Suddenly (32 page)

Noah answered the door wearing a sweatshirt and sweatpants, with his round, wire-rimmed glasses perched on the bridge of his nose and a pencil between his teeth. He took one look at her, tossed the pencil aside, and hauled her in by the arm. “Brilliant,” he declared, as he swung the door shut. “Absolutely brilliant.” He pulled off her hat and mittens and set to picking at the zipper of her parka through the snow that had crusted there. “What in the world possessed you to run all the way out here?”

“Don’t know,” she said through chattering teeth. She was shifting from one foot to the other, too cold to stand still but unable to undress, which was fine, since Noah was doing it for her. “It wasn’t conscious. I just ran. My feet took me here.”

He had freed the tab of the zipper and was tugging it down. She turned from one side to the other to free her arms from the parka. Then she held his shoulder when he knelt to pull off her sneakers. “This’ll all melt in your hall,” she warned.

“Fine. I need an excuse to resand the wood. Do you know how much snow’s out there?”

“They kept plowing. It wasn’t so much.”

“It’s twenty-two degrees out. And you’re wearing these skimpy running pants.” After tossing aside the second sneaker, he took her hand and led her up the stairs and through the bedroom she assumed was his to the bathroom, where he turned on the shower. While he waited for it to heat, he pulled off her turtleneck jersey, then her running pants. He muttered a pithy oath when he saw her legs, which were bright red from the cold. When steam had begun to fog the door of the shower, he opened it and shoved her inside, underwear and all.

The warmth was heavenly. Paige’s muscles ached. Her skin stung, then tingled. She held her face to the spray, turned, and let it pour over her head. Parts of her body that had been numb began slowly to revive. With the increased sensation, she pulled off her underwear, dropped it in a corner, and returned to the full force of the spray.

She was thinking that she might just stay in Noah’s shower forever when the door opened and he joined her. His glasses were gone, and his clothes, but it seemed the best thing to happen to her that day. Without a second thought, she wrapped her arms around his neck.

If there was a birthday gift to be had, this was it. She had been wanting him forever, it seemed, and the waiting only enhanced the pleasure she felt. She was tingling now from the inside, all the more so when he circled her hips and lifted her so that their mouths could meet.

Their kiss was as wet as the shower. Paige lost herself in it and in the kisses that followed, each one sweeter, deeper, more consuming—and frustrating. For every kiss, every touch, she needed more. She strained closer, moving her hands through his hair and over his skin, craving the kind of possession for which her dreams had left her wanting.

Taking her weight on his thighs, he braced her against the shower wall, touched her breasts and swallowed her cries, and still it wasn’t enough. She was feeling desperate, feeling that if she didn’t have more, she might die. That was when she felt his entry.

The scraping glide, the fullness, the sense of every loose end of her life coming together, touched off a million tiny explosions inside her, and that was before he began to move. When he did, she could only catch her breath and hang on. Her body shook in a trail of orgasmic shocks, one dovetailing the next, never quite ending but going on and on and on.

She was gasping against his ear, trembling in the aftermath, when she realized that he was rock still and hard all over. She drew back, wiped the water from his face, and, with a hand on his cheek, met his eyes. They were as hard as his body, but hot and hungry.

“I can’t finish,” he ground out, “until I put something on.”

“No need,” she whispered. She slid off him and took him between her hands, and while she gave everything she could to his mouth, she stroked him below. It didn’t take long. He was as primed as she had been—from dreams? she wondered, but didn’t ask. That would have involved confessions and deeper discussions than those she was prepared to hold. Rather, when he came with a long, guttural cry, she held him until he could breathe again, then bathed him, then let him towel her off and lead her to his bed.

She was thinking how beautiful his body was, how well proportioned and manly, and that she wanted him again. But when he should have slid under the covers and taken her in his arms, he simply perched on the sheets, punched out a phone number, and looked at her while he waited for the other end to ring.

“Hey, Nonny, it’s Noah. Paige is here.” He listened. “She’s fine. I’m just warming her up.” He listened more, then asked, “Any problem if she spends the night?” He listened a final time. “Sounds good. We’ll see you then.”

Paige didn’t move.

Looking at her all the while, he hung up the phone and said, “It’s time we stop fooling ourselves. Something’s going on between us, and I don’t know as it’s pure lust.” His mouth curved. “But I’m willing to explore the pure lust theory for a while.”

He reached for her as he slid under the covers, and if she had objected to anything he had said or done, she would have promptly forgotten. The coming together of their bodies was like nothing she had ever experienced. It was so strikingly new and special, so provocative, so incendiary, that to deny it would have been to deny her very existence.

The exploration was slower this time. It was a hand here, glancing over skin and through hair. It was a tongue there, tracing and taunting, dancing away when the arch of a body sought more. It was the visual study of a tactile response and the seductive effect of a word, a hum, a sigh, and the joint rise of breathing and need until only completion would do.

This time they climaxed together, then lay for a long time, reluctant to move. A sweet lethargy owned Paige’s body. She felt warm and safe and incredibly at peace.

Noah stretched against her. He kissed her forehead and said in a crusty male voice, “When I applied for this job, the trustees asked me about my morals. They were concerned because I was single. Seeing how it’s isolated up here. And the sweet young locals are always hungry for fresh meat. Wonder what the board would say if they could see me now.”

Paige grinned against his chest. “I’m not a sweet young local. I’m a doctor. And this is the very first time I’ve come here.”

“Why did you?”

She raised her eyes. “Nonny didn’t tell you that?”

“Tell me what?”

She settled in again, running her thumb over the hair that trailed down the center of his chest. It was darker than that on his head, the color of warm maple against his skin. “It’s my birthday. I figured I deserved a treat.”

“Your birthday. No kidding?”

“No kidding.”

“Did Nonny bake a cake?”

“No. Mara was always the one who did that. Last year she made a monstrosity of a cake, brought it into the office, and set it up in the waiting room where everyone who walked in could take a piece.” She fell quiet, thinking of Mara, feeling lonely to be growing older without her.

Noah’s arms tightened. The comfort was welcome, but it didn’t divert Paige’s thoughts. After a time she said, “She had a way of making everyone happy but herself. She was like the clown who was crying inside. So sad. Something I don’t ever want to be. So when I started feeling sorry for myself this afternoon—because the snow had spoiled my plans, and Nonny was cross with me, and my parents hadn’t called—I went out for a run. And ended up here.”

He ran his hands through her hair. It was a lulling gesture. When she hummed her pleasure, he kept at it. Within minutes she was asleep.

*   *   *

Noah dozed, but not for long. He had no desire to sleep away as intense a pleasure as Paige Pfeiffer. For a time he just looked at her, studying her features as she slept, savoring the curl of her body against his, the swell of her breast, the sweep of her thigh. In time he kissed her, because to be near her this way and not do it was painful.

She came slowly awake, saw him, and smiled.

“You’re tired,” he whispered.

“Not that tired,” she whispered back.

“Hungry?”

“Starved.”

“Can I make you a birthday dinner?”

Paige found the thought of that eminently pleasing. “Sure. If you want.”

“I want,” he said, but he made no move to leave the bed. Instead he came over her and kissed her eyes, her nose, her mouth. Then he kissed the tip of her chin, then under it, then her throat, then the pulsing spot at her neck. The pulsing picked up as he worked his way down her body, over her breasts, her ribs, her belly, until she was a writhing mass of nerve ends waiting to connect, and when they did, when his tongue brought her to a release as no man ever had, she was too scattered to realize it.

But later, after he had indeed left the bed and prepared her the most simple, most kind, most delicious birthday dinner she could have wanted, she knew that something special had happened. She had tasted something, a nameless something that threatened to upset the order of her life as neither Mara’s death, nor Sami’s arrival, nor Nonny’s moving in had yet.

One part of her wanted to run as fast and far as she could, but she didn’t move. She stayed in Noah’s bed, made love with him over and over through the night, and when he drove her home the next morning through the winter wonderland that Tucker had become, she let him kiss her a final time.

“This isn’t over,” he warned as though reading her mind.

She didn’t answer. There were too many things she had to think about, not the least of which was sitting in a high chair with mashed banana all over her face when Paige walked in the door. When Sami gave her a mucky grin and said through the mess, “Ma-ma-ma-ma-ma,” Paige wondered if there was a conspiracy afoot. They were trying to snag her by the strings of her heart and tie her down.

She was thinking that she was going to have to steel herself by immersing herself more deeply in those other things that made up her life, when the hospital called to say that Jill was in labor.

Peter called out to Paige as she ran down the hospital corridor, but she simply held up a hand and was gone. So he continued on to the office. Angie was really the one he wanted to talk to anyway.

He caught her an hour later, between patients. “Got a minute?”

She tucked her stethoscope in the pocket of her lab coat and motioned him into her office. “What’s up?”

“I need your opinion on a patient.”

“Who is it?”

“Not one of ours, just someone I helped at the hospital after the accident. It’s a thirty-four-year-old female in otherwise good health. She was in the balcony and fell clear of the worst of the debris, but she landed on her lower back. X-rays show a lapse in the spinal cord between T-twelve and L-one. She was a questionable red-code at the time. They considered flying her out, but since it appeared to be an isolated spinal injury and there were so many other patients with multiple injuries, they kept her here. She’s had repeated CAT scans. The initial swelling responded to the drip they gave her, but she can’t move.”

“Not at all?” Angie asked.

“Not from the waist down. She doesn’t have any sensation. No pain. No pressure. No tingling.” Peter had done his own little tests when he’d seen her. “The neurosurgeon has been in and out. He says it’s a done deal. Paralysis. I want to know if he’s right.”

“Was this Mike Caffrey?”

Peter nodded.

“He’s good,” Angie said.

But Peter hadn’t liked his bedside manner. At a time when she had no one at all with her, he had bluntly told Kate Ann that she would never walk. Peter had come in hours later and found her in tears. He couldn’t help but feel bad for her.

“What do you think about the case?” he asked Angie.

“I’m not a neurosurgeon.”

“But you remember every detail of every rotation you did, and you know the neurosurgeon’s bible by heart. Should I call in a consult, or is it a done deal?”

She thought for a minute. “The CAT scan says there’s no swelling?” He shook his head. “But she has no feeling at all?” He shook his head again. Sympathetically she said, “Then it doesn’t look good.”

That was what he was afraid of. Too much time had passed with no physical response to suggest that movement might return on its own. “What about physical therapy?” he asked.

“Is that what they’re suggesting?”

“They’re not suggesting much. The poor woman is lying there all alone, day after day, not knowing what in the hell’s going on.”

“Does she have family?”

“Nope.”

“Friends?”

“Nope.”

“She was at that concert all alone?” Angie asked in surprise.

Peter sputtered out a facetious half laugh. “Yeah. That’s the joke of it. She’s the quietest, shiest woman in the world, but she happens to love Henderson Wheel. She’d never been to a rock concert in her life before this. It took every bit of her courage to buy the ticket, much less show up.” Not that anyone had taunted her. Peter had asked. In the midst of the music and the lights and the beat, she had simply faded onto her paid seat in the balcony, which was largely the story of her life. Even now she lay in her hospital room, quiet, undemanding, and nearly invisible. Peter didn’t know how anyone couldn’t feel sorry for her.

“Physical therapy,” he said, hauling his mind back on track. “Will it do much good?”

Angie shrugged. “It’ll develop and strengthen the muscles in her upper body. It’ll keep her lower body limber so that she can handle it better, and if there is a return of sensation, she can capitalize on it. Will it fix what’s been broke? No.”

Peter ran a hand up the back of his head. “That’s what I thought.” He swore softly. He had no idea what Kate Ann was going to do. Neither did she—and she wasn’t dumb, by a long shot. He was fast coming to understand that. She knew what she faced.

“The Spinal Cord Center in Rutland is a good one,” Angie suggested. “Or the Rehab Center in Burlington. If she’s willing to go to Springfield or Worcester or Boston, she’ll have even more to choose from.”

Peter knew all that. What he didn’t know was how she was going to pay for the care that she needed. She didn’t have medical insurance, hadn’t been able to afford it.