Come Lie With Me Read online

  “I’m not seeing Richard,” she said quietly. “Aside from the fact that he’s married, when would I have time? I’m with you all day long, and I’m too tired at night to put forth the energy that sneaking around would take.”

  “Serena said that she saw you on the patio one night.”

  “She did. We were talking about you, not making love. I know that Richard’s unhappy with Serena—”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I’m not blind. She’s devoted the last two years to you and virtually ignored her husband, and naturally he resents it. Why do you think he was so determined to find a therapist for you? He wants you walking again so he can have his wife back.” Perhaps she shouldn’t have told him that, but it was time Blake realized that he’d been dominating their lives with his physical condition.

  He sighed. “All right, I believe you. But just in case you start thinking how attractive Richard is, let me tell you now that the one thing I won’t tolerate is for Serena to be hurt.”

  “She’s a big girl, Blake. You can’t run interference for her for the rest of her life.”

  “I can do it as long as she needs me, and as long as I’m able. When I think of how she was after our mother died…I swear, Dee, I think I’d kill to keep her from ever looking like that again.”

  At least she’d had a mother who loved her. The words were on Dione’s lips, but she bit them back. It wasn’t Serena’s fault that Dione’s mother hadn’t been loving. Her burden of bitterness was her own, not something to be loaded onto someone else’s shoulders.

  She pushed it away. “Do you think he really is seeing someone else? In a way, I can’t see it. He’s so besotted with Serena that no one else registers.”

  “You register with him,” Blake insisted.

  “He’s never said anything to me,” Dione replied honestly, though she was still stretching the truth a little. “How do you know? Male intuition?”

  “If you want to call it that,” he murmured, leaning back against her as he tired. Her soft breasts supported his weight. “I’m still a man, even if I couldn’t chase a turtle and catch it. I can look at you and see the same thing he sees. You’re so damned beautiful, so soft and strong at the same time. If I could chase you, lady, you’d have the race of your life.”

  The soft words alarmed her in a way that was different from the panic she normally felt when faced with a prowling, hunting male. Her hands were still on his shoulders, and his weight was resting on her; his body was as familiar to her as her own, the texture of his skin, even the smell of him. It was as if he were a part of her, because she was building him, remaking him, shaping him into the gorgeous man he’d been before the accident. He was her creation.

  She suddenly wanted to rest her cheek on his shaggy head, feel the silky texture of his hair. Instead she denied the impulse, because it was so foreign to her. Yet his head beckoned, and she moved her hand from his shoulder to touch the dark strands.

  “You’re beginning to look like a sheepdog,” she told him, her voice a little breathless and tinged with the laughter that they shared so often now.

  “Then cut it for me,” he said lazily, letting his head find a comfortable position on her shoulder.

  “You’d trust me to cut your hair?” she asked, startled.

  “Of course. If I can trust you with my body, why not my hair?” he reasoned.

  “Then let’s do it now,” she said, slapping his shoulder. “I’d like to see if you have ears. Come on, get off me.”

  A shudder rippled down him, and he turned his eyes to her, eyes as blue as the deepest sea, and as primal. She knew what he was thinking, but she turned her gaze away and refused to let the moment linger.

  A nameless intimacy had enfolded them. She was jittery, yet she couldn’t say that she was really frightened. It was…odd, and her forehead was furrowed with a pensive frown as she plied the scissors on his thick hair. He was a patient, and she’d learned not to be afraid of her patients. He’d gotten closer to her than she’d ever allowed anyone else to get, even the children who had tugged the most strongly at her heartstrings. He was the challenge of her career; he’d become so much to her, but he was still a man, and she couldn’t understand why she didn’t get that icy, sick feeling she normally got when a man got close to her. Blake could touch her, and she couldn’t tolerate the touch of any other man.

  Perhaps, she decided, it was because she knew that she was safe with him. As he’d pointed out, he wasn’t in any condition to do any chasing. Sexually, he was as harmless as the children she’d hugged and comforted.

  “You look like Michelangelo, agonizing over the final touches to a statue,” he said provokingly. “Have you cut a big gap in my hair?”

  “Of course not!” she protested, running her fingers through the unruly pelt. “I’m a very good barber, for your information. Would you like a mirror?”

  He sighed blissfully. “No, I trust you. You can shave me now.”

  “Like heck I will!” With mock wrath she practically slapped the loose hair off his shoulders. “It’s time for your session on the rack, so stop trying to stall!”

  In the days that followed nothing else was said about the situation between Serena and Richard, and though the couple continued to have dinner with Blake and Dione, the coolness between them was obvious. Richard treated Dione with a warmth that never progressed beyond friendliness, though Dione was certain that Serena wasn’t convinced that the situation between them was innocent. Blake watched everything with an eagle eye and kept Dione close by his side.

  She understood his reasons for doing so, and as it suited her to be with him, she let him be as demanding of her company as he wanted. She liked being with him. As he grew stronger his rather devilish personality was coming out, and it took all her concentration to stay one step ahead of him. She had to play poker with him; she had to play chess with him; she had to watch football games with him. There were a million and one things that took his interest, and he demanded that she share them all. It was as if he’d been in a coma for two years and had come out of it determined to catch up on everything he’d missed.

  He pushed himself harder than she ever would have. Because she could lift more weigh than he could, he worked for hours with the weights. Because she could swim longer and faster than he could, he pushed himself to do lap after lap, though he still couldn’t use his legs. And every week they had a rematch at arm wrestling. It was their fifth match before he finally defeated her, and he was so jubilant that she let him have blueberry waffles for breakfast.

  Still, she was nervous when she decided that it was time for him to begin using his legs. This was the crux of the entire program. If he couldn’t see some progress now in his legs, she knew that he’d lose hope and sink into depression again.

  She didn’t tell him what she had planned. After he’d done his sets on the weight bench she got him back into the wheelchair and guided the chair over to the parallel bars that he would use to support himself while she reeducated his legs in what they were expected to do. He looked at the bars, then at her, his brows lifted in question.

  “It’s time for you to stop being so lazy,” she said as casually as possible, though her heart was pounding so loudly it was a miracle he couldn’t hear it. “On your feet.”

  He swallowed, his eyes moving from her to the bars, then back to her.

  “This is it, huh? D day.”

  “That’s right. It’s no big deal. Just stand. No trying to walk. Let your legs get accustomed to holding your weight.”

  He set his jaw and reached out for the bars. Bracing his hands on them, he pulled himself out of the wheelchair.

  The weight lifting came in handy as he pulled himself up, using only the strength in his shoulders and arms. Watching him, Dione noted the way his muscles bunched and played. He had real muscles now, not just skin over bone. He was still thin, too thin, but no longer did he have the physique of a famine victim. Even his legs had responded to the forced ex