Kiss Your Prince Charming

But he forgot all that while Rach was here.

Thunder boomed outside. Rain slashed against the windows, running down the glass in silver ribbons. Against that black night, Rachel’s skin looked pearl-soft and luminous, like a treasure a man felt compelled to protect—even if her eyes were full of the devil and she was unrepentantly trying to sneak a peek at his cards. “Are you saving aces over there, Stoner?”

“Like I’d tell you.”

“I think you are.” Again she peered into his eyes as if she could see the truth there. “You know I’m at a disadvantage because I can’t see your face, when you can see mine. So I think it’s only fair that you give me a hint whether you have an ace or two.”

“Fair? Fair! You’re talking to a man who’s lost for four nights running. I’ll tell you whether I have aces when hell freezes over.”

She sniffed. “Okay. When you get home, I was going to make you a big fat steak on the grill with French fries, because I thought that’d taste good after all the meals you’ve had to drink from a straw. But if you can’t even give me a teensy little hint—”

“God. You play just like a girl. Sneaky. Manipulative. Making low-down blackmail threats—”

“Yeah. So what’s your point?”

He let out an exhausted sigh. “I have aces. Is that what you wanted to know?”

“Uh huh.” She promptly dispensed a deuce—and a female-rascaly grin at the same time.

They kept playing...but Greg’s mind couldn’t help spinning back to the day he’d met her. She was full of frisky sass now, but not that day. That afternoon she’d reminded him of a kitten drenched in a storm. Miserable, huddled into herself, eyes shell-shocked and lost—but just like a cat, she spit and clawed if anyone tried to help her. Particularly anyone male.

She’d been married to Mark for seven years.

Two seconds after meeting Rach, Greg was inclined to murder the guy—and he didn’t even know the whole story then. The details had drifted out over time. She’d still been wildly in love when her Sacred Mark walked out. She had no idea there was another woman in the picture. She had no clue there was even a problem. They hadn’t argued. He hadn’t complained. She was under the impression their sex life was superb.

From the start of the relationship, Rach had dropped out of college to put her True Love through school. Then she’d worked two low-wage jobs while the spineless jerk was getting around to sending out résumés. Her turn to finish college somehow never happened. Mark-O just had a lot of needs—like the right clothes and wheels suitable to a certain status, then the right house in the right neighborhood, and naturally he couldn’t sacrifice any fishing or hunting trips with his pals.

Greg figured that Rach had had plenty of clues early on. She just hadn’t wanted to see that her Sacred Mark was a selfish, immature jerk. Actually, to a point, Greg didn’t think that particularly mattered. If she loved the guy, then she did.

But what killed Greg—what fried him upside and down the other—was that the son of a bitch had broken her heart. Mark had obviously been the only guy she ever loved, ever knew intimately. His chasing another woman had the same effect as ripping the heart right out of her. The day she’d moved next door, she’d had nothing—a checkbook with a couple hundred dollars, no job, no plans, and a little rented U-Haul heaped with impractical, sentimental junk that she couldn’t even sell, much less wear or eat.

Greg had never felt it happen before. His heart, doing the slam-bam-alakazaam thing. His hormones, suffering instant delirium His nerves, trying to electrocute him with the lightning-bolt voltage.

Of course she wasn’t for him. Greg recognized that right off. Look what happened when King Kong pined after the blonde. When Romeo started moping after a Capulet. When Bogart got obsessed with a married woman in Casablanca. When a guy fell in love with an mappropriate woman, nothing ever followed but a heart-gashedin-two and disaster. There was love and there was love. If you had the wrong kind, best you bite the bullet, shut up and just try to value what you did have.

“I’m out.” Rachel—the fragile, withdrawn, vulnerable woman he’d fallen in love with—snapped down her last card and then wiggled her fingers. “Gimme, gimme, gimme. Thirty whole cents. Am I good or am I good? You might as well admit it, Stoner. I buried you. I trounced you deep. I beat the pants off you.”

“You’re the worst winner I ever met, ” he grumbled, and dug in the bedside table for his wallet. “You ever hear of the word humble?”

“What’s to be humble for? I won, I won, I won.”

He couldn’t grin because of the bandages. He couldn’t laugh because of the sore ribs. But he wanted to do both. As he forked over her thirty cents, he savored how much she’d changed from two years ago. For a while, Greg had his doubts she’d ever recover from the blows that creep had inflicted on her.

One of the rehab staff—a buxom nurse named Maeve—cocked her head through the doorway. “Well, if this isn’t typical. Visiting hours are over. The whole floor’s quieted down. All my good patients are behaving themselves. And then there’s you two.”

Rachel chuckled, but she also swiftly scooched off the bed. “I’m sorry. And I promise, I’m leaving right away.” The nurse had barely disappeared before she added to Greg, “I’ll give you a chance to earn back the loot tomorrow.”

“You’d better,” he said with the tone of the longsuffering.

With a cheeky grin, she started searching for her shoes and found them lying cockeyed under the chair. “You know what?”

“What?”

She pushed on the shoes, then grabbed her trench coat. “Every day you’ve sounded stronger, Greg, but tonight was the first time that you really, really sounded like yourself. I realize you’re not quite ready to climb K-2, and those bandages still make you look like one of those Egyptian pharaoh mummies. But I think they just might let you out of here soon.”

“That’s exactly what I told the doc this morning. It’s time to throw me out. Tomorrow wouldn’t be too soon for me.”

“I don’t blame you for being impatient. If I’d been cooped up this long, I’d be going just as nuts. But this started out almost as scary as the Humpty Dumpty story, Stoner. They had a lot of pieces to put back together.” She cinched the belt on her trench coat and then clipped toward him. “Just for the record, I am going to make you that steak and French fries as soon as you get home. You just have to stay cool a little longer and do what the docs tell you, okay?”

She bent down. He saw her wispy bangs, the faint spray of freckles on her nose, her soft mouth. He knew she was going to kiss him. Before the accident, she’d never touched him, but she’d pulled this kiss-good-night routine fairly often since he’d been in the hospital.

Now, like those other times, her lips had to search for a spot to kiss because almost everything above his neck was covered with white gauze.

Now, like the other times, her blue eyes flashed on his first. For two years Rach had been allergic to men, never went out, never gave a guy a chance to hurt her. Greg was positive that he’d earned her trust, yet still she needed to do that affirming quick eye study to remind herself that he was different—a proven friend, not a predator, not a male where sex or intimacy was an issue.

Now, like the other times, she seemed to decide it was okay to express an honest affectionate gesture with him...and did. Her lips touched down, softer than satin, gentler than a sigh. He caught the faint drift of the spicy scent she wore, saw her silky blond hair sweep down in pale, fine curls, inhaled the rustle of girl clothes and the pure delicate femaleness of her. And the first time she’d kissed him, all he had to do was brace because it was all over in two seconds.

But now, like the other times, Rach seemed to unconsciously stretch it out. Past two seconds.

Past five.

Past the point of a good-night-smack between pals, although Greg was meticulously careful not to touch her, not to move, not to breathe.

When she finally lifted her head and straightened up, her eyes flashed on his again, then swiftly shifted away like a nervous gambler’s. Color streaked her cheeks. Her hands restlessly tightened a belt that was already securely tied.

“You really need to get out of here.” Greg covered the sudden awkward silence. “I’m going to worry about your driving on ice if you don’t get home.”

That coaxed back her natural smile again. “I’m going, I’m going.” She snatched up her purse and hiked toward the door. “Give the nurses hell, I love you and sleep good, okay?”

Once those orders were delivered, naturally she whisked out of the room before he could respond. For a few seconds longer he could hear her heels clicking down the hospital linoleum, and then she was gone. Greg sank against the pillow and squeezed his eyes closed. It was worrisome. Not just her recent habit of kissing him, but her brand new habit of leaving him with that light, blithe, “I love you.”

Only a few moments passed before Maeve ambled back in. “Hi, darling’. Your company finally gone?”

“Yes.”

“As many visitors as you get, she’s my favorite. Such a sweetie. And cute as a button.” Efficiently Maeve wrapped his arm in the blood pressure cuff, then did the temperature and the pulse routine. “I got a secret for you. Dr. Webster says we can try you on real food tomorrow. And if that goes okay, you’ll be out of here in a matter of days. Now I’ve got some juice and couple of pills for you....”

Greg sipped the juice, ignored the pills, and when Maeve had moved on to badger the patient in the next room, he twisted to a sitting position and slowly stood up. He made it the five steps to the window, but the sensation of dizzy weakness was exasperating.

All the broken parts on his torso were healing fine. It was his face that had kept him trapped in the hospital all these weeks. From the broken jaw to the reconstruction surgeries, he’d been drinking dinners for weeks now. He could do physical therapy, but he simply could not build up strength when his diet maxed out at soft foods like tapioca.

Bracing both hands on the windowsill, Greg scanned the rain-slick parking lot below, hoping to spot Rachel. Headlights blinked and glared, but it was too dark to identify any cars, even anything as distinctive as her classic-survivor yellow VW. He was about to give up and step away, when he caught his mirror reflection in the glass pane.

The tall, lean man in the reflection was stunningly—eerily—unfamiliar. Yeah, he’d always been tall, but even from childhood, he’d been chunky and stoop-shouldered. Now his body felt like a stranger’s. The new lean build and straight posture just didn’t feel like him, and he was increasingly edgy about the mystery face under the bandages. The plastic surgeon had repeatedly promised him that the reconstruction surgeries had gone “fabulous” and he was going to look great. Truthfully, Greg didn’t care what he looked like, as long as he didn’t have scars that would scare children or draw attention to himself.

But suddenly he did care.

Something was happening between him and Rachel. Something new, something different. Something threatening. She just wasn’t behaving the same around him. Sooner or later Rach was always going to realize that she wasn’t allergic to men anymore, that Sacred Mark hadn’t wounded her for life, that sleeping alone wasn’t any fun for grown-ups. Greg had loved helping her. Loved feeling a part of her healing. Loved knowing he was one of the few men in the universe that she trusted.