Confusion replaced the boy’s rage.
“How come you didn’t say nothin’ about it when I told you I wanted to be a doctor?”
“I didn’t see it as relevant.”
“You didn’t see...” The boy resumed his catlike prowling around the room, slapping his fist against his palm. “Let me get this straight. If it hadn’t been for this...this bird of yours, you’d still be a travel manager?”
At that, Mason conceded himself the right to a show of temper.
“You’ve got a problem with that?”
Skip didn’t yield.
“I don’t know, man. I mean, Mason. Like I’m dying to be just like you, but if I get to be a doctor, I sure as h— I sure ain’t gonna check out and go around the world. I don’t think I like this.”
In for a penny, in for a pound.
“Sit down, Skip.” He related his story in detail, beginning with his near-accident while operating, sparing nothing. “Being a doctor is more than glamour, more than ego and self-importance. It’s healing sick people, but when you take chances with their lives and do it for self-aggrandizement, there comes a time when you have to stop and take stock of what you’re doing and why. I reached that point the morning my hand slipped and my patient almost paid for it with her life. I realized at that moment that some force beyond me, greater than I, had saved the woman’s life, that I wasn’t infallible and that I was capable of irreversible damage to my patients. I didn’t quit because I got scared, but because I had dared to play God and I found out that I’m not all-powerful.”
He didn’t have to be told that he had deeply impressed Skip. The boy sat watching him as though mesmerized.
“I wasn’t accusing you. I just couldn’t understand how you could give up what I want so badly. You were A-one, right?”
Mason nodded. “Yes, but I got cocky, and that’s dangerous.”
“So what about Jeanny? Is she your patient or your bird?”
“Jeanny?”
“Jeannetta’s too long a word.”
Mason laughed. His hours with Skip gave him so much pleasure that he sometimes wondered if he could ever repay the boy.
“She’s my girl and my patient, but that’s an accident, and it’s not a good thing.”
“Is she okay? Nothing went wrong?”
Chills danced down his spine as the possible scenarios flashed through his mind.
“She’s okay and nothing went wrong. I expect she’ll be good as new in a couple of months.” He watched Skip rub his chin, run his hand over his tight curls, and shake his head.
“Gee, man, weren’t you scared walking in there after three years and picking something outta somebody’s head? Especially when she was your bird?”
Mason smiled to himself at Skip’s choice of words.
“I didn’t let myself think of anything but what I had to do. I wasn’t scared, but I had a good talk with God when I’d finished. We’d better get moving.”
“Like wow, man... I mean, Mason. How big is this place we’re going?” Mason laughed at the boy’s enthusiasm and patted him on the head.
“Bigger than you are. Did you bring your biology books?”
“I brought all of my books,” Skip said, and patted the school bag that had been a present from Mason.
“Okay, let’s get started.” He glanced around, admiring what he saw, glad to be back where he knew he belonged.
“Who’s this trip for, Mason? Me or you?” Mason raised an eyebrow at the boy’s astute question.
“Both of us. This is your big chance to get some polish.” And mine to find out where I’m going, he added to himself.
* * *
“Come in.” Jeannetta looked at her watch. Nearly four hours had elapsed since Laura had left her room. Had a dread of seeing her detained him? “Hello, Clayton.”
“Hello.” He rushed to kiss her cheek, but she sensed a new reserve in him, and emotional distance where previously none had existed.
“How are you, my dear?” Banalities. Forced conversation. He meant to stick to his promise to marry her until she voluntarily released him, though he had to know that that kind of gallantry had made a lot of people miserable.
“I’m glad to see you, Clayton. How long have you been here?” Maybe she shouldn’t put him on the spot, but she meant to find out as best she could and as quickly as possible whether he intended to hurt Laura. He looked her straight in the eye and she had the uneasy feeling that he’d judged her. Then he raised his head and looked toward the ceiling.
“I asked you to marry me, Jeannetta. More than once I’ve told you that I’d be honored to have you as my wife. I’ll be happy knowing that you’re well-cared for. What is your answer?”
“I’m honored, Clayton.” He paled visibly—dark though he was—his eyes widened and his breath quickened. She couldn’t help marveling when his left hand jerked voluntarily toward his chest, only to have him force it into his pants pocket. She put him at ease.
“I appreciate your gesture more than you can know, but I’m sure you’ll understand that I can’t marry you when I love another man.”
Air flowed out of him with such force that he released it through his lips, and his entire upper body sagged as the tension eased out of him.
“Are you going to marry Fenwick?”
She shook her head. “That’s irrelevant. The point is that he’s the one, and I can’t marry anybody else. So don’t worry. I’m going to be fine.”
“Has he told you that the operation succeeded?” he asked doggedly, causing her to wonder whether she’d been unfair to him.
“He won’t know for a few weeks or maybe months. Are you in love with my sister?”
Both of his eyebrows arched sharply. “She told you?”
Annoyance pricked at her. How else would she know? “She told me that you wanted to declare yourself but couldn’t, because you were committed.” Jeannetta couldn’t help remembering how she had allowed Alma to think that she encouraged Jethro’s advances in revenge for Alma’s having seduced Jethro and tricked him into marriage, although
Jethro had been engaged to Jeannetta. She had tried several times to set it right, but Alma’s vicious gossip and supercilious behavior had discouraged decency on Jeannetta’s part. So she had let the woman worry. But that lesson was all the motivation she needed to avoid future tangled relationships. She stared hard at Clayton, scrutinizing him in a way that must have surprised him.
“You and I are friends, or so you said. But you’d been here twenty-four hours and hadn’t greeted me. Surely you wouldn’t marry a woman if you felt that way about her.”
He’s a fighter, she realized, when he straightened his shoulders, tilted his head and wordlessly dared her to question his integrity.
“I didn’t want to hurt Laura by going to you, and, though I would have honored my proposal, I dreaded knowing I’d have to—feeling as I do about your sister.”
“Laura looks and acts tough,” she told him, “but she isn’t. People think I’m fragile, but they’re invariably surprised to learn otherwise. If anybody hurts my sister, they’ll hear from me. You get the message?”
His wan smile and cold eyes told her that he wouldn’t take much more, but his mild words denied it.
“Too bad you think you have to warn me, though that was more of a threat. You’ll learn that I’m honorable.”
“I’ll be watching for it, too,” she replied, refusing to weaken her stance. He grasped her hand before she could move away.
“This isn’t the way friends should talk to each other. I’d prefer to have your blessing.”
She tried to release her hand, but he held it firmly.
* * *
“What are you doing up here? I want you to move around.” At the sound of Mason’s voice, her glance
shot toward the door. “You’re not to stay in...wh...what’s going on here? What the hell is this?”
“Mason!” She smiled, her heart bursting with joy at the sight of him, as Clayton released her hand, but her smile evaporated when she noticed the scalding fury reflected in Mason’s dark eyes.
“What is it? Oh,” she exclaimed, when she followed his gaze to Clayton. “You remember Clayton Miles, don’t you?”
“Bad pennies don’t let you forget them. So give it to me straight, Jeannetta. What is this man to you?”
You’d think a man of his brilliance wouldn’t need her public declaration.
“He’s a man who wants my sister, Laura,” she said, mainly for Clayton’s benefit.
“If he can’t see how you feel about him, you ought to let him sweat!” Clayton said as he left the room, but if Mason heard that, his next words didn’t indicate it.
“If he’s nothing to you, why were you holding his hand?”
Her joy at seeing him didn’t mean he couldn’t make her mad, and she bristled.
“How did you get the temerity to walk into my room without knocking or having yourself announced?” He folded his arms across his chest, accentuating his maleness and teasing her with his provocative posture.
“’Scuse me, baby. I wanted to surprise you.” The natural seductiveness of his low, husky voice addled her, and she rubbed her arms and swallowed while his gaze pierced her. She watched, mesmerized, while his eyes changed to greenish-brown, and she got a whiff of his man’s scent and felt moisture on her skin. Like a hawk, he watched her, and she took a few steps backward, knowing that he’d come after her. She sprang to him when he held out his arms and lost herself in his drugging kiss. His lips, his skin, his smell besotted her, and she had to hide her face in the curve of his neck while she fought for composure.
* * *
“I didn’t mean what I said,” she murmured. If he’d thought she did, he wouldn’t be holding her. He had wanted to see her face light up when he walked into her room, but conceded that he shouldn’t have done it. He held her away and gave her what he hoped was a stern look.
“We have to avoid these hot scenes, honey, because I don’t want you to get overly upset. Anger is just as detrimental as passion. Try not to get excited.” He had to laugh at her raised eyebrow and rueful expression.
“Where’s Skip?” Jeannetta asked.
“Downstairs in the office at the computer. He was as happy sitting there as a worm in a barrel of apples.”
“I want to meet him.” He walked them to a floor lamp and removed the shade.
“Time enough. I want to examine your eyes.” He dressed the wound.
* * *
The cool early morning breeze of late August drifted into the room, and Mason grabbed a fistful of it and stretched his long body, his arms extended toward the ceiling. He glanced toward the other bed and had to laugh, though he was barely awake. Skip sat up in bed waiting for Mason to open his eyes. “I’ll go back to New York the day before school starts,” the boy said at the end of a long and rapid discourse. “Since you’re going to get a place for my aunt Mabel, and I won’t have to worry about her, I can stay up here. Can’t I?”
He heard the worry and anxiety in the boy’s voice.
“You really want to stay up here for the next six weeks? This room’s expensive.”
“Laura said I can have the maid’s room, since she lives at home with her folks. And she said I can mow the grass, wash all the windows, polish all the floors, dry-clean the carpets, wax her car, and a couple of other things she named. I’ll get the place ready for winter, and she’ll pay me eight bucks an hour, room and board. Man...I mean, Mason, that’s money.” Mason wanted Skip to stay at the Hideaway, but he didn’t like the idea of his doing such heavy work.
“Skip, that’s hard work for a twelve-year-old. Whose idea was it?”
The boy grinned cockily. “Mine. If there’s any work around, I find it. Okay?” That’s what he’d thought.
“We’ll see.”
“Merde, man. I work that hard at my aunt’s place and don’t get a cent. Just think, I can put fifty dollars a day in the bank. That’s twenty-one hundred bucks.” Skip jumped off the bed. “You’re not going to make me give that up, are you?”
Mason yawned. He’d gotten accustomed to Skip’s bursts of energy, and he’d handle this one with some words to Laura.
“I’ll think about it, and watch your language. You aren’t the only one who’s studied French.”
“Okay. So how come you didn’t stay with your bird last night?”
Mason had to stifle a laugh; the boy was incorrigible.
“Skip, do not refer to Jeannetta as my bird, and try being your age. This is not a subject for children, of which, believe it or not, you are one.” He grinned broadly at Skip’s expression of amazement. “And, son, men mind their business when it comes to such things. You shower first, and make it snappy. I’m ready for breakfast.”
He watched the boy dash into the bathroom, and the memory of Steve’s sacrifices for his own well-being settled in his mind. Was he about to take on an even greater responsibility? And what if Jeannetta didn’t want to mother someone else’s twelve-year-old?
Chapter 10
Jeannetta had never thought she’d have occasion to envy Laura her relationship with a man, but when she walked into the kitchen and saw the glow on her sister’s face she could only stare at the transformation and know that Clayton had brought it about. Feminine softness radiated from Laura, her movements and gestures had taken on a new daintiness, and her fair complexion reddened whenever she risked a glance at Clayton, who seemed unable to look at anything or anyone but Laura. If she’d made love with Mason, wouldn’t she know it, and wouldn’t she react to him as Laura did to Clayton? She knew she loved Mason, but she sensed a peculiar gap in their relationship. She turned and went to find him.
The handsome young boy was talking animatedly to Mason, as though pleading his case for something important, and she saw that he had the man’s rapt attention.
“You must be Skip,” Jeannetta said as she walked toward him with her right hand extended.
The boy started to meet her, turned back, and asked Mason, “This is your...I mean, is this Jeanny?”
“Yes. I’m Jeannetta.”
“Wow, man.” A grin spread across his face, and his whole visage brightened as though a floodlight had been turned on him, and Jeannetta knew she would like him. Still, her raised eyebrow bespoke her astonishment when he declared, with a hefty shot of confidence, “It’s time I met you, ’cause me and you are gonna be seeing a lot of each other.”
She glanced at Mason for an explanation, but he limited his visible reaction to a dry smile.
“Skip has problems trying to be a child and keeping his imagination in check.” The boy whirled around.
“But me and her are gonna be tight. Right?” Jeannetta saw the boy’s desperate need for love and, when Mason walked to him and slung an arm loosely around his shoulders, she understood that the man she loved knew how to give it.
“Stop lapsing into that street language, and speak the way I’ve taught you. If you behave yourself, I’m sure she’ll want you to be her friend,” Mason told him, adding, “Now stop worrying and go talk with Laura. You may work five hours a day, but not a minute more, and you’re not to get on a ladder that’s over six feet high. Got it?”
“Yes, sir. But...Mason...”
“Skip!”
“Okay, Okay.”
Jeannetta couldn’t miss the parental pride with which Mason watched Skip as the boy sped from the lounge. “He’s very attached to you.”
“Yes. He is. He’ll keep you busier than an ant, but he’s a great kid. If you still want to go fishing, we’d better do it before the sun gets too high.”
“Can Skip come along?” Her heart fluttered at the suggestion in his obsidian eyes when they swept slowly over her with half-raised lids.
“What’s the matter? I’m boring, or you don’t trust your virtue with me out there in the woods?” A flirtatious grin added fuel to his seductive glance and wicked tone.
She laid her head to one side, and rested her right knuckle on her right hip bone. “Are you playing with me? I don’t seem to remember your getting this familiar with me. Not that I don’t like it—I’m just burning my brain up trying to figure you out. I understand you when you’re being the doctor, but when you’re somewhere between suitor and lover, I’m lost.”
“The doctor told you not to tax yourself trying to remember, but the lover is going mad wanting to hold you to your words and behavior when you spun out of this world in his arms.”
She touched the bandage on her head, winced, and smiled with what he knew involved a good deal of effort to ignore the discomfort.
“When I say out of this world, I mean heaven on earth,” he emphasized. He watched her swallow hard just before her lips parted and her eyelids dropped, the way they did when desire claimed her, and he told himself that they would recapture what they’d lost, even if her memory of their loving didn’t return.
“I can think of at least one way for you to restore my memory of that in a hurry.”
“Honey, if you’re thinking that, don’t mention it to me, because I remember, and I don’t need that provocation. When your doctor says you’re well, you won’t have to ask. Trust me.” He tried to soften the words with a smile, but he didn’t feel like smiling. He picked up their fishing gear and a folding chair.
“What’s that for?” She pointed to the chair.
“Jeannetta, I know you don’t like having me coddle you, but cut me some slack here. You are recovering from serious major surgery, and I have to see that you act like it. I can’t stop being your doctor just because I’ve got something going for you. Come on.” He settled Jeannetta on the short pier at the edge of the lake, baited her hook, slipped off his fatigues and dived into the water.
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