pounds of catatonic woman perched on a ladder twenty feet in the air, and expecting Superman to fly to the rescue!”
Letting go of her hand, he abruptly disappeared from view and, for one horrified moment, she thought he was going to resolve matters by abandoning her to the wasps and stinging nettles down below. From somewhere inside the room she heard a shuffling and a string of curses that, even in her panic-stricken state, left the tips of her ears burning.
Then, just as abruptly, he reappeared, except this time there was more of him to see than just his head and shoulders. The entire upper half of his body was visible, too.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s try this again.”
“No,” she said. “I can’t. I’m too scared.”
“I’ll be nice to your dog if you don’t chicken out on me,” he wheedled in what she supposed he considered to be his most winning way. “I won’t use him for target practice the next time I feel like shooting the pellet gun Coffey keeps under the bed. I won’t even tell anyone that I caught you messing around with my underpants.”
What he no doubt perceived to be irresistible bribes struck her as nothing short of blackmail. “You’re a horrible man,” she whimpered.
He wasn’t one to tolerate having his suggestions thwarted. “What the devil is it you want of me?” he roared, immediately reverting to his usual confrontational self. “A pint of blood? A pound of flesh? I can’t maintain this position indefinitely, you know!”
Only then did it fully sink in that he’d hauled himself out of the chair and was propping himself upright by taking all his weight on one arm, while he reached out to her with the other.
The sweat pearling his face attested to what the effort was costing him and shamed her out of her own cowardice. “All right, you win,” she said faintly and quickly, before the foolhardiness of the undertaking had time to impress itself on her brain, she crabbed one foot onto the ledge and literally hurled herself at him.
Her knuckles and knees scraped against the cedar shingles and she managed to clip the side of her head on the ladder in passing, but the pain scarcely registered beside the utter relief of feeling him grasp a fistful of the front of her T-shirt and yank her the rest of the way to safety.
“Aah!” she gasped, landing in a winded heap at his feet. “Thank you so much! I owe you big-time for this.”
He expelled a mighty breath, literally falling like a sack of potatoes into the wheelchair, and swung it toward the living room. “Oh, please, no! The last thing I need is any more of your favors. You’re more trouble than you’re worth.”
“It wouldn’t hurt you to show a bit of gratitude, as well, you know,” she said, picking herself up and trailing after him. “Most people would be happy to have windows they could open, rather than live in a place as dark as a cave.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, Goldilocks, I’m not ‘most people.’ If I were, I’d have taken care of the problem myself, instead of having to fall back on the services of a semi-competent woman with a bad case of acrophobia.” He positioned himself in front of one of the lower kitchen cabinets and hauled out a bottle of Scotch. “I could use a drink and so, I imagine, could you.”
“At this hour of the morning?” she protested. “I hardly think—”
“And you can spare me your homilies on the evils of booze, as well! I’ll get plastered any time I feel like it, and right now, I feel like it.”
She opened her mouth to tell him that drowning his sorrows in alcohol wouldn’t make them go away, then thought better of it when she saw that a grayish pallor undermined the deep tan of his face. Even his hand shook as he unscrewed the cap on the bottle.
Moved by a compassion that had its roots in another time when she’d been equally helpless to alleviate suffering, she covered his hand with hers and took the bottle away. “Let me,” she said quietly, and splashed a scant half inch of whiskey into a glass.
He tossed it down in one gulp, cradled the glass in his hands, then leaned back in the chair with his eyes closed. He had a rather wonderful face, even with that devastatingly direct gaze hidden, she decided, taking advantage of the chance to study him unobserved; a face that revealed far more about the man who owned it than he probably realized.
She saw strength in the line of his jaw, laughter in the fan of lines beside his eyes, passion and discipline in the curve of his mouth. His recent proclamation notwithstanding, he was no drinker. He showed too much pride for such self-indulgence.
“You can leave anytime,” he said, not moving a muscle more than was needed to spit out the words. “I’m not going to do the socially acceptable thing and invite you to stay for coffee.”
“Then I’ll invite myself,” she said, and without waiting for permission, filled the kettle and set it to boil on the stove. “How do you take yours?”
“Alone, thank you very much.”
She shrugged and inspected the contents of the refrigerator. Beyond a block of cheese, a couple of eggs, an open carton of milk, some bread and the remains of something which, under the layer of green mold, might have been meat, the shelves were empty.
She sniffed the milk and immediately wished she hadn’t. “This milk went off about a week ago, Mr. McGuire.”
“I know,” he said, a current of unholy mirth running through his voice, and when she turned back to face him, she saw he was observing her with malicious glee. “I saved it on purpose, just for the pleasure of seeing your expression when you stuck your interfering nose into yet another part of my life. Would you like to taste the ham, as well, while you’re at it?”
She emptied the milk down the sink drain and tossed the ham into the garbage can. “Whoever does your shopping is falling down on the job, but since I’m planning on going across to Clara’s Cove later on today, I can stop by the general store and pick up a few staples for you, if you like.”
“What is it you don’t understand about ‘Mind Your Own Business’?” The question ricocheted off the walls like machine gun bullets. “What do I have to do to make it clear that I’m perfectly able to shop for myself? How do I let you know that you can take your charity and shove it, because I neither want it nor need it?”
She recognized the insults for what they really were: bitter resentment at only recently finding himself confined to a wheelchair. When the same thing had first happened to Derek, he’d reacted much the same way and it had taken months for him to come to terms with how his life was going to be from then on.
“I know how difficult you must find all this, Mr. McGuire,” she said, “and I certainly didn’t mean to offend you.”
“Unless you’ve been where I am now, you don’t know beans about how I feel!”
She washed and rinsed the plate which had held the ham, placed it in the dish rack, and made the coffee. “Actually, I do,” she said. “My husband—”
“Oh, goodie, you have a husband, you have a husband!” he gibed. “That being the case, why don’t you run along and minister to him, instead of foisting your attentions on me?”
“Because he’s dead,” she said baldly.
Shock,
