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.
But once he got home from the hospital, he just wanted to feel sure their next-door friendship went back to the way it was. He was the frog. She was the princess. Everything had always gone well between them as long as Greg never tried coloring outside those lines.
Slowly he turned around, then went through all the stiff contortions it took to get himself ready for bed and covered up again. Once the lights were off, he stared at the black ceiling, remembering Randall Conrad, the class bully in fourth grade. Greg had taken one beating from the bully and never told. Then another beating. It seemed that was around the time he started wolfing down extra snacks, playing the bumbling brain, making good-natured jokes no matter what anyone said to him. Randall had quit hounding him. Nobody had really picked on him after that.
In fact, girls had always liked him. Greg couldn’t remember a time when he didn’t have close female friends. He didn’t threaten women. Didn’t inspire them either— but Greg knew himself incapable of doing that. By age thirty-two, naturally he’d had some serious relationships. If none had ended in marriage, none had ended badly or cruelly, either. They just seemed to fizzle out like champagne left uncorked. Personally, he never thought sex was worth all the hoopla. He seemed to bore the lovers he’d chosen, almost as badly as they’d bored him. He’d like to marry sometime. He’d like kids, like a family. But just to have another body in the house was no justification to pursue something where Greg had already proven to be mediocre.
Unlike the old song claimed, one wasn’t the loneliest number. Two was. Being with someone you really didn’t want to be with was not only exhausting, but the most painful brand of loneliness.
Greg was pretty sure Rachel felt nothing but sympathy for him. He was also pretty sure she had no clue he was in love with her. Her sympathy should die a natural death once he got home and back to normal life again, but he treasured their friendship and worried doing anything to screw it up.
The second he met Rachel, he’d known she wasn’t for him. He had money. He had brains. But he’d never had the kind of zesty style and people skills and innate guts for life that she had. She’d shoot him for using the word class but there it was. It’d be like trying to pair a Chevy with a Jag. A guy could admire a Jag. Could lust after it. Could look. But a grown man with character knew better than to touch something that couldn’t belong to him.
Greg sighed heavily and closed his eyes. Most of his life he’d been invisible, the kind of guy who faded into the woodwork and no one noticed. Other men liked attention. Not him. And right now all he wanted was to be home again—back to his work, back to his life, back to being comfortably invisible. Especially with Rachel.
A week later, Rachel rapped on Greg’s back door, and when no one answered, she twisted the knob and poked her head inside. “Stoner! It’s me, Rach! Are you here?”
“Yeah, I’m back here in the den.”
Shaking her head with impatience, she stomped inside and closed the door. Technically Greg was still on a medical leave of absence, but there was no telling him that. When the hospital finally sprang him four days ago, he’d had a co-worker bring him work from the office ever since. He was always in the den working on the computer. Reminding him that he still had a doctor’s mandate to take it seriously easy fell on deaf ears.
Quickly she peeled off her pea coat and tossed it on a kitchen chair, automatically glancing around the room. No crumbs cluttered the red-tile counter; no dishes were stacked in the white porcelain sink. Old-fashioned glass cabinets revealed neatly stacked plates, and the long oak table held a nauseatingly tidy pile of mail and magazines. Personally Rachel didn’t trust anyone who didn’t leave a shameful mess somewhere—it just wasn’t human—but Greg was a friend. One had to forgive a friend a few revolting habits.
Momentarily, though, she only glanced around the kitchen to ascertain how he was doing today.
The dimwit wouldn’t ask for help if his life depended on it, so Rachel had to rely on clues. He’d been working too hard ever since coming home from the hospital, but Stoner was too much of a hard-core perfectionist to ever leave a mess unless he were exhausted or in pain. Today, his spotless kitchen reassured her that he was feeling good.
Pushing off her shoes, she padded in stocking feet down the wainscotted hall and through the living room. His decor always struck her sense of humor. Greg had told her that Stoners had built the family home in the 1890s, and some furnishings were obviously heirlooms from that elegant Victorian period—like the mahogany breakfront and a burgundy crushed-velvet rocker and the rich Oriental rugs. And then there were Greg’s choices. Futuristic minimalist. A spear of a lamp, a lapis lazuli slab for a coffee table, a giant wall-size TV and entertainment center, futons for seating. The furnishings were backdropped by old fashioned stuccoed walls and fancy copper-carved ceilings.
Rachel was unsure whether Greg didn’t realize that nothing went together or, worse, that he thought it did. A wolf had to have a better sense of style that he did. The French doors at the far end of the living room opened onto his study.
She paused in the study doorway. The closed wooden blinds sealed out the midday sun and made the room murky-dim. All she could really see was Greg’s back, hunched over a glowing computer monitor, his fingers clicking on the keyboard. He was wearing his favorite Green Bay sweatshirt—which was so decrepitly frayed that it should have seen a trash bin up-close-and-personal years ago—and he was obviously concentrating hard. One look, and a lump filled her throat.
She’d loved him as a friend for ages now, but feelings had hugely and drastically changed since his car accident. Maybe it was watching him cope with so much pain. Maybe it was all those nights in the hospital, the way he teased her, the way he cheated at cards so she’d win, the way they so easily laughed together.
Somehow she had just never looked at Greg as a man before. She’d seen him as a brainy, overweight nerd, because that was how he’d always made such a point of billing himself. And more privately she’d thought of him as a gentle giant, because that’s how he’d been with her—a neighbor, a friend, a fixer of fuses and a stealer of cookies and an unbeatable listener. She’d seen Greg in lots of roles. All of them wonderful.
But until the accident, she’d just never thought of him