you could get yourself around,” she said, hanging on to her patience by a thread.
“I can push myself short distances.”
“That’s not quite the same thing as walking, is it?” she said exasperatedly. If he could do more…if he could walk…why didn’t he? Ornio, she thought, using the Greek word for ornery. The previous nurses hadn’t exaggerated a bit. Kristian was as obstinate as a mule.
He snorted. “Is that your idea of encouragement?”
Her lips compressed. Kristian also knew how to play both sides. One minute he was the aggressor, the next the victim. Worse, he was succeeding in baiting her, getting to her, and no one ever—ever—got under her skin. Not anymore. “It’s a statement of fact, Mr. Koumantaros. You’re still in the chair because your muscles have atrophied since the accident. But initially the doctors expected you to walk again.” They thought you’d want to.
“It didn’t work out.”
“Because it hurt too much?”
“The therapy wasn’t working.”
“You gave up.” She reached for the handles on the back of his chair and gave a hard push. “Now, how about that lunch?”
He wouldn’t release the rims. “How about you tell me who is covering your services, and then we’ll have lunch?”
Part of her admired his bargaining skill and tactics. He was clearly a leader, and accustomed to being in control. But she was a leader, too, and she was just as comfortable giving direction. “I can’t tell you.” Her jaw firmed. “Not until you’re walking.”
He craned to see her, even though he couldn’t see anything. “So you can tell me.”
“Once you’re walking.”
“Why not until then?”
She shrugged. “It’s the terms of the contract.”
“But you know this person?”
“We spoke on the phone.”
He grew still, his expression changing as well, as though he were thinking, turning inward. “How long until I walk?”
“It depends entirely on you. Your hamstrings and hip muscles have unfortunately tightened, shortening up, but it’s not irreparable, Mr. Koumantaros. It just requires diligent physical therapy.”
“But even with diligent therapy I’ll always need a walker.”
She heard his bitterness but didn’t comment on it. It wouldn’t serve anything at this point. “A walker or a cane. But isn’t that better than a wheelchair? Wouldn’t you enjoy being independent again?”
“But it’ll never be the same, never as it was—”
“People are confronted by change every day, Mr. Koumantaros.”
“Do not patronize me.” His voice deepened, roughened, revealing blistering fury.
“I’m not trying to. I’m trying to understand. And if this is because others died and you—”
“Not one more word,” he growled. “Not one.”
“Mr. Koumantaros, you are no less of a man because others died and you didn’t.”
“Then you do not know me. You do not know who I am, or who I was before. Because the best part of me—the good in me—died that day on the mountain. The good in me perished while I was saving someone I didn’t even like.”
He laughed harshly, the laugh tinged with self-loathing. “I’m not a hero. I’m a monster.” And, reaching up, with a savage yank he ripped the bandages from his head. Rearing back in his wheelchair, Kristian threw his head into sunlight. “Do you see the monster now?”
Elizabeth sucked in her breath as the warm Mediterranean light touched the hard planes of his face.
A jagged scar ran the length of the right side of his face, ending precariously close to his right eye. The skin was still a tender pink, although one day it would pale, lightening until it nearly matched his skin tone—as long as he stayed out of the sun.
But the scar wasn’t why she stared. And the scar wasn’t what caused her chest to seize up, squeezing with a terrible, breathless tenderness.
Kristian Koumantaros was beautiful. Beyond beautiful. Even with the scar snaking like a fork of lightning over his cheekbone, running from the corner of his mouth to the edge of his eye.
“God gave me a face to match my heart. Finally the outside and inside look the same,” he gritted, hands convulsing in his lap.
“You’re wrong.” Elizabeth could hardly breathe. His words gave her so much pain, so much sorrow, she felt tears sting her eyes. “If God gave you a face to match your heart, your heart is beautiful, too. Because a scar doesn’t ruin a face, and a scar doesn’t ruin a heart. It just shows that you’ve lived—” she took a rough breath “—and loved.”
He said nothing and she pressed on. “Besides, I think the scar suits you. You were too good-looking before.”
For a split second he said nothing, and then he laughed, a fierce guttural laugh that was more animal-like than human. “Finally. Someone to tell me the truth.”
Elizabeth ignored the pain pricking her insides, the stab of more pain in her chest. Something about him, something about this—the scarred face, the shattered life, the fury, the fire, the intelligence and passion—touched her. Hurt her. It was not that anyone should suffer, but somehow on Kristian the suffering became bigger, larger than life, a thing in and of itself.
“You’re an attractive man even with the scar,” she said, still kneeling next to his chair.
“It’s a hideous scar. It runs the length of my face. I can feel it.”
“You’re quite vain, then, Mr. Koumantaros?”
His head swung around and the expression on his face, matched by the cloudiness in his deep blue eyes, stole her breath. He didn’t suit the chair.
Or the chair didn’t suit him. He was too big, too strong, too much of everything. And it was wrong, his body, his life, his personality contained by it. Confined to it.
“No man wants to feel like Frankenstein,” Kristian said with another rough laugh.
She knew then that it wasn’t his face that made him feel so broken, but his heart and mind. Those memories of his that haunted him, the flashes of the past that made him relive the accident over and over. She knew because she’d once been the same. She, too, had relived an accident in endless detail, stopping the mental camera constantly, freezing the lens at the first burst of flame and the final ball of fire. But that was her story, not his, and she couldn’t allow her own experiences and emotions to cloud her judgment now.
She had to regain some control, retreat as quickly as possible to professional detachment. She wasn’t here for him; she was here for a job. She wasn’t his love interest.
