Harlequin Superromance February 2014 - Bundle 1 of 2: His Forever Girl\Moonlight in Paris\Wife by Design (69 page)

“No. I came to tell you that I think us as friends would be good.”

The smile that slowly spread on his face made
her
feel drunk. Or maybe it was the smell of all the flowers getting to her.

“I was actually at your place.”

“You were? Did you see Maddie?”

“Yeah. She opened the door before I could knock to tell me to be quiet so I didn't wake Kara.”

“A cannon going off wouldn't wake her.”

“She also told me you weren't home.”

“I had an appointment cancel this afternoon. I was going to make an early day of it, but wanted to stop by here first.”

Her lips were dry again. She was moist in other places.

“I took another look around your backyard area. I've got an idea and thought, if you were up for it, I could get those lights installed for you on Saturday. I'll be done with the Garden of Renewal tomorrow.”

She'd be saying goodbye to Kara for her first overnight visit. For the first time since her daughter's birth she was going to be in a different city than her.

“Saturday would be perfect,” she said.

If anything could distract her from the depression of Kara's absence—from the sadness and grief that continued to linger at the demise of her happy family life—Grant Bishop could.

His head dropped, and then he looked up at her. “Eight o'clock okay?” he asked.

“In the morning?” She heard the question and knew that it was asinine. He wasn't going to install landscape lighting at night.

Brandon was due to pick Kara up at ten.

“Yeah, I thought morning would be best.”

He smiled. Her blood ran hot.

“Eight is fine. And...with Kara leaving, Maddie won't be there so it would be the best time to have Darin around.” She tried to stay focused. To listen to her mind, which she could trust, and not get waylaid by emotions, which weren't trustworthy at all.

“Do you have early appointments?”

She shook her head. And wondered what his kiss would feel like. “Not until the afternoon.”

She planned it that way on purpose so she could be at home when Brandon came to collect Kara. And thinking of her ex somehow led to the reminder that she hadn't had sex in three years.

“But...you have to let me pay you,” she said, desperate to keep herself on track. “I make okay money, Grant, and I don't have a mortgage. Let me pay your company the going rate.”

He grinned again. A slow grin that made her feel as if he'd just taken her clothes off. “Lady, you can't afford me.”

“Try me.”

He named a price. She didn't blanch. But if she'd tried to speak she would have choked.

“Too much, huh?” His head at a slight angle, he studied her. She didn't want to fail his test.

“No,” she finally managed, and her voice sounded fine. Years of practice in the medical field paying off, probably. “I can afford you.”

But she couldn't. Not financially. And not emotionally, either.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

H
E
SAW
L
YNN
twice on Friday. Both times she'd been walking within view of the Garden of Renewal. She waved. He waved back. And his thoughts of her were hotter than the lights he was wiring—the finishing touch on the garden.

By the time he collected Darin from his afternoon therapy session, he was ready to remove the caution tape from around the newly remodeled garden.

He told Darin the second he saw him, lifting his left hand to Darin's right for a high five, a ritual at the completion of every job.

“I don't know why you keep coming here to get me, Grant,” Darin said, leaving Grant's hand hanging in midair.

“I like to watch the last few minutes of therapy each day so I can see how well you're progressing,” he said, aware of the slightly petulant tone of his voice.

He was hurt. He knew he had absolutely no right to be, but he couldn't help the way he felt.

“You've always liked to have me around,” he added as he headed down the hall and out the back door. Darin kept pace with him.

“I do like having you around,” his older brother agreed.

“Then what's the problem?”

“Nothing.”

It was a truculent “nothing.” Not an assured, truthful one. But he let it go. Because he knew what was wrong—if Grant was there, Darin couldn't wait for Maddie—and was hopeful that if they continued to ignore the issue, it would fade away as so many others had in the past.

“Oh, yeah, look.” Reaching over with his right hand, Darin pulled Grant to a stop on the sidewalk. He held out his left leg. Pulled up the leg of the sweatpants he'd worn to therapy that day.

In place of the piece of gauze taped to his brother's shin, there was a line of pink puffy skin. “Lynn came and got me and we went to her room and she took out my stitches.”

He'd wanted to be there. If for no other reason than to have the excuse to spend the time with Lynn. “She said seven to ten days,” Grant said aloud. “It's only been six.”

“But I saw her in the hall before my therapy and I told her I was itching there and she said, ‘Let me take a look,' and she did and she brought me right over and took out the stitches and walked with me back over to my therapy. Don't worry, I wasn't late, Grant.”

“I wasn't worried. And I'm very glad the stiches are out. Now you can shower without having to make sure it's covered.”

“That's what Lynn said.” They continued on toward the garden.

And Grant thought about Darin's nurse in the shower.
His
shower.

* * *

T
HAT
EVENING
,
AFTER
stopping for burgers on the way back home from The Lemonade Stand, Grant asked Darin to help him find the landscape lights he wanted in the supply shed behind their garage.

While they were in the shed, his phone rang, and he talked to Luke about a problem he and Craig had run into that day on a fifty-thousand-dollar job. At the customer's request they were planting two rows of flowering trees along a river rock walkway and they'd run into some slate ground.

He'd tested patches of the ground himself and found the soil nutrient rich. Telling Luke he'd be at the job site at six in the morning, he made a mental note to check the design blueprint before turning in that night. He needed a plan B for the mini-orange-tree grove at the end of the line of trees if he was going to have to reroute the walkway.

Luke filled him in on the other job they'd been at that morning. And by the time Grant hung up, Darin had a bin open on the workbench.

“These are the ones you wanted, right?” he asked.

He glanced in the bin. “Yep, thanks, bro.”

Darin closed the bin with his good hand and pushed it to the corner of the workbench, turning to replace the other plastic bins he'd pulled off the waist-high shelves. Handled one at a time, the bins were light enough for Darin to move on his own without breaking the doctor's no-lifting rule.

They were light enough to move with one hand, but his brother was using both. Slowly. Awkwardly. But successfully.

Darin's left hand didn't do much more than touch the underside of the bin—a two-or three-inch movement that didn't appear to be weight bearing. But it was a start.

Grant grabbed some wire, clips and extra bulbs, put them in a bag and turned to find Darin standing at the workbench between them, frowning at him.

“What?” Grant asked a little more irritably than he probably should have. He had a problem at a job site—a very lucrative job site—he'd had a long week, his brother didn't seem to want him around and he had formed an unhealthy addiction to a woman he couldn't have. Could you blame a guy for being a little frustrated?

“You know that girl, Maddie, the blonde you saw me with, who was looking after Lynn's little girl, Kara? The one who was so upset the day Kara almost fell in the hole?”

“Yes.”

“I like her.”

Play it down, man. It's only a big deal if you make it one.
Darin's words to him when he was a junior in high school and wasn't chosen to play first string basketball...

“I like her, too.”

Darin stood tall, making eye contact. A sign of a lucid moment. “You don't know her as well as I do.”

“No, I don't. But from what I've seen she seems very nice.”

“I know a lot about her.”

Was this the time to mention the phone calls he knew about?

Or maybe it was time to ask Darin if he wanted to make a run for some ice cream.

“She's very trusting and sometimes gets hurt.” Darin had both hands on the workbench.

All Grant could think of to say was, “That's nice.” And managed to stop himself.

“We like talking to each other.” Darin's tone was growing stronger. And the child in him wasn't surfacing, Grant noted.

He knew he was going to have to engage.

“I had a call from the phone company yesterday,” he said, equally serious as he met his brother's gaze head-on. “We were over our minute allowance. They did a usage analysis for me.”

“I've been talking to Maddie on the phone.”

“Late at night, apparently.”

Darin wasn't a child to be disciplined, he reminded himself as he heard the almost accusing tone in his voice. “Which is fine,” he quickly added.

His tension was his problem. Not Darin's.

“I'll pay you for the phone bill.”

Grant nodded, knowing full well that Darin had no idea how much the phone bill cost, or how much money it would take to cover it. He had a bank account because Grant paid him, and he got federal assistance, as well. But Grant was the executor of the account. And kept very clear records of every dime of Darin's money that was spent.

“You already pay your share of the phone bill, bro,” he said, wishing he'd opted for ice cream. Or that Darin had started this conversation while he still had things to do in the shed.

“I'm sorry the phone company had to call you.”

“I'm not. You have a friend, Darin, that's fine.”

It was just going to have to be. Because his brother deserved a life, for God's sake. Standing there listening to a forty-four-year-old man apologize for talking on the phone—and knowing that his handling of the situation had prompted his brother's remorse—made him sick.

Darin watched him for a long time, which wasn't all that unusual. His brother took a long time to focus sometimes. And then he said, in a perfectly normal tone, “I want to take Maddie on a date.”

Grant needed a beer. A whole case of beer. And a deep breath, too. He'd already screwed up the phone company conversation.

Of course Darin couldn't take Maddie on a date. That was a given. How to handle the situation in a way that respected his older brother, he didn't know.

“I need your help, Grant.” Darin could have been in college, and Grant fourteen again. That was how Darin sounded. And how Grant felt.

He waited.

“I can't drive. And while I could pay with a debit card, I'm afraid I'd screw it up and spend too much of our money.”

Life wasn't meant to be this way. Logic and knowing mixed with helplessness. It just wasn't natural.

But Darin was alive. With him. He hadn't died with Shelley that day. Or in the critical days afterward when they'd had to do the first of many surgeries on his brain.

“Maddie needs me.”

It was a completely adult concept. A completely Darin concept.

“How does she need you?” he challenged, on the defensive again, but managing to keep his feelings out of his tone as he posed the question.

“She needs me to be a man who's her friend.”

So any man would do?
The words, thankfully, didn't make it out of his mouth.

“And she trusts me not to hurt her.”

“How do you know that?”

“She told me.”

Grant's eyes narrowed as he and his brother stood facing each other across the workbench—man to man—wishing he knew how much man was really left inside his brother.

Sometimes he was convinced that Darin was all there, just challenged in his delivery.

“And that's why you want to go on a date with her? So that you won't hurt her?”

The old Darin would have known that to lead a girl on would hurt worse in the long run. But the act of trying to prevent a woman from hurting was just like the old Darin.

“I want to go on a date with her because I like her and want to go on a date with her, silly,” Darin said. He dropped his head and slurped saliva before scooping the box of lights under his arm. Grant followed, bag in hand, turning off the lights to the shed as they left. He stopped to deposit the morning's supplies in the back of the truck.

Were they done, then? Was that it?

Darin stood back, waiting for Grant, and then followed him into the house. Grant had work to do. He waited to see if his brother would go calmly about his routine, take his shower, eat a snack.

Grant dropped his keys on the kitchen counter. Darin emptied his pockets beside them, something Grant had trained him to do early on after the accident. You could tell a lot about a guy and his day by what was in his pockets.

Grant also always made sure Darin had money in his pocket. Money that would most likely get lost if Darin didn't turn it in every night.

Darin moved toward the archway that led from the kitchen to the living room.

“I want to go diving, too, Grant,” he said, and then turned slowly to face him again. “But I want to go on a date with Maddie first.”

“Darin...”

“Please, Grant. Don't make me beg for this.” Darin's brow was furrowed, and he looked as if he might cry.

“Okay, bro. If Maddie wants to go on a date with you, I'll find a way to make it happen.”

Darin laughed then, and followed it up with a full-bodied, unrestrained whoop. A little-boy reaction to a big-boy request.

“And I don't even have to cover my stitches,” he said, proceeding toward the bathroom.

Grant was left standing in the middle of the room with another problem on his hands. One he had no idea how to handle.

But there was one thing he did know. Maddie seemed to be good for his brother. He couldn't remember the last time Darin had had so many “real” moments in one span. It was as though Maddie's need for him—and his protectiveness of her—was bringing out some latent instincts that hadn't been diminished by the injury to his brain.