Jennifer Greene - Kiss Your Prince Charming

“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—”