tell you that he’s ready to begin tomorrow. And to let you know that instructions will be sent via email….”
She’d had a thousand questions. Ben had answered none of them. He’d given her a choice. She could be flown to El Paso and he would pick her up there. Or she could drive her own vehicle.
She’d opted to drive, figuring it was better to have her own car in a situation like this. In order to arrive before dark, she’d been on the road before the sun came up that morning.
The drive was endless. An eight-hour trek across the wide-open, windblown desert to this godforsaken corner of Texas.
And now she was here, what? She’d met the great man at last. And she found him flat-out rude. As well as dismissive of her work.
He demanded, “What were you thinking to bring me lackluster crap like this?”
Okay, worse than dismissive.
The man was nothing short of brutal. He’d seen a fraction of what she’d brought. And yet he had no compunction about cutting her ideas to shreds.
Abilene had had enough. And she said exactly that. “Enough.” She closed her files and ejected her memory stick.
“Excuse me?” came the deep voice from behind the screens. He sounded vaguely amused.
She shot to her feet. Upright, at least she could see the top half of his head—the thick, dark gold hair, the unwavering gray-blue eyes. “I waited a very long time for this. But maybe you’ve forgotten that.”
“I’ve forgotten nothing,” was the low reply.
“We were to have started at the beginning of last year,” she reminded him.
“I know when we were scheduled to start.”
“Good. So have you maybe noticed that it’s now January of the next year? Twelve months I’ve been waiting, my life put virtually on hold.”
“There is no need to tell me what I already know. My memory is not the least impaired, nor is my awareness of the passage of time.”
“Well, something is impaired. I do believe you are the rudest person I’ve ever met.”
“You’re angry.” He made a low sound, a satisfied kind of sound.
“And that makes you happy?”
“Happy? No. But it does reassure me.”
He found it reassuring that she was totally pissed off at him? “I just don’t get it. There’s such a thing as common courtesy. You could at least have allowed me to finish my presentation before you started ripping my work apart.”
“I saw enough.”
“You saw hardly anything.”
“Still. It was more than enough.”
By then, she just didn’t care what happened—whether she stayed, or whether she threw her suitcases back into her car and headed home to San Antonio. She spoke with measured calm. “I would really like to know what you were doing all year, that you couldn’t even be bothered to follow through on the fellowship you set up yourself. There are kids out there who desperately need a center like this one is supposed to be.”
“I know that.” His voice was flat now. “You wouldn’t be here now if I didn’t.”
“So then, what’s up with you? I just don’t get it.”
Unspeaking, he held her gaze for a solid count of five. And then, bizarrely, without moving anything but his arms, he seemed to roll backward. His torso turned, his arms working.
He rolled out from behind the massive desk—in a wheelchair.
Chapter Two
A wheelchair.
Nobody had mentioned that he was using a wheelchair.
Yes, she’d heard that he’d had some kind of accident climbing some snow-covered mountain peak in some distant land. But that was nearly a year ago. She’d had no clue the accident was bad enough for him to still need a wheelchair now.
“Oh, God. I had no idea,” she heard herself whisper.
He kept on rolling, approaching her down the endless length of the room. Beneath the long sleeves of the knit shirt he wore, she could see the powerful muscles of his arms bunching and releasing as he worked the wheels of the chair. He didn’t stop until he was directly in front of her.
And then, for several excruciating seconds, he stared up at her as she stared right back at him.
Golden, she thought. He was as golden up close and personal as in the pictures she’d seen of him. As golden as from a distance, on a stage, when she’d been a starry-eyed undergraduate at Rice University and he’d come to Houston to deliver an absolutely brilliant lecture on form, style and function.
Golden hair, golden skin. He was a beautiful man, broad-shouldered and fit-looking. A lion of a man.
Too bad about the cold, dead gray-blue eyes.
He broke the uncomfortable silence with a shrug. “At least you’re no doormat.”
She thought of the apology she probably owed him. She really should have considered that there might be more going on with him than sheer egotism and contempt for others.
Then again, just because he now used a wheelchair didn’t mean he had a right be a total ass. A lot of people faced difficult challenges in their lives and still managed to treat others with a minimum of courtesy and respect.
She returned his shrug. “I have a big mouth. It’s true. And my temper rarely gets the better of me. But when it does, watch out.”
“Good.”
It wasn’t exactly the response she’d expected. “It’s good that I never learned when to shut up?”
“You’ve got guts. I like that. You can be pushed just so far and then you stand up and fight. You’re going to need a little fighting spirit if you want to have a prayer of saving this project from disaster.”
She didn’t know whether to be flattered—or scared to death. “You make it sound as though I would be doing this all on my own.”
“Because you will be doing this all on your own.”
Surely she hadn’t heard him right. Caught by surprise, she fell back a step, until she came up against the hard edge of the drafting table. “But …” Her sentence trailed off, hardly begun.
It was called a fellowship for a reason. Without his name and reputation, the project would never have gotten the go-ahead in the first place. The San Antonio Help the Children Foundation was all for giving a bright, young hometown architect a chance. But it was Donovan McCrae they were counting on to deliver. He knew that every bit as well as
