Come Lie With Me Read online

  “Patients have fallen in love with me before,” she pointed out.

  “I don’t doubt that, but have you ever fallen in love with a patient before?” he asked relentlessly.

  “I’m not in love with him.” She had to protest the idea, had to thrust it away from her. She couldn’t be in love with Blake.

  “I recognize the symptoms,” Richard said.

  As sticky as the conversation was when they were discussing Serena, Dione infinitely preferred it to the current line, and she moved jerkily away. “I don’t have any sandcastle built,” she assured him, clenching her hands into fists in an effort to keep herself from trembling. “When Blake’s walking, I’ll move on to another job. I know that; I’ve known it from the beginning. I always get personally involved with my patients,” she said, laughing a little. That was all it was, just her normal intense concentration on her patient.

  Richard shook his head in amusement. “You see so clearly with everyone else,” he said, “to be so blind about yourself.”

  The old, blind panic, familiar in form but suddenly unfamiliar in substance, clawed at her stomach. Blind. That word, the one Richard had used. No, she thought painfully. It wasn’t so much that she was blind as that she deliberately didn’t see. She had built a wall between herself and anything that threatened her; she knew it was there, but as long as she didn’t have to look at it, she could ignore it. Blake had forced her on two occasions to face the past that she’d put behind her, never realizing what the ordeal had cost her in terms of pain. Now Richard, though he was using his coolly analytical brain instead of the gut instincts Blake operated on, was trying to do the same.

  “I’m not blind,” she denied in a whisper. “I know who I am, and what I am. I know my limits; I learned them the hard way.”

  “You’re wrong,” he said, his gray eyes thoughtful. “You’ve only learned the limits that other people have placed on you.”

  That was so true that she almost winced away from the thrust of it. Instinctively she pushed the thought away, drew herself up, marshaling her inner forces. “I think you wanted to talk to me about Serena,” she reminded him quietly, letting him know that she wasn’t going to talk about herself any longer.

  “I did, but on second thought, I won’t bother you with it. You have more than enough on your mind now. In the end, Serena and I will have to settle our differences on our own, so it’s useless to ask anyone else’s advice.”

  Walking together, they reentered the house and went into the study. Serena was sitting with her back to them, though her posture of concentration told them exactly what expression was on her face. She hated to lose, and she poured all her energies into beating Blake. Although she was a good chess player, Blake was better. She was usually wild with jubilation whenever she managed to beat him.

  Blake, however, looked up as Richard and Dione came in together, and a hard, determined expression pulled his face into a mask. His blue eyes narrowed.

  Later that night, when she poked her head into his bedroom to tell him good-night, he said evenly, “Dee, Serena’s marriage is hanging by a thread. I’m warning you: don’t do anything to break that thread. She loves Richard. It’ll kill her if she loses him.”

  “I’m not a home wrecker or a slut,” she retorted, stung. Anger brought red spots to her cheeks as she stared at him. He had left the lamp on, evidently waiting until she told him good-night, as she usually did, so she could see exactly how forbidding he looked. Bewildered pain mingled with her anger to make her tremble inside. How could he even think…“I’m not like my mother,” she blurted, her voice stifled, and she whirled, slamming the door behind her and fleeing to her own room despite the sound of her name being called demandingly.

  She was both hurt and furious, but years of self-discipline enabled her to sleep dreamlessly anyway. When she woke hours later, just before her alarm went off, she felt better. Then she frowned. It seemed as if her subconscious could hear the echo of her name being called. She sat up, tilting her head as she listened.

  “Dee! Damn it to hell!”

  After weeks of hearing that particular note in his voice when he called her, she knew that he was in pain. Without her robe, she ran to his room.

  She turned on the light. He was sitting up, rubbing his left calf, his face twisted in a grimace of pain. “My foot, too,” he gritted. Dione seized his foot and forcefully returned his toes to their proper positions, digging her thumbs into the ball of his foot and massaging. He fell back against his pillow, his chest rising and falling swiftly as he gulped in air.

  “It’s all right,” she murmured, moving her soothing hands up his ankle to his calf.

  She devoted her attention to his leg, unaware of the fixed way he watched her. After several minutes she straightened out his leg and patted his ankle, then pulled the sheet over him. “There,” she said, smiling as she looked up, but the smile faded as she met his gaze. Those dark blue eyes were as fierce and compelling as the sea, and she faltered in the face of his regard, her soft lips parting. Slowly his eyes dipped downward, and she was abruptly aware of her breasts, thrusting against the almost transparent fabric of her nightgown. A throbbing ache in her nipples made her fear that they had hardened, but she didn’t dare glance down to confirm it. Her new nightgowns didn’t hide a lot; they merely veiled.

  Suddenly she couldn’t withstand the force of his gaze, and she averted her eyes, her thick lashes dropping to shield her thoughts. His body was in her line of vision, and abruptly her eyes widened. She almost gasped, but controlled her reaction at the last second.

  Jerkily she got to her feet, forgetting about how much the nightgown revealed. She’d accomplished her aim, but she didn’t feel smug about it; she felt stunned, her mouth dry, her pulses hammering through her veins. She swallowed, and her voice was too husky to be casual when she said, “I thought you said you were impotent.”

  It was a moment before her words registered. He looked as stunned as she felt, then he glanced down at himself. His jaw hardened and he swore aloud.

  A hot blush suddenly burned her face. It was ridiculous to stand there, but she couldn’t move. She was fascinated, she admitted, completely bewildered by her reaction, or rather, her lack of it. As fascinated as a bird before a cobra, and that was a Freudian simile if ever she’d heard one.

  “I must be psychic,” he whispered rawly. “I was just thinking that that little bit of nothing you have on would rouse the dead.”

  She couldn’t even smile. Abruptly, though, she was able to move, and she left the room as swiftly as she could without actually running.

  That disturbing dryness was still in her mouth as she dressed, pulling out her old clothes rather than the clinging new garments she’d been wearing. There was no need to dress seductively now; that particular milestone was behind him, and she knew better than to play with fire.

  The only problem was, she discovered as the days passed, that Blake didn’t seem to notice that she’d reverted to her old clothes, her modest nightgowns. He didn’t say anything, but she could always feel the blue fire of his gaze on her when they were together. In the course of therapy she was constantly touching him, and she gradually became accustomed to the way he’d wrap his fingers around her leg while she massaged him, or the frequency with which their bodies rubbed together when they were swimming.

  Much sooner than she’d expected, he stood alone, not using his hands. He swayed for a moment, but his legs held and he regained his balance. He worked harder than any patient she’d had before, determined to end his dependency on the wheelchair. He paid for his determination every night with the torturous cramps that he suffered, but he didn’t let up the killing pace he’d set for himself. Dione no longer organized his therapy; he pushed himself. All she could do was try to prevent him from doing so much that he harmed himself, and soothe his muscles at the end of every workout with massages and sessions in the whirlpool.

  Sometimes she got a lump in her throat as she watched him straining h