Come Lie With Me - Linda Howard [49]
“By making you fall in love with him.” He was too astute, capable of summing up a situation in a glance. “I’ve been watching you change these last couple of weeks. You were beautiful before, God knows, but now you’re breathtaking. You…glow. Those new clothes of yours, the look on your face, even the way you walk…all of that has changed. He needs you now so intensely that everyone else is wiped out of his mind, but what about later? When he can walk again, will he still watch you as if his eyes are glued on you?”
“Patients have fallen in love with me before,” she pointed out.
“I don’t doubt that, but have you ever fallen in love with a patient before?” he asked relentlessly.
“I’m not in love with him.” She had to protest the idea, had to thrust it away from her. She couldn’t be in love with Blake.
“I recognize the symptoms,” Richard said.
As sticky as the conversation was when they were discussing Serena, Dione infinitely preferred it to the current line, and she moved jerkily away. “I don’t have any sandcastle built,” she assured him, clenching her hands into fists in an effort to keep herself from trembling. “When Blake’s walking, I’ll move on to another job. I know that; I’ve known it from the beginning. I always get personally involved with my patients,” she said, laughing a little. That was all it was, just her normal intense concentration on her patient.
Richard shook his head in amusement. “You see so clearly with everyone else,” he said, “to be so blind about yourself.”
The old, blind panic, familiar in form but suddenly unfamiliar in substance, clawed at her stomach. Blind. That word, the one Richard had used. No, she thought painfully. It wasn’t so much that she was blind as that she deliberately didn’t see. She had built a wall between herself and anything that threatened her; she knew it was there, but as long as she didn’t have to look at it, she could ignore it. Blake had forced her on two occasions to face the past that she’d put behind her, never realizing what the ordeal had cost her in terms of pain. Now Richard, though he was using his coolly analytical brain instead of the gut instincts Blake operated on, was trying to do the same.
“I’m not blind,” she denied in a whisper. “I know who I am, and what I am. I know my limits; I learned them the hard way.”
“You’re wrong,” he said, his gray eyes thoughtful. “You’ve only learned the limits that other people have placed on you.”
That was so true that she almost winced away from the thrust of it. Instinctively she pushed the thought away, drew herself up, marshaling her inner forces. “I think you wanted to talk to me about Serena,” she reminded him quietly, letting him know that she wasn’t going to talk about herself any longer.
“I did, but on second thought, I won’t bother you with it. You have more than enough on your mind now. In the end, Serena and I will have to settle our differences on our own, so it’s useless to ask anyone else’s advice.”
Walking together, they reentered the house and went into the study. Serena was sitting with her back to them, though her posture of concentration told them exactly what expression was on her face. She hated to lose, and she poured all her energies into beating Blake. Although she was a good chess player, Blake was better. She was usually wild with jubilation whenever she managed to beat him.
Blake, however, looked up as Richard and Dione came in together, and a hard, determined expression pulled his face into a mask. His blue eyes narrowed.
Later that night, when she poked her head into his bedroom to tell him good-night, he said evenly, “Dee, Serena’s marriage is hanging by a thread. I’m warning you: don’t do anything to break that thread. She loves Richard. It’ll kill her if she loses him.”
“I’m not a home wrecker or a slut,” she retorted, stung. Anger brought red spots to her cheeks as she stared at him. He had left the lamp on, evidently waiting until she told