The Invitation (10 page)

So now William had prepared her a meal and was insisting that she eat it. “I'm not hungry,” she said, and even to her own ears she sounded like a whining child.

William stood over her, looking down at her from his great height. “All right,” he said softly, “have it your way. I'll call a nurse and pay her to take care of you for the next few days. I won't impose myself on you further.”

“I can take care of myself,” she said defiantly.

“Can you?” He arched an eyebrow. “How are you going to wash your hair with one hand? I guess you could leave it full of dried blood. Of course you might attract flies, but what does that matter? You're tough. You can take it. How are you going to feed yourself with one hand? There isn't enough food in this house now to feed a goldfish much less a hungry female. I think I'd better call a nurse. I believe I heard that Miss Norton is free.”

At that name Jackie paled. Miss Norton was every child's nightmare of a nurse: big, strong, utterly unsympathetic. She had been born full-grown, with steel gray hair, wearing a starched white uniform and looking about fifty years old, and she'd never aged a day since her birth, which had to have been over a century before Jackie was born.

“I…Uh…Couldn't someone else come? Whatever happened to dear, sweet Mrs. Patterson?”

“Some of the mothers in town figured out that that cough syrup she was giving the kids was straight whiskey. We suggested she might be happier in a town other than Chandler. You can put up with me, I can call Miss Norton, or you can find your own nurse. But one thing I won't do is leave you here alone to take care of yourself. Not that you deserve my assistance after what you did to me today, but I cannot leave you here alone.”

He cocked his head to one side. “What is your problem with me anyway, Jackie? Have I made an improper gesture toward you? Have I said anything to make you think that I have depraved intentions toward you?”

“Nooooo,” she said, using what willpower she had to keep from blushing. Considering how much blood she had lost today, it was a wonder she could blush.

“Then what is wrong? Do you think that I might make advances toward you? After all, as you constantly remind me, I am just a boy. How could a mere child like me do any of the things you seem to think me capable of? Besides, you're an old woman, remember?”

“Yes,” she said hesitantly. “I guess so. I mean, yes, of course.”

“All right, Jackie, I'll be honest with you. I'm a Montgomery, remember? Have you been away from town so long that you've forgotten the pride of my family? Do you think I'd try anything with a woman who has made it crystal clear that she can hardly bear the sight of me? Today you went to a great deal of trouble to show me that you wanted nothing to do with me. You showed me that you'd rather end a lifelong friendship than be around me. Do you know how you made me feel this afternoon?”

“You were rather explicit on that point,” she said, trying hard not to remember all the things he had said to her. She had never felt so small as he had made her feel today.

“Okay, so you made me feel bad, and I gave you some of your own back. You've made it clear that you don't want me, that you never have, that I am and always will be a boy to you. So be it.”

She was trying to read the expression on his face but couldn't. Even as a boy, Billy had been unreadable. He'd followed her around, but she'd never understood whether he liked her or just thought of her as an oddity.

“Right now you need help and it's easy for me to give it. Young Blair said you could move your hand in about a week. I'll do whatever you want. I'll stay, or I'll leave and hire someone else to take care of you, whatever you want. If I stay, it will be on terms of…”

He smiled. “Remember all the times you baby-sat me? Maybe now I can return the favor. I'll baby-sit you. Doesn't that seem like a fair trade?”

“I…I don't know,” she managed to say. The entire right side of her body hurt, her hair itched, and she was extraordinarily tired. She didn't want to make decisions now. She just wanted to be clean and to sleep.

“Come on,” he said, reaching out for her uninjured hand and pulling her out of bed. “You can't think now. You're going to take a bath, I'm going to wash your hair, and then you're going to sleep.”

“I don't think—”

“You rarely do. You act first and think later.” When she was standing in front of him, he looked into her eyes. “Jackie, do you really think I'm the kind of boy who'd take advantage of a woman when she's hurt and in pain?”

Something about what he said made her frown. Maybe it was the use of “boy” and “woman” together. But no matter what bothered her, she knew that he would not take advantage of her. He wasn't the type of
man
a woman had to be afraid of. It was more likely that William should fear women.

“You can't wash my hair,” she said at last. “I can do it.”

“Not with one hand you can't.”

What he was saying and what he was doing confused her. Maybe she shouldn't have compared him to Charley, but Charley was the only man she'd ever really known. Charley had been a great father figure, he'd given orders and made decrees, said no more often than yes, but as a mother he was the worst. Thank heaven Jackie had almost always been as healthy as a pilot after the first solo, because during the few times she was ill, Charley had been annoyed and had stayed out of the house until she was well. She remembered running a fever, being horribly weak and in the kitchen trying to open a can of soup.

Maybe the men you knew well in your life shaped your ideas of what men should and should not be, because now she wondered if it was really a masculine thing for a man to wash a woman's hair. Which of course was absurd. If a man did “women's things,” did his male body parts fall off? Or shrivel up until they were useless? Of course not. It was just that the two men in her life, her father and her husband, had spent their lives sitting on chairs asking her to bring them things. And maybe that was what she'd come to expect of men, that the woman was to give and the man to receive and when a man gave, it was somehow…not right, or not wholly masculine.

William had his arm around her shoulders in a companionable way, a nonsexual way, and she found his touch very confusing. This morning he had been yelling that he loved her,
had
loved her, but now he didn't even like her very much. Yet he was leading her into the bathroom to…what?

“Stop thinking so much,” William said as he opened the bathroom door. He left her for a moment as he got a glass of water then took a pill from a little jar on the side of the sink. “Here, take this.”

“What is it?”

“It could be a drug made from an ancient herb found in a tomb in South America, guaranteed to make a woman do anything a man wants her to do. Or it could be a painkiller that will make you feel the pain in your hand less. What do you think?”

She didn't even smile as she took the pill from his hand and swallowed it with the water.

“Okay, now off with that bloody shirt.”

Jackie opened her mouth to say something, but what could she say? She had on a brassiere, and that certainly covered what little she had on top. And hadn't she often appeared in halter tops in public in the summer? What was the difference?

Abruptly, William grabbed her shoulders and turned her to face him, his nose to her nose. “Jackie, I am not a rapist. I am not a man who would take advantage of a woman who has lost a lot of blood. I am not so…so needy of female companionship that I have to resort to trickery to get a woman's clothes off. All I want to do is to wash a couple of quarts of blood off of you. You are a disgusting sight and you stink. Now will you be sensible and take your shirt off? You can wrap a towel around yourself so I won't see anything, but whatever you do, let's get you clean.”

The pill had begun to take effect: the pain was lessening and she was starting to feel woozy. With a little smile she started to unbutton her blouse, but it was difficult to do with only one hand. Pain shot through her when she tried to use her bandaged hand. In the end, William efficiently unbuttoned her blouse and slipped it off her shoulders. After that, she didn't give him any difficulty. One minute she was a thirty-eight-year-old woman and the next she was a child in pigtails leaning over a basin having her hair washed.

Jackie was startled to find that the most sensual thing in the world was having a man wash her hair. When she went to the beauty shop and a woman washed her hair, she did a good job, but she was always in a hurry because she had six other women lined up waiting to use the sink. But as every woman knew, men knew that the world would wait for them, so they took their time.

William's strong hands massaged her scalp. No fingernails to hurt her skin, no rushing, no feeling that he wanted to get this over with. The pain pill made her feel dreamy, as though she'd had a couple of drinks after a hard day's work. She wasn't drunk, but she wasn't quite sober. She just felt relaxed, and her body grew warm and soft with the pleasure of the massage that William was giving her. His fingers caressed her scalp, then her neck muscles; he seemed to know exactly which muscles were tight and where to rub to make her relax.

All too soon he rinsed her hair for the second time, wrapped a towel about her head, making her feel like a movie star, and stood her upright.

“I'm going to fill the tub while you undress and put on your robe.”

With that, he turned his back to her and turned on the tub taps. After only seconds of hesitation, Jackie stripped off her filthy, stiff clothes, took her robe from the hook on the back of the door, and put it on. When William looked back at her, he had the tub full of steamy hot water with a five-inch-thick layer of foamy bubbles on top. If she plunged under that thick, opaque layer, she'd be completely hidden from sight.

“I'm going to get some more towels; you climb into the tub. And be careful you don't get your bandage wet.” Before he left, he turned out the light so the only illumination in the room was through the glass transom into the bedroom.

After he left the room, she removed her robe and stepped into the hot, hot water. There was nothing more luxurious than a tub full to the brim of steamy water, topped by soft, fragrant bubbles. Rarely in her life had she allowed herself the pleasure of a long soak in a tub. Rarely did she have the time, but, more important, she seldom did things of such a decadent, purely sensual nature for herself. One could get clean in a shower, so why bother with all the time and waste of water and soap?

Closing her eyes, she let the water soak through her skin, all the way into her bones. The bubble bath had been a gift from Terri two Christmases ago. Terri had the idea that a single woman did such delicious things as lounge about in a tub of hot water, but Jackie had never opened the jar. It smelled like a basket of freshly picked apricots warming in the sun, sweet and rich and luscious.

She was two-thirds asleep when William quietly opened the door to check on her. Turning her head as it rested on the back of the tub, she smiled at him. He smiled back and closed the door.

She must have been asleep when he reentered the room half an hour later and began to wash her face. When she opened her mouth to object, he said, “Don't even think of protesting,” so she leaned back and closed her eyes. She was too sleepy, too relaxed, to think of anything. He washed her blood-encrusted face and neck, then her unbandaged left arm and hand. When he moved to the end of the tub, seated himself on the rim, pulled one of her feet out of the water and began a soapy massage of her foot, the feeling was too heavenly to consider resisting.

It was nearly dark in the bathroom and the gentle foot massage along with the hot water, the smell of the bubble bath, combined with the pill, made Jackie feel quite wonderful. It sometimes seemed that she had been working all her life and she'd never taken time to enjoy anything. There had always been goals to achieve and, if nothing else, the responsibility of putting bread on the table.

When William stopped massaging, she smiled at him, so handsome in the golden light that floated in from the bedroom.

“Thank you,” she whispered as he moved toward the towel rack to take a fluffy white towel and hold it out for her.

“Get out and I'll dry you off.”

As he said this, he turned his head to one side and closed his eyes. Reluctantly leaving the tub, Jackie stepped out, soap still clinging to her skin, and allowed him to wrap her in the towel. Her arms were pinned to her sides inside the towel and it was perfectly natural that his arms should go around her as he rubbed the ends of the towel up and down her back. In spite of her relaxed state, she shivered.

“Cold?”

“No,” she whispered and found herself putting her head on his shoulder.

Pulling away from her, he lifted her chin with his fingertips. “You are exhausted.” At that he swept her into his arms and carried her into the bedroom where he stood her beside the bed and handed her a pair of pink pajamas. “Put them on. I'd help you, but you'd remember it in the morning and hate me.”

That made her laugh, and while he busied himself with putting all her cosmetics on top of the mirrored bureau in precise military order, she slipped into the pajamas, then gratefully got into the bed.