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Too Short A Blessing Penny Jordan Table of Contents CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
THE moment she stepped inside the front door, Sara Barclay saw the change in her brother. Gone was the morose, withdrawn man she had left behind two weeks ago, and in his place was the older brother she remembered from her teenage years. ‘Managed to tame the wild beast, did you?’ he teased as he rolled his wheelchair forwards to relieve her of her suitcase. ‘Just about.’ The wild beast in question was the very advanced computer-cum-word processor which her brother had just purchased, and which she, as his secretary-cum-assistant, had spent the last fortnight learning to operate. In addition to its basic functions, the machine was so advanced that it could be locked into the information banks of other computers on a worldwide scale, thus enabling Sam to keep himself completely up to date with the economic world. Before the devastating accident which had robbed Sam of the use of his legs and killed both Sam’s wife, Holly, and Sara’s own fiancé, Rick, Sam had been part of the frenetic world of currency dealing, with a brilliant future ahead of him. Now that was gone, along with so much else; Sam was virtually confined to his wheelchair, able to walk only a dozen or so steps unaided, his health far too uncertain to permit him to work in the gruellingly demanding world of currency dealing, where young men could be burned out by the time they were thirty, unable to keep up with the ferocious pressure of the work. Sam now worked from home, writing for various economics magazines, and working on the book he was trying to write—a blend of fact and fiction based on the world he had once known. Getting the computer had been Sara’s idea—a last-ditch attempt to rouse her brother from the miasma of depression that had engulfed him since Holly’s death, but it was obvious to Sara as he ushered her into the sitting-room of his London house that something had happened during her absence to restore her brother to something approaching his old self. ‘Where’s Carly?’ she asked him as she sat down. All of them had been affected by the tragedy of the two shocking deaths and Sam’s physical disability, but surely the person to suffer the most damage must be her little niece? In one short evening Carly’s small world had been virtually destroyed. Her mother had been killed, and her father so badly injured that for days the doctors had despaired of being able to save him. Perhaps it was no wonder that she and Carly should have grown so close in those early weeks after the accident. Physically Carly had clung to her, but emotionally she had been the one to cling to the little girl, Sara acknowledged. Without the responsibility of Carly, she doubted if she could have found the will to survive those dreadful early days. Even now, over eighteen months later, they were still etched sharply on her memory: the laughter when Holly set off with the two men to drive them to the station to catch the train for Cambridge—Rick, her fiancé, had been at university with Sam, and it was Sam who had introduced them. Sam and Rick were attending a new computer course together, and she and Rick had been spending the weekend with her brother and his family. She and Rick had been going to be married, six weeks after the course ended. They had met and fallen in love over a long period of time, but she was still at the ecstatic disbelieving stage, still giddy and delirious with the pleasure of being in love and loved in return. And then in one short, horror-filled afternoon her whole world was overturned. She hadn’t worried when Holly didn’t come rushing back. Her sister-in-law had said that she might take advantage of having a resident babysitter to do some shopping, so when the knock came on the door and she opened it to a white-faced police constable the very last thing in her mind was that there had been an accident. At first she had been too shocked to take very much in. The first numbing discovery that Holly, lovely, laughing Holly whom her brother adored, and Rick, dear, wonderful Rick, who had made her whole world come alive, were both dead, was so immensely unbelievable that it blotted anything else out. Scooping up Carly, she had gone numbly into the police car, and from there to the hospital, leaving Carly in the care of a calmly smiling nurse while she was ushered into a room where a grave-faced doctor tried to explain to her why it was impossible for her to see her brother. After that there had been a week of disbelief, broken sharply by unbearable bursts of pain; Holly’s and Rick’s funerals; the shock and despair on the faces of their families. She and Sam had only one another; their father had died from a heart attack when Sara was in her mid-teens, and their mother had slowly faded away after that, dying when Sara was nineteen. Sara had had a good job as a secretary, which she had planned to give up when she and Rick married. In the circumstances, leaving a little earlier had presented no problems. During those first early weeks there had been a lot for her to cope with Visits from Sam’s employers, Sara’s keen perception showing her that beneath their concerned enquiries was an implacable determination to let her know that there could be no place in the company for a man with Sam’s disabilities—a man who would virtually be confined to a wheelchair—if he was lucky. There had been no immediate financial problem—she had her savings to draw on to keep herself and Carly; it was out of the question for her to approach Sam concerning money. He was far too ill to be worried by anything like that. Even when it was clear that he would survive, the doctors were very reluctant to let him come home. He had had to spend time in a rehabilitation centre, learning how to deal with his lack of mobility, and from there his doctors had wanted him to go into a home until they deemed him well enough to leave, but Sara had insisted that she was perfectly capable of looking after him; indeed, she had fought untiringly to get him home. After the funeral, Holly’s parents had offered to take Carly, but they were an older couple who, much as they loved their granddaughter, lived a life far too quiet and retired for a lively five-year-old, and so, without making any deliberate decision, Sara had found herself slipping into the role of surrogate mother to Carly, and nurse-cum-companion to Sam. If nothing else, it gave her some reason to keep on living. Over the last six months Sam had commented on several occasions that she should get out more, make new friends. New men friends, he meant, but that part of her life had gone for ever. Where she had once been warmed by her love for Rick, she now felt cold—dead, really. She had no desire to replace him. A psychologist would no doubt put her
