D aytona was a modest golf, tennis and racket-ball club nestled in the hills near a tiny village named Dayton, a scant half-hour ride west of Osseo. Old Highway 52 that led to it was once a major westbound thoroughfare, but since the interstate had been built, it lazed in somnolence, its signs disappearing, its shoulders clothed in woods and grassland, dotted with cows and corncribs.
The afternoon sun lighted the hills to fresh spring green and reflected from the shimmering road surface. The air was fragrant. It was lilac time. Apple trees and wild plums were at their peak of blossom. The fragrant warmth of the spring day rejuvenated Win's spirit. Bouncing along beside Joseph on the ancient cracked seat of an old pickup truck, she was loath to bring up the subject that had so disturbed her earlier in the day. It was too pleasant, too peaceful riding with Joseph, listening to some old Jim Reeves song-it seemed he was always surrounded by vintage of one sort or another-with the wind blowing in the lowered window, gently lifting the hair on her arm.
Winn sunk low, wedged a knee against the glove-compartment door and let her eyes sink closed. Joseph glanced at her lazy pose but said nothing. She had not brought up whatever it was she wanted to talk about, and that was fine with him. She looked sensational in the mint green jogging suit she'd produced when they detoured to her house. She was slumped low with her nape catching the top of the seat, hair loose and messed, and the breeze from the open window occasionally billowing it. As he studied her, a spirited gust caught a strand and whipped it across her lips. Without opening her eyes she hooked it with the crook of a little finger and pulled it aside. Immediately it blew back and she spit it out, then threaded it behind her ear.
Her eyes opened, and she indolently turned her head to find he'd been watching her. He smiled. She smiled back. Neither spoke as he drove on as before, with a wrist hooked languidly over the wheel, softly whistling "Four Walls" between his teeth.
At that moment Winn discovered something very wonderful: she could comfortably share silence with Joseph Duggan. There were at least a dozen men she knew, including Paul, who'd be chattering away a mile a minute. How pleasing it was to be with one today who was content to smile and whistle softly between his teeth, and let the true mellow voice of Jim Reeves do all the speaking.
Jo-Jo wondered what it was that was bothering her but decided not to probe. She'd get around to it whenever she was good and ready. In the meantime he was doing what he'd wondered if he'd ever have the chance to do again, what had kept him from readily falling asleep many nights since the wedding: he was simply being with her.
They passed Diamond Lake and soon turned the clattery old Chevrolet between two giant boulders, then rolled up the long gravel approach to the clubhouse that sat at the top of a hill. The golf links were verdant. Into the window came the smell of newly cut grass and fresh-turned loam from adjacent farms. On the club land itself were the ancient barn and farmhouse of those who'd owned the land previously.
When Jo-Jo and Winn stepped from the truck and slammed their doors, something fell off underneath it.
"Oops," he said with a slanting grin. "This old heap isn't in quite as good a shape as the Haynes."
"I wasn't going to ask where the Haynes was." Winn came around the truck to find him on one knee, bracing his palms on the gravel and peering underneath the truck's belly.
"This is my everydayer. New cars really don't do it for me. I like the old ones." He reached beneath the truck and withdrew a piece of tail pipe. "They've got character."
As he straightened, he was still grinning. She smiled down at the rusted hunk of metal in his hand. "This one's character is a little loose, wouldn't you say?"
He tossed the piece onto the bed of the truck, clapped a rounded rear fender as if it were the flank of a horse, brushed off his palms and took her elbow. "I love her just the same."
But he was looking into Win's eyes as he made the comment, and because his crinkle-eyed smile made her so very, very happy, and because his intentional double meaning made her far too giddy, she turned her eyes to the clubhouse as they approached.
Inside they passed a dining room with a field-rock fireplace in its center, and the bar where he'd brought Sandy when the groomsmen had stolen her. After Joseph signed them in at the desk, they parted to go to the locker rooms and check their tote bags.
He was waiting in the hall outside court number two, leaning back with one rubber sole against the wall, repeatedly flipping and catching a can of balls. As she walked toward him, he turned, and the can stopped doing cartwheels. He seemed to have forgotten he held it. His eyes made a quick scan of her length, and he slowly drew his hips away from the wall and smiled.
When she stood close before him, he grinned and said, "Wow" in a soft way that made her blush.
She had a healthy curiosity about his bared limbs, too, but felt it prudent to refrain from ogling. Once inside the racket-ball court, however, with the door closed behind them, there was ample opportunity for more than surreptitious glances without being detected. Assessing each other was almost unavoidable.
The court was a brightly lighted cell with a twenty-foot ceiling, poured-concrete walls, and a twenty-by-forty-foot hardwood floor. It was stark, bare and echoing. Every sound within it became amplified. As Joseph idly bounced the ball, it gave off an audible ping while expanding to its original shape. When he spoke, his voice seemed to reverberate from the walls.
"A little warm-up first?" He tugged on a short white leather glove.
"Yes. I haven't played for a good four weeks. I'll need it."
They looped cord handles around their wrists, spun them to take up the slack and gripped their rackets.
"Why four weeks?" he asked, bouncing a royal blue ball with his racket.
"Nobody to play with lately."
"How about Silicon Chip?"
"He's done it occasionally to please me. But I told you, he doesn't much care for sweat."
Joseph snatched the ball from the air, studied her expressionlessly for a moment, then turned away to face the front wall. Across the center of the court ran two parallel red lines five feet apart: the serving area. They stood just behind it as Joseph sent the ball bouncing off the front wall, giving her a direct easy return. Between them they made a total of eleven good returns before Winn missed.
She retrieved the ball and bounced it to him. As he nonchalantly juggled it above his head, bouncing it off the racket, he said, "You're pretty good, huh?"
"Good enough," she replied honestly. "But I haven't played against many men. You guys usually have the edge on power."
He turned away to the front again. "We'll see."
This time he gave her a more difficult serve, angling it so she had to cross behind him to return it from near the back wall. He didn't have time to turn around and watch her form before the ball sailed over his head and against the right sidewall. Then they concentrated on a volley of shots that lasted longer than the first. This time he missed.
She flicked the rolling ball up with the tip of her racket and gave him an impertinent grin. "You're pretty good, huh?"
"Damn right. And I don't give no quarter to no woman." His brown eyes danced mischievously.
"That's the way I like it."
"Volley?" he suggested.
"You're on."
She won the right to first serve, and as she walked to the red lines, his eyes skimmed down her lanky legs. With each step the muscles hardened and squared, but when she stood at ease, her limbs were shapely and feminine. She wore mint green athletic-style shorts trimmed with white cord around the notched legs. Her tank top was white and showed him the true spareness of the flesh across her ribs, for he'd never seen her in anything conforming before. Her tennis shoes were white with sturdy wedged soles, and as his eyes traveled down to them, he admired the shadows where her ankle tendons dove down into the shoes behind tiny white tassels.
Her first serve came whizzing off to his left, and he missed it completely. As a matter of fact, he moved a full second too late: he'd been engrossed with her shapely ankles.
She turned with a hand on her hip. "Hey, you awake back there?"
"Yeah. Yeah… give me another one."
She took three points before he executed a faultless roll-out shot, where the ball hit both floor and front wall at once, then rolled toward them as docilely as if a baby had pushed it with his chubby hands.
Winn swiveled to face Jo-Jo, raised one eyebrow and cooed, "Whooo-eee. The man gets serious."
"And the woman loses the serve."
He now stood where she had, and Winn was the curious one. He wore white tennis-style shorts and a disreputable looking T-shirt of navy blue that said Dick's Bar on the back and looked as if it had been relieved of its sleeves and bottom half by somebody's dull hedge trimmer. The crudely slashed fabric curled back on his shoulders, and the armholes sagged halfway down his ribs. Six inches of bare stomach showed between navy shirt and white shorts, and it was remarkably tan for May, as were his sinewy legs above the calf-high socks. She was staring at the socks, one with a gold stripe around its top, the other with a purple, when his serve careered past her head. She completely ignored it and burst out laughing.
"Now who's asleep?"
"No fair, your socks broke me up!" Her laughter resounded from the walls.
He rolled onto his heels, bringing his toes off the floor, and perused his hairy legs. "What's the matter with them?"
"They don't match!" She was still laughing.
"Naw, they never do. Not in a house where three men do their own laundry. Clean will do-matched we don't need." He grinned up at her. "You ready to get serious now and stop laughing at my laundry?"
"Hit it," she returned.
They threw their total effort into racket ball then, and before the serve had changed twice, they'd quite forgotten to ogle each other. They were immersed in competition, concentrating on the reaching, running, reflexive joy of rivalry. They were well matched, and if physically Joseph had the edge, she was perhaps the more accurate shot.
When he gained a point by charging up on a dying pigeon and slamming it off the back wall, she came back with a placement shot so deadly he missed it even after a belly dive. His legs were four inches longer, but hers were quicker. He'd perfected the difficult ceiling shot, and she missed it every time after it caromed from ceiling to front wall to floor, then always beyond her reach. But she had a keen feel for successfully sprinting to meet the ball a mere five feet before the front wall and softly finessing it so it dropped softly, two feet from the wall and fell dead, leaving Joseph no chance to charge forward and save the point.
They reveled in the exhilaration of pushing their bodies to great physical limits. The acoustical room was filled with the high magnified squeaks of their rubber soles on the hardwood floors, the slap of the ball, their grunts-and sometimes groans-and occasionally the clatter of a racket against concrete. They stretched their tensile limbs to their limits. They strained their bodies for the simple reward of beating the ball. They smashed and drove and sometimes watched a shot arcing over their heads, not knowing till the final second whether it would reach the back wall or fall that agonizing three inches from it. Their shirts became soaked and their limbs sheeny. His hair became curlier, and hers stringier. They smiled, teased, cried "I told you so" and sometimes, "Damn you!"
And he took the game 21-20.
They fell to their backs in the middle of the backcourt, panting, heaving, closing their eyes against the white fluorescent glare of caged lights overhead. Star bursts danced before their lids. Their hearts pounded against the cool boards beneath their shoulders. Their legs stuck to the floor. Their weary arms flopped straight out to the side, lifeless. They were in heaven.
He rolled his head to look at her. She was five feet away, but her lax fingers almost touched his.
"Hey, Gardner." She opened one eye and peeked at him. "You're good."
"So're you. But next time I'm gonna whip you, boy."
His laughter bounced off the walls like a well-executed Z-serve.
"My pleasure," he offered, then closed his eyes and rested again. A minute of pure silence passed. Their breathing was less labored. She pulled her shirt up, exposing her stomach, and rested a hand on it. He flexed a knee.
"Oh, God, I needed this." Her quiet admission whispered three times as it came back to them.
He rolled his head to look at her again. "Why?"
Meredith Emery came into her mind's eye. "Oh, Joseph, I've done the worst thing it's possible for a physical therapist to do. I've become empathetically involved with one of my patients."
"Who?" He studied her profile as she stared up at the overhead lights.
"Her name is Meredith Emery, and she's ten years old." He saw her swallow. "And she's the victim of an explosion."
Joseph hadn't guessed physical therapists worked with burn patients, and though he wanted to question her about it, he wisely kept silent.
"She has these enormous brown eyes that… that have no eyelashes anymore and no eyebrows, either. And her face has been scarred, and she's bald now. But she showed me her school picture when she had beautiful black hair down past her shoulders." She paused, took a deep gulp of air and went on. "She studied ballet and was a gymnast, too, and now she can't even touch her ear to her shoulder because her skin has lost so much elasticity she has to wear a splint to hold her chin up." A tear formed in Winn's eye and ran from its corner down her temple, disappearing within the droplets of perspiration already there.
Joseph inched nearer and took her outflung hand. She grasped his fingers so tightly his ring cut in almost painfully. Her ragged voice went on. "And next summer her family is all going to Disneyland… and… and…" Suddenly Winn flung a forearm across her eyes and released one gulping sob that echoed from the high bright ceiling.
Joseph rolled to one hip and braced beside her on an elbow. "And?"
"And sh-she won't be g-going along b-because she's going to die." Winn began sobbing unrestrainedly then and attempted to roll away from Joseph, but he clasped her shoulder to keep her on her back.
"Winn… oh, Winn." He lifted her to a sitting position-they were hip to hip, facing each other-and wrapped his arms around her, cradling her against his chest, cupping the back of her damp hair while she clung to him and cried.
"Oh, J-Joseph, sometimes I d-don't understand why."
"I wish I could tell you, but I can't find any reason for the waste, either." He pressed her hair hard, contouring the back of her head. "God… only ten years old." He, too, sounded choked up.
"And she's b-been through such hell already. Pain and scars, and… and sh-she still fights with me when I tell her to-sh-she doesn't know that all the physical therapy is f-for nothing because she'll never l-live to see her limbs m-move as they did on the p-parallel bars." He kissed the side of her skull, then patted her back, feeling the pitiful heaving of her chest against his.
"Do her mother and father know?"
"I don't know. Her kidneys just failed today."
"What are they like? Do they love her a lot?"
"Oh, yes. She adores her mother and… and beams all over wh-when she talks about her father. At least her eyes look like they're beaming, but it's an… an awful sight when they don't have any lashes."
Joseph leaned back, grasped her temples in both hands and repeatedly pushed the hair back from her face, searching her eyes. "Maybe that's what it's all about… love. She had love, and she gave it, so her life wasn't for nothing, was it?"
Winn's eyes swam with tears. The skin beneath them was wet and shiny as he rested his thumbs there. Oh, God, she thought, why couldn't Paul have been this way when I needed him?
"Do you think so, Joseph?" She sat as still as the walls around them. He gazed into her sad wet eyes with their lashes stuck together, then lifted his gaze to her tawny hair and gently brought her forehead to his lips.
Meeting her eyes again, he assured Winn, "Yes, I think so. There's got to be a reason for all of this, and if it's not love, what else could there possibly be? You love her, too, and because you do, you needed to cry and so you came to me. And I think I could very easily fall in love with you. Maybe that's the reason… to bring us together."
"Joseph, you mustn't say that." Her voice was quiet, unchiding, as she probed his dark brown eyes with her troubled blue ones.
"But it's true."
"But there's still Paul."
"Yes… Paul." The pressure on her jaws increased as Joseph held her prisoner with his hands and eyes. "And why aren't you with him right now, crying on his shoulder? He's the one who should be comforting you at a time like this."
She pulled away and drew her knees up, looping them with both arms. "Paul has a hard time dealing with the fact of death or even disease. He sees perfection as the ultimate, I guess. The imperfect bodies I work with put him off, and he's uncomfortable talking about them."
"Did he try… this time?"
"He… I… no. I told you, he wasn't home when I tried to reach him. But when I first got Merry as a patient, I was upset one night and called him then."
"And what did he do?"
"We talked a little bit about it."
"Did he come over?"
She flashed him a warning glance. "Don't judge him, Joseph. He has his own qualities. They may be different from yours or mine, but he has them just the same."
"Such as?"
"Such as his supreme intelligence, his analytical mind, his… his tenacity. I mean, when Paul makes up his mind to do something, he does it, if it takes him a month or a year, he does it."
"Such as providing you with a house and furniture?"
"Exactly. I'm the one at fault for wishing he'd-"
"Cut it out, Winn!" he snapped.
"Cut what out?" she snapped back.
"Rationalizing about your relationship with him. It stinks and you know it."
"It does not stink! We get along wonderfully!"
"Oh, sure. That's why you came running to me instead of to him today. From what you tell me about him, he must have silicon chips for emotions!"
Her face colored deeply. "You're overstepping, Joseph."
"I'm pointing out what you already know but refuse to admit. The two of you have nothing in common except some goddarn house he's living in without you! If you were engaged to me, I wouldn't be letting you flirt around with other men at wedding dances."
"I didn't-" But Joseph forged ahead.
"And your birth-control pills would be sitting in my bedroom. And your panty hose would be lying on my bedroom floor beside my jockstrap after we ended up every day with a rousing game of racket ball like the one we just played."
She tried jumping to her feet, but he grabbed her wrist and held her where she was.
"Winn, sit still!" he ordered, refusing to release her. "How in blazes did you ever end up with somebody like him in the first place?"
She simmered for a long time while their eyes locked angrily. Her wrist strained against his grip, and at the precise moment she wrenched it free, she spit, "My mother!"
His eyes widened in surprise. "Your what?"
"My mother introduced me to him." Winn dropped her eyes, uncomfortable with the admission.
"Go on."
"He was teaching a class on computers that she took, and the two of them discovered this great common interest in COBOL and FORTRAN."
He screwed up his face. "What?"
She waved an impatient hand. "Oh, those are some high-level computer languages. Anyway, she told me she'd met this wonderful man." Winn stopped and shrugged.
"Then why didn't she marry him instead of you?"
Winn stiffened. The corners of her mouth pulled down, and she glared at Joseph. How unflinchingly he hit upon her most vulnerable spot. How many times had she submerged the very thought, believing it too touchy to allow herself to think, much less voice!
"I don't think that's funny, Joseph."
"Why? Did I hit a nerve?"
"The nerve here is yours, and you're displaying plenty of it."
"It's nothing to be ashamed of. You wouldn't be the first woman who agreed to marry somebody because he was her parents' choice."
"That's not why I'm marrying him," she claimed, perhaps a little too emphatically.
"Then why are you? Did he sweep you off your feet-sexually?" Her mouth puckered tighter. He drove on, "Well, it's sure obvious you didn't fall for him because he shared your interests. Or your goals or your tastes! You've already told me enough about him to know you're like steam and he's like ice. They may both be made of the same element, but that doesn't mean they're anything alike, Win, and you know it."
She crossed her forearms on her knees and dropped her forehead onto them. "I didn't come here so you could make me feel worse than I already did, but somehow you're managing it."
"I'm sorry, Winn." He rested a hand on her slumped shoulder, but she shrugged it away. "I didn't mean to make you upset, but so far the only thing I can name that the two of you do well together is dance, and he leaves you behind to do that with me? I should think you'd be the one picking out these gaping holes in your relationship, not me."
She raised her head wearily. "Don't you understand? Our wedding is only six weeks away."
His eyes pierced through her. "Yeah. Scary, isn't it?"
Winn did leap to her feet then and leaned over angrily to scoop the blue ball off the floor. She began bouncing it vehemently with the racket while presenting her rigid back. "Do you want to play another game or not?"
He glared at her shapely back, her erect shoulders and the irritation she displayed as she whapped the ball. He grew more than irritated. He was frustrated and angry that she refused to explore the mistake she was making in her choice of men just because of a few social commitments.
"You bet I do. And we'll see who whips who." She was standing in the serving lane when his answer bit the air just behind her shoulder. Then he went on, "I won the first match, Gardner. The serve is mine."
She felt properly chastised and not a little embarrassed. There were men who extended the courtesy of always letting ladies serve first. It had always peeved Winn. She'd win on her own merits or not at all. How dare Joseph Duggan imply that she was trying to grab an unearned advantage! Wordlessly she retreated to the backcourt, leaving the serving lane to him. When the first ball came, it whistled off three surfaces before she reached it just in the nick of time. The volley was long and exhausting, and he took the point. Her ego was definitely stung, for she'd tried her hardest to take the initial point after their argument. As he bounced the ball preparatory to serving, she held her racket in a position that definitely stated, "Attack," leaning forward from the waist, rocking her hips from side to side, intensity written on every muscle of her face and stance.
The longer the game went, the better they both played.
They were neck and neck at fifteen, and her lungs felt ready to explode. She felt a slight cramp in her right foot but shook it off, promising herself Joseph Duggan would lose this game, come hell or high water.
He slammed a power shot off the back wall, and she missed it.
She executed a beautiful pass shot and left him standing on the opposite side of the court from where the ball rebounded.
At nineteen all, the sweat was running down their legs, backs and bellies. Her bra was soaked, and the band of her shorts stuck to her skin. His shirt-what there was of it-was so dark with sweat she wondered why he bothered to pull at its shoulder to swab his forehead.
She served a deadly one that struck with the speed of a copperhead and took point twenty to tie him.
On his next attack he reached and leaped at a scorcher skimming no farther than a quarter inch away from the wall. But in his intensity he grew careless, leaped too hard and hit the concrete, then bounced off and landed with a thick thud, flat on his back.
He winced, bared his teeth, grabbed his right knee and rolled back and forth, sucking air.
She dropped her racket and ran, falling to her knees beside him. "Joseph, I'm sorry. Oh, Judas, what is it? Is it your knee? Here, let me see."
He rolled and winced all the more.
"Joseph, let go. See if you can straighten it."
He felt her fingers on his arm and forced himself to lie back, releasing the knee and leaving it flexed while his foot rested on the floor. Her hands grasped the backside of his calf, then one of them eased over his shinbone, forcing him to straighten his leg. He gasped and arched his chest higher. She laid the leg on the cool floor, touched it exploringly here, there, there, there. She made him work it back and forth, gently probing the muscles, the kneecap.
His initial shot of pain eased slightly. "Well, what do you think, doc?" he asked.
"I think we'd better get some ice on it right away and, depending on how it feels within the next hour, have it X-rayed."
She stood up, reached a hand down to help him. "Can you use it?" He could, but he limped. She wrapped his arm around her shoulder and together they hobbled back to the dressing rooms.
"If you shower, use cool water, not hot, and I'll meet you back here as quick as you can make it." He'd already pushed open the locker-room door. "And Joseph?" He stepped and looked back over his shoulder. "I really am sorry."
"It's not your fault, Winn. I was playing stupidly, with all body and no brains. I deserved it."
She thought it best if he didn't drive the truck because it had a floor shift, and until they found out how serious his injury was, the leg definitely shouldn't be strained. She stalled the old rattletrap three times before she'd even managed to back it out of its parking space. It chortled and chugged and nearly snapped their necks when she shifted from first to second.
But it made Joseph laugh. And when she heard him laugh, she was so relieved, she laughed, too. She talked him into letting her take him to North Memorial Medical Center, even though he said he didn't want to check into any emergency ward.
"All right, then I have another plan. But we'll have to sneak to do it."
"Sneak?"
"Into P.T.-it should be deserted at this time of night-and we'll put an ice pack on your knee and wait to see if you think you need the X-ray."
"Why should you have to sneak when you work there?"
"Because I could get fired if we get caught. The hospital is liable if you're using their facilities, and unless you're officially admitted, they have no legal recourse if something happens to you on our equipment. But it won't. I'll see to it."
"But what if you get caught?"
She angled him a devilish corner-of-the-lip grin. "You'll be indebted to me for life."
A short time later they pulled up before the Abbott Street entrance, a back door used for patient pickup, which was deserted now at 7:00 P.M. and also was the closest route to Physical Medicine.
Just before Winn got out of the truck, Joseph reached out to lay his palm on the seat beside her. "Winn?"
She stopped and turned to him.
"I'm sorry. You were right. I overstepped."
Judas, but the man had eyes she couldn't get enough of. "We'll see," she answered cryptically, then the truck door slammed behind her.
It was quiet and dark in the rehabilitation room, and he stood in the doorway, interested in its every fixture simply because it belonged to her world, and he wanted to know as much about it and her as possible.
The room was like a narrow gymnasium with ceiling-to-floor windows at one end. Along the walls were various pieces of exercise equipment lined up: two sets of portable wooden stairs with handrails, two stationary bicycles, a refrigerator-freezer, low tables topped with blue mats, more mats on the floor and various ordinary wooden chairs.
She led the way to the far left end of the room. "Sit here," she ordered, "on the table." It was scarcely knee height and easy to fall back upon. She stood beside him and ordered him to stretch out on his back. He clasped his head as if about to do sit-ups and looked along his trunk to watch her untie and remove his tennis shoe, then the clean sock he'd put on only a half hour ago. He wore the red jogging suit again. He had six-inch zippers up each ankle. She slid the right one up, then pushed the pant leg past his knee until it drew tight around his thick thigh and stayed there.
Whatever he'd done, he'd done to the muscles just below his knee, and as she surrounded them with competent hands, she gently probed and tested.
"Relax," she ordered. "You're all tensed up with your head raised like that. I'm not going to hurt you."
He fell back flat and answered all her questions, telling her what each touch felt like. Her fingers were gentle and her palms soft as she explored the muscles below the knee, then the knee itself, and finally worked her way up his thigh, probing. He tried to concentrate on the discomfort, because her hand felt so good, and because he was having difficulty disassociating the therapist from the woman. Her hands skimmed over the hair-roughened surface of his leg all the way to the top of his thigh.
At last, when he thought he was in mortal danger from the wonderful feeling of her hands upon him, she dropped them. "It's not a hamstring, and it's not a knee. I think it's your triceps surae."
"My what?"
"Triceps surae, the muscles found in the lower leg. You may have pulled one or more when you fell after hitting the wall."
"How can you tell?"
"Three things. Pain, heat-it's hot right here…" She touched a sensitive spot lightly. "And swelling. You've got all three." She crossed to the refrigerator while he lay thinking about another swelling that she'd come awfully close to promoting. She returned with a flat pack that looked like a miniature inflated mattress and carefully wrapped it around his leg just below the knee and secured the Velcro patches.
"For the first forty-eight to seventy-two hours ice is best, then if it's still bothering you, we'll switch to heat."
"We? Does that mean I'll see you again in the next couple days?"
She withdrew her hands from his leg immediately, then realized what she'd done and let her hands drop to her sides while sitting down on the edge of the table beside him, crossing her knees.
"If your leg is giving you pain, of course I'd be happy to help you work with it and save you the cost of outpatient care. But if it's not…"
He reached to take one of her hands and twisted their fingers together.
"And if it's not?"
She studied him silently, and from nowhere came the appealing one-eyed blink that he could read so well by now.
"Joseph, you're an extremely attractive man." She rubbed the back of his hand with her thumb. "But how many times in a woman's life does she meet an attractive man whom she must resist? Once I'm married, I'm not expecting never again to be face to face with men who raise my temperature a notch or two. It's bound to happen, but it's how I react to it that's important. I'm not denying I've… reacted to you. You're a very persuasive man, Joseph, and sexy to boot. But I'm involved in wedding plans that are so mind boggling I wouldn't even care to list all the people and dollars involved. My mother-" again her thumb brushed his hand softly "-well, my mother is a very frugal woman and always concerned about security-investing, saving, planning for the future. But this time she's throwing caution aside and going whole hog. Nothing's too good or too expensive for Pau -" She caught herself in time and finished, "For us."
But Joseph heard her slip. "Just make sure you aren't making a mistake, Winn."
She dropped his hand, placed hers on her thighs and pushed herself up to her feet. "There's no such thing as a sure bet, but I know mother will be ecstatic when I marry Paul, and he'll be terribly good to me, and I'll have all the security she always wanted for me."
"All the security she never had?" Joseph questioned.
Winn pondered silently, then answered, "Yes. It's not hard to see through her. Security is her biggest hang-up."
"Because of your father?" She had never mentioned her father.
"Yes."
"Did he leave her?"
"It wasn't a question of his leaving. He never stayed long enough to leave. He got her pregnant while they were dating, then disappeared, and she never heard from him or saw him again. She's had a rough time making something of herself with me to raise and nobody else to rely upon. But she's a scrapper. She made it through business school and became a superb private secretary, and she didn't stop there. When things changed, when computers came along, she didn't rest on her laurels or make up her mind she wasn't going to go along with such upstart ideas. Instead she went to learn how to use them. And of course, that's when Paul became her teacher."
They fell silent again. But it was not a comfortable silence this time. Joseph wanted to tell her she was being a fool. She wanted to tell him to mind his own business.
At length, she picked a neutral subject. "How does your leg feel?"
"Numb."
"Good. Let's see it now."
She removed the ice pack and examined the leg again, had him flex it, stand on it, and judged it to have pulled muscles, not broken bones.
"I don't think you'll need an X-ray. How does it feel when you walk?"
"Better since the ice."
"Good. Would you like to see the tank room where I work with Merry?"
"I'd love to."
She showed him around the rest of the Physical Medicine Department, but much of the time Joseph was thinking of other things than the Hubbard tank, traction units and treadmills. He wondered how she could be so sensitive to the needs of others, yet so ignorant of her own.
When they got back to his house, he tried to kiss her, but she pressed a hand to his chest and turned away.
"No, Joseph. My mind is made up."
"Can I call you?"
"No."
"I think you're making a mistake. I think you and I would be-"
"Don't say it."
"You think it's just spring fancy, but I don't."
"Goodbye, Joseph, I hope your leg gets better." She turned to her own car and practically ran the few steps to it before slamming herself inside its sanctuary, as if a mere enclosure of metal and glass could insulate her from the powerful force that compelled the two of them together.
He watched her back up and took a step toward the car as he thought he saw her start to cry. But before he could advance, she stepped on the gas and roared down the street.