Passion's Baby

The buzzing grew ominously closer and she cringed, certain that at any minute she’d feel insect feet crawling up her bare legs. “Do you think,” she said, hanging on by her fingernails, “that we could pursue this discussion after I’ve figured a way out of my present predicament?”

“You?” He gave a bark of contemptuous laughter. “You couldn’t figure your way out of a brown paper bag without help. Face it, honey, you’re the one needing favors from me, this time—unless you think Blunder’s about to come to the rescue.”

“His name’s Bounder,” she said from between clenched teeth. “And if it’s all the same to you, I’d appreciate it if you’d try to keep him away from the foot of this ladder. I don’t want him to get stung.”

“Well, heaven forfend!” He was jeering at her again but, to his credit, he snapped his fingers sharply and, in quite a different voice, ordered, “Blunder, come!”

Amazingly, she heard the faint click of claws on the wooden porch, followed by a thump as Liam McGuire rapped out, “Sit!”

“Pity you don’t have an equally winning way with people,” she couldn’t help observing.

“I’d save the smart-ass remarks until I was safely on firm ground again, if I were you,” he said. “You’re in no position to be passing judgment on anyone, least of all the guy you expect to come to your rescue.”

She ventured a look down and hastily closed her eyes as the ground swam up to meet her. “How are you going to get me down, with all those wasps swarming around?”

“I’m not,” he said. “And if that’s what you’re hoping for, you’re in for a disappointment. Your only choice is to haul the rest of the boards off that window which I’ll then open from the inside so you can crawl through.”

Swing one leg over that narrow sill? Heavenly days, it was all she could do to maintain her balance with both feet planted on the ladder rung! “I…don’t think I can do that, Mr. McGuire.”

“Then I hope you remembered to go pee before you came over here, because you’re stuck up there for the duration,” he said bluntly.

Oh, he was the most vulgar, insensitive man ever to walk the face of the earth and, forgetting to be cautious, she swung her head around to tell him so. But the ladder gave a shudder, as though to remind her that it wouldn’t take much to send it—and her—sliding down the slope.

“All right, we’ll do it your way,” she said faintly.

“Good girl.”

Was it possible that was a hint of sympathy—of kindness even, that she heard in his voice?

“Stay put until I get myself into the bedroom,” he went on. “Then do exactly as I tell you.”

The wheelchair whispered away and a moment later his voice came again, this time on the other side of the shutters. “This is your lucky day, Janie. The window slides open so all you need to do is pry off a couple of boards and make an opening wide enough to get your butt through. I’ll take care of the rest.”

She had no reason to believe him, at least on the last point. Not only was he wheelchair-bound, he’d shown no inclination to be chivalrous. Yet what choice did she have but to put herself at his mercy?

“Well?” he asked, impatience already eroding his temporary show of kindness. “Make up your mind. Do we have a deal or not?”

“We have a deal,” she said. “Thank you, Mr. McGuire.”

CHAPTER TWO

HOW he managed it, she didn’t know—nor, given her precarious situation, did Jane choose that moment to demand any explanations. It was enough that one minute she was teetering in midair, almost afraid to breathe as she wrestled the first board loose, and the next, he’d reached through six inches of open window to bring the whole operation to a speedy conclusion.

That solidly muscular forearm and the unshakeable strength in his hand reassured her as nothing else could. In no time, the rest of the glass was uncovered. All that remained was for her to gather up what was left of her courage and climb inside the house.

It should have been easy; would have been, if she hadn’t immediately realized that the ladder was positioned too far to the left of the open end of the window. A full two feet of empty space separated her from safety, and the mere idea of launching herself across it was as far-fetched as trying to leap the Grand Canyon.

Liam McGuire saw her hesitation. “You haven’t come this far to chicken out now,” he said. “Quit scaring yourself witless and get on with it.”

Perspiration prickled all over her body.

Perspiration, nothing! It was sweat, pure and simple, imprisoning her in clammy fear. “I can’t do it,” she quavered, eyeing the chasm between them.

“You can’t not do it, woman!” he said flatly. “You got yourself into this mess and since I’m damn near useless in this wheelchair, you’re going to have to get yourself out. So stop the hyperventilating, grab a hold of the top of the window frame, and climb onto the ledge. There’s nothing to it.”

Nothing to it? Her voice rose nearly a full octave. “Are you out of your mind? That ledge is scarcely wide enough to hold a seagull!”

He glared at her from eyes turned brilliant aquamarine in the reflection of sunlight on water. It was the kind of look which, all by itself, probably had subordinates leaping to obey his every command, but when all she did was stare back in frozen terror, he lost his temper and bellowed, “Oh, for crying out loud! Just what the doctor ordered for a full and speedy recovery—a hundred and fifteen pounds of catatonic woman perched on a ladder twenty feet in the air, and expecting Superman to fly to the rescue!”

Letting go of her hand, he abruptly disappeared from view and, for one horrified moment, she thought he was going to resolve matters by abandoning her to the wasps and stinging nettles down below. From somewhere inside the room she heard a shuffling and a string of curses that, even in her panic-stricken state, left the tips of her ears burning.

Then, just as abruptly, he reappeared, except this time there was more of him to see than just his head and shoulders. The entire upper half of his body was visible, too.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s try this again.”

“No,” she said. “I can’t. I’m too scared.”

“I’ll be nice to your dog if you don’t chicken out on me,” he wheedled in what she supposed he considered to be his most winning way. “I won’t use him for target practice the next time I feel like shooting the pellet gun Coffey keeps under the bed. I won’t even tell anyone that I caught you messing around with my underpants.”

What he no doubt perceived to be irresistible bribes struck her as nothing short of blackmail. “You’re a horrible man,” she whimpered.

He wasn’t one to tolerate having his suggestions thwarted. “What the devil is it you want of me?” he roared, immediately reverting to his usual confrontational self. “A pint of blood? A pound of flesh? I can’t maintain this position indefinitely, you know!”

Only then did it fully sink in that he’d hauled himself out of the chair and was propping himself upright by taking all his weight on one arm, while he reached out to her with the other.

The sweat pearling his face attested to what the effort was costing him and shamed her out of her own cowardice. “All right, you win,” she said faintly and quickly, before the foolhardiness of the undertaking had time to impress itself on her brain, she crabbed one foot onto the ledge and literally hurled herself at him.

Her knuckles and knees scraped against the cedar shingles and she managed to clip the side of her head on the ladder in passing, but the pain scarcely registered beside the utter relief of feeling him grasp a fistful of the front of her T-shirt and yank her the rest of the way to safety.

“Aah!” she gasped, landing in a winded heap at his feet. “Thank you so much! I owe you big-time for this.”

He expelled a mighty breath, literally falling like a sack of potatoes into the wheelchair, and swung it toward the living room. “Oh, please, no! The last thing I need is any more of your favors. You’re more trouble than you’re worth.”

“It wouldn’t hurt you to show a bit of gratitude, as well, you know,” she said, picking herself up and trailing after him. “Most people would be happy to have windows they could open, rather than live in a place as dark as a cave.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, Goldilocks, I’m not ‘most people.’ If I were, I’d have taken care of the problem myself, instead of having to fall back on the services of a semi-competent woman with a bad case of acrophobia.” He positioned himself in front of one of the lower kitchen cabinets and hauled out a bottle of Scotch. “I could use a drink and so, I imagine, could you.”

“At this hour of the morning?” she protested. “I hardly think—”

“And you can spare me your homilies on the evils of booze, as well! I’ll get plastered any time I feel like it, and right now, I feel like it.”

She opened her mouth to tell him that drowning his sorrows in alcohol wouldn’t make them go away, then thought better of it when she saw that a grayish pallor undermined the deep tan of his face. Even his hand shook as he unscrewed the cap on the bottle.

Moved by a compassion that had its roots in another time when she’d been equally helpless to alleviate suffering, she covered his hand with hers and took the bottle away. “Let me,” she said quietly, and splashed a scant half inch of whiskey into a glass.

He tossed it down in one gulp, cradled the glass in his hands, then leaned back in the chair with his eyes closed. He had a rather wonderful face, even with that devastatingly direct gaze hidden, she decided, taking advantage of the chance to study him unobserved; a face that revealed far more about the man who owned it than he probably realized.

She saw strength in the line of his jaw, laughter in the fan of lines beside his eyes, passion and discipline in the curve of his mouth. His recent proclamation notwithstanding, he was no drinker. He showed too much pride for such self-indulgence.

“You can leave anytime,” he said, not moving a muscle more than was needed to spit out the words. “I’m not going to do the socially acceptable thing and invite you to stay for coffee.”

“Then I’ll invite myself,” she said, and without waiting for permission, filled the kettle and set it to boil on the stove. “How do you take yours?”

“Alone, thank you very much.”

She shrugged and inspected the contents of the refrigerator. Beyond a block of cheese, a couple of eggs, an open carton of milk, some bread and the remains of something which, under the layer of green mold, might have been meat, the shelves were empty.

She sniffed the milk and immediately wished she hadn’t. “This milk went off about a week ago, Mr. McGuire.”

“I know,” he said, a current of unholy mirth running through his voice, and when she turned back to face him, she saw he was observing her with malicious glee. “I saved it on purpose, just for the pleasure of seeing your expression when you stuck your interfering nose into yet another part of my life. Would you like to taste the ham, as well, while you’re at it?”

She emptied the milk down the sink drain and tossed the ham into the garbage can. “Whoever does your shopping is falling down on the job, but since I’m planning on going across to Clara’s Cove later on today, I can stop by the general store and pick up a few staples for you, if you like.”

“What is it you don’t understand about ‘Mind Your Own Business’?” The question ricocheted off the walls like machine gun bullets. “What do I have to do to make it clear that I’m perfectly able to shop for myself? How do I let you know that you can take your charity and shove it, because I neither want it nor need it?”

She recognized the insults for what they really were: bitter resentment at only recently finding himself confined to a wheelchair. When the same thing had first happened to Derek, he’d reacted much the same way and it had taken months for him to come to terms with how his life was going to be from then on.

“I know how difficult you must find all this, Mr. McGuire,” she said, “and I certainly didn’t mean to offend you.”

“Unless you’ve been where I am now, you don’t know beans about how I feel!”

She washed and rinsed the plate which had held the ham, placed it in the dish rack, and made the coffee. “Actually, I do,” she said. “My husband—”

“Oh, goodie, you have a husband, you have a husband!” he gibed. “That being the case, why don’t you run along and minister to him, instead of foisting your attentions on me?”

“Because he’s dead,” she said baldly.

Shock, and perhaps even a little shame, wiped the sneer off Liam McGuire’s face. “Oh, cripes,” he muttered, examining his hands. “I’m sorry. That must be tough. You’re kind of young to be a widow.”

She dried her scraped knuckles tenderly, folded the dish towel over the edge of the counter, and turned to leave. “I’m not looking for your sympathy, any more than you’re looking for mine, Mr. McGuire. But take it from me, people can and do adapt—if they’ve a mind to. Of course, if all they’re interested in is wallowing in self-pity, they can do that, too, though why they’d find it an attractive alternative baffles me since it must be a very lonely occupation. Good day.”

“Hey!”

She was almost at the door when he stopped her. “You called?” she inquired sweetly, not bothering to turn around.

“Are you by any chance a schoolteacher?”

“Not that it’s any of your business, but no. Why do you ask?”

“Because you talk like one.”

“I see. Is there anything else, Mr. McGuire?”

“Yes,” he said irritably. “You can stop calling me Mister McGuire in that snotty way. My name’s Liam.”

“How nice! Will that be all, Liam?”

He thumped the flat of one hand on the armrest of his chair and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling as though calling on divine intervention to save him from himself. “I’m going to regret this later,” he announced morosely, then swung his gaze back to her. “Since you’ve made the damn coffee anyway, you might as well stay and have a cup. There’s canned milk in the cupboard, if you want it.”

“That’s very kind of you, I’m sure, but I just remembered that Bounder’s outside and I don’t want him running loose all over the island.”

“Bring the benighted hound inside, then. It won’t be the first time he’s made himself at home here.”

“My goodness!” she said, unable to quell the mean-spirited pleasure of having finally wrung a concession from him. “How can I refuse such a gracious offer?”

He waited until the coffee was served, she had taken a seat on the couch, and Bounder was snoozing beside the wheelchair, before he spoke again. “Have you been…by yourself for very long?”

“Just over two years.”

He stared into his mug. “What you said, about understanding how I feel in this chair, was your husband…?”

“Yes, for the better part of the last three years of his life.”

He averted his gaze, but not before she saw the grimace he couldn’t control. “I’d go mad if I was facing that length of time,” he said.

“It’s amazing what people come to accept when they don’t have any other choices.”

“Not me,” he said. “I’m not handing over control of my life to anything or anyone else, especially not a bunch of doctors who don’t know what they’re talking about. According to them, I should settle for being alive with both legs still attached, and never mind expecting to walk again. But I’ll show them! It’ll take more structural failure at the bottom of an offshore oil rig to keep me tied to a wheelchair for the rest of my life.”

Good grief, the man lived dangerously! She’d seen news reports and documentaries about offshore drilling for oil. The rigs had struck her as frighteningly inhospitable, even those parts above the water. She couldn’t imagine how much worse they’d be fathoms deep in the ocean. “I gather,” she said, treading delicately, “that you had an accident of some kind?”

“You could put it like that, yeah. I found myself pinned under a steel beam and had a bit of trouble getting free.”

Since he was so determined to dismiss what had clearly been a life-threatening incident as something of no great consequence, she deemed it wise to respond in like fashion. Tilting one shoulder in a faint shrug, she said, “Well, there’s no doubt that, given the will and a reasonable amount of luck, some people do make remarkable recoveries. May I pour you more coffee before I leave?”

“You’re leaving already? Why? Where’s the fire?”

If he hadn’t already gone to such lengths to try to get rid of her, she’d have thought he wanted her to stay a bit longer. But, Wishful thinking, Jane, she told herself. You’re just dazzled by those beautiful sea-green eyes.

“No fire,” she said, as much to refute her own foolishness as to answer his remark. “Just the opposite, in fact. I want to take Bounder down for a swim before the tide turns.”

At the mention of his name, the dog reared up in excitement, a running shoe clamped in his mouth.

“He needs a few lessons in obedience, if you ask me,” Liam said, grabbing the shoe and flinging it under the table, then seizing his coffee cup before it was swept on the floor by Bounder’s thrashing tail. “He’s out of control. Settle down, idiot!”

“He’s not much more than a puppy,” Jane said defensively. “He’s still learning and I have to be patient.”

“Patient, my eye! He’s already mastered one lesson and that’s how to control you! If you were as dedicated to making him behave and keeping his teeth off other people’s property, as you are to nosing around in business that doesn’t concern you, you’d be a sight better off and so would he. He’s too damned big to be galumphing around like this.”

She swallowed a laugh. “Well, the truce was nice while it lasted, but it’s clearly over so I’ll get us both out of your hair before you start tearing it out by the roots. Thanks for the coffee. Come on, Bounder.”

“Yeah, well…thanks. For what you did. With the shutters, and all.”

He might have been having all his teeth pulled without benefit of anesthetic, he sounded so pained! But she made allowances because she knew that his pride was injured at least as badly as his leg. Anyone could see that Liam McGuire wasn’t accustomed to being helpless and that it particularly went against the grain for him to have to watch a woman take on what he considered to be a man’s job.

“You’re welcome,” she said. “Thanks for rescuing me.”

“It’s the only way I could think of to get rid of you.”

The smile which accompanied his remark, though meager, transformed his face. Charmed more than she cared to admit, Jane smiled back and said, “I’ll make a deal with you. I promise not to bother you again, provided you agree to call on me if you need help.”

“And how do you propose I do that, Goldilocks?”

“Tie a towel or something to the post at the end of the porch railing so I can see it from my place.”

He chewed the corner of his lip thoughtfully, then shrugged and extended his hand. “Sounds like a one-sided deal to me, but if that’s what it’ll take to keep the peace….”

Since he’d shown a near-aversion to touching her any more than was absolutely necessary, she expected his handshake would be brief and businesslike. But, noticing her raw knuckles, he stroked his thumb carefully across her fingers and said, “You’ve chewed yourself up pretty badly. Do you have something you can put on these to prevent infection?”

“Yes.” His concern, though impersonal, left her foolishly misty-eyed.

He noticed that, too. Misinterpreting the reason for her distress, he said, “Are they hurting that badly, Jane?”

“Uh-uh.” She swallowed and shook her head. “It’s just that I’m not used to having someone be concerned about me. It’s usually the other way around.”

Raising his eyes, he subjected her to a brief, intense scrutiny before dropping her hand and turning the wheelchair toward the door. “Then go put some salve on your scrapes and look after yourself for a change. You’ve wasted enough time on me for one day.”

She felt his gaze following her all the way along the path. Before climbing the steps to her own front porch, she looked back and sure enough, he’d stationed himself beside the post at the edge of the porch. When he saw her turn, he lifted his hand in a salute. She did the same and, fanciful though it might be, it was as if a small flame sprang alive in the cold, empty wasteland which for so long had been her heart.

That simple gesture set the pattern for the days which followed. Whenever they happened to see one another from a distance, they’d mark the occasion with a wave, an acknowledgment which, though wordless, nevertheless conveyed a sense of cautious awareness of each other.

Once, she saw him seated at the wheel of Steve’s eighteen-foot runabout and heading across the stretch of water separating Bell Island from Clara’s Cove on Regis Island. Another time she caught sight of him hauling driftwood up the ramp from the beach. But though her every instinct screamed for her to go over and make sure he was coping by himself, she honored their pact and kept her distance.

The heat wave softened to the more typically temperate warmth of early July, with cool, refreshing nights and mornings cloaked in milky haze. The leisurely days worked their magic and Jane found the healing, the sense of contentment and peace within herself, which had for so long evaded her.

She spent evenings sitting on the porch in one of the wooden Adirondack chairs her grandfather had made years before, and watching the first stars come out. Early each morning she left a trail of footprints along the newly-washed sand at the water’s edge. She swam in the sun-warmed waters of the cove, and hiked the lower slopes of Bell Mountain to pick wild blueberries. She taught Bounder to sit and stay on command.

Her skin took on a sun glow and she gained a pound or two because her arms and legs no longer seemed quite so scrawny. She slept like a child—deeply, dreamlessly—and rediscovered a serenity of spirit she’d thought she’d lost forever.

Sometimes, she thought she could live like that indefinitely, hidden away with only Bounder for company and the bald eagles and killer whales to witness her comings and goings. But nothing stayed the same for very long. Time, life—they moved forward. Change occurred.

For her, it began the morning she went outside and found a pail of fresh clams at the foot of her porch steps. He didn’t bother leaving a note, but she knew Liam had to be the one who’d left them there, though how he’d found the stamina to navigate the rutted path from his place to hers she couldn’t begin to fathom.

In return, she waited until she saw him take the boat from its mooring, then sneaked over and left a loaf of freshly baked bread outside his door.

And so they established another tenuous line of communication: half a small salmon from him, a bowl of wild strawberries from her; apple pie still warm from her oven as thanks for prawns the size of small lobsters which he hauled out of the deep water of the mid-channel. And all done furtively so as not to contravene the terms of their pact of peaceful but independent coexistence.

Then, one time, she noticed his unoccupied wheelchair leaning drunkenly against the post at the top of the ramp leading to the house. Afraid that he’d somehow lost control of it, she sneaked over and crept up the ramp to his cottage, dreading what she might discover.

She found him stationed on the seaward side of the porch. Using the railing for support, he was testing his weight on his injured leg.

Be careful! You can’t rush recovery! she wanted to cry out, because he was a big man, tall and powerfully built. And the fact that he was trembling with the effort it cost him to put himself through the exercise told her he was pushing himself too hard, too soon.

Her concern wasn’t entirely altruistic. She knew a tiny disappointment, too, because as his recovery progressed, the likelihood that he’d call on her for help grew increasingly remote. And solitude, she was beginning to learn, had its drawbacks. There was only so much intelligent conversation one could hold with a dog, even one as smart as Bounder.