“I told you to decide beforehand which games you’d play. That way, they couldn’t strong-arm you into everything.”
“I didn’t know they would come at me in relays. While I’m out there killing myself in every game, they’ve got reserves resting up in the shade.”
Josh Worsley wasn’t one of those sitting in the shade. He was home, not feeling well.
“You can’t give up now,” Ethan said, trotting over to where Liz had spread their blanket in the shade of an oak near the edge of the lake. “We have to defend the honor of the adults in volleyball.”
“I’m not moving,” Matt insisted.
“I’m still going.”
“You spend every day climbing up and down that mountain. I spend it sitting in a chair. I’m out of shape.”
“You can’t give up. They’ll think we’re sissies.”
“They’re welcome to think anything they want as long as I don’t have to get up off this blanket.”
“We don’t have anybody else.”
“Ask Amos,” Liz suggested.
“He said he can’t leave the hotel,” Ethan said.
“Set the kids on him,” Matt offered. “They’ll drag him out of his lair.”
“Get Naomi,” Liz suggested. “If she plays, Amos will, too.”
“What you ought to do is get Salome,” Matt said. “She’ll kill them.”
“She broke three nails last year,” Liz told him. “She refuses to come anywhere near a volleyball.”
“Forfeit,” Matt said as he rolled onto his stomach. “Then we can all get some rest.”
Liz giggled inwardly as she stared at Matt spread inelegantly at her feet If she’d only thought to lay her picnic on a sheet, Salome could have fulfilled her wish to see Matt spread out on a sheet. Liz had to admit he did look delicious. His shirt clung to his back and arms, revealing muscles Matt swore he didn’t have. Tight shorts delineated his rounded behind and powerful thighs. Muscled calves tapered down to slim ankles and trim feet. Even out of breath, he looked like a minor god.
“Why don’t you take a nap?” she suggested. She was tired of games. She wanted some time alone with Matt. “I’ll keep everybody away.”
Matt rolled up on his elbow with a sudden display of energy. “I’m not that tired. I just wanted to spend some time with you.” He pulled her down next to him.
“Matt, stop it. Everybody will see us.”
She sat up, flustered. She wanted to know if he liked her. And if so, how much. But she wasn’t prepared to start necking with him in public, especially not rolling around on a blanket in full view of the whole town. She wouldn’t put it past Josie Woodhouse to demand she stop making a public spectacle of herself.
Matt started to trace a pattern on the skin of her leg just above her knee. “Nobody will see us.”
Liz moved her leg. “Don’t let appearances fool you. At least half the gazes in Iron Springs are on us at this moment.”
Matt sat up and looked about him. The tents containing the crafts had been set up across from the hotel on the open lawn that ran from the road down to the shore of the lake. Most of the tents were close to the road and the hotel, where guests retreated every hour or so for shade and liquid refreshment. The rest of the lawn had been set off for games. Liz had spread her blanket under trees at an angle from the hotel, but they were still in view of anyone who wished to see them.
Matt came to his knees, held out his hand to her. “Then let’s go for a walk in the woods.”
“I can’t leave the children.”
“Of course you can. They’re being watched by the other half of the people in Iron Springs.”
“We might as well hang a sign around our necks saying Going Necking. Back In An Hour.”
“It works for me.”
“But not for me. You get to leave Iron Springs. I have to live here.”
“We can both run away.”
“Don’t be silly. I don’t want to run away.”
Matt looked directly at her, no grinning, no kidding. “I thought you invited me to this fair so we could have a chance to talk. I’m beginning to think you only wanted someone to entertain your kids.”
That was coming to the point with a vengeance. She hadn’t been nearly so clever as she thought.
“I did. But we can talk without hiding in the woods.”
“Then at least let’s walk. We won’t be such easy targets.” They got to their feet. “I don’t know how you stand it here. I couldn’t, knowing dozens of people were looking over my shoulder, ready to gossip and whisper about every move I made.”
“Most of it is friendly, even protective.”
“So you told me, but I’d rather take care of myself by myself.”
“So you told me.”
Things weren’t getting off to a good start at all. Already they were arguing over one of the fundamental differences between them. It only pointed to the fact they would never want the same thing.
“When you invited me to the fair, did you think one of us would be so overcome with passion that we’d need the entire town as a chaperon?” Matt asked.
“I have to admit I wasn’t thinking about the town at all,” she replied. “I just wanted to talk. I couldn’t stand us avoiding each other all the time.”
They ambled along side by side, their shoulders occasionally brushing as they tried to stay on the path. The sun had long ago dried the dew. Matt picked stalks of grass and stripped the layers one by one. She fiddled with the collar of her blouse or readjusted her straw hat.
“We could have talked at the house,” Matt said.
“And have Ben or Rebecca interrupt us every five minutes?”
“We could have talked after they went to bed.”
“Maybe I did want the protection of daylight, open spaces, people watching.”
Matt turned. “Do you distrust me that much?”
“I don’t distrust you. But after you spent the whole week hiding in your room, I had to do something to draw you out. Nothing else came to mind.”
“Did you care that much?”
Now he was shifting the burden of confession onto her. Well, she’d already confessed in so many words.
“It made me very uncomfortable to be living in the same house with someone who was avoiding me,” she said, sidestepping a direct answer to his question. “I’d rather bring the problem out in the open, put a name on it.”
“That’s not our problem.”
“What do you mean?”
“We know what the problem is.”
“In a way,” she temporized. “I mean, I don’t know what your feelings are.”
“Do you know what yours are?”
She stopped and turned to face him. She had to shade her eyes from the afternoon sun as she looked up into his face. “Yes. I like you. I tried not to because I knew it was pointless. I tried to use all the things we’ve argued over to convince myself I couldn’t possibly care about you, but it didn’t work. Besides, you like my children. What woman could resist that?”
He didn’t move for a moment, just looked down at her with his big brown eyes. Why did she find them so fascinating? They were an ordinary brown—not honey or whiskey colored—but they glowed with a warmth that reached out and wrapped itself around her. No wonder his patients wouldn’t go to anyone else.
“What if I don’t like you?”
“Not even a little bit?”
“Not even that much.”
She turned away. She didn’t believe him, but the thought he didn’t return as least a small portion of her regard hurt. “That would simplify things,” she said, looking out over the small lake.
“Would you prefer it?”
She’d never thought to ask herself that question. Would she prefer an impossible love to a comfortable indifference? She’d no sooner framed the question in her mind than she knew the answer. She turned back to Matt.
“It may sound like a terribly overused cliché, but I’d rather have loved and lo
st than never have been loved at all.”
He took her by the arm, and they resumed their walk around the lake.
“I never wanted anyone to love me,” he said after they’d gone a short distance, “not even like me very much.”
“But that’s awful.” She tried to turn and face him, but he forced her to keep walking.
“I didn’t believe in love, at least as far as I was concerned. I didn’t want it. It would just get in the way.”
“It doesn’t have to.”
“It always does. It makes people do things they don’t want to do to make other people happy. They end up with something neither of them wanted.”
“You don’t have a very high opinion of mankind, do you?”
“No.”
“Then why did you become a doctor?”
“I wanted to become rich.”
“I can’t believe that’s the only reason. Didn’t you want to help people?”
“Yes.”
“See, you—”
He stopped abruptly, swung her around to face him. “Don’t try to make me out to be better than I am.”
“What are you trying to tell me, Matt?”
“I’m not the kind of man you want. I want to be a good doctor—no, I want to be the best—but I have laid out very specific goals for my career. I don’t mean to let anything get in the way of my reaching them.”
She turned and started walking again. It was a moment before Matt followed. They had reached the far side of the lake and began to circle behind it. The path wound under trees and among small boulders that had tumbled down the mountain eons ago.
“Okay, so you’re a clear-eyed pragmatist with no intention of letting your career plans be altered by so much as a single degree,” she said. “You still haven’t told me whether your heart—and you do have a heart despite your efforts to deny it—has slipped the leash long enough to feel something for once.”
He turned her around and pulled her to him. A patch of bull rushes shielded them from view.
“Are you asking me if I like you?”
“I know it’s a shocking thing for a bare-legged girl from a small Southern town to ask a sophisticated career man like you, but yes, that’s exactly what I’m asking.”
His answer wasn’t at all what she expected.
Chapter Fourteen
Liz suddenly found herself in Matt’s arms being kissed in the most satisfyingly ruthless manner. There was nothing gentle or loverlike about it. His arms had closed around her like steel bands, and his mouth roughly took hers.
He suddenly let her go and stepped back. He looked like a wild man, confused, angry, maybe even frightened by the things that were happening inside him. “Does that answer your question?”
Liz knew it wasn’t nice to feel triumphant, but she couldn’t help it. It thrilled her to know she had managed to shake this stubborn man so profoundly.
“I think it raises more questions than it answers,” she finally managed to say. She touched her lips with the back of her hand. It was a reflex action. She had to touch them to make certain what she thought happened was real.
“I’m leaving—you’re staying,” Matt said. “We’ve always known there couldn’t be anything permanent between us. That leaves only one question that needs answering.”
A choking sensation made it difficult for her to speak. Maybe he was good at letting himself be whiplashed by conflicting emotions. She wasn’t. Her marriage to David had scarred every part of her psyche. She could feel the pain of every tiny rebuff.
“What?” she finally managed to ask.
“Can we live and work together and keep it from growing any stronger?”
“Can you?”
“Yes.”
He said it so quickly, so decisively, she wondered if he was trying to convince himself, as well as her. He had always controlled his emotions, had never let them control him. But he’d let go just a moment ago. Would he let go again?
Despite his appearance of control, she felt certain he was as unsure as she. She wasn’t a woman of the world, but no one in firm control of his feelings kissed like Matt had just kissed her. That was the kiss of a man who’d been shaken to his foundations, who felt an incredible passion he was fighting with an equally fierce passion. He was on the edge. How long could he hang on?
But if he didn’t manage to hang on, could she control her feeling for him? If not, could she let him go?
Liz didn’t know the answer to that. She hadn’t yet fully come to terms with her feelings for Matt. They were too new. She’d had even less time to figure out how they might affect her life. Her children’s lives.
“I don’t know if I can do that. I’m not even sure I want to try,” she said.
“Where does that leave us?”
“At opposite poles, where we’ve always been.”
He reached out and took her hand. “But you like me.”
“Yes.”
“And I like you.”
“So it seems.”
“That doesn’t sound too opposite to me.” He took hold of her other hand and pulled her toward him until she leaned against him. “Let’s not think beyond that.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We can go on liking each other. No more than that.”
He was asking her to enjoy the moment, take what they could and not regret the rest. It sounded like something David would say but with one crucial difference. Matt wasn’t making any promises. He wasn’t expecting any. “I’ll have to think it over.”
“Is it okay to lobby for my point of view?”
“It depends on what you had in mind.”
“I promise it won’t hurt.”
He kissed her gently this time. He teased her lips, brushing them with his own, tickling them with the tip of his tongue, nibbling, taking her lower lip between his teeth and pulling gently. A wildly irreverent thought crossed her mind. She wanted to ask him if medical schools had special classes to teach doctors the most sensitive and erogenous parts of the body. He certainly had found her combination in one try.
Though his hands barely touched her shoulders, her entire body responded to his touch. She reached out, settled her hands on his waist. She resisted the urge to pull him close, to press her body against his. She was hanging on to her self-control by a thread. She was certain that would break it.
Despite his promises, she wasn’t sure this might not hurt more than outright rejection. Yet she couldn’t summon up the will to push him away. She was enjoying it too much.
“Mama! Mama!”
Rebecca’s frightened voice cut through the fog that clogged Liz’s thoughts. She wrenched herself out of the nearly hypnotic trance to see her daughter running toward them.
“Come quick!” Rebecca called. “It’s Ben. He’s been sick all over everywhere.”
Maybe it was the heightened emotion; maybe it was that her nerves were on edge. Liz panicked. She started running as fast as she could. As she rounded the far edge of the lake, the playing field came into view. A knot of people had gathered around someone she couldn’t see. She couldn’t think of anything but getting to Ben. He had to be all right.
Matt reached Ben before she did.
“Move back,” he ordered. “Give me some room.”
Ben lay on his side, his knees pulled up, his hands on his stomach, tears in his eyes. He had ruined his clothes.
“Mama,” he cried when he saw her. He reached out to her, but Matt motioned her back. It nearly killed her not to grab him up in her arms, but she knew it was more important that Matt examine him.
“I think he just played too hard on a full stomach,” Matt said as he straightened up. “We’ll take him home and put him to bed.”
Ben grabbed hold of his mother and held on tight, but when it came time to pick him up and carry him back to the house, Liz found she was still weak from shock.
“I’ll carry him,” Matt said.
Before Liz could object, Matt had scooped up the bo
y and started from the field. She had all she could do to gather up Ben’s discarded hat and shirt and hurry after him.
“Are you sure he’s all right?” she asked at least half a dozen times before they reached the house.
“I’m certain,” Matt reassured her. “But I’ll sit with him awhile just to make sure.”
It didn’t take long to get Ben cleaned up, in his pajamas and in bed. He wasn’t satisfied until he had Matt on one side and his mother on the other. Rebecca nestled close to her mother, uneasy as long as there was something wrong in her family.
“Tummy hurts,” he said.
“It usually does when you make a pig of yourself over hot dogs.” Matt talked and teased until Ben was grinning.
Liz couldn’t help but think Matt was a great fool for cutting himself off from people. He’d make a great father. If he’d just open his eyes, he’d see that. Ben and Rebecca adored him. He could already do more with Ben than she could. Most important, he didn’t do any of it out of duty. He was genuinely concerned about them.
The thought occurred to her that this was the kind of family relationship she’d hoped to have with David. She’d dreamed of the two of them watching over their children, tending to their cuts and bruises, consoling them when the hurts were deeper and harder to reach. She’d pictured him sitting across the bed where Matt sat, comforting Ben, making him forget that he hurt.
But that dream was dead, and Matt would have her believe her dreams about him would one day be just as dead. Yet Liz couldn’t believe he was the kind of person he said he wanted to be. She didn’t know what forces had shaped him, what had made him resist all the best parts of life, but she was certain he would realize his mistake if she just gave him time.
For a man like Matt Dennis, she had all the time in the world.
“There can’t be any doubt,” Matt said to Mr. and Mrs. Worsley. “I had them run all the tests twice. Josh has leukemia.”
He could tell from the blank looks on their faces they hadn’t understood the full impact of what he’d just said. Maybe they didn’t know much about the disease, but apparently Josh did.
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