Passion's Baby

Straightening, she prepared to offer an introduction-cum-explanation for her uninvited presence. In fact, the words, “I’m Jane Ogilvie from next door and I just stopped by to say hello” were all ready to pop out of her mouth, but her attempt to appear nothing more than a friendly neighbor welcoming a summer visitor faltered and died before she uttered a single syllable.

The man had stationed himself on the cottage threshold, making escape impossible, and the cold, unwelcoming stare he directed at her would have silenced a thunderbolt. But it was neither the justifiable indignation in his eyes, which were the same translucent blue-green as the sea on a cold winter’s day, nor the embarrassment of finding herself caught brazenly snooping through his home, that left her speechless. Instead she stared mutely at his legs, knowing she shouldn’t, but unable to help herself.

From the way he let her squirm in the ensuing silence, it was her guess he was the kind who thrived on other people’s discomfiture. Finally, when she was about ready to choke on humiliation, he said, in a voice so larded with bitterness that she recoiled, “What’s the matter, Goldilocks? Never seen a man in a wheelchair before?”

Oh, yes, she could have told him, had he been at all interested in hearing her answer. But he was much too busy cursing with stunning vulgarity as he navigated the furniture and maneuvered himself farther into the room.

Knocking aside a wooden kitchen chair, he propelled himself around the table and only just missed wheeling over the tip of Bounder’s tail in the process. “Move it, hound!” he snapped, not even pausing to consider that Bounder, had he been equally ill-tempered, could have taken a chunk out of his unshaven face.

Instead, the dog tried to lick the hand which clearly wouldn’t have fed him if he’d been starving. Deciding sensitivity was wasted on such a man, Jane adopted a more confrontational approach. “Does the owner of this cottage know that you’re living here?” she inquired, folding the garment she still held in her hand and fixing him in a forthright stare.

“What business is it of yours?” he shot back. “And what the devil do you think you’re doing with my undershorts?”

She thought she’d already scaled the upper limit of human embarrassment but the realization that she was absently fingering underwear belonging to a man whose name she didn’t even know taught her the folly of that assumption. “Uh…” she mumbled, switching her horrified gaze from his face to the scarlet maple leaves emblazoned on the offending garment. “Um…oh, dear, I didn’t realize that’s what these are.”

“Cripes!” He rolled his rather beautiful eyes in disbelief. “You’ll be telling me next that you didn’t know you were trespassing on my property.”

“But it’s not your property,” she said, latching onto any excuse to change the subject. “It belongs to Steve Coffey who is an old friend of my grandfather’s and whom I’ve known since I was five years old.” Then, realizing she still hadn’t introduced herself, added, “I’m Jane Ogilvie and I’m staying at the house on the other side of the cove.”

“No, you’re not,” her ungracious host said flatly. “I’m Liam McGuire and when I signed the lease on this place, Coffey assured me I’d have the beach to myself all summer.”

“Then we’ve both been misled, because my grandfather told me the same thing. But if you’re worried I’m going to make a nuisance of myself, you can relax. I’m no more anxious to be neighborly than you are.”

“Uh-huh.” He looked pointedly at his boxer shorts. “Is that why you’re having such a good time fiddling with my drawers?”

The flush which rode up her neck rivaled the underwear’s maple leaves in color. “I most certainly am not fiddling…!”

“The hell you’re not,” he retorted with grim amusement. “The way you’re stroking them is downright indecent. You’ll be asking me to model them next.”

She dropped them as hurriedly as if they’d suddenly caught fire. “I don’t think so!”

“Why not?” he asked, his voice laced with slow insolence. “Because it’s not polite to recognize that a man in a wheelchair exists below the waist?”

“No,” she said, refusing to submit to that particular brand of emotional blackmail. “Because you’re not my type.”

“Why not?” he repeated in the same lazy drawl. “Because I’m in a wheelchair?”

“No. Because you’re arrogant, unpardonably rude, about as unappealing as a cockroach, and apparently enjoy living in a pigsty.”

He smiled. At least, she supposed his sudden display of flawless teeth amounted to that. “May I take it then that you won’t feel obliged to stop by every morning to make sure the unfortunate slob next door hasn’t accidentally fallen out of bed during the night and broken his miserable neck?”

“You may safely assume exactly that,” she said recklessly. “In fact, you may wheel yourself right off the end of the dock and drown, for all I care!”

And grabbing Bounder by the collar again, she’d marched past Liam McGuire and out of his house without so much as a backward glance. Not for the world would she have let him see how rattled she was by his attitude, or how appalled at her own behavior. Only when she reached the cover of the rock behind which she now huddled had she allowed the rigid set of her shoulders to relax and the shame to flood through her.

How could she have said such things—she who knew better than most the frustrations and agony of being confined to a wheelchair? Where was the compassion which had come so easily to her when Derek was alive?

It dried up with his death and I will not be drawn into such a web of pain again. I could not survive it a second time.

She closed her eyes, as if doing so would silence the truth echoing through her mind. But one thing she had learned too thoroughly ever to forget: turning away from the facts did nothing to change them. Like it or not, the man next door was disabled. How seriously, she didn’t know, but she understood now why the shutters remained in place over the windows, and why he hadn’t hung his clothes in the closet.

And with a defeated sigh, she knew that, no matter how unwelcome he might find her visits, sooner or later she’d come knocking on his door again, because she could no more ignore him or his plight than she could turn back the tide creeping up the beach.

“Son of a bitch!”

He slumped in the wheelchair and glared at his hands, clenched into fists in his lap. As if he didn’t have enough on his plate without having to contend with a next-door neighbor who had “Good Samaritan” written all over her face!

He’d seen the way she looked, immediately after she’d told him to go drown himself—as if she’d just swallowed a red-hot potato whole!—and he knew what would happen next. The stiff-necked pride which had carried her out of sight along the beach would evaporate faster than that morning’s early mist, and be replaced by a great surge of guilt embroidered with pity. She’d belabor herself for having spoken harshly to the gimp in the wheelchair and feel compelled to come back and be kind.

She’d train her big brown eyes on him and stammer out an apology, with a glimmer of penitent tears thrown in for extra effect. Worse, she’d probably bake something in the form of a peace offering—bran muffins most likely, because everyone knew that not getting enough exercise tended to have a detrimental effect on a man’s innards.

Swinging the wheelchair around, he rolled out to the front porch again and checked his watch. Almost ten-thirty. She’d been gone nearly half an hour and by now was likely wallowing up to her earlobes in remorse. Give her another hour to slave over a hot stove, and he’d bet money she’d reappear shortly after noon.

And maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if she did. Since he’d run out of fish heads, he could use her bran muffins for crab bait. Shuffling his sorry backside into the runabout and motoring out to the traps was awkward and time-consuming, but worth every ounce of effort for the pleasure he got in feasting on freshly caught rock crab steamed in wine over a bed of coals in the outdoor fire pit.

Good food and wine were among the few pleasures he got from life these days and, under different circumstances, he might have invited her to join him for dinner. If she had a bit more meat on her bones, he’d probably have tried to get her in the sack, as well, because even skinny as a reed, she was a good-looking woman. Decidedly feminine, elegant, and with something fragile about her that, once, would have brought out his protective instincts.

Just as well he was confined to fantasizing about sex these days, though, because she was also the type who’d expect a lot more in return than respect the morning after! When he got on his feet again and was good for something other than swallowing painkillers and feeling sorry for himself, he’d make up for lost playtime but, if he was half as smart as he liked to think he was, it wouldn’t be with Jane Ogilvie. Because she was clearly the marrying kind. And he definitely was not.

A movement down on the beach caught his attention. Uh-oh! There she went, right on cue: a woman on a mission if ever he saw one, climbing the sloping path to the house next door with an unmistakable sense of purpose in her step, while her dizzy hound gamboled clumsily at her heels. Talk about the odd couple!

Something about his face felt strange—an odd sort of ache as if he were bringing into play muscles which hadn’t seen much use lately—and he realized that, for the second time in less than an hour, he was genuinely amused. He even laughed, though he was so badly out of practice that he sounded like a seal with a bad case of laryngitis.

Well, what the hell! A bit of free entertainment on the side would help pass the time.

Letting a smile settle on his mouth, he leaned forward in the chair and waited for scene two to unfold: Goldilocks on a mission of mercy—except with that mane of dark brown hair, the name Goldilocks didn’t exactly suit her.

For the rest of that day and most of the next, Jane turned a deaf ear on the urgings of her guilty conscience. In light of the way Liam McGuire had received her the first time, he was unlikely to welcome another visit anytime soon. It would be best if she gave him time to simmer down before inflicting herself on him again.

But it wasn’t easy staying away, and for all that she managed to keep herself busy around her own house, no amount of self-discipline could prevent her from looking out of her bedroom window last thing at night to make sure lamplight showed between the cracks in the shutters on the cottage next door. Or from checking first thing in the morning for the telltale column of smoke that showed he was up and about.

“It’s absurd that he’s living there alone,” she complained to Bounder. “In fact, it’s unconscionable. He has no right burdening total strangers with responsibility for his welfare.”

But that line of reasoning soon fell by the wayside and it was all the fault of those darned shutters. Well…theirs and the heat wave which struck out of nowhere two days later and showed signs of staying awhile. How, after all, could any woman with an ounce of charity to her name ignore the fact that, with temperatures suddenly soaring to the mid-eighties, Steve’s place, boarded up as it was, would be like an oven by the end of the day?

So, armed with a small crowbar and a hammer, she set off after breakfast on the third morning, determined that nothing Liam McGuire could fling at her in the way of insults would provoke her into leaving before she’d accomplished the task she’d set herself.

Once again, she found his front door open, propped wide this time with an old flat iron acting as a stop, and she could see that he’d made some attempt to clean up the kitchen. A plate, two coffee mugs, a frying pan and a handful of cutlery were stacked neatly in a dish rack next to the sink, and he’d spread a tea towel over the porch railing to dry.

She’d learned her lesson, though, and didn’t repeat the mistake of walking in when he didn’t respond to her polite knock. With both feet planted on the porch, she leaned forward and gave the door a mighty thump with her hammer. “Are you there, Mr. McGuire? It’s Jane Ogilvie from next door.”

Still no reply, nor any movement but Steve’s old hammock strung from the porch rafters and swinging in the hot breeze. Assuming Liam McGuire wasn’t deaf or dead, he must be out again, though where he went, given his condition and the uneven terrain around the cottage, was a mystery not hers to solve.

To do what had to be done, all she needed was the ladder Steve kept in his woodshed, and in all honesty, she was just as glad not to have an audience. Carpentry, even the crude kind she was about to tackle, had never been her forte. She could very well do without the sarcastic running commentary Liam McGuire would no doubt have offered, had he been there to witness her efforts as she wrestled the boards away from the windows and stored them under the porch where they normally spent the summer.

Things went well enough to begin with, though having to move the ladder every few yards used up an astonishing amount of energy, but the real trouble began when she tackled the bedroom windows. All the others opened onto the porch which offered a nice stable platform from which to work. The ground below the bedroom, however, fell away steeply and was knee-deep in grass, stinging nettles and wild honeysuckle.

Doubtfully, she sized up the situation. Finding a firm footing for the ladder was difficult enough, but scaling rungs fully fifteen feet in the air taxed her dwindling courage to the limit. She’d never had a good head for heights. And to make matters worse, the glare from the sun hitting the uncovered glass half blinded her.