Cindy Gerard – Lone Star Knight (страница 2)

Justin crossed his arms over his chest, gave Matt a considering look. “We’ve covered this ground before.”

“Humor me. Cover it again.”

“Look, I’m not the primary here—I’m just consulting until she’s ready for the cosmetic repairs. Harding’s on the burns. Chambers is her bone man. But the charts pretty much speak for themselves.”

“Not to me they don’t.” Matt shifted his weight to one hip. “Suppose you fill me in.”

“You’re not family, Matt.”

“Oh, for the—”

“Wait. Wait.” Justin held up a hand. “Cool down. You’re not family but, since you’re all she’s got standing between her and Lord knows what might be a threat to her, you have a need to know. And that gives me license to tell you.”

After a glance toward the charge nurse who was busy on the phone, he steered Matt toward the sofa at the end of the hall on the pretense of privacy. Matt suspected what Justin really wanted was to get him off his feet. Too tired to make an issue of it, he sat.

“As you already know, most of her burns are second degree and restricted to her left arm and upper leg.” Justin eased down beside him. “It’s that nasty patch of third degree on the back of her left hand that’s giving her trouble. The extensor tendons are heavily involved—the ones that control finger movement. We had to graft. Unfortunately, the site’s been problematic.”

Matt slumped back, rubbed an index finger over his brow. “Infection, right?”

Justin nodded. “We’d hoped to avoid it—we always hope to avoid it—but with a burn that deep and so much debris ground into it, it was pretty much a given. It’s cleared up now but it set her recovery back. Only time will tell what kind of mobility she’ll regain.”

Matt thought of the lovely hand he’d held in his at the Cattleman’s Club reception and dance. The petal-soft skin. The slim, graceful fingers. “And her ankle?”

Justin shook his head. “That’s still up for grabs, too. It’s a bad fracture. Real bad. Even with the surgery and the pins in place, Chambers can’t guarantee that she won’t have a permanent limp.”

Matt stared past Justin’s shoulder to the partially open door of Helena’s room. He thought of the beautiful, vivacious woman he’d waltzed around the dance floor. The woman whose cornflower-blue eyes had smiled into his with unguarded interest. The woman who had said his name in her perfect, practiced English yet made it sound exotic and made him feel extraordinary. That woman had been beyond perfection.

He didn’t have to be inside her head to understand that the woman in the hospital room, though still beautiful, was now badly scarred, potentially disabled—and that there would be much more to her recovery process than knitting bones and healing flesh. And he couldn’t throw the helpless notion that there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to help her.

“You need sleep, bud.” Justin’s voice broke into Matt’s thoughts. “Call someone to relieve you.”

“Not an option. Not tonight anyway. My men are tied up, so I’m it.”

After a long look, Justin rose. “Okay. Here’s the plan. I’ve got a patient on the floor spiking a temp so I’ll be here for a while. I can cover for you for a few hours.”

“Thanks, but she’s my assignment, not yours.”

Justin’s long, measuring look asked the same question Matt had been asking himself lately. Are you sure this is just an assignment?

Matt wasn’t sure of anything except that he wasn’t ready to admit, even to himself, that it might be more. Yeah, he recognized that his commitment to her safety was running a tad toward territorial. He also knew that he found himself thinking about her more than he should. Helena was, after all, an intriguing woman. Not his type of woman, but intriguing, nonetheless.

Regardless, it all came down to one thing. The five club members who were in the know on this incident agreed that Lady Helena Reichard was his responsibility. It was a charge he took seriously. Even more so after what had happened last week. He’d ducked out for a moment and come back to find a strange man standing just outside her open doorway. The man had run like hell when Matt had approached him, and in the darkened hall, he’d never even got a glimpse of his face. Whoever it was, he was still out there. Judging by his actions, he was also a potential threat.

“I’m not going anywhere, Justin,” he stated flatly.

“Yeah,” Justin said with quiet authority. “You are.”

He pointed to the room across the hall from Helena’s. “The bed in there is empty. Use it. I’m taking your watch for a few hours. End of story.”

When Matt opened his mouth to protest, Justin cut him off. “Use it,” he ordered and walked to the nurses’ station to grab some charts.

Helena stared out her hospital-room window into the predawn darkness of the West Texas morning. The nightmare had awakened her. Again. As she so often did, she sat in the dark and fought a losing battle with haunting memories of the crash.

She swallowed back the slick ball of nausea that rose to her throat. Almost two months of endless nights had passed, and she still hadn’t been able to come to terms with what had happened to her. And with what hadn’t.

She hadn’t died. Miraculously, no one had. In fact, she and Robert Klimt, a member of King Bertram’s cabinet, were the only ones who had been seriously injured. Yes, she had lived, but her injuries were a constant, vengeful reminder that life, as she’d known it, would never be the same again.

A helpless anger flushed her skin as she carefully peeled the protective pressure glove—her constant companion for at least the next year—from her left hand. She made herself look at it. At the disfiguring patch of grafted flesh, the repulsive scarring, the stiff, useless fingers that might never again hold a champagne glass, might never wear a ring or be lifted to a man’s lips for a lingering kiss.

She pushed back her sleeve and forced her gaze to travel the angry red scars that ran almost to her elbow. Touching her hand to the insulted flesh, she shivered at the dry, hot feel of it then grimly flipped back the long folds of the hospital gown that covered her legs.

More painful even than her broken ankle and the six-inch surgical incisions running on either side of it beneath the cast, more painful even than the burns, was the donor site on her leg. A four-by-three-inch patch of skin had been harvested from her outer thigh to graft to the back of her hand. It still looked raw. It still gave her pain. The hope was that it would also give her back the use of her hand.

That was the hope.

She covered her leg, tucked her hand into the folds of her robe, and hated herself for giving in to self-pity. Robert Klimt still fought for his life. She did not know him well. She knew only that he lay in a coma and might not recover. Yet she sat here feeling sorry for herself because her perfection had been marred.

“Beauty such as yours is a rare gift, child. You are a jewel. A precious, flawless gem to be adored and revered by the world as a priceless treasure.”

Her father’s words, words she’d heard and believed since she’d been old enough to crawl up on his knee and bask in his adoration, echoed relentlessly through her mind.

“Not anymore, Papa.” She stared into the hollow, echoing silence. “I’m not flawless anymore.”

Matthew Walker had thought she was perfect. She had seen it in his eyes, eyes she’d envisioned too often in her mind since the crash. She’d heard it in his laughter, laughter that brightened her dreams, but never her days. She’d thought he would come to the hospital to see her. For conflicting reasons, she’d been both disappointed and relieved when he hadn’t.

She stared again at the hand that no longer seemed to belong to her, at the mass of ugly scars, the stiffened fingers that refused to work as they once had.

Matthew Walker would not think that she was perfect now.

No one would.

She raised her head, stared without seeing, as the blackness of night slowly gave way to the pearly gray break of another dawn. Artificial light from the hall behind her shone in through her door, casting the room in half shadows. A call bell pinged softly at the nurses’ desk; a doctor’s page echoed in this sterile, isolated world where the silence spoke of an aloneness only someone who had spent myriad sleepless nights swathed in bandages and morphine and uncertainty could understand.

She had become accustomed to the night sounds in the burn unit for she had slept too little and thought too much. Now, in the background, the nursing staff moved with quiet efficiency to the soft rustle of crepe-soled shoes and pristine white uniforms.

She hadn’t rung for their assistance when she’d inched carefully out of bed and eased into the chair by the window. She’d been managing that particular feat by herself for over a week now. The fine sheen of perspiration beading her brow was the only outward indication of the physical cost. The tear that trickled unheeded down her cheek was less a result of the pain than of the growing and grim acceptance that she would never be, would never look, the same again—and that the waltz she had shared with the tall, handsome Texan might have been her last dance.