protected leather.

  “Interesting,” she observed, continuing to rub her hands over the slowly relaxing muscles of his thigh. Her long tapering fingers looked as delicate as fine porcelain, but felt as if they were made of spun steel sheathed in velve
t. “You insist on calling yourself a cripple—not a term I’d use, by the way—but you refuse to act like one. You won’t even use a proper pair of crutches that would make getting around a lot easier for you.”

  “I did use them for a while, but I hated the looks of them.”

  It wasn’t so much the looks of the crutches that he hated, but how he looked when dragging himself around on them. Especially after Anita got through with him.

  He managed a halfway grin. “I’ve graduated to a cane. Don’t I get any marks for that?” He pointed to the antique cane topped with a handgrip of smooth brass that he’d dropped to the floor.

  “Okay. I guess you deserve a passing grade—for effort, if nothing else.”

  He’d drawn a smile from her. For some reason he felt quite proud of himself for that.

  Her hands worked their way to the top of his leg, taming torment into a manageable ache. With the searing red flame in his leg subsiding, he gradually became aware once again of something outside himself.

  And the closest thing to him was Cara. The only women who’d touched him in the past year and a half were medical personnel. And, of course, his grandmother. But Anne’s touch had never brought him anything but comfort. Cara’s hands on him should feel as neutral as their’s had. They didn’t. He was completely conscious of them as a woman’s hands. As her hands.

  Just looking at her did something funny to his chest. A few silky golden strands had escaped the knot on top of her head and fluttered against the softness of her cheek as she worked. Her full, pink lips were parted slightly and her breath came in fast little puffs from the physical effort of tending to him.

  Lying flat on his back in front of her left him a long way from feeling comfortable. Instead he felt dangerously vulnerable. Vulnerable to what, he wasn’t sure, since she was doing nothing but easing his pain.

  Her knuckles brushed lightly against the lump of almost insensitive flesh at the juncture of his thighs. What had been almost insensitive flesh. Her accidental touch jolted a flash of heat through him. Startled surprise mushroomed into the beginnings of panic. But beneath the reflexive anxiety curled a desire to feel the animating touch again.

  He pushed himself upright.

  “You can stop now, Doctor.” He felt like a fool for the harshness in his voice, but couldn’t help it. “My leg feels fine.”

  “No more pain?”

  “No.”

  She slipped a hand under his knee and gently worked the leg up and down a couple of times. “You don’t have good range of motion in that knee. You’ve had surgery on it.”

  “Lots.” It wasn’t easy to shift his leg away from her when the pleasure of her touch felt so good, but he managed it.

  “Very well, Commander.” She shoved her hands into the pockets of her examining coat and stepped back from him. “You’d better stay off your feet for a while. Come into my office and rest in the recliner for the next hour.”

  He needed her help to edge himself off the table and onto his feet without sending his leg back into spasm. She stooped to recover his cane from the floor and handed it to him. He would have preferred not to accept the support of her delicately boned but surprisingly sturdy shoulder while staggering into the next room, but he wasn’t sure enough of his leg to avoid it.

  She was practically holding him in her arms as she helped him settle into the big black leather chair behind her desk.

  Her breasts brushed electrifyingly against his chest. Her face was so close it would take only a slight tip of his head to touch his mouth to hers. And just as it had yesterday, looking into those blue eyes up close made him feel as if he’d knocked back one drink too many.

  She quickly pulled back from him.

  “There’s coffee brewed,” she said, lifting a hand to check the position of the silver comb anchoring her swept-up hair. “Help yourself.”

  Too bad he couldn’t let her know that she was perfectly safe with him. Not pleasant to admit that he posed no sexual hazard whatever to any woman.

  Still, he had to be careful around her. Yesterday, as she climbed the steps ahead of him, he’d been so busy admiring the enticing sway of her sweetly rounded little bottom that he’d damn near fallen flat on his face. Astonishing, because he’d thought himself completely immune to such enticements. Today he’d almost committed an even greater misstep. One he could hardly have predicted. And he’d make certain it would never be repeated.

  The voices in the outer rooms finally died out, and in less than an hour she returned to him. She pulled the stethoscope from around her neck and dropped it on top of a bookcase near the door. With an exhausted sigh, she sank into the chair on the other side of the desk. Lines of fatigue bracketed the soft pink. lips as her fingertips scribed tiny circles in the delicate skin at her temples.

  “Tough day, Doctor?”

  “Ordinary day—except for you. I just didn’t get a whole lot of sleep last night.”

  He could relate to that. And he didn’t have to add to her problems by badgering her about her fiance. Regardless of his own opinion of Tommy the junkie, a woman so worried about the man to whom she considered herself bound didn’t deserve to have her concern belittled.

  “Thank you for helping me out in there.” He angled his head toward the examining room next door. “God knows I needed it.”

  “Glad I could help. It’s my job, you know.”

  “You do it well.”

  “According to Elliott, you did yours pretty well, too—although I’m not quite sure just what that job was. I guess that’s why he figured you could do what I need you for.”

  It had been a long time since he’d felt that he was truly needed for anything. The idea that it might really be so was a seduction he resisted. He knew better.

  “Assuming you ever find Dr. Grant, what do you intend to do about him?”

  “I’ll bring him back, of course. Maybe it’s not too late for me to help him with his ... his problem. I want to get him into the rehab program run for drug addicted and alcoholic physicians. Unlike most others, this facility can boast of a high success rate. Tommy needs to know I’m still there for him, that we can work this out together.”

  “You sound more like Tommy’s mother than his lover. Is that what you’ll settle for? Taking care of a man as if he were a child?”

  She dropped her hands from her head and snapped her gaze to his.

  “That’s not the way I look at it. Is it so hard to see it as one person being concerned about another?”

  David tossed her another fast ball, hoping he could hit on something that would dent her persistence. “Why weren’t you there for him before?”

  “I’m getting used to your penchant for blunt talk, Commander. That question didn’t sting quite as much as it would have before you’d prepared me for it by our conversation yesterday. However, it deserves an honest answer. Tommy fell into a black pit because of me—because of what I didn’t do, and should have.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that I let myself become so involved with finishing my residency and making the arrangements to open a joint medical practice with Tommy that I didn’t pay enough attention to his problems. We went through med school together, but we were serving our residencies in different cities, so we weren’t able to see a whole lot of each other. Both our schedules were chaotic. It wasn’t unusual for us not to see each other or even find time to call each other for days. All we could do was squeeze in a few hours together now and then, either here or in New York. Tommy was out of touch for three weeks before I became alarmed enough to notify the police of his disappearance.”

  “Not exactly what you’d call a hot romance,” David observed dryly. This Tommy must be an even bigger fool than he already thought him not to have hiked himself to this woman’s bed every chance he could.

  “I’m sure it wasn’t what you’re accustomed to.” He almost laughed out loud at that. “But our relationship wasn’t that unusual between busy medical professio
nals. That only made the time we were able to spend together more precious to us. We respected each other’s work and we cared deeply about each other.”

  He could readily believe that. If not about Tommy, certainly about her. “You must really be in love with the guy to do all this for him.”

  She shot out of the chair and turned away from him. Her fingers curled around the back of her neck as if her headache had just spread to that region.

  “I planned to marry him, didn’t I?” Her voice was unusually sharp.

  “Don’t get all bent out of shape, Doctor. It was just a passing observation.”

  She turned to him, a look of contrition on her beautiful face. “I’m sorry. I’ve been on edge lately.”

  She slipped back down into the chair. “I’ve known Tommy for years. We grew up together. Went to grade school and high school together. Why do you seem to find my feelings for him difficult to accept?”

  “Maybe I just don’t understand it. Frankly I don’t have a lot of experience with that level of commitment from a woman.”

  “Stand By Your Man.” Foolish though it was in this case, she was sure taking the song to heart. He of all people ought to support her in that.

  He wasn’t ready, though, to buy her entire loyal angel-of-mercy bit. Anita laid on the same scene while he’d been in the hospital. Fluffing up his pillows, straightening the sheets, holding the straw in a glass of water to his lips when he hadn’t the strength to lift his head. She dropped the act quickly enough that first night at home in their bedroom. The night she finally ran up against the sickening reality of him.

  “Come right down to it, I don’t think I really believe in love. Not the kind of romantic delusion that seems to have come over you.”

  “You consider love a delusion?”

  “Let’s drop it, shall we?”

  This conversation was getting a little too personal. He jogged the subject back to the man in question by picking up the silver-framed photograph standing on the desk. While Cara was gone, he’d stared at the photo for several minutes trying to figure out what the guy had to so grab a woman that she wouldn’t let go even after he’d kicked her in the teeth. The portrait had given him no clue.