He walked in to find her carrying a tray with a bottle of wine and cut up sandwiches.
“If I’m going to have my way with you again later, you’ll need to keep your strength up.”
She was smiling as she spoke. Her face was bare of makeup, her hair long and loose. She’d dressed in jeans and a blue T-shirt and her feet were bare.
He stopped where he was just to look at her, to take in her radiance, to feel the life pulsing through her. Then he crossed the room, took the tray from her, put it on the coffee table and pulled her into his arms.
When they surfaced from the kiss, she continued to hang on to him. “You do have a way with greeting people. Not that I would encourage you to do that with the other women in the hospital. They would be throwing themselves at you constantly and that would make it hard to work.”
“Yes, it would.”
She laughed.
His cell phone rang.
He didn’t want to answer it. For once, he didn’t want to be called to the hospital for an emergency, didn’t want to help or heal or… He swore and pushed the talk button.
“Bradley.”
“You sound grumpy,” a cheerful Alistair said.
Simon relaxed. “I’m busy. Go away.”
Alistair chuckled. “Ah, yes, the ever present American overexuberance. Who is she?”
He glanced at Montana, who wasn’t bothering to pretend she wasn’t listening. “Someone special.”
“A girl?”
“A woman.”
“Better and better,” Alistair told him. “Would I like her?”
“Yes, but you can’t have her. I’m hanging up now.”
“Give her a kiss for me.”
“Not a chance.”
“A friend of yours?” Montana asked when he’d hung up.
“Yes. Alistair. I’ve known him for years. He’s a surgeon, as well. We’ll be in Peru together.”
He drew her close and kissed her. “He’s handsome, witty and British. You’d like him.”
“I like you better.”
He kissed her again, released her and reached for the wine. “Your mother came to see me earlier.”
Montana froze, her eyes wide. “Why?”
“She brought me food.”
“Oh. Good. She’s like that. You didn’t tell her, did you?”
“No.”
“Not that I mind her knowing. Sort of. I don’t know. The whole sex-parent-child situation confuses me. I don’t want to know if she’s doing it, and I suspect she feels the same way about me.”
“I didn’t tell your mother what we’d done.” He poured red wine into two glasses, then handed her one.
“I don’t usually drink wine at three in the afternoon.”
“I wish I could say the same,” he joked.
“Ha. I knew you were the bad boy type.”
“Not until I met you. I was pretty boring and studious as a kid.”
She sank onto the sofa. “I guess I need to tell you something.”
She sounded worried. That should have concerned him, but this was Montana. Nothing she could say would shock him.
He sat across from her and leaned forward. “Go ahead.”
“I know what happened to you. The scars, I mean. Someone told me.”
He’d been expecting some sort of confession, not this. His first reaction was embarrassment. No one liked admitting they had been so unlovable as a child that their own mother had set them on fire. Only there wasn’t a “them.” There was him.
“I was a smart kid. Scary smart. I never fit in. Skipping a lot of grades meant I was always the youngest in the class. That didn’t help either.”
He leaned back on the sofa. “My mother wasn’t one who enjoyed working for a living. She preferred to find a man to support her. Something that wasn’t so easy with a freaky kid around. When I was eleven, her boyfriend was kind of a weasel. I don’t know exactly what he did for a living, but I’m sure it was illegal.”
He took a sip of the wine, more as something to do than because he wanted to taste it. “He complained that I was always staring at him, which wasn’t true. When I was home I knew to keep my head down. One day they had a big fight and he walked out. On the way he said I was the main reason he was leaving. My mother was already drunk and she started screaming at me. Crying and screaming.”
He kept telling the story as if it belonged to someone else, as if relating a movie premise. He didn’t want to remember that this had happened to him.
“She threw a couple of things across the room. My schoolbooks, I think. I went to leave but she grabbed me by the front of my shirt and shoved me hard. She told the police that she didn’t mean for me to fall in the fire, but she did. There was no screen, nothing but burning logs.”