Jennifer Greene - Kiss Your Prince Charming

Temporarily he couldn’t wince—but he wanted to. “You call that a dream? I call it a nightmare. I’d rather have chicken pox than shop. I’d rather eat liver. Hell, I’d rather do anything.”

Rachel perched a hip on the bed and pulled the hospital tray table between them. A deck of cards appeared in her hands. “Well, from the goodness of my heart, I’ll help keep your mind off your troubles. You prepared to lose the rest of your life savings tonight?”

“Are you gonna fleece a poor, disadvantaged invalid again?”

“Yup. In fact, while you’re on this losing streak, I think we should up the ante to maybe a dime a game instead of just a nickel.”

“There goes my retirement,” Greg said plaintively, and was rewarded with her rich throaty chuckle.

Rach shuffled with the flashy style of a Las Vegas hustler and then dealt the cards. He cheated so she’d win—but no more than three out of four hands. If she won them all, Greg figured she’d guess something was fishy, particularly since he was a comptroller and should have had some skill with numbers.

His bumbling ineptitude didn’t seem to trouble her, though, possibly because she loved winning. And since he loved watching her win, Greg considered them even. Tonight, besides, he really couldn’t concentrate on the cutthroat canasta game.

His ribs still screamed when he laughed. The broken arm itched. And in the beginning, the bandages swathing his head had aroused his sense of humor—he did look like a mummy in training—but they also constricted his sight and movement and he was sick of them now. What the plastic surgeon had cut—and recut—on his face over the last weeks had involved constant bruising and swelling, and their rebuilding his jaw had been the worst. He couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, could never just let down and relax because there was always some kind of pain nagging at him.

But he forgot all that while Rach was here.

Thunder boomed outside. Rain slashed against the windows, running down the glass in silver ribbons. Against that black night, Rachel’s skin looked pearl-soft and luminous, like a treasure a man felt compelled to protect—even if her eyes were full of the devil and she was unrepentantly trying to sneak a peek at his cards. “Are you saving aces over there, Stoner?”

“Like I’d tell you.”

“I think you are.” Again she peered into his eyes as if she could see the truth there. “You know I’m at a disadvantage because I can’t see your face, when you can see mine. So I think it’s only fair that you give me a hint whether you have an ace or two.”

“Fair? Fair! You’re talking to a man who’s lost for four nights running. I’ll tell you whether I have aces when hell freezes over.”

She sniffed. “Okay. When you get home, I was going to make you a big fat steak on the grill with French fries, because I thought that’d taste good after all the meals you’ve had to drink from a straw. But if you can’t even give me a teensy little hint—”

“God. You play just like a girl. Sneaky. Manipulative. Making low-down blackmail threats—”

“Yeah. So what’s your point?”

He let out an exhausted sigh. “I have aces. Is that what you wanted to know?”

“Uh huh.” She promptly dispensed a deuce—and a female-rascaly grin at the same time.

They kept playing...but Greg’s mind couldn’t help spinning back to the day he’d met her. She was full of frisky sass now, but not that day. That afternoon she’d reminded him of a kitten drenched in a storm. Miserable, huddled into herself, eyes shell-shocked and lost—but just like a cat, she spit and clawed if anyone tried to help her. Particularly anyone male.

She’d been married to Mark for seven years.

Two seconds after meeting Rach, Greg was inclined to murder the guy—and he didn’t even know the whole story then. The details had drifted out over time. She’d still been wildly in love when her Sacred Mark walked out. She had no idea there was another woman in the picture. She had no clue there was even a problem. They hadn’t argued. He hadn’t complained. She was under the impression their sex life was superb.

From the start of the relationship, Rach had dropped out of college to put her True Love through school. Then she’d worked two low-wage jobs while the spineless jerk was getting around to sending out résumés. Her turn to finish college somehow never happened. Mark-O just had a lot of needs—like the right clothes and wheels suitable to a certain status, then the right house in the right neighborhood, and naturally he couldn’t sacrifice any fishing or hunting trips with his pals.

Greg figured that Rach had had plenty of clues early on. She just hadn’t wanted to see that her Sacred Mark was a selfish, immature jerk. Actually, to a point, Greg didn’t think that particularly mattered. If she loved the guy, then she did.

But what killed Greg—what fried him upside and down the other—was that the son of a bitch had broken her heart. Mark had obviously been the only guy she ever loved, ever knew intimately. His chasing another woman had the same effect as ripping the heart right out of her. The day she’d moved next door, she’d had nothing—a checkbook with a couple hundred dollars, no job, no plans, and a little rented U-Haul heaped with impractical, sentimental junk that she couldn’t even sell, much less wear or eat.

Greg had never felt it happen before. His heart, doing the slam-bam-alakazaam thing. His hormones, suffering instant delirium His nerves, trying to electrocute him with the lightning-bolt voltage.

Of course she wasn’t for him. Greg recognized that right off. Look what happened when King Kong pined after the blonde. When Romeo started moping after a Capulet. When Bogart got obsessed with a married woman in Casablanca. When a guy fell in love with an mappropriate woman, nothing ever followed but a heart-gashedin-two and disaster. There was love and there was love. If you had the wrong kind, best you bite the bullet, shut up and just try to value what you did have.

“I’m out.” Rachel—the fragile, withdrawn, vulnerable woman he’d fallen in love with—snapped down her last card and then wiggled her fingers. “Gimme, gimme, gimme. Thirty whole cents. Am I good or am I good? You might as well admit it, Stoner. I buried you. I trounced you deep. I beat the pants off you.”

“You’re the worst winner I ever met, ” he grumbled, and dug in the bedside table for his wallet. “You ever hear of the word humble?”

“What’s to be humble for? I won, I won, I won.”

He couldn’t grin because of the bandages. He couldn’t laugh because of the sore ribs. But he wanted to do both. As he forked over her thirty cents, he savored how much she’d changed from two years ago. For a while, Greg had his doubts she’d ever recover from the blows that creep had inflicted on her.

One of the rehab staff—a buxom nurse named Maeve—cocked her head through the doorway. “Well, if this isn’t typical. Visiting hours are over. The whole floor’s quieted down. All my good patients are behaving themselves. And then there’s you two.”

Rachel chuckled, but she also swiftly scooched off the bed. “I’m sorry. And I promise, I’m leaving right away.” The nurse had barely disappeared before she added to Greg, “I’ll give you a chance to earn back the loot tomorrow.”

“You’d better,” he said with the tone of the longsuffering.

With a cheeky grin, she started searching for her shoes and found them lying cockeyed under the chair. “You know what?”

“What?”

She pushed on the shoes, then grabbed her trench coat. “Every day you’ve sounded stronger, Greg, but tonight was the first time that you really, really sounded like yourself. I realize you’re not quite ready to climb K-2, and those bandages still make you look like one of those Egyptian pharaoh mummies. But I think they just might let you out of here soon.”