dried her scraped knuckles tenderly, folded the dish towel over the edge of the counter, and turned to leave. “I’m not looking for your sympathy, any more than you’re looking for mine, Mr. McGuire. But take it from me, people can and do adapt—if they’ve a mind to. Of course, if all they’re interested in is wallowing in self-pity, they can do that, too, though why they’d find it an attractive alternative baffles me since it must be a very lonely occupation. Good day.”
“Hey!”
She was almost at the door when he stopped her. “You called?” she inquired sweetly, not bothering to turn around.
“Are you by any chance a schoolteacher?”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but no. Why do you ask?”
“Because you talk like one.”
“I see. Is there anything else, Mr. McGuire?”
“Yes,” he said irritably. “You can stop calling me Mister McGuire in that snotty way. My name’s Liam.”
“How nice! Will that be all, Liam?”
He thumped the flat of one hand on the armrest of his chair and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling as though calling on divine intervention to save him from himself. “I’m going to regret this later,” he announced morosely, then swung his gaze back to her. “Since you’ve made the damn coffee anyway, you might as well stay and have a cup. There’s canned milk in the cupboard, if you want it.”
“That’s very kind of you, I’m sure, but I just remembered that Bounder’s outside and I don’t want him running loose all over the island.”
“Bring the benighted hound inside, then. It won’t be the first time he’s made himself at home here.”
“My goodness!” she said, unable to quell the mean-spirited pleasure of having finally wrung a concession from him. “How can I refuse such a gracious offer?”
He waited until the coffee was served, she had taken a seat on the couch, and Bounder was snoozing beside the wheelchair, before he spoke again. “Have you been…by yourself for very long?”
“Just over two years.”
He stared into his mug. “What you said, about understanding how I feel in this chair, was your husband…?”
“Yes, for the better part of the last three years of his life.”
He averted his gaze, but not before she saw the grimace he couldn’t control. “I’d go mad if I was facing that length of time,” he said.
“It’s amazing what people come to accept when they don’t have any other choices.”
“Not me,” he said. “I’m not handing over control of my life to anything or anyone else, especially not a bunch of doctors who don’t know what they’re talking about. According to them, I should settle for being alive with both legs still attached, and never mind expecting to walk again. But I’ll show them! It’ll take more structural failure at the bottom of an offshore oil rig to keep me tied to a wheelchair for the rest of my life.”
Good grief, the man lived dangerously! She’d seen news reports and documentaries about offshore drilling for oil. The rigs had struck her as frighteningly inhospitable, even those parts above the water. She couldn’t imagine how much worse they’d be fathoms deep in the ocean. “I gather,” she said, treading delicately, “that you had an accident of some kind?”
“You could put it like that, yeah. I found myself pinned under a steel beam and had a bit of trouble getting free.”
Since he was so determined to dismiss what had clearly been a life-threatening incident as something of no great consequence, she deemed it wise to respond in like fashion. Tilting one shoulder in a faint shrug, she said, “Well, there’s no doubt that, given the will and a reasonable amount of luck, some people do make remarkable recoveries. May I pour you more coffee before I leave?”
“You’re leaving already? Why? Where’s the fire?”
If he hadn’t already gone to such lengths to try to get rid of her, she’d have thought he wanted her to stay a bit longer. But, Wishful thinking, Jane, she told herself. You’re just dazzled by those beautiful sea-green eyes.
“No fire,” she said, as much to refute her own foolishness as to answer his remark. “Just the opposite, in fact. I want to take Bounder down for a swim before the tide turns.”
At the mention of his name, the dog reared up in excitement, a running shoe clamped in his mouth.
“He needs a few lessons in obedience, if you ask me,” Liam said, grabbing the shoe and flinging it under the table, then seizing his coffee cup before it was swept on the floor by Bounder’s thrashing tail. “He’s out of control. Settle down, idiot!”
“He’s not much more than a puppy,” Jane said defensively. “He’s still learning and I have to be patient.”
“Patient, my eye! He’s already mastered one lesson and that’s how to control you! If you were as dedicated to making him behave and keeping his teeth off other people’s property, as you are to nosing around in business that doesn’t concern you, you’d be a sight better off and so would he. He’s too damned big to be galumphing around like this.”
She swallowed a laugh. “Well, the truce was nice while it lasted, but it’s clearly over so I’ll get us both out of your hair before you start tearing it out by the roots. Thanks for the coffee. Come on, Bounder.”
“Yeah, well…thanks. For what you did. With the shutters, and all.”
He might have been having all his teeth pulled without benefit of anesthetic, he sounded so pained! But she made allowances because she knew that his pride was injured at least as badly as his leg. Anyone could see that Liam McGuire wasn’t accustomed to being helpless and that it particularly went against the grain for him to have to watch a woman take on what he considered to be a man’s job.
“You’re welcome,” she said. “Thanks for rescuing me.”
“It’s the only way I could think of to get rid of you.”
The smile which accompanied his remark, though meager, transformed his face. Charmed more than she cared to admit, Jane smiled back and said, “I’ll make a deal with you. I promise not to bother you again, provided you agree to call on me if you need help.”
“And how do you propose I do that, Goldilocks?”
“Tie a towel or something to the post at the end of the porch railing so I can see it from my place.”
He chewed the corner of his lip thoughtfully, then shrugged and extended his hand. “Sounds like a one-sided deal to me, but if that’s what it’ll take to keep the peace….”
Since he’d shown a near-aversion to touching her any more than was absolutely necessary, she expected his handshake would be brief and businesslike. But, noticing her raw knuckles, he stroked his thumb carefully across her fingers and said, “You’ve chewed yourself up pretty badly. Do you have something you can put on these to prevent infection?”
“Yes.”
