Kiss Your Prince Charming
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Jennifer Greene
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11
Chapter 1
Rachel Martin had had it. She zipped her ancient yellow VW into the driveway, cut the engine and then scowled at the debris piled on the passenger seat. There was no way she could carry the mail, groceries, her purse and her briefcase into the house in one haul—but she was too darn hot and cranky to make two trips.
Since the divorce, of course, Rachel had learned the obvious. A woman could always find a way to do the impossible. Sometimes the impossible was just a little more challenging than other times.
Once she climbed out of the car, she stuck the mail between her teeth, hooked the key ring on a finger and then used both arms to scoop up the grocery sack, briefcase, and purse tote. The success of her hauling mission seemed assured until she tried slamming the car door closed with her fanny—which jostled everything, particularly threatening to topple the ice cream at the top of the overstuffed grocery bag.
Oh, man. She needed that ice cream. She deserved it. The whole day had been a nonstop test of sanity. The air-conditioning had malfunctioned at work. All six of her engineers had been testy and demanding. She’d skipped lunch and then had to work late. Her blue linen suit had more limp wrinkles than a shar-pei’s face, her right stocking had a run and her stomach was making pitiful growling sounds of starvation. The unrelenting heat was so unfair. This was Milwaukee, for Pete’s sake. Cool nights should have been a guarantee by the middle of September—particularly by seven o’clock—and yet the temperature still registered a mean, cruel ninety degrees with enough humidity to melt steel.
Carefully juggling her packages, sweat drooling down the back of her neck, Rachel mentally pictured her life ten minutes from now. Forget chores. Forget the sounds of lawn mowers and honking cars and kids shrieking as they skateboarded down the sidewalks of the old neighborhood. She could be inside her rented house in two minutes. Naked in six. A few seconds after that, she could be draped under the air-conditioning vent in her living room, dipping a spoon into an entire gallon of Fudge Ripple, with an old classic Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn flick plugged into the VCR.
The fantasy was almost as satisfying as sex. Maybe even better. Sex wasn’t a remote possibility in her life right now, where ice cream was definitely a can-do.
“Ms. Martin? Wait, Ms. Martin!”
She recognized Leo Rembrowsky’s voice coming up behind her, and any other time she wouldn’t have minded chatting a few minutes with her elderly neighbor. Leo was okay. Occasionally he’d tried to peek in her bathroom
window and he was an incurable busybody, but mostly he was just lonely since his wife died. Swiftly she turned around, so Leo could see her arms were completely stuffed and she was in no position to stop and visit—yet he didn’t seem to notice.
“I been waiting for you.” He huffed and puffed up the driveway until he caught up with her, his Slavic accent even heavier than usual. “You’re late today. I wait outside in the heat. But I thought you should know. Mr. Stoner was in big car accident.”
Her heart clutched. She dropped her briefcase and yanked the mail out of her mouth. “You mean Greg? Our Mr. Stoner?”
“Yes, yes. I heard from Tilda. She heard on scanner. Then Josie, she call the hospital—”
Vaguely Rachel heard the details of the neighborhood gossip vine. Vaguely she was aware of the bloodred sun, dropping fast now, painting the maple leaves gold and brushing the sky with dusky sunset shadows. Life just seemed so everyday normal that it took a jolting few seconds for Rachel to believe something had really happened to Greg. “Mr. Rembrowsky, which hospital? And do you know how badly he was hurt?”
Leo crouched down to pick up the spray of envelopes. “St. John’s, I hear. It was three-car pileup. Early afternoon. Tilda called hospital, but no one would say how he is. You have to be family or nobody wants to talk to you. But I still thought you would want to know.”
“I do. I did. Thank you, Mr. Rembrowsky, and I’m so sorry you waited out in the heat....”
He straightened up and piled the mail on top of her grocery sack. “You just tell me when you find out news, okeydoke? And if there’s something we neighbors can do, you say.”
“Okeydoke. I promise.” She hustled up the sidewalk, shifted everything so she could unlock the back door, then swiftly jogged in and dropped all the debris on the counter in her yellow-and-white kitchen.
Inside, the air conditioner was wheezing and gasping like a four-pack-a-day smoker, but at least it was working—for now. Like most homes in the neighborhood, her two-story frame house dated somewhere around the turn of the century. On the plus side, the rooms had personality and character and unique little architectural features. On the minus side, every appliance in the place had a capricious personality. Greg’s theory was that she needed to get tougher and show the appliances who was boss.
Again her heart squeezed tight at the thought of Greg injured, and she quickly grabbed the phone book and searched for the hospital’s number. Once she dialed and was stuck waiting for someone to answer, her gaze peered outside.
Her kitchen window overlooked his kitchen window. The distance between houses was a mere fifty yards, but the economic chasm between them might as well have been miles. Her rental house mimicked most structures in the respectable-turned-shabby neighborhood. Greg’s elegant Victorian house, though, was the exception, and stood out like a treasured castle with its manicured lawn and wrought-iron balconies and gleaming casement windows. Why he lived alone in the big old white elephant, Rachel hadn’t yet figured out—but over the last couple years, she’d spent countless hours in that house. They’d had dinner in his kitchen two nights ago. Cripes, she’d shared a cup of coffee with him just that morning.
Finally someone at the hospital answered. “Hello, this is Rachel Martin. I’m inquiring about a patient—Greg
Stoner—I believe he was brought in this afternoon after a car accident...” Swiftly she crossed her fingers. “Oh, yes, of course I’m a relative. That’s exactly why I’m asking—I just heard about the accident, and I’m his sister—”
The lie slipped out smoother than butter. Thankfully Leo had mentioned the hospital’s unwillingness to give out patient information to anyone who wasn’t kin. Greg had kin—retired parents in Arizona, a brother working for some company in Japan—but there was no one Rachel knew how to contact. If she wanted immediate answers on Greg’s condition, she had to find some way to get them on her own.
And the fib worked—at least claiming to be his sister successfully got her transferred to another hospital floor. But then she was put on hold. And then transferred to yet another floor. One could interpret all this monkeying around as great news, she told herself. If they were moving him around, he was obviously alive, right? And he couldn’t be in too bad a shape or he’d be immobilized in ICU. Yet her fingernails drummed a worried rhythm on the old yellow linoleum counter.
It seemed like she was stuck on hold for hours this time. A dozen memories of the lumbering, gentle giant flashed through her mind. She’d met Greg two years before, the day she’d moved into the neighborhood. He’d stopped by to welcome his new next-door neighbor. She’d nearly bitten his head off.
It hadn’t been exactly her best day. Mark had just announced that he’d discovered “true love” with the bimbo. Rachel knew nothing about divorces then, had no idea you weren’t supposed to leave the marital home—or the savings accounts—unarmed and undefended. She’d never lived anywhere but her hometown of Madison, but she’d impulsively taken off for Milwaukee because it seemed
best. She didn’t want to live in the same town as the cheating creep, and had craved a distance from her overprotective family, as well. This house was the cheapest rent she could find, at a time when even cheap was too expensive for her. She had no job, no money, an ego in shreds and a life in shambles. She never planned to trust another man as long as she lived.
She’d never planned on trusting Greg, either. But tarnation. He’d given her absolutely no choice.
“Ms. Martin?”
Finally a live body answered at the other end of the receiver, but the call proved worthless. Greg was still “undergoing tests.” His condition was labeled “serious.” No one would say exactly what his injuries were, or when he’d be settled down in a room and okayed for visitors.
Rachel heard out all the hospital rules, hung up, jammed the ice cream in the freezer and then simply hurled out of the house again for her car. Never mind their rules. Never mind anyone’s rules. Greg had put her pieces back together when she thought she was too broken to mend. It wasn’t his fault that he was one of the Enemy Species with that unfortunate Y chromosome. He was still the best friend she’d ever had—and nobody was going to stop her from seeing him.
Naturally St. John’s was one of the oldest hospitals in the city, which naturally meant it was way downtown, which naturally meant she had no idea how to get there. She knew where to shop, how to locate the art and entertainment centers, could find Rudy’s—the die-cast company where she worked as an engineering secretary—in her sleep. But Milwaukee’s industrial section was a tangle of tanneries and foundries, railroads and shipping canals. Roasting hops from the downtown breweries added an alien, bitter smell to the humid night air. Rachel never
had reason to become familiar with these inner-city neighborhoods—nor would she be driving them alone in the dark if she had a choice. Tonight, of course, she had no choice, but fear of getting lost only made her more anxious, and her tummy was already roiling with nerves.
By the time she was parked and galloping through the hospital’s entrance doors, though, that problem was forgotten and another one nipping on her mind. If anyone questioned her claim about being Greg’s sister, Rachel figured no one was going to believe her lie. Obviously lots of siblings looked dissimilar, but man, she and Greg were drastic opposites in physical appearance.
He was a hefty six foot three; she was five foot four—in heels. He had to tilt the scales past two hundred and fifty pounds, where she only weighed one hundred and ten if she wore a winter coat and clunky shoes. She was small-boned; he was a natural defensive end. Their personal styles were even more night and day. Greg often claimed that she looked like a younger Meg Ryan. That wasn’t true—he was just being a sweetie—but she did have the blondish hair and blue eyes, and people had been annoyingly labeling her as girl-next-door “cute” since she was six. Greg.. well. There was nothing wrong with his looks—nothing—but he wasn’t exactly the kind of guy who cared about his appearance. His jet-black hair was whacked off in a dorky style; his glasses were usually broken, and his clothes looked like something twenty years out of date—and lacked all claim to taste even then.
Still, as she started asking questions at the hospital’s front desk, no one seemed inclined to challenge her claim to be a relative. Possibly it helped that she looked so pitiful, with her limp hair straggling to her shoulders and her wilted suit and the run in her stocking. Who’d go out in public looking so wasted if they didn’t have to? Cripes,
she hadn’t even stopped to put on lipstick. But it wasn’t as if Greg would ever care or notice what she looked like. The only thing that mattered was finding him.
Questions eventually led her up one set of elevators, then down a mile-long hall, where she searched for room 315. Her spirits lifted just knowing he’d been settled in a regular room. At least he wasn’t in surgery or worse. Maybe he was just a little battered up, she tried to reassure herself.
Only, her heart stopped when she poked her head through the doorway of room 315. The room looked like a clone of all the others—a mutated melon color, linoleum too ugly to wear out, inescapable antiseptic smells. It wasn’t that bad. It was just the usual two-bed hospital room...and only the far bed by the window was occupied.
But the occupant in that bed was a long, long way from just “a little battered up.”
She would never have recognized Greg at all, if it weren’t for a glimpse of jet-black hair and the lumberjack shape under the sheets. She tiptoed closer with her heart in her throat. Bandages completely covered his face, except for a narrow strip around his eyes. He was connected to tubes all over the place. There was some kind of contraption affecting his jaw and neck. His left arm was raised on a pillow and immobilized in a splint.
“Hey.”
Rachel almost jumped when she heard his voice. He was lying so still that she feared he was unconscious. But the kindest blue eyes in the universe had suddenly opened to half slits and looked drug-dazed. His normally strong tenor was barely a cracked, strained whisper.
“Hey, back.” She plastered on her cheeriest smile and touched his right hand. She was afraid to touch anything else. She didn’t want him to know how frightening he
looked. “You can go right back to sleep, Stoner. I’m only going to stay a minute. I just had to know for sure how you were. And I’m not positive you should even be trying to talk—”
He motioned to the constraining bandages affecting his jaw. “I can talk—because nothing hurts. They just dosed me up with morphine. But I can’t seem to speak any louder or clearer than this mumbling...and I guess I’ll be eating dinner out of a straw for a while. Don’t look so scared, Rach. Everything’s mendable. I’ll be fine.”
Rachel wanted that promise in blood from a doctor. “This is a heck of a way to get time off work, you lazy slug.”
“You know me. Any excuse to loll around.”
Yeah, she knew him. He lumbered around with his glasses askew and a chronic distracted air, looking like the stereotype of a bumbling, absentminded professor. But it was so easy to misjudge Greg based on his appearance. The neighbors all camped out on his doorstep whenever there was a community problem, because he was just one of those people who quietly stepped up and took charge.
She’d learned that—firsthand—the day she moved in. Unfortunately there was no denying that she’d been a mortifying disaster that afternoon. The thing was, she’d married Mark with the foolish, naive idea that marriage was forever, and discovering his relationship with the bimbo had emotionally leveled her. She’d taken off with a wild hodgepodge of belongings. A lamp, but no table to put it on. A mattress, but no bed. Her grandma’s sacred red-velvet antique love seat, but no silverware. A few dishes, but nothing she could boil water in. Greg had asked if he could help her carry things. She’d snarled out a no.
He’d chosen to ignore her and simply started toting
things in, making trip after trip for no thanks. Eventually it became obvious—even to her—that a puppy could have packed better than she had. For all the stuff she’d mounded together, she lacked even the basics to get through a single day. She didn’t have a broom, didn’t have a spoon. And when she realized that she’d been so stupid as to even forget shoes—plenty of clothes, but no shoes beyond the pair on her feet—she’d plunked down on the porch steps and cried. Greg had plunked next to her and doled out tissue, as if coping with a rude, fruitcake neighbor having an out-of-control crying jag was nothing unusual in his day.
Looking at his white-bandaged face now made her feel fierce and angry. He’d been there for her so many times. She wanted to shoot whoever had done this to him, strangle them with her bare hands, do something. Not just because she owed him, but because she loved the big lug. “Are they giving you enough pain juice in those tubes?” she asked lightly.
“Too much. My head’s in la la land. You don’t have to stand there, Rach, sit...”
“I’ll sit. For a minute. But I can’t believe you need company for long. And I should probably confess that I’m not supposed to be here. I lied and told them I was your sister, so don’t blow my cover, okay?”
“Okay, sis.”
She wanted to chuckle. Even with the strange, strained sound of his voice, she could hear the hint of his dry humor. Through blizzards and power outages and crises, she’d never heard Greg lose his sense of humor. “I want to ask you how the accident happened, but I’m not still convinced that you should be talking. I don’t understand exactly what kind of bandage contraption they’ve got around your jaw, but if it hurts you to talk—”
“It doesn’t hurt. Nothing hurts. Like I said, I’m in poppy heaven. I just can’t open my mouth very far. I think they wired my jaw, but I was really out of it a few hours ago and I’m honestly not sure exactly what anyone was doing to me in the E.R.”
She scooched a chair closer. “So you think your jaw’s broken. Your arm, too?”
“Yeah, for sure on the arm. They just haven’t set it yet. It was too swollen. The bone guy’s supposed to come back and take a look still tonight.... Rachel?”
“What?” His sudden hesitation, the way he said her name, made her quickly surge forward with alarm. “What can I do? Do you want water? The nurse?”
“No. I’d just feel better to get this said—you may not recognize me when this is over. There was a plastic surgeon in here earlier, too. He was pretty frank about the injuries to my face. He made out like they’ll be rebuilding from scratch. Could be my days of being a handsome hunk are over.”
Rachel felt her heart clamp in a painful fist. She wanted to say the right thing, whatever would help him most, but she just didn’t know what that was. Although the gauzy bandages completely concealed his expression, she could see those steady blue eyes searching hers. And he was joking about the “handsome hunk.” Once Greg had wryly described himself as a fade-in-the-woodwork kind of guy. He was a comptroller, so it wasn’t like he needed to be a GQ fashion plate. And since he chose the geeky haircut and dated clothes and never seemed concerned about the extra thirty pounds, Rachel had just assumed that looks didn’t matter to him. Once she’d come to love him as a friend, she never thought about his physical appearance one way or another.
But she did now. This was way, way different. Maybe
Greg didn’t have a vain bone in his body, but facing a drastic change in appearance was still a terribly unnerving thing to cope with. If he had to deal with scars, that was more disturbing yet. Although they’d never been the touchy-feely kind of friends, again she reached for his hand and loosely laced her fingers with his. “You know, if you get a new face, you could be even more drop-dead handsome than you are now.”
“Well, hell. You think that’s possible?”
She grinned. “Hopefully not, because I’m not sure I could survive living next door to that big ego, Stoner. With any luck, they’ll let you keep a few scars, though. I don’t know what it is about scars, but they either seem to appeal to a girl’s pirate or bad-boy biker fantasy. You’ll probably have to beat the women off with a stick.”
“Not that. Not a fate worse than death. And how come I had to reach the vast age of thirty-two before I heard this interesting fact of life? Maybe you’d better explain some more about that biker fantasy—”
There was a hint of devil in his eyes, enough to make her chuckle. “Forget it. Women only tell those fantasies on a need-to-know basis. And you don’t need to know anything else from me—particularly since I couldn’t care less what you look like one way or another—but now you’ve got me thinking about this. Hey. You get a whole new face out of this deal? Where do I sign up?”
“Sheesh. Bite your tongue. You’re cuter than Meg Ryan now. No way you ever need to touch that face.”
“If you feel good enough to flirt, you can’t be too bad off, Stoner. But we have to get serious, because any second now some nurse is bound to walk in and kick me out. I’m trying to think of what you need done.” Rachel foraged in her purse for her checkbook—since she didn’t have a pad of paper—and a pen. “All right. Now you
know I have a key to your house, so I can do the obvious stuff—close the windows, take care of perishables in the fridge, get your mail—”
“I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”
“Don’t be a goose. Look at all the stuff you did for me over the last two years.” She ripped off a deposit slip, clicked on her pen and started to make a to-do list.
“Yeah, well, you didn’t know a screwdriver from a hammer two years ago. But...if you don’t mind, I’d appreciate your calling my work. Monica.”
Monica Kaufman was the CEO where Greg worked as a comptroller, Rachel already knew. “Sure thing. And how about your parents? I don’t know if you can make a long-distance call from a hospital room like this. You want me to call them?”
His eyes closed, as if he’d suddenly dropped off, just like that. But then he spoke again. “No. I need to contact them, if only so they know where I am. But they’re both getting older, and I don’t want to give them a shock or a scare if I don’t have to. I’ll find a way to call them myself—but not until I know from the docs exactly what’s going to happen.”
He still hadn’t opened his eyes. She hesitated. “Greg, I don’t want to stay, even another minute, if there’s any chance you could fall asleep and really rest—”
“I’m not sleeping. It’s just the drugs. I seem to keep zoning out and then somehow my mind starts replaying the accident....”
“You want to talk about it, get it off your chest?”
Outside the door, carts wheeled by, nurses called, the loudspeakers kept snapping out codes. But inside Greg’s room it was another world, a quiet, private world that only included the two of them. Their fingers had been loosely threaded together, but now his grip tightened until the heat
of his palm nested in the heart-bed of hers. “I was in the old MG, not the Volvo. On I-94 in the middle lane, just driving back to work after lunch. That’s all. Nothing weird. Only this truck ahead suddenly blew a front tire and he was swerving everywhere, all over the road.. and so was everyone behind him, trying to clear out of his way. I was the peanut butter between a Cadillac and an Explorer. My MG squished like a pancake. Lucky.”
He wasn’t through talking, but his voice was losing power, sounding increasingly syrup-thick and slow. She leaned forward, clasping his hand more snugly. She’d never held hands with Greg—there’d never been even a teensy problem with male-female chemistry between them—and she felt embarrassed at her sudden awareness of his big fingers and maleness and the electric feeling of connection. Naturally, though, her emotions were nerves-sharpened. He was painfully describing how lucky he was to even be alive.
“Three other cars were in the same smash-up. At least nobody was killed. Took the Jaws of Life to get two of us out of our cars. I don’t even know where all the glass came from. The back of the one truck, maybe. But it was the glass that cut up my face—could have my eyes so easily. And I kept hearing this little girl—she was crying. Rach? Will you find out how she is for me?”
“I’ll ask, Greg. I promise.”
“She was crying so hard, I told myself she had to be okay. I mean, nobody could bawl that loud if they weren’t basically pretty strong. But find out, okay? She was so little.”
It was so typical of Stoner, worrying about others. “I’ll get an answer. But in the meantime, I think I should leave and you should rest. Only, before I come back tomorrow, can you think of some things you need me to bring? I
assume you want your own toothbrush, but I don’t know if you can use one if your jaw’s all wired up—”
“Believe me, I’ll find a way to use one. If I can’t brush my teeth, I’d have to commit hara-kiri. So yeah, I really would appreciate that.”
“And you probably want your own pajamas—”
“Um, Rach. I don’t do pajamas.”
“Oh. Well.” She could feel a flush blooming on her cheeks and wanted to kick herself. At twenty-nine years old—and having been both married and divorced—it was downright ridiculous to fluster up at the idea of a man sleeping naked. Particularly when Greg was just a friend. “Well, with all those bandages on your face, I don’t think you’ll be needing a razor for a while. I’ll bring some books and magazines, but there must be something else I can do.” Abruptly she snapped her fingers. “I know what.”
“What?”
“Your sacred lawn. All life would end if it didn’t get mowed by Saturday, wouldn’t it? So I’ll get your grass cut. I won’t manicure it like you do, but consider this is an offer I wouldn’t make to even Mel Gibson. Even Brad Pitt. We’re talking a true test of how much I love you, neighbor. Now...what else could be worrying you?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, something else may cross your mind, but I’ll come back and visit tomorrow after work. You can make a list if you think of anything else.”
His hand clutched hers just for a second longer, and then loosened. “Rach—thanks for coming.”
“No sweat.” But once she stood up, Rachel couldn’t just leave. He looked so alone in that bed, so isolated behind the wall of bandages. And though he had dozens of friends, right then she felt like the only family he had.
There was simply no way that she could walk out of that room without expressing support and caring in some concrete, physical way.
So she bent down, but finding a spot to kiss him was almost a humorous challenge. His face and brow—and really, most of his head—were wrapped in white gauze. The only uncovered spot was his mouth.
His lips were naked, warm, soft. She snapped her head back up. Instantly. Not because she suddenly, inappropriately, felt her pulse buck and bolt—but because all she intended was a kiss lighter than the stroke of silk. Anything else risked hurting him. Anything else risked...well, this was Greg. Not just a good man, but a true hero of a friend. Rach would die if he misunderstood any gesture from her.
“All right, you,” she said firmly. “I’m outa here. But I want you to behave yourself until I come back tomorrow—no seducing the nurses, no playing football in the hall, no wild drinking parties, you hear me? And I’ll be in tomorrow right after work.”
She made it outside in the hall, out of Greg’s sight, before abandoning the cheerful smile and leaning weakly, sickly, against the wall. God. All those tubes. All those bandages. Sure, it could have been worse, but there was no question in her aching heart that he was lucky to be alive.
Without talking to a doctor, she had no idea what his prognosis really was. Or what be had to face ahead. The only thing Rachel felt sure of was fiercely wanting to be there for him.
Whatever it took to get him on his feet again, she was more than willing to do.
