THE MORNING SIDE OF DAWN Page 18

One problem solved, he thought as he massaged his twisted knee. The rest, he thought as he looked at the probably reparable but currently useless chair, were going to take a little more doing. He glanced up to the top of the slope, gauging the distance. He was damned lucky, he thought. If he'd gone over ten yards sooner, he'd probably be counting broken bones; the drop there was straight down and a good fifteen feet. As it was, all he had to worry about was getting out of here. As he'd once told Cassie, he couldn't exactly hike home. But if he had to, he supposed wearily, he could crawl.

  * * *

  "Cassie?"

  She buried her head deeper into the pillow, trying to change what she was sure was just another dream come to haunt her sleep—Dar, calling her name in pleading tones.

  "Cassie, it's me."

  She opened one eye.

  "Come on, Cassie, I know you're there."

  It was Dar. Or his voice, anyway. She opened the other eye and lifted her head, surprised at the fading light, and even more surprised when she glanced at her watch and saw it was late afternoon. She'd fallen asleep reading, on the couch where she'd spent most of the night lying awake thinking about the man who was talking to her now. But he wasn't here, she thought sleepily. He'd gone out with the off-road chair. How could he be talking to her?

  "Cassie, pick up the phone."

  The phone. She sat up, the explanation finally dawning. His voice was coming from the answering machine.

  "Cassie, pick up the phone, please?"

  Please? From Dar Cordell? She scrambled over and grabbed the receiver.

  "Dar?"

  A moment of silence, then what she could have sworn was a sigh of relief. "Hi."

  It was probably the shortest thing he could have said, just a brief syllable, hardly enough to hear any kind of undertone, but she was suddenly wide-awake.

  "What's wrong?"

  "I … uh, need a little help."

  Her fingers tightened around the receiver. Dar saying please, asking for help? "Are you all right?"

  "Pretty much."

  "What does that mean?" she said, an edge creeping into her voice.

  "It means I'm not missing anything. That wasn't already missing, I mean."

  She leapt to her feet. "Oh, God. What happened?"

  "I sort of … crashed."

  She tried to fight down the panic that was trying to knot her stomach. She hadn't heard the van start, but she'd been so sound asleep…

  "The chair or your van?" she asked.

  "The chair."

  That was probably worse, she thought. She'd seen some of the trails he took that thing on; there was no way he could crash it and not get hurt.

  "How bad?"

  "Only one thing broken, more bent."

  "Oh, God, Dar! Where are you?"

  "About a quarter mile from the warehouse."

  "What?"

  "First trail to the right as you start up the big hill."

  "You're still out there?" she yelped.

  "Well, yeah. I told you the chair's broken."

  "The chair. The chair's broken." She sank down on the sofa once more. "I ought to kill you, Dar Cordell. You scared me to death."

  "I … what?"

  "Who gives a damn about your stupid chair?" she shouted. "I thought you were broken!"

  Silence stretched out for a long moment. "Dar?" she said at last. "Are you still there?"

  "I … yes."

  "I'm sorry I yelled. But I thought you were hurt."

  "I'm fine. A little banged up, but fine."

  He sounded so strange, she thought. So quiet. Not the way he sounded when he was being aloof and distant, but more … puzzled. Maybe he was hurt worse than he realized, she thought suddenly. Maybe he was in shock and didn't realize it. Thank God he always took that blessed phone with him.

  "I'll come for you. What should I bring?"

  "Just my chair."

  "You're sure? You don't need the paramedics or something?"

  "God, no."

  It was so fervent she took heart. "I'll be right there."

  "Wait," he said suddenly. "There's some nylon cord in that metal cabinet in the workshop. Bring that, too, will you?"

  "Okay."

  Several minutes later, as she trekked up the trail, she was filled with a new admiration for the shape Dar was in. She knew his blue chair was lightweight as daily-use chairs went, but she'd given up trying to carry it about halfway up this hill. She'd always considered herself fairly fit, but the thought of what it would take for her to sit in a chair and propel her own weight over terrain like this was overwhelming; just pushing along his chair was difficult enough. He'd told her most off-road competitors used compatriots with ATVs or the like to pull them up the steepest of practice runs, but for these "little hills," as he called them, he relied on his own power. She couldn't imagine what land of strength propelling the heavier off-road chair, plus his own body weight, would take.

  When she reached the crest of the hill, she guessed she'd come almost a quarter mile. And then, as she looked at the steep, treacherous-looking path that spilled down the other side, she had to suppress a shiver. The rolling look of these hills was deceptive; she would never have guessed this steep drop-off was on the other side. Leave it to Dar to pick the worst, most dangerous path available to do his silly tests on.

  When she realized her hands were shaking, she stopped for a few precious seconds to regain control. She knew the last thing Dar was going to want was someone fussing over him. It must have been hard enough for him to have to ask for help; to have to ask it of her no doubt only made it worse. She took several deep breaths until she felt steadier, then went on.

  She slowed her pace, afraid she might miss him in the lengthening shadows. Maybe she should have brought a flashlight, in case she didn't find him right away. She hadn't thought of that, and she'd just been anxious to get to him, to reassure herself that he was okay. But it was getting dark fast, and—

  She stopped abruptly, almost slipping on the steep trail. And then she was laughing, her panic washed away by the sound of a rather pleasant baritone on the thirty-eighth of "Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer." She ran the last few steps around a curve, stopping dead when she saw him sitting by the edge of the path.

  Her eyes went over him hurriedly; he was filthy, looking as if he'd been dragged through the dirt. He had a bruise on one cheek, his shirt was torn and she could see some bloody patches of skin that looked painful, but he obviously wasn't seriously hurt. She let out a relieved breath. The evidence of the crashing ride he'd taken—broken scrub brush and skidding tire tracks down the hillside—gave her a pang, but it was impossible to worry as she listened to him work his way through bottle thirty-nine and head for forty.

  He saw her then, and the singing stopped. She walked toward him, tugging his chair along, then came to a halt and set the brake as she had seen him do so many times. He watched her silently as she crouched in front of him. He didn't move, but she saw the tension in his jaw, saw the wariness in his eyes. She'd been right about how hard this had been for him, in much more than a physical way; Dar Cordell was a proud man.

  "I'm glad I got here before you ran out of beer," she quipped.

  He didn't retort, but she thought she saw him relax slightly. She looked down the slope to where the off-road chair sat at a crazy angle. He'd climbed up to the edge of the trail, she thought, realizing now why his clothes looked so dirty. She took a moment to control the automatic alarm that had gripped her at the thought of what easily could have happened, how badly he could have been hurt. Finally, when she was certain she could keep her voice light, she turned back to him.

  "Boy, when you say downhill, you mean downhill, don't you? You keep this up, you're going to have to build a parachute into these things."

  "Or at least a bungee cord," he muttered. But his mouth was twitching as he said it.

  "A whole new sport," Cassie said, grinning. "Chair bungee jumping."

  And then he was smiling at her. "Makes
it off-off-road, I guess."

  She laughed. Then she glanced down at the chair again. It looked almost intact to her, until she saw the bent handlebar and wheel.

  "We need a tow truck or something?"

  His smile quirked up at one corner. "Nah. Just me. If you brought that rope."

  She nodded and got the length of line she'd stowed in the pocket on the backrest of his chair. He took it, but when she realized he meant to go back down the hill, she grabbed back.

  "Let me." He stiffened. Cassie's chin came up. "Don't be stupid, Cordell."

  His eyes narrowed. She could almost see his resistance as she knelt down in front of him.

  "Dar, you've had one trip down this mountain already. That's enough. Pride stops being useful when you trip over it."

  Slowly, she saw the stiffness drain out of him. He lowered his eyes, as if staring at his worse-for-wear clothes. She saw him take a deep breath.

  "Sorry," he muttered. Then he looked up at her from beneath still-lowered lashes. "Knee-jerk reaction again."

  Cassie managed to smile despite the fact that he had knocked the wind out of her as surely as if she had been the one who had taken the fall down that rocky hillside. She didn't know if it was the intimacy of the private joke, or simply the angle of his head, the thick, dark sweep of his lashes and the smile that was playing around the corners of his mouth. But whatever it was, it filled her with a longing both emotional and physical, and stronger than anything she'd ever known before.

  And for once, she didn't try to hide it. She just looked at him, knowing it must show in her face like a beacon in the dark. His head came up, and he was looking at her directly, staring, and she could almost see him recognize the look for what it was.

  "God, Cassie," he said hoarsely.

  She didn't blush, didn't lower her gaze. She just looked at him. He knew now, knew how she felt. She should probably be afraid of that, but she couldn't find it in her. Her only fear was that he would retreat from her forever, now that he knew. She'd done a lot of chipping away at Dar Cordell's walls, but she didn't know if she'd done enough, didn't know if he would let her in. The most disheartening thing to her was that, if he wouldn't—or couldn't—she couldn't blame him. And she didn't know where that left her.

  Except walking out of his life, if that was what he wanted.

  It was he who finally looked away, as if recoiling from the intensity of her gaze. She prayed silently that that wasn't to be her final answer. She handed him one end of the line, turned and without another word started to scrabble down the hillside; there really wasn't anything to say.

  She tied the other end of the cord in a neat square knot around the frame of the off-road chair, paused to pick up the padded pouch that had thankfully saved the cellular phone from damage, then waved an okay at him.

  He had turned himself to face the drop and, as soon as she signaled him, he began to pull. Despite its weight, damage and the steepness of the hillside, the off-road chair seemed to come up easily, but Cassie suspected Dar was only making it look that way. All she had to do was guide the chair, and occasionally free the contorted front wheel when it hit some loose dirt and dug in.

  When she got to the top, she noticed that he had wedged the stump of his right leg against a large rock, and realized that he had needed to be able to brace himself against something to compensate for the missing counterbalance of the weight and length of his lower legs. She had never realized that that was one of the problems he faced until he'd once explained—after she'd nagged him with so many questions that he'd finally given up and just started answering them—that his personal chairs had a slightly longer wheelbase than a paraplegic chair, to adjust for the change in the center of gravity caused by his missing legs. She suspected that was also why he was so adamant about maintaining muscle in his residual limbs; it wasn't just fitness for its own sake, but also because muscle meant mass and weight.

  "I'm damn lucky," he'd said for a second time, and without a trace of sarcasm in his voice. "There are a lot of people who don't have the options I do. They can't work out, or build any strength. For them, chairs can be a prison, not a convenience. And there's not a damn thing I can do about it."

  She hadn't realized until that day that he felt so keenly the differences, not between himself and die able-bodied world, but between himself and others the world seemed to want to lump together into one huge category labeled neatly as disabled.

  As a rather odd caravan they made their way back to the warehouse. His regular chair was hardly designed for this kind of use, which made the going necessarily slow; only the sunbaked summer hardness of the ground made it possible at all. On the uphill section he towed the battered chair behind him; on the downhill side he reversed the order, putting the off-road chair in front, with Cassie to guide it while he controlled the speed with his grip on his own wheels. She knew it had to be a strain, and guessed he was more than a little grateful for the fingerless gloves that had not only saved his hands from some damage in his crash, but were probably saving them now from some serious blistering.

  She wondered if the steady heat of his gaze between her shoulder blades was doing some blistering of its own.

  * * *

  The chair was fixable, he thought as he looked it over. The frame wasn't hurt at all; he'd only have to replace the one handlebar, and the mounting for that front wheel—

  "Dar."

  He didn't look up at her. He wasn't sure he could ever meet her gaze again, not after what he'd seen—or thought he'd seen—in her face out there on the hill. "What?" he finally said when she just stood there.

  "That can wait," she said.

  "I can do it now. I have the parts handy." He'd have to flip on the high-intensity workshop lights, he thought as he tugged off his gloves. It was full dark now and—

  "Dar, you're bleeding."

  He glanced at his left elbow, which had lost one layer of skin too many and was, indeed, bleeding slightly. Then shrugged.

  "That's just one," Cassie said. "How about your back? Your shirt's all bloody. And your cheek. And—"

  "It'll stop."

  "The infection won't, if you don't get those cuts cleaned up. You look like you brought half that hillside in with you."

  Well, she was right about that, he thought, glancing down at himself. And he could feel air coming through a tear in the back of his T-shirt, right over the spot that was sending him painful signals he'd been trying to ignore.

  "Come on. I raided your medicine cabinet and the doctor is in. Let's go."

  She started to walk away, toward the bathroom. He watched her, remembering that trip down the hill, when he'd spent most of his time reminding himself to concentrate on controlling his descent instead of the gentle sway of her hips as she moved.

  She stopped now, turning halfway back to look at him. "Move it, Cordell."

  He didn't know when it had begun, or how it had happened, but he seemed to have reached a point where it was impossible to say no to her, not when she turned that bantering tone and teasing look on him. It seemed to have happened at about the time she'd whacked off her hair, he thought, as if the new, sassy shortness of it had changed her attitude, as well as her looks. He liked both, he decided. Not that he believed for a minute that she'd done it to get his attention, or change his perception of her, as she'd said.

  "Yes, ma'am," he said with exaggerated meekness, and began to wheel toward her. The moment she was assured he was coming, she started off again, and once more he had to quash a memory of that moment on the bill, when she had looked at him as he'd never expected to be looked at again by any woman. When she'd looked at him in a way he was desperately trying to convince himself he'd misunderstood.

  When he got to the bathroom, he saw that she had indeed raided his medicine cabinet. Since he worked as well as lived here, he had a fairly comprehensive first-aid kit, and she'd plundered it for antiseptic, cotton pads, scissors and adhesive bandages, all of which lay spread out on the small counter.


  And only when he saw her standing next to that counter did he realize for the first time how awkward this room must be for her, as tall as she was. Everything was geared to him and his chair. But she'd never even mentioned it.

  He came to a halt beside her, and she reached out and plucked gingerly at the back of his T-shirt. He felt the tug, then a dart of pain, and realized the cloth had adhered to that protesting spot on his back.

  "You want to risk peeling that off, or shall I cut it, since it's already ripped beyond saving?"

  "There's only a couple of holes," he protested.

  She gave him a look that made him grimace ruefully.

  "Okay, okay, cut it. I can always use another cleanup rag."

  She did it neatly and efficiently, but the shirt still didn't want to release its hold on what he realized now must be bloodily raw skin. Even her gentle tugs hurt, and he tried not to wince.

  "Just yank it," he said.

  "No, thanks," she said. "I know you're tough enough, but I don't think I am. We can do better than that."

  She went to the sink and turned on the tap, setting it for warm. It was quick—he hated waiting for hot water, and one of the things he'd done when he'd converted the warehouse was make sure the water heater was close to the bathroom—and she soaked a washcloth and walked back to him. She applied the cloth over the spot, and while it stung, it was much better than the dry pull of the painfully attached cloth. After a moment she was able to pull the bloody shirt free and he barely felt a thing. There was, he had to admit, something to having somebody to help at times like this; he would have just yanked the shirt off and no doubt started the bleeding all over again.

  He almost protested when she began to wash away the dirt that streaked his torso, but the soft warmth and the soothing touch felt too good. He'd never had anyone take care of him like this, except once in his life, at a time he didn't care to dwell on. Crazy, he thought, letting his eyes drift closed, that what had been a humiliation during long months in the hospital could ever be so … pleasant.

  She turned to his cuts and scrapes next, tending to him with fingers that were exquisitely gentle and a running commentary that was anything but, but distracted him from the pain of what she was doing. Which, he thought as the smell of the antiseptic made him open his eyes, was no doubt what she had intended.