A Minute to Smile (22 page)

Esther shivered. “Somehow, I keep forgetting that garlic.”

“Darn.” He rubbed a circle over her stomach, then wickedly over a breast. “Come on, I’ll chase those worries away.”

And he did.

* * *

Alexander was required to attend a faculty dinner the following week, to which he asked Esther to go. She protested she had nothing to wear since the fire had burned her clothes. The next day, he brought a dress home with him—a brilliant blue, with winking rhinestone buttons and a flowing skirt and wide-cut shoulders. She tried it on, but looked so unhappy he took her hand.

“If you don’t like it, you can say so. It won’t hurt my feelings.”

“It’s beautiful, Alexander.” She sighed. “I just feel really nervous about going with you to something like that.”

“Why?” It had never occurred to him that she would be shy in any situation.

“They’ll all have advanced degrees and prestigious positions.” She lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “I don’t belong.”

“Ah, so that’s it, my silly queen,” he said with a grin.

She frowned. “I’m not kidding. I’ll feel like the girl from the wrong side of the tracks. They’ll ask me what I do and when I tell them, their eyes will glaze over.”

“You’re the colonel’s daughter.”

“Oh, yes. And we all know how popular the Army is on college campuses.” In her warm brown eyes was the shadow of insecurity that sometimes resided there.

He took her arms. “Esther, they’re no more intelligent or well-bred than you are. They’ll like you as much as I do.”

“They’re better educated.”

The truth struck him. He inclined his head for a moment thoughtfully, wondering why he hadn’t understood it before. He let the subject drop.

But the next day, he picked up an application to the university, financial-aid forms, scholarship information—everything he thought she might need. “Here,” he said as he came into the house. “I brought you something.”

Esther accepted the sheaf of papers curiously, brushing a stray wisp of hair from her face as she looked at them. Her smile of welcome faded. “What triggered this?” she asked warily.

“You did, yesterday. It’s time to quit putting off that dream of yours, Esther. You want your degree, whether or not you know it.” He took a bottle of ale from the fridge. Piwacket heard the tip whoosh off, and came trotting into the kitchen, eyes blinking sleepily. When Alexander lifted the bottle and drank with great thirst in the hot afternoon, the cat meowed raggedly and bumped his leg.

Quite suddenly, he realized how Esther’s coming had changed his life. He remembered how empty the house had been in the evenings before she’d come to stay with him, how he’d shared his bottle of ale with his cat instead of another human being. As Esther stood now in the middle of the kitchen, her cloud of hair falling forward to hide her face as she stared down at the packet of papers in her hands, his emotions grew very clear. He reached for her hand and lifted it to his lips. “I love having you here,” he said.

She raised her head and he read the question in her eyes. Once again, he’d sidestepped expressing himself, but the moment had passed. Although he read the disappointment in her face when he let go of her hand, he found the words still choked him.

“I thought about the dinner,” she said. “I’ll go with you if you want me to.”

He grinned. “I don’t want to drag you to an execution or anything.”

“No, you aren’t.” She lifted a shoulder and smiled softly. “I decided you were right. And I’d really like to be with you, wherever you are.”

Again his emotions lit and flowed through him.
I love you,
he thought. And he saw the answer in her beautiful face, a radiance he felt honored to have bestowed upon him.

She put the papers aside and hugged him wordlessly, then let him go. “I know you’re hot. Go take a shower and I’ll fix a salad for us to eat outside.”

* * *

As he’d known she would, Esther added a rare spirit to the faculty dinner. He watched her all evening, making the small talk she’d been schooled in since toddlerhood, putting people at ease, making them laugh. She glowed in the blue dress that he’d chosen, the simple fabric clinging to her womanly hips and strong legs. More than one man barely concealed his disappointment when she turned her attention to someone else.

He was proud of her and proud to be with her, fiercely so. Watching her across the room, he realized for the first time that he didn’t want to let her go back home when the wiring in her house was finished, couldn’t bear the thought of his home now without her in it.

He imagined the years ahead, the pleasure of her company easing this sort of gathering. He imagined himself being in the audience when she was awarded her degree, a child on either side of him, all of them cheering as she walked over the stage. He imagined her old, her red hair gone white, pottering around an herb garden.

And yet, he still had not even told her that he loved her. Standing in the company of two associate professors, she laughed at a joke one of them told. The sound rang out, robust and vibrant. Then, as if she felt his eyes, she glanced toward him. Her eyes burned suddenly with a sexy fire, a come-hither somnolence.

Grinning, he let his eyes fall to her mouth and imagined the taste of those ripe pink lips, then his gaze tiptoed over her neck and the demure but enticing swell of her breasts at the bodice of her dress. He caressed her with his eyes, watching her nipples tighten just enough that he knew she was as aroused as he. He looked back to her face and saw the lust in her smile.

To hell with convention. He suddenly wanted her with such power he couldn’t breathe. “Excuse me,” he said briskly to the man who was telling him about an archaeological dig in Peru that promised miraculous additions to the knowledge of ancient Indian life.

He stalked toward her, took her hand and. left the small common room. “Alexander, where are we going?”

“Someplace isolated,” he growled. He didn’t dare even look at her. They crossed the campus under cover of night, surprising a pair of lovers kissing in an alcove.

In his office, he closed and locked the door. Moonlight streamed in through the window, and he flung it open to let the stuffy air out of the room. He turned back. “Come here,” he said.

A slow smile spread over her face as she approached him, a smile that said she knew exactly what they were doing there. It was the last push he needed. He grabbed her and kissed her with a mindless, violent passion. He pushed his hands beneath her dress, his hands skimming up her thighs to her panties. Her mouth opened to him and she loosened his tie, her fingers as eager as his own.

He tugged her panties down as he kissed the valley between her breasts. Esther unfastened his shirt and loosened the confines of his trousers, her tongue hot on his mouth, her teeth digging with barely restrained hunger into his lips, his neck, his chest. He groaned when he found with his hands that she was ready for him, and he settled her on the edge of his desk, reaching around her to push the papers scattered there to the floor. He urgently opened the buttons on her dress and the fastening of her bra, pushing them both away from her gloriously beautiful shoulders. Moonlight cascaded through the window, silvering the curve of her cheek, the pale flesh of her breasts, the long, lovely expanse of her arms.

He drove into her and Esther met him with a muffled cry, wrapping her legs around him and lifting into him, her hips braced on the edge of the desk. He found her mouth and drove there as he drove below, and she met him violently, her nails digging into his flesh.

Alexander had thought he could not want her more than he had already, thought his passion would ebb, that it was impossible to want a woman more than he had already wanted Esther. But now, with her skirt shoved up, her breasts bare in the pagan light, his shirt open around him, he thought if he died now, in this moment, he could not have asked more of life.

She gasped and clutched him, her head falling backward as she quivered in passion. Alexander held her, drove harder and met the truth as he left his body to merge with hers once again.

After a moment, she lifted her head from his shoulder. A haze of pleasure softened her features. His emotions welled up and finally spilled over. He took her face in his hands. “I love you, Esther,” he said at last. “Don’t go home again. Stay with me, bring your children.”

Her dark eyes went wide. “Don’t say this now, Alexander. You’re drunk with passion.”

“Yes.” He combed his fingers through the cloud of hair and spoke again, very deliberately. “I love you.”

As she had once before, she pressed her fingers to his lips. “
Shh
.”

He’d waited too long, he thought with sorrow. Now she didn’t believe him. As he gathered her close, smelling lavender on her shoulders, he thought he would simply have to show her he meant what he said.

“Let’s go back to your house,” she said as they dressed. “I’ll make some chocolate fondue and feed you strawberries.”

“Mmm. I can think of a few interesting things to do with chocolate.”

She laughed, the sound wicked and warm and inviting. “You’re insatiable, Dr. Stone.”

He caught her hand. “I’ll never have enough of you, Esther.”

Her reply was lost in the sound of a violent rapping at his office door. “Esther!” It was Abe’s voice, urgent and loud.

Esther’s eyes flew to Alexander’s. He frowned and switched on a light as she smoothed her dress. She opened the door. “What’s wrong, Abe?”

“It’s Jeremy,” he said without preamble. “He got kicked by a horse. They’re flying him to Children’s Hospital in Denver.”

Alexander froze.

“How bad is it?” Esther asked, her voice remarkably calm.

“Bad,” Abe said and licked his lips. “It’s his head.” Esther looked over her shoulder at Alexander. “Will you drive me?”

And in spite of the panic suddenly flaring in his nerves, the dread that surrounded him like the fires of hell, he replied quite calmly. “Of course.”

T
he drive seemed endless, although it was less than thirty miles. Overhead, the moon that had seemed so beautiful only minutes before now seemed to flood the fields with grim, cold light. At the wheel, Alexander was utterly silent, his attention focused on the road ahead. Esther felt his tension as palpably as if it were alive. He didn’t speak.

She sat in the passenger seat, twisting her hands together, remembering the night before the children left and her odd sense of dread. Why hadn’t she paid attention to that intuition? It had
never
led her wrong. When it told her to check on Jeremy, she always found him in trouble or about to get into it.

As the almost endless skyline of Denver came into view, fear clenched her heart and squeezed. Everything she’d ever learned about head wounds in almost four years of nurses’ training came back to her. Concussions, contusions, hemorrhage, skull fractures. A dry, hollow thudding chased the words and their symptoms around in her mind.

Please,
she begged silently.

The instant they passed through the hospital doors, however, a steely calm overtook Esther. The familiar sharp scents of ammonia and minty alcohol, the pale green fluorescent lighting and the intermittent growl of the overhead paging system were familiar, somehow welcoming. She approached the admissions desk briskly and located Jeremy, then led Alexander to the elevators. As the doors swooshed closed, she took his hand. His fingers were icy cold. “Are you all right?” she asked.

He gave her a quick nod, his eyes fastened firmly on the numbers over the door.

“Alexander, if you’re one of those people who hates hospitals, I’ll understand. You don’t have to come up with me. I’ll be okay.”

He still didn’t look at her, but his voice was oddly strangled when he spoke. “I want to see him.” He finally looked at her, and Esther felt a pang at the bleak gray in his eyes. “Please.”

She nodded.

John was hovering near the nurses’ station when they came out of the elevators, his face drawn, shoulders hunched. Esther saw that he was struggling with tears. Forgetting Alexander, she rushed forward. “John! Where is he? How bad is it?”

“They’ve got him down the hall, looking him over,” he said brokenly and bent his head. “I don’t know. I don’t understand all this crap.”

“Is he conscious. Is his head bleeding?” She took his hand urgently. “Think.”

“He wasn’t bleeding,” he said, “but he’s out cold.” A doctor came toward them, her white coat flapping around her. “Mrs. Lucas?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“You can come in and see your son if you like. There isn’t much we can do except watch him for the next twenty-four hours.”

Esther looked at Alexander and gestured toward him. Grimly, his jaw set, he took her hand. In spite of the rigidness of his grip, she took strength from his presence and nodded toward the doctor. “I’d like to see him.”

As they headed toward the room, the doctor explained the injury. “He evidently crawled under a stall and startled one of the horses. It caught him on the top of the skull, but luckily he was on the ground and it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.” She paused before opening the door, her eyes compassionate. “I want to warn you—”

Esther touched her arm. “I know,” she said quietly, and went in.

But all the training in the world didn’t make any difference when it was her own son lying beneath a crisp white sheet, face bruised and swollen, eyes black, lip swollen from a secondary injury; not when it was her wild Jeremy with such a pallor over his features who lay so deathly still in the big bed. She stepped forward, feeling the tears finally fill her eyes as she bent to press a gentle kiss to his brown little cheek. “Hi, honey,” she whispered. “Mommy’s here.”

She took his small hand, and brushing away her tears, looked back to the doctor.

“There’s no fracture,” the doctor said. “No sign of hemorrhage, either. At the moment, we have to treat it like a concussion, but since he hasn’t regained consciousness. . .“ She frowned. “It may be a little more serious.”

Esther nodded, her eyes on her son. Contusion was the official word for the concern she saw expressed. The brain swelled from its jostling, sometimes requiring surgery to relieve the pressure. It might lead to convulsions, to learning disabilities, to—“I understand.”