When You Wish (Contemporary Romance)

by Handeland, Lori

  “My experiment. I should have been home hours ago. I might still save it if I can get there in the next half hour.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  Dan stopped rowing, and the boat drifted toward shore. “Don’t say ‘Uh-oh.’”

  “All right.” Grace’s heart had started a panic dance of its own. What had she done?

  “Say something!”

  “Oops?”

  Dan groaned. “Spill it.”

  “We’re in Minnesota.”

  “What?” The single word echoed across the lake.

  Grace winced. “You were sleeping all the way here. I drove for two hours.”

  He started laughing. He’d definitely blown a brain watt. “Very funny. You had me going.”

  “I’m serious.”

  He stopped laughing. “Damn.”

  He began to row, but more slowly this time. The lack of panic scared Grace more than the panic had. “Dan, say something.”

  “What is there to say? I’m not even surprised. This is what happens when I rebel. All my life, every time I tried to do something a little bit different, disaster followed.”

  She didn’t like the way he said “do something different.” He’d just done her, and she’d always been different. “You don’t seem the rebellious type.”

  “My entire career is a great big rebellion. And now it’s a disaster, too. You think I would have learned my lesson by now. This just proves I learned nothing.”

  “What do you mean by ‘this’? I took you away for a day. You deserved a break. We both did. I thought this afternoon was more than an interlude and a hell of a lot more than a little rebellion. Or was I wrong?”

  The bottom of the boat scraped the shore and Dan hopped out. He held out his hand to her, but she ignored him. A different sort of panic had settled in her heart. Had she been wrong about Dan? Was what they had shared during this golden afternoon merely a little walk on the wild side for the good Dr. Chadwick? She found that hard to believe, but she’d been suckered by a man like him before.

  He walked toward the car, mumbling again, and she didn’t press the issue. She had issues of her own, thank you.

  The drive home was as silent as the drive there had been, but for different reasons. When she stopped in front of the lab, Dan was out of the car and running into the cabin before she could turn off the engine. Grace sat for a long moment staring at the light in the window. Should she stay or should she go? The continued silence from the cabin unnerved her, and she could not just drive away without knowing the truth, or discovering the lie.

  He sat where he always did—on a stool at the center island table—but he looked different. Was it because he wore a wrinkled black shirt and no lab coat? Perhaps the bare feet instead of shiny shoes? No, it was the dejected slump of the shoulders instead of the lighthearted movements that usually characterized his mixing and mumbling.

  She didn’t speak; she didn’t move, but he knew she was there because he spoke. “Trashed. Wrecked. Ruined. Crap.” He gave a short bark of laughter that didn’t sound amused. Grace didn’t feel like laughing either. “Months of work because I took an afternoon off. You win, Grace.”

  “Win what?”

  “The whole shebang. The big banana. The grant. The money.”

  She’d forgotten. Silly of her. All she’d been thinking about was him. “Who says I win? Who says I want to?”

  “This fiasco sets me back at least a year. So I give up, and you win. Your blankie-drop will be funded. And why shouldn’t it be? Isn’t that what these last few weeks have been about?”

  “Is it? If that’s what you think, then you don’t know me at all.”

  Her cool tone must have penetrated his misery because he turned slowly toward her as she stalked across the distance that separated them. “Sure I want the grant. But not at your expense. Tell me why this is so important to you? Tell me why you’re willing to give up a normal life, your health, your happiness for . . . for . . . for whatever the hell it is you want to cure so badly.”

  “Because thousands of people—”

  She held up her hand. “No more propaganda, Dan. Tell me the truth.”

  For a moment she thought he’d put her off with more drivel. Then he gave a quick nod and spilled it. “My parents were very disappointed in me when I chose this profession.”

  “Medical research? I’d think they’d be thrilled and very proud.”

  “You’d think. But they said I was wasting myself in research. Truth is, I’m a coward. People make me nervous.”

  “I’ve never noticed that about you. Except with Olaf and he makes everyone nervous.”

  “I feel comfortable with you and the Jewels. More comfortable than I’ve ever felt with anyone. Even my family. People in pain—all that emotion, focused on me, I didn’t cope well.”

  “Maybe that’s because you care too much. What’s the crime in that?”

  He flicked a glance at her from beneath his bangs, and his face revealed he’d never thought of that before. “I don’t understand.”

  “You care, Dan. I saw you with Em. I’ve seen you with your work. It wouldn’t obsess you so much if you didn’t truly want to help people. Just because you aren’t on the front lines doesn’t mean you aren’t contributing to the battle. Quit beating yourself up over who you are. Accept it and be proud. So you like bottles and beakers. Big deal. Someone has to.”

  His smile was a shadow of the grin she’d come to crave, but at least he wasn’t hanging his head anymore. “I do like being alone with my stuff. My sister, the cardiothoracic surgeon, calls me Dr. Frankenstein.”

  “How . . . cute.” Grace wanted to smack his sister up alongside her head.

  “I think my parents would have adjusted if I’d gone to work for one of the big research hospitals and put my brilliance to use curing cancer. But I’ve never been interested in taking the usual path. I chose an underdog disease.”

  “Because you’re an underdog.”

  He shrugged. “I truly believe that by finding out why a minor infection occurs you can prevent all kinds of major infections. But my parents were embarrassed. Toenail fungus isn’t very glamorous. They told me I was wasting my brilliance.”

  “Wasting! You blaze trails from nothing. Why don’t they try it?”

  He looked at her like she was some new bug he would like to stick on a pin and put beneath his microscope. Obviously what she thought was big news to him. “At any rate, they disinherited me. I haven’t spoken to them in five years.”

  “Good riddance,” Grace muttered.

  Dan lifted an eyebrow and his lips twitched. Progress. “I thought if I could make a success of this I’d prove my theory and win them over. But once again—disaster.” The smile dissolved and Grace wanted to kiss those sad, sad lips.

  He turned around again and pushed the glass jar with the “crap” in it across the table with his finger. His sigh was long and deep, and wavered in the middle. Grace lost the battle. She had to touch him.

  Leaning against his back, she slid her arms around his neck and snuggled her head along his shoulder. He tensed but didn’t shrug her off.

  “Maybe you started out wanting to prove your parents wrong, but I think somewhere along the line you discovered you wanted to help the suffering masses more. Forget about the insufferable messes that pretended to be family.”

  His snort of laughter warmed her soul. When he put his hands over hers, their joined fingers lay over his heart. “Stay with me tonight, Grace. I need you more than I’ve ever needed anyone or anything.”

  She shouldn’t.

  Grace opened her mouth to explain, and “yes” whispered past her lips. With no more words left, Dan carried her to his cabin.

  They both smelled of lake water and waning sunshine. Dan would have liked to take Grace directly to his bed. He’d imagined her there so many times. Instead he took a detour to the shower.

  Luckily his cabin previously had been the camp director’s, so he had his own bathroom. W
hile showering with Grace in the community showers might have sparked adolescent fantasies, he’d been having enough of those lately and he really needed to get over it.

  Dan kicked open the door of his cabin and crossed the crowded room. He set Grace down at the bathroom door. She glanced over his shoulder at the bed, then back at him in confusion.

  “You want to use the shower?”

  “Are you saying I smell?”

  “I just thought—” He shrugged.

  “Oh!” She smiled seductively, which confused his mind, but his body went hot all over, even though his skin was chilled from driving two hours in wet pants. “I get it. Shower. Sure.”

  Dan didn’t get it, until she yanked the tie on her blanket sarong and the material dropped to the floor with a damp-sounding thud.

  “Let’s take a shower.”

  “Let’s? As in us?”

  “Don’t sound so surprised. I thought that’s what you wanted.”

  Pathetic as it was to admit, and he didn’t plan on admitting it, Dan had never taken a shower with anyone else. Except in a locker room, and that really didn’t count.

  “Of course that’s what I want,” he blurted, afraid she might change her mind if he stood there gawking for too long.

  But who wouldn’t stare at the beauty of Grace. Her skin was the same shade all over and smooth as honey. Except there, where she had a scrape on her belly and there an odd-shaped mark on her hip, and was that a bruise on her thigh?

  She’d turned to precede him into the bathroom, but he caught her arm. “What’s this?” He traced his thumb along her hipbone.

  Her breath caught and she leaned into his touch. That movement—sensual, yet trusting, made Dan’s own breath catch.

  Grace glanced down and so did he. The sight of his lighter hand against her darker hip made him think of an artsy black-and-white photograph. He spread his large fingers around her small waist, fascinated with the texture of her skin and the contrast in the shades.

  “I think that’s from your teeth.”

  He lost all interest in art and color as his gaze flew up to hers, and he snatched his hand away as if she’d slapped him. He wanted to slap himself. “God, Grace, I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not.” She drew his hand back to her stomach and held him there. “You want to make a matching set?”

  “Yep.” The word was out before he realized it. Grace laughed, probably from sight of the shock on his face.

  “Come on then.” She pulled him after her into the small bathroom, undressing him like he was a sick child.

  Dan couldn’t seem to function very well. Sadness danced in his belly to the drumbeat of the need he had for Grace. She was trying to keep things light, to get his mind off his failure. And as she dropped the last stitch of his clothes into a pile on floor, his mind stopped thinking about anything other than this tiny room that was starting to fill with steam.

  Grace stepped into the tiny shower stall. Dan stood there like a lump and hoped he didn’t start to drool as she threw back her head and let the water flow down her face and neck, then cascade over her cinnamon-tipped breasts. She turned her head and smiled at him through the foggy glass door. Beads of water dotted her face and her eyelashes were clumped together in such a way that her eyes looked even darker than usual, if that were possible.

  “Are you coming, Dan?”

  Not yet, he thought. “Soon.”

  She raised a brow. “How soon?”

  “Aren’t you the one who told me to stop and smell the coffee?”

  “Coffee?”

  “Relax, Juan Valdez, it’s just an expression.”

  “Too bad. I’d like some coffee.”

  “Later. After.”

  “Come on in here and show me before.”

  He gave a long-suffering sigh. “All right. If I must, I must.”

  The shower stall had never seemed big, especially for a man of Dan’s size. But with Grace in there too, it suddenly seemed just right. He couldn’t move without bumping into her.

  She picked up a bottle from the floor. He became distracted by the view so that when she spoke her words didn’t register for several seconds. “I’ve been dying to wash your hair since I first got my hands into it.”

  He blinked the water from his eyes. “My hair?”

  Grinning, Grace poured shampoo into her palm. “Kinky little me, huh?”

  She hadn’t actually meant they were going to take a washing kind of shower, had she? Knowing Grace, she wanted to conserve natural resources. She hadn’t even considered satisfying a fantasy Dan hadn’t even known he had.

  “Bend down,” she ordered. He sighed, and did as he was told.

  Grace raised her arms and started massaging his head. Her slick, perfect breasts came level with his face. “Isn’t this nice?”

  “Huh?”

  “I always liked it when my mother washed my hair. I got so relaxed.”

  Dan was anything but relaxed. He tried to close his eyes so he wouldn’t have to look at what he shouldn’t touch or taste. But then he could smell her, he could feel her heat, so close to his lips all he had to do was pucker and he would touch them. No, she couldn’t be that close, could she?

  Tentatively, Dan stretched his mouth outward. A nipple brushed his lips and he captured it. She gasped, but she didn’t protest. In fact she arched against him and moaned, then clasped his shoulders when he yanked her closer and set about putting matching marks everywhere she suggested.

  Grace had a lot of excellent suggestions.

  The one he liked the most was called wash but do not kiss. Dan lathed soap over every exquisite inch of Grace, he looked and he touched but he did not kiss and he did not take. Then she did the same for him. By the time the water ran tepid, they were both hot enough to not care much.

  With only a haphazard use of a towel they tumbled from the shower and onto his bed. Dan was in such a state he could think of nothing beyond the feel of her body beneath his. He had to feel her body around his or explode. He drove into her as soon as they landed on the mattress.

  She gasped and he froze, afraid he’d hurt her. Idiot. She was tall, but she was fragile. Or more fragile than him. Who wasn’t?

  “Don’t you dare stop.” She arched against him. “Don’t you dare smell the coffee now, Dan.”

  He laughed, right in the middle of the most erotic sex he’d ever had. She opened her eyes and grinned.

  “Coffee after,” he said.

  “Long after.”

  Dan finished what she’d started, and then he started and she finished, then they both started and finished together. They forgot about coffee because there didn’t seem to be much after. Only a whole lot of before, during, and again.

  Much later, silver slivers of moonlight spilled through the window and across Dan’s bed. He wasn’t in the bed. Grace was. He’d been sitting in a chair, watching her sleep for at least an hour.

  She was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, and not because of the shape of her face or the shade of her body, but because she was Grace, and he loved her. He wanted to watch her every day for the rest of his life.

  She had not wanted to stay with him; he had seen that in her eyes. Yet she had, because he’d needed her to. He probably should have sent her home, but he hadn’t been able to do that once she’d touched him. When Grace touched him, every ache in his life went away.

  Was that love? The realization that another person filled a part of you that you didn’t even know was empty?

  Dan knew nothing of love. Oh, sure, his parents had loved him, though they’d never said the words. They probably loved each other, too, but it would be inappropriate to act like they did.

  Dan had not known he was lonely until Grace came into his life. Now every moment he spent without her rang hollow. Waking up entangled in her arms was the most soul-shattering experience of his life. How was he going to get her to stay with him forever?

  He had an idea.

  Dan left the cabin with a fi
nal, lingering gaze at the woman in his bed before he went to the lab. One last look and then he’d do what he had to do.

  Sitting down at his worktable, Dan pulled the jar of crap close and stared morosely into the bottom of his work. He blinked. He straightened. He opened his mouth, shut it again, and then began to laugh. He put his arms onto the table and laid his forehead against them. Then he laughed until tears ran down his face.

  A door closed somewhere in the distance. Grace awoke, alone, in a strange bed. Where was Dan?

  She found his T-shirt, dropped the garment over her nakedness, hugged the soft cotton that smelled of lake water and him to her skin, then slid from the room. A light in the lab drew her. Was he working again already?

  Not wanting to disturb him, Grace looked into one of the windows. Her heart filled with pain as she watched him look into the jar, then put his head onto the table in a gesture of despair. His shoulders shook as he cried.

  Grace blinked away tears of her own. His earnest devotion to what he believed tore at her heart. She’d said they were different from each other, but in many ways they were alike. She could feel his pain as if it were her own.

  She took a step toward the back door, meaning to go in and lead him back to bed. She would make him forget everything but them, as she had only a few hours before. But obviously the explosive passion and tender lovemaking they had shared had not been enough to cleanse his heart. Only one thing would do that.

  Project Hope was worthy. Project Hope was her baby, her dream. But Dan—Dan was her love.

  Lord knows she had tried not to love him. She hadn’t even wanted to like him. She’d projected all the bad qualities of men in her past that had betrayed and hurt her. But Dan was not like Jared; he was not like her father. He was Dan—and just as he’d said she had a Ferrari inside—the man had a Cadillac heart.

  She had to trust him not to hurt her. She had to trust him to be the man he seemed to be. She had to trust that when he said his research could help countless people, he was telling the truth. A man that would cry because he’d failed at curing toenail fungus was a man she couldn’t live without.

  Leaving him to his turbulent emotions, Grace returned to Dan’s bed. Before she fell back asleep, she made one little phone call that she hoped would fix all the ills of their world.