His hot mouth claimed her one final time as she arched against him, then fell back, too delirious to even know where she was.
When she opened her eyes, it was to see him above her. Courtney felt a smile rising to her lips. It was almost all she had strength for.
“You should punch Andrew more often.”
“I will,” he promised her, “if he ever lays another hand on you.”
How possessive. How territorial.
“My hero,” she whispered.
Courtney knew that she should bristle and protest, but something inside of her loved it. And understood. Because she would have done the same to any woman who tried to claim him.
And then he was entering her, filling her not just with a promise, but with himself. Courtney arched her hips, taking him in deeper, deeper, until he’d reached her very soul.
One by one, he’d joined his hands, his lips, his body, with hers. And she knew, even as her senses rose to a fever pitch, that she wanted it to be this way always. At any cost.
The phone rang, breaking apart a delicious dream she was having, tearing it into fragments that quickly disappeared. She remembered only the passion that it embodied.
Or had that been real?
Courtney opened her eyes, reaching for the telephone mechanically. It was morning. The morning after the annual fund-raiser. The morning after a torrid night of lovemaking.
Only slowly did another, more important fact penetrate. It was morning and the place beside her wasn’t empty.
Courtney realized that even as she brought the receiver to her ear.
Her mouth curved as sunshine filled her, coming from a more ethereal source than the one outside her window. John was still here, in her bed, asleep beside her. He hadn’t left her this time, but had remained to greet the day with her.
Courtney let out a long, contented sigh.
Progress.
“Hello?” she said sleepily into the receiver. She felt as if she could hug the whole world.
The voice on the other end belonged to a soft-spoken woman. “Is this Mrs. Gabriel?”
Mrs. Gabriel. Courtney rolled the name over in her mind slowly, savoring it. Until this moment, she hadn’t thought of herself as that
. It did have a nice ring to it, didn’t it? What if…?
But she was letting her mind drift in directions that weren’t completely mapped out yet. There was a danger in getting ahead of herself. Courtney focused her mind back to the present.
“Yes, it is.” She dragged her hand through her hair, trying, at the same time, to clear her brain.
“This is the surgical department at Harris Memorial Hospital calling. We’re just confirming your daughter’s surgery date.”
The crisp statement shook the last remnants of sleep and daydream from her. Courtney tried to make sense out of the words. “Her what?”
“Her surgery date,” the woman repeated patiently. If she noticed any surprise on the other end, she gave no indication as she competently recited the particulars of Katie’s surgery, beginning with the day and time. “We wanted to inform you that her anesthesiologist will be Dr. Cunningham. Her surgeon, of course, will be Dr. Benjamin, and Dr. Swan will be assisting, as usual. They work in tandem, you know,” she confided. “And your daughter couldn’t be in better hands. There’ll be another team on standby. Everything will be ready when she comes in.
“Since you have no insurance, there will be a few extra forms to sign, so please be sure to stop by the preadmit desk first.”
“Yes, of course,” Courtney heard herself saying hollowly. “Thank you.”
The woman said goodbye. Reaching over, Courtney hung up the receiver and then sat there perfectly still, too numbed, too shocked, to move.
John turned around in bed and looked at her. The telephone had woken him, but he had assumed that the call was for Courtney. No one called him here except Rick, and Rick was on duty this morning.
He saw the expression on her face and sat up. “Bad news?”
Only her eyes shifted in his direction. The rest of her was immobilized with disbelief..
Katie was having an operation and he hadn’t thought enough of her to tell her. Hadn’t thought enough of her to let her come even this far into his life.
Someone had cut off the air supply in her world. Everything ached. The hurt Courtney felt was entirely without precedent and almost more than she could bear.
Something was wrong, he thought. Her face was a frozen mask. He couldn’t think of a single thing that could affect her this way. What had happened?
Concerned, John slipped his arm around her shoulders. She was shaking. “Courtney, what is it?”
She was so hurt, so angry, she thought the top of her head was going to explode. With a jerk, she shrugged his arm off her shoulders. She couldn’t bear for him to touch her, not when everything he’d said, everything he’d done, had been a lie.
He didn’t care about her, not even a little. He couldn’t
. When she looked at him, her eyes were blue flames. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
What was going on? “Tell you what?”
How could he sit there and make her tell him? How could he put her through this? And how could he have done this to her?
A sob rose in her throat. No, not this time. The tears weren’t allowed to come this time. They weren’t going to embarrass her in front of him any further. She had given herself to him on every level and he had held himself back from her, like a stranger. All he had shared with her was his body.
She didn’t want half measures. If it couldn’t be all, it would be nothing.
Her voice was dangerously still as she said, “Why didn’t you tell me how you really knew Dr. Benjamin when I asked you?”
Warning signs shot up, but he ignored them. He’d come too far in this direction to retrace his steps. He watched her face as he answered cautiously, “I told you, he was my ex-father-in-law’s doctor.”
He was still lying to her. She could have hit him. “Then what is he doing operating on Katie?” She didn’t want to yell, to give him the satisfaction of seeing how deeply he had hurt her, but the momentum in her voice, once activated, began to escalate. “Why is he operating on Katie?”
Holding on to the sheet, she wrapped it around herself as she rose to her knees over him, indignation and fury in her eyes. “That was the hospital, calling to confirm Katie’s operation. What operation? What’s wrong with her?”
He hated being put in this position, hated her knowing that he had lied to her. “Why didn’t you give me the telephone?”
Was that all he had to say to her? He’d cut out her heart and he wanted to know why she hadn’t conducted proper telephone etiquette?
She slammed her palm against his chest in frustration. “They didn’t ask for you, and that’s not an answer. Why were you keeping this from me?”
He fell back on the very first reason he had. “This doesn’t concern you.”
He couldn’t have found a better weapon to use against her than if he had deliberately tried.
Her eyes widened. “Doesn’t concern me? Doesn’t concern me?” she repeated incredulously. “I care about her.” Couldn’t he understand that? Didn’t he know? “Somewhere along the line, I started taking being called Mommy seriously.”
And then it became clear to her.
“Oh, I see.” She raised her chin defiantly, fervently wishing she could pull a cloak around herself and disappear. “I’m good enough to sleep with, good enough to take money from, but not good enough to be let into your life, is that it?”
His pride stung at the mention of money. “No, that’s not it and you know it,” he shouted at her.
“I don’t know anything of the kind,” she countered. “And as for the money, I guess that was our bargain, wasn’t it? Two years of your life for two hundred thousand dollars. That comes to $273.97 a day. That’s pretty cheap, really. Maybe you should charge time and a half for the nights.”
He
had no defense against the hurt in her eyes, nor against the guilt he felt knowing he was responsible for putting it there.
His voice was toneless. “It’s not like that, Courtney.”
Then why wasn’t he trying to explain? There had to be more. He owed her that, owed her an explanation.
“Then what is it like, John? Tell me. You’ve got too much pride to take money from someone. If you didn’t, you would have gotten it from Diane in the divorce settlement.”
She knew she’d struck a nerve the moment she’d said it. His eyes had darkened at the mention of her name. “I never took a penny from Diane.”
That’s what didn’t make any sense. “But you were willing to sell yourself into servitude for two years to me. Why?”
What was the use? “To pay for Katie’s operation,” he finally admitted. John dragged air into his lungs. She might as well know the rest of it. “Katie was born with a congenital condition. She has something called a Ventricular Septal Defect. In layman’s language, there’s a small hole in her heart, in the lower chambers between the left and right ventricle. She can function fairly well with it, but she gets tired when she plays, very tired.”
It made sense now, she thought, the way Gabriel had hovered over his daughter, cautioning her, wanting he to rest. But he could have told her. Should have told her.
“And Dr. Benjamin was Diane’s father’s doctor. He was called in when Katie was born. He’s been her cardiologist ever since. He’s been waiting for her to become strong enough to have bypass surgery so that he could repair the hole. It wasn’t supposed to be for another year, but lately,” he said, his voice becoming tight, “Katie’s been getting more tired more often. He thought it best to hurry the timetable along.”
Courtney covered her mouth, devastated by the news that Katie was ill, and devastated by the fact that he thought he could keep it from her. “And you didn’t think enough of me to tell me?”
“It’s not the kind of thing you toss out in casual conversation,” he snapped in frustration.
But it was the kind of thing you shared with someone you loved. “Didn’t you think I might notice when she. didn’t come down to breakfast one morning that something was wrong?” she shouted back at him, blinking back her tears. “How could you have thought that she could go in for that kind of surgery without me knowing?”
John reached for her, then let his hand drop to his side. He was at a loss how to handle this.
“Look, I’ve been dealing with things on my own for so long, it just got to be a habit.” He tried to make more sense of it than that. As he spoke, reasons began to gel that even he hadn’t been conscious of. “Diane left me because she couldn’t deal with it, couldn’t deal with the idea of a sick child. Maybe on some level, I thought if I told you, you’d have the same reaction. That you’d want to terminate our ‘arrangement.’ I honestly don’t know. I do know that I didn’t want Katie to feel rejected again. And she would have if you pulled back. So it was easier not telling you than risking having you leave.”
She couldn’t believe she was hearing this. After the past week, didn’t he know her better than this? Hadn’t he taken the time to get to know the woman he was making love with?
“You think that little of me?”
He shook his head. Katie came first. He was all she had. If he didn’t think of her, no one would. “I didn’t know what to think.”
“I guess that’s obvious.” Sheet tucked around her, Courtney rose from the bed. She didn’t know how to deal with him, with what he had done to them. “I have to take a shower.”
There was a wall between them again. And he had supplied the bricks. “Courtney—”
She didn’t trust herself to look at him. “I don’t want to talk to you right now. I don’t want to say something in the heat of the moment that one of us might regret. Please, just go.”
She heard the door close as she walked into the bathroom.
Chapter Fifteen
He was in her room when she came out of the shower.
The shower had been a long one. Every surface in the pink-and-gray tiled bathroom behind her was deeply fogged, covered with a thick layer of mist that reminded her of her own tears. She had stood there while the shower head pulsated water at her, trying to sort out her emotions.
She was as confused and hurt now as she had been hundreds of gallons of water ago.
Seeing him in her room didn’t help.
Courtney stopped toweling her hair. Hadn’t he even bothered to listen? “I thought I said—”
He wasn’t going to let her throw him out until he said what he’d returned to say. “I know what you said, but I wanted to say I was sorry.”
She took a deep breath and then exhaled slowly. The word came very easily to more than a few people she knew. But not for John. It had taken a great deal for him to say that to her.
Courtney pressed her lips together and nodded. “It’s a start, I suppose.”
She draped the towel around her neck, running her fingers through her tangled, wet hair. Barefoot, denuded of makeup, she was still the most desirable, the most beautiful, woman he’d ever seen.
“But it doesn’t change what’s happened,” she went on. “You lied to me, excluded me. You make me feel that everything that has happened between us happened because I was your—” She searched for something to cut to the heart of the matter. Nothing pithy came to mind. Words were failing her. Everything, it seemed, was failing her. “Your piggy bank,” she finally retorted in frustration.
He hated her feeling that way about the relationship that had unfolded between them. The only thing he had done in exchange for money was to marry her. Everything else had happened for reasons that had nothing to do with money. She had to know that.
“Making love with you wasn’t part of the deal,” he reminded her.
She’d never bargained on that Never bargained on falling in love with the man she’d chosen only to fulfill a requirement. “No,” she agreed quietly. “It wasn’t.”
He drew closer to her. There were a great many things in his life that had gone wrong, but at all costs, he didn’t want this to be one of them. “And I wouldn’t have made love to you if I didn’t…feel something for you,” he finally admitted. “No amount of money in the world would have made me prostitute myself that far.”
Her head jerked up and something hard entered her eyes. “That far,” she repeated.
He could have kicked himself. It wasn’t what he meant. “Poor choice of words.”
She didn’t think so. Maybe his subconscious had only let slip what he actually felt in his heart. “Telling choice of words.”
He opened his mouth to deny it, and then stopped. With effort, he examined his conscience.
“Maybe,” he relented. When she turned away, hecaught her by the wrist and turned her around. He forced her to look at him. There was more, and she had to hear it. “Because in the beginning, that’s what I felt I was doing. But I was doing it for Katie, not for the money.” He searched her face, her eyes, looking for something, a spark that told him she understood. “Haven’t you ever loved anyone so much that you would have done anything for them? Done anything to save them?”
She thought of her father. She would have traded half her life to give him just one more week of his own. Then she thought of Katie, and how she felt as she had listened to John explain her condition.
“Yes.”
Hope began to build. “Well?”
She couldn’t forgive him, not yet. It wasn’t that simple for her. It would have been simple only if she hadn’t cared. “Like I said, it’s a start.” She closed her eyes and thought. There was more to consider than just their relationship. Or the end of it.
“The operation’s Friday, right?” When she opened her eyes to look at him, John nodded. “All right, then, let’s fill now until Friday with as much happiness as she can stand.”
He didn’t leave. “She’ll want you there.”
“I intend to
be there,” Courtney replied crisply, then measured out her words as she added, “And for Katie’s sake, we’ll pretend to be a family.” There was no humor in her eyes when she laughed at the thought. “Always pretending for one reason or another, aren’t we?”
He wanted to hold her, to make her understand how really sorry he was. To ask her to hold him and promise that everything would be all right.
But he didn’t. He just remained where he was, an insurmountable distance away. “Maybe some of us are just pretending to pretend and we don’t know it.”
She wanted to believe him but was afraid to. She’d been hurt enough for one day.
For one lifetime.
“Pretty eloquent for an engineer.”
He didn’t think of himself as that anymore. It, along with Diane, was all in his past. “Carpenters have their moments.” John started for the door. “I’ll let you get dressed.”
She merely nodded, not trusting her voice any longer.
He left the room just in time. If he’d stayed, he would have seen the tears.
Courtney put everything, else in her life on hold, canceling long-standing obligations and sending Mandy in her place to chair a meeting of the foundation’s board. She gave no explanations, except to Mandy. And Mandy promised not to tell.
She tried her hardest. So did John. For Katie’s sake, they were an inseparable family unit for the next five days. They went to amusement parks, to the movies, to the zoo and even to a children’s play at the Orange Coast Performing Arts Center. A few discreet calls to the right people had yielded front-row seats at the sold-out performance. It had been worth the effort to see the look on Katie’s face as she watched the performance. The one on John’s as he watched his daughter laugh and applaud was a bonus.
And gradually, with Katie between them, somewhere along the line the laughter became a little less forced, the words a little less strained, the feelings a little more intimate.
You would have almost believed, Courtney thought as Sam, the chauffeur, drove them to Harris Memorial Hospital early Friday morning, that they were a real family instead of two actors putting on a play for a little girl’s benefit.
Wanted: Husband, Will Train Page 19
