by Nora Roberts
“Most of the flooring can be saved with sanding and refinishing. But some must be replaced.” He kicked at a square of plywood he’d nailed to a hole in the second-floor landing.
Sydney merely nodded, asking questions only when they seemed intelligent. Most of the workers were gone, off to cash their week’s paychecks. The noise level had lowered so that she could hear muted voices behind closed doors, snatches of music or televised car chases. She lifted a brow at the sound of a tenor sax swinging into “Rhapsody in Blue.”
“That’s Will Metcalf,” Mikhail told her. “He’s good. Plays in a band.”
“Yes, he’s good.” The rail felt smooth and sturdy under her hand as they went down. Mikhail had done that, she thought. He’d fixed, repaired, replaced, as needed because he cared about the people who lived in the building. He knew who was playing the sax or eating the fried chicken, whose baby was laughing.
“Are you happy with the progress?” she asked quietly.
The tone of her voice made him look at her, something he’d been trying to avoid. A few tendrils of hair had escaped their pins to curl at her temples. He could see a pale dusting of freckles across her nose. “Happy enough. It’s you who should answer. It’s your building.”
“No, it’s not.” Her eyes were very serious, very sad. “It’s yours. I only write the checks.”
“Sydney—”
“I’ve seen enough to know you’ve made a good start.” She was hurrying down the steps as she spoke. “Be sure to contact my office when it’s time for the next draw.”
“Damn it. Slow down.” He caught up with her at the bottom of the steps and grabbed her arm. “What’s wrong with you? First you stand in my room pale and out of breath. Now you run away, and your eyes are miserable.”
It had hit her, hard, that she had no community of people who cared. Her circle of friends was so narrow, so self-involved. Her best friend had been Peter, and that had been horribly spoiled. Her life was on the sidelines, and she envied the involvement, the closeness she felt in this place. The building wasn’t hers, she thought again. She only owned it.
“I’m not running away, and nothing’s wrong with me.” She had to get out, get away, but she had to do it with dignity. “I take this job very seriously. It’s my first major project since taking over Hayward. I want it done right. And I took a chance by…” She trailed off, glancing toward the door just to her right. She could have sworn she’d heard someone call for help. Television, she thought, but before she could continue, she heard the thin, pitiful call again. “Mikhail, do you hear that?”
“Hear what?” How could he hear anything when he was trying not to kiss her again?
“In here.” She turned toward the door, straining her ears. “Yes, in here, I heard—”
That time he’d heard it, too. Lifting a fist, he pounded on the door. “Mrs. Wolburg. Mrs. Wolburg, it’s Mik.”
The shaky voice barely penetrated the wood. “Hurt. Help me.”
“Oh, God, she’s—”
Before Sydney could finish, Mikhail rammed his shoulder against the door. With the second thud, it crashed open to lean drunkenly on its hinges.
“In the kitchen,” Mrs. Wolburg called weakly. “Mik, thank God.”
He bolted through the apartment with its starched doilies and paper flowers to find her on the kitchen floor. She was a tiny woman, mostly bone and thin flesh. Her usually neat cap of white hair was matted with sweat.
“Can’t see,” she said. “Dropped my glasses.”
“Don’t worry.” He knelt beside her, automatically checking her pulse as he studied her pain-filled eyes. “Call an ambulance,” he ordered Sydney, but she was already on the phone. “I’m not going to help you up, because I don’t know how you’re hurt.”
“Hip.” She gritted her teeth at the awful, radiating pain. “I think I busted my hip. Fell, caught my foot. Couldn’t move. All the noise, nobody could hear me calling. Been here two, three hours. Got so weak.”
“It’s all right now.” He tried to chafe some heat into her hands. “Sydney, get a blanket and pillow.”
She had them in her arms and was already crouching beside Mrs. Wolburg before he’d finished the order. “Here now. I’m just going to lift your head a little.” Gently she set the woman’s limp head on the pillow. Despite the raging heat, Mrs. Wolburg was shivering with cold. As she continued to speak in quiet, soothing tones, Sydney tucked the blanket around her. “Just a few more minutes,” Sydney murmured, and stroked the clammy forehead.
A crowd was forming at the door. Though he didn’t like leaving Sydney with the injured woman, he rose. “I want to keep the neighbors away. Send someone to keep an eye for the ambulance.”
“Fine.” While fear pumped hard in her heart, she continued to smile down at Mrs. Wolburg. “You have a lovely apartment. Do you crochet the doilies yourself?”
“Been doing needlework for sixty years, since I was pregnant with my first daughter.”
“They’re beautiful. Do you have other children?”
“Six, three of each. And twenty grandchildren. Five great…” She shut her eyes on a flood of pain, then opened them again and managed a smile. “Been after me for living alone, but I like my own place and my own way.”
“Of course.”
“And my daughter, Lizzy? Moved clear out to Phoenix, Arizona. Now what would I want to live out there for?”
Sydney smiled and stroked. “I couldn’t say.”
“They’ll be on me now,” she muttered, and let her eyes close again. “Wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t dropped my glasses. Terrible nearsighted. Getting old’s hell, girl, and don’t let anyone tell you different. Couldn’t see where I was going and snagged my foot in that torn linoleum. Mik told me to keep it taped down, but I wanted to give it a good scrub.” She managed a wavery smile. “Least I’ve been lying here on a clean floor.”
“Paramedics are coming up,” Mikhail said from behind her. Sydney only nodded, filled with a terrible guilt and anger she was afraid to voice.
“You call my grandson, Mik? He lives up on Eighty-first. He’ll take care of the rest of the family.”
“Don’t worry about it, Mrs. Wolburg.”
Fifteen efficient minutes later, Sydney stood on the sidewalk watching as the stretcher was lifted into the back of the ambulance.
“Did you reach her grandson?” she asked Mikhail.
“I left a message on his machine.”
Nodding, she walked to the curb and tried to hail a cab.
“Where’s your car?”
“I sent him home. I didn’t know how long I’d be and it was too hot to leave him sitting there. Maybe I should go back in and call a cab.”
“In a hurry?”
She winced as the siren shrieked. “I want to get to the hospital.”
Nonplussed, he jammed his hands into his pockets. “There’s no need for you to go.”
She turned, and her eyes, in the brief moment they held his, were ripe with emotion. Saying nothing, she faced away until a cab finally swung to the curb. Nor did she speak when Mikhail climbed in behind her.
* * *
She hated the smell of hospitals. Layers of illness, antiseptics, fear and heavy cleaners. The memory of the last days her grandfather had lain dying were still too fresh in her mind. The Emergency Room of the downtown hospital added one more layer. Fresh blood.
Sydney steeled herself against it and walked through the crowds of the sick and injured to the admitting window.
“You had a Mrs. Wolburg just come in.”
“That’s right.” The clerk stabbed keys on her computer. “You family?”
“No, I—”
“We’re going to need some family to fill out these forms. Patient said she wasn’t insured.”
Mikhail was already leaning over, eyes dangerous, when Sydney snapped out her answer. “Hayward Industries will be responsible for Mrs. Wolburg’s medical expenses.” She reached into her bag for identification a
nd slapped it onto the counter. “I’m Sydney Hayward. Where is Mrs. Wolburg?”
“In X ray.” The frost in Sydney’s eyes had the clerk shifting in her chair. “Dr. Cohen’s attending.”
* * *
So they waited, drinking bad coffee among the moans and tears of inner city ER. Sometimes Sydney would lay her head back against the wall and shut her eyes. She appeared to be dozing, but all the while she was thinking what it would be like to be old, and alone and helpless.
He wanted to think she was only there to cover her butt. Oh yes, he wanted to think that of her. It was so much more comfortable to think of her as the head of some bloodless company than as a woman.
But he remembered how quickly she had acted in the Wolburg apartment, how gentle she had been with the old woman. And most of all, he remembered the look in her eyes out on the street. All that misery and compassion and guilt welling up in those big eyes.
“She tripped on the linoleum,” Sydney murmured.
It was the first time she’d spoken in nearly an hour, and Mikhail turned his head to study her. Her eyes were still closed, her face pale and in repose.
“She was only walking in her own kitchen and fell because the floor was old and unsafe.”
“You’re making it safe.”
Sydney continued as if she hadn’t heard. “Then she could only lie there, hurt and alone. Her voice was so weak. I nearly walked right by.”
“You didn’t walk by.” His hand hesitated over hers. Then, with an oath, he pressed his palm to the back of her hand. “You’re only one Hayward, Sydney. Your grandfather—”
“He was ill.” Her hand clenched under Mikhail’s, and her eyes squeezed more tightly closed. “He was sick nearly two years, and I was in Europe. I didn’t know. He didn’t want to disrupt my life. My father was dead, and there was only me, and he didn’t want to worry me. When he finally called me, it was almost over. He was a good man. He wouldn’t have let things get so bad, but he couldn’t…he just couldn’t.”
She let out a short, shuddering breath. Mikhail turned her hand over and linked his fingers with hers.
“When I got to New York, he was in the hospital. He looked so small, so tired. He told me I was the only Hayward left. Then he died,” she said wearily. “And I was.”
“You’re doing what needs to be done. No one can ask for more than that.”
She opened her eyes again, met his. “I don’t know.”
They waited again, in silence.
It was nearly two hours before Mrs. Wolburg’s frantic grandson rushed in. The entire story had to be told again before he hurried off to call the rest of his family.
Four hours after they’d walked into Emergency, the doctor came out to fill them in.
A fractured hip, a mild concussion. She would be moved to a room right after she’d finished in Recovery. Her age made the break serious, but her health helped balance that. Sydney left both her office and home numbers with the doctor and the grandson, requesting to be kept informed of Mrs. Wolburg’s condition.
Unbearably weary in body and mind, Sydney walked out of the hospital.
“You need food,” Mikhail said.
“What? No, really, I’m just tired.”
Ignoring that, he grabbed her arm and pulled her down the street. “Why do you always say the opposite of what I say?”
“I don’t.”
“See, you did it again. You need meat.”
If she kept trying to drag her heels, he was going to pull her arm right out of the socket. Annoyed, she scrambled to keep pace. “What makes you think you know what I need?”
“Because I do.” He pulled up short at a light and she bumped into him. Before he could stop it, his hand had lifted to touch her face. “God, you’re so beautiful.”
While she blinked in surprise, he swore, scowled then dragged her into the street seconds before the light turned.
“Maybe I’m not happy with you,” he went on, muttering to himself. “Maybe I think you’re a nuisance, and a snob, and—”
“I am not a snob.”
He said something vaguely familiar in his native language. Sydney’s chin set when she recalled the translation. “It is not bull. You’re the snob if you think I am just because I come from a different background.”
He stopped, eyeing her with a mixture of distrust and interest. “Fine then, you won’t mind eating in here.” He yanked her into a noisy bar and grill. She found herself plopped down in a narrow booth with him, hip to hip.
There were scents of meat cooking, onions frying, spilled beer, all overlaid with grease. Her mouth watered. “I said I wasn’t hungry.”
“And I say you’re a snob, and a liar.”
The color that stung her cheeks pleased him, but it didn’t last long enough. She leaned forward. “And would you like to know what I think of you?”
Again he lifted a hand to touch her cheek. It was irresistible. “Yes, I would.”
She was saved from finding a description in her suddenly murky brain by the waitress.
“Two steaks, medium rare, and two of what you’ve got on tap.”
“I don’t like men to order for me,” Sydney said tightly.
“Then you can order for me next time and we’ll be even.” Making himself comfortable, he tossed his arm over the back of the booth and stretched out his legs. “Why don’t you take off your jacket, Hayward? You’re hot.”
“Stop telling me what I am. And stop that, too.”
“What?”
“Playing with my hair.”
He grinned. “I was playing with your neck. I like your neck.” To prove it, he skimmed a finger down it again.
She clamped her teeth on the delicious shudder that followed it down her spine. “I wish you’d move over.”
“Okay.” He shifted closer. “Better?”
Calm, she told herself. She would be calm. After a cleansing breath, she turned her head. “If you don’t…” And his lips brushed over hers, stopping the words and the thought behind them.
“I want you to kiss me back.”
She started to shake her head, but couldn’t manage it.
“I want to watch you when you do,” he murmured. “I want to know what’s there.”
“There’s nothing there.”
But his mouth closed over hers and proved her a liar. She fell into the kiss, one hand lost in his hair, the other clamped on his shoulder.
She felt everything. Everything. And it all moved too fast. Her mind seemed to dim until she could barely hear the clatter and bustle of the bar. But she felt his mouth angle over hers, his teeth nip, his tongue seduce.
Whatever she was doing to him, he was doing to her. He knew it. He saw it in the way her eyes glazed before they closed, felt it in the hot, ready passion of her lips. It was supposed to soothe his ego, prove a point. But it did neither.
It only left him aching.
“Sorry to break this up.” The waitress slapped two frosted mugs on the table. “Steak’s on its way.”
Sydney jerked her head back. His arms were still around her, though his grip had loosened. And she, she was plastered against him. Her body molded to his as they sat in a booth in a public place. Shame and fury battled for supremacy as she yanked herself away.
“That was a despicable thing to do.”
He shrugged and picked up his beer. “I didn’t do it alone.” Over the foam, his eyes sharpened. “Not this time, or last time.”
“Last time, you…”
“What?”
Sydney lifted her mug and sipped gingerly. “I don’t want to discuss it.”
He wanted to argue, even started to, but there was a sheen of hurt in her eyes that baffled him. He didn’t mind making her angry. Hell, he enjoyed it. But he didn’t know what he’d done to make her hurt. He waited until the waitress had set the steaks in front of them.
“You’ve had a rough day,” he said so kindly Sydney gasped. “I don’t mean to make it worse.”
“It’s…” She struggled with a response. “It’s been a rough day all around. Let’s just put it behind us.”
“Done.” Smiling, he handed her a knife and fork. “Eat your dinner. We’ll have a truce.”
“Good.” She discovered she had an appetite after all.
CHAPTER FIVE
Sydney didn’t know how Mildred Wolburg’s accident had leaked to the press, but by Tuesday afternoon her office was flooded with calls from reporters. A few of the more enterprising staked out the lobby of the Hayward Building and cornered her when she left for the day.
By Wednesday rumors were flying around the offices that Hayward was facing a multimillion-dollar suit, and Sydney had several unhappy board members on her hands. The consensus was that by assuming responsibility for Mrs. Wolburg’s medical expenses, Sydney had admitted Hayward’s neglect and had set the company up for a large public settlement.
It was bad press, and bad business.
Knowing no route but the direct one, Sydney prepared a statement for the press and agreed to an emergency board meeting. By Friday, she thought as she walked into the hospital, she would know if she would remain in charge of Hayward or whether her position would be whittled down to figurehead.
Carrying a stack of paperbacks in one hand and a potted plant in the other, Sydney paused outside of Mrs. Wolburg’s room. Because it was Sydney’s third visit since the accident, she knew the widow wasn’t likely to be alone. Invariably, friends and family streamed in and out during visiting hours. This time she saw Mikhail, Keely and two of Mrs. Wolburg’s children.
Mikhail spotted her as Sydney was debating whether to slip out again and leave the books and plant she’d brought at the nurse’s station.
“You have more company, Mrs. Wolburg.”
“Sydney.” The widow’s eyes brightened behind her thick lenses. “More books.”
“Your grandson told me you liked to read.” Feeling awkward, she set the books on the table beside the bed and took Mrs. Wolburg’s outstretched hand.
“My Harry used to say I’d rather read than eat.” The thin, bony fingers squeezed Sydney’s. “That’s a beautiful plant.”
