Lady Be Bad (13 page)

The tempo of their rhythm increased until
Marlayna crossed that elusive boundary and was propelled into
exquisite nothingness. A momentary standstill of time that suddenly
exploded into a million fluttery pulsations. Seconds later, Noah
joined her. His urgent cry shattered the night. He erupted inside
her and, with a pleasurable groan, collapsed on her breast.

His arms held her prisoner until his own
trembling stopped. Then Noah rolled onto his back, taking her with
him. He pressed her head into his shoulder, his legs sliding
intimately between hers, relishing the silken smoothness of her
body against his heated flesh. "I won't…I could never leave you
again."

Lifting her head, Marlayna stared at him.
The rosy glow from the dress-shrouded lamp failed to soften the
agony that was etched on his features. Hot tears pricked her eyes.
She was as confused now as she had been six years ago. "Why did you
leave me, Noah? I think it's time for me to know."

Gentle fingertips blotted the moistness from
her cheeks. "I don't know where to begin," Noah faltered, "…or how.
I want to make sure you fully understand everything that happened.
Why it had to happen just that way."

Marlayna snuggled up, rested her cheek
against his and interlaced their fingers. "Start at the beginning.
Our fight that awful morning …"

"Had nothing to do with it. I cleverly
turned it to my advantage." He rubbed a weary hand over his face.
"The accident is the real place to start. There were eight of us
working that morning. We were carefully bringing down the east
brick wall on the Devon warehouse. And I stress the word
carefully.
Suddenly, the whole damn thing collapsed. Tumbled
like a house of cards. Bob, Cliff and Nate just disappeared under a
wave of mortar, rubble and dust that ended up swamping the other
five of us."

Noah was silent for a moment, thinking about
the men he had worked side-by-side with for six years. "And then, I
was drowning. I couldn't get any air. Couldn't move. Couldn't see.
Couldn't feel. A thunderous roar kept ringing in my ears. So did
all the screams." He felt her fingers tighten on his.

"The next thing I remember is an overhead
light blinding me. I was in the hospital emergency room. The pain
was unbearable. I couldn't breathe. Nurses and doctors were
yelling. Needles were being jabbed in my arms. An oxygen mask was
slapped on my face. Nothing anyone said made any sense at all. And
then, blessedly, everything stopped."

"Stopped?" Marlayna echoed. Her usually
smooth forehead creased into three vertical lines. "Oh, you mean
they put you under? Gave you something for the pain?"

He shook his head. "No. Mimi, I died." Noah
heard her horrified, strangled gasp. "Hey…" his tone was light,
teasing. "It wasn't bad. At that particular moment, I welcomed it.
Instant relief. It was Heaven."

"Oh, Noah, I never knew. They never told
me."

"Shhh." His arm slid around her shoulder to
give her a comforting hug. "I know, love, I know." He forced
himself to continue, to sound calm and easy. "Listen, Dr. Pierson
was not about to have a mortician steal his fee. He put up one
helluva fight over me and Pierson won. Then he busied himself with
the real work.

"I had six broken ribs, one punctured lung,
internal hemorrhaging from a ruptured spleen and, last but not
least, two crushed legs. The legs were the worst, Mimi. The legs
were why I had to divorce you."

Noah stilled her lips with his finger.
"Please, honey, let me just get through all of this." He took a
deep breath and continued. "Surgery took care of the lung and
spleen. But despite being loaded with antibiotics, the legs
developed an infection in the crushed bones. Pierson called in an
orthopedic team, but unfortunately all the second and third
opinions agreed with the first: If they couldn't clear up the
infection and stop gangrene from setting in, both legs would have
to be amputated. And even if my legs could be saved, they all
agreed, I'd never walk again.

"Being a semiconscious patient was a unique
experience," he added with a wry twist to his lips. "They shot me
full of drugs to deaden the pain, stuffed me with tubes, wired me
into various electronic medical machines and then, they wrongly
assumed that I was unconscious.

"But I wasn't. I could hear every word that
was said. Groups of doctors and nurses would come in, read the
chart and discuss me. Talk about future operations. Banter back and
forth about new medical techniques in development. Then the talking
dwindled, heads shook, shoulders shrugged, and pity would replace
hope.

"Pierson proved to be the most honest of all
the doctors. He laid my choices on the line. That line was damn
thin. I was the one who had to make the decisions, Mimi. Not only
for myself but for you as well. To be honest, the only choice I had
was to go it alone."

Marlayna picked her words with care. "How do
you figure that, Noah? Didn't we promise to love in sickness and in
health?" She came up on one elbow and looked down at him. "I'd like
to think that if our positions had been reversed, you would have
been there for me."

His hand caught her chin. "That was my
biggest problem. I knew you'd be there for me. I knew you'd stand
by me at the gates of hell. And I didn't want that for you."

"Maybe you just didn't want me to
wheel
you to those gates." Her anger was simmering. "You
weren't just a body to me, Noah. Do you think I married you just
because of your legs? That I'd leave you because you couldn't
walk?"

"No, dammit, and that's exactly why I had to
leave you." His finger made a gentle tap on the tip of her nose.
"Don't think I was being foolishly macho, either. What I did, I did
totally out of love for you."

"Love?" She pulled away and sat up, tucking
the pink quilt under her arms. "I'm not sure we share the same
definition of that glorious word. Maybe for you, love is just a
physical act. Maybe you equate love with sex. Is love only good,
only perfect when the person is perfect? The body is whole?"

Noah stared at Marlayna's bare back, heard
the tautness in her voice. He wasn't explaining himself well at
all. He cleared his throat and hoped his answers would match his
feelings. "Love isn't something you can see. It's an abstract
emotion. Sex is much more absolute and visible, especially for a
man. I'll admit that during my callow youth, long before I ever met
you, the word
love
flowed off my tongue quite easily, with
no meaning whatsoever.

"Then, one day, all that changed. You
happened. I wasn't interested in a quick score and an even quicker
getaway, I wanted to share more with you — all the sensuality and
all the tenderness that was buried deep within me not just in the
physical act of love but in the day-to-day joys and sorrows, hopes
and dreams."

He sat up and put his arms around her,
pressing her trembling body tightly against his chest. "I was a man
lying to myself about living a full life. I was just going through
the motions until you came along. I knew right from the beginning
that I would always be more dependent on you than you were on me.
You completed me.

"I envied you. Truth be told, I was very
jealous of you. You were always the strong one, Mimi. You handled
everything and you did it all superbly. When the accident happened,
I was forced to make a decision. I was forced to be strong."

Her face rested on his forearm. "And you had
to send me away to get your strength?"

"In a way, yes." He laid his cheek against
her hair. "My reasoning may seem a little convoluted, but at the
time I thought I had the perfect solution. As I told you, Dr.
Pierson was very honest about my prognosis, and learning that I was
going to be a cripple at best was shattering to both my ego and my
manhood. I will admit, I wallowed in self-pity. Cursed the doctor
who gave me back my life. Life?" A cruel laugh twisted the word.
"What kind of life was I going to have? I was a prisoner of my
body."

Marlayna's hand smoothed the coverlet that
shielded his legs. "I could have made things easier for you. I know
I could have …"

"No. It would have been harder. For both of
us. I couldn't chance watching your love turn to pity, then hate."
Noah's tongue moistened his dry lips. "There were other factors in
my decision, too."

"Like what?"

"Money. We always lived from one paycheck to
the next. What didn't go for normal living expenses went for your
schooling and my college loan. The operations, medicine, therapy,
care and equipment I was going to require went beyond the medical
coverage at work. It went beyond any dollar amount I ever dreamed
about.

"I knew you too well. I knew that you would
work two or three jobs. That you'd work yourself to death to pay
the bills. I didn't want that for you. I couldn't watch you die for
me. So, I decided on a course of action that would be the best for
both of us."

"Divorce." Marlayna couldn't disguise the
bitterness in her voice.

"Dammit, Mimi, don't you see it was my only
choice? No one could have touched you. You would be safe from the
creditors."

She twisted around and stared at him. "We
could have discussed it. You could have talked to me, explained
yourself." She swallowed hard, and whispered, "you had never done
anything to hurt me, Noah. You had never been cruel. But on that
day …"

"On that day, I had to be cruel. I took all
the anger, all the pity, all the facts and decided to set you free.
It may have been foolish, but at that time, in that place, under
those circumstances, I felt I had made the right choice. The
prospect of losing you was even more disastrous than losing my
legs. But watching you wither and die trying to care for me and
keep up with the bills, of seeing your love turn to resentment and
anger. . . well, that I just couldn't do."

His fingers caressed her damp face, knuckles
gently stroking the soft curve of her cheek. "I didn't dare see you
again. I couldn't take the chance on losing my courage and letting
you talk me out of my decision. The argument that we had played
right into my hands.

"I told Dr. Pierson that we were separated.
That I had absolutely no interest in seeing you. That you had only
come out of guilt that you were no longer a part of my life. I'm
not sure whether he believed me or not, but he went along with
it.

"He helped me find a lawyer and quickly
started all the wheels in motion. I didn't want you to have any
association with me, including the same last name. I was afraid
that you'd be dunned for money, maybe even have your wages
garnisheed."

"Your lawyer was very thorough," Marlayna
recounted. "He was also obnoxious, rude, disgusting, demoralizing,
crude, horrid."

Noah's lips consumed the rest of her words.
"He played his role perfectly." He kissed her again, longer,
deeper, more passionately. His hands stroked the tension from her
back and shoulders, kneading the soft, supple skin. "I don't know
how I ever had the strength to send you away." Pushing the bed
linen to one side, he held her tightly, loving the feel of her full
breasts snuggled into his hair-roughened torso.

"I wished you hadn't." She playfully tugged
a lock of his hair. "I should have stormed into your hospital room
and demanded that you tell me to my face that you wanted a divorce.
Then we wouldn't have lost six years of our life."

He nipped her shoulder. "Six years.
Sometimes it seemed like an eternity, other times like a blink of
an eye. But, honey, I'm glad you weren't with me, because I wasn't
the same man." At her quizzical expression, Noah gave her a twisted
smile. "Time to tell you part two of my story.

"Dr. Pierson and the orthopedic team did
what they could for me in Atlanta and then shipped me off to a
variety of hospitals including the Mayo Clinic, Columbia Medical
Center, an orthopedic hospital in California, and every major
therapy center in the country. I've got metal and plastic joints
and wires in my hips, knees and legs and hundreds of other
replacement parts I don't even know the names for. I agreed to be a
guinea pig for every product in development.

"I spent most of the years trapped in casts.
And…" Noah averted his eyes, "also during that time, I was heavily
doped with drugs. Morphine, Demerol, Valium, whatever would make me
more comfortable, whatever would make me a more cooperative guinea
pig, they shot into me."

Her thumb and forefinger caught his chin,
bringing his face back on level with hers. "But you defied them
all. You are walking again and free of drugs."

"Very free."

She flashed him a wicked grin. "Apparently
those mega-million-dollar knees of yours work very well, at least
with a mattress beneath them."

"Hmmmm. I guess they did just lose their
virginity in a very successful debut. Two years of physical therapy
put them through assorted tests but none quite like that. I just
began using the cane full time about nine months ago, Mimi. Before
that, Perkins would help me navigate my wheelchair around the
castle."

"How did you end up here with Arthur
Kingman?" Came her quick inquiry.

"While I was going through four years of
operations and therapy, I finished my architectural studies and
passed my exam. I stayed at that rehab hospital Los Angeles for
nearly eighteen months and was lucky enough to meet an architect
who was volunteering his free time working with patients. He let me
apprentice with him and I started doing some freelance assignments.
One of them was designing a house for a chemist who worked for
Kingman Cosmetics.

"He raved about my work to his visiting boss
and Arthur came to see me about the castle. It seemed to be the
perfect solution. I could use my skills in remodeling this place,
practice with my cane and have a place to live with good old
Perkins providing food, minimal care and companionship. And I
started looking for you."