Still, as she started asking questions at the hospital’s front desk, no one seemed inclined to challenge her claim to be a relative. Possibly it helped that she looked so pitiful, with her limp hair straggling to her shoulders and her wilted suit and the run in her stocking. Who’d go out in public looking so wasted if they didn’t have to? Cripes, she hadn’t even stopped to put on lipstick. But it wasn’t as if Greg would ever care or notice what she looked like. The only thing that mattered was finding him.
Questions eventually led her up one set of elevators, then down a mile-long hall, where she searched for room 315. Her spirits lifted just knowing he’d been settled in a regular room. At least he wasn’t in surgery or worse. Maybe he was just a little battered up, she tried to reassure herself.
Only, her heart stopped when she poked her head through the doorway of room 315. The room looked like a clone of all the others—a mutated melon color, linoleum too ugly to wear out, inescapable antiseptic smells. It wasn’t that bad. It was just the usual two-bed hospital room...and only the far bed by the window was occupied.
But the occupant in that bed was a long, long way from just “a little battered up.”
She would never have recognized Greg at all, if it weren’t for a glimpse of jet-black hair and the lumberjack shape under the sheets. She tiptoed closer with her heart in her throat. Bandages completely covered his face, except for a narrow strip around his eyes. He was connected to tubes all over the place. There was some kind of contraption affecting his jaw and neck. His left arm was raised on a pillow and immobilized in a splint.
“Hey.”
Rachel almost jumped when she heard his voice. He was lying so still that she feared he was unconscious. But the kindest blue eyes in the universe had suddenly opened to half slits and looked drug-dazed. His normally strong tenor was barely a cracked, strained whisper.
“Hey, back.” She plastered on her cheeriest smile and touched his right hand. She was afraid to touch anything else. She didn’t want him to know how frightening he looked. “You can go right back to sleep, Stoner. I’m only going to stay a minute. I just had to know for sure how you were. And I’m not positive you should even be trying to talk—”
He motioned to the constraining bandages affecting his jaw. “I can talk—because nothing hurts. They just dosed me up with morphine. But I can’t seem to speak any louder or clearer than this mumbling...and I guess I’ll be eating dinner out of a straw for a while. Don’t look so scared, Rach. Everything’s mendable. I’ll be fine.”
Rachel wanted that promise in blood from a doctor. “This is a heck of a way to get time off work, you lazy slug.”
“You know me. Any excuse to loll around.”
Yeah, she knew him. He lumbered around with his glasses askew and a chronic distracted air, looking like the stereotype of a bumbling, absentminded professor. But it was so easy to misjudge Greg based on his appearance. The neighbors all camped out on his doorstep whenever there was a community problem, because he was just one of those people who quietly stepped up and took charge.
She’d learned that—firsthand—the day she moved in. Unfortunately there was no denying that she’d been a mortifying disaster that afternoon. The thing was, she’d married Mark with the foolish, naive idea that marriage was forever, and discovering his relationship with the bimbo had emotionally leveled her. She’d taken off with a wild hodgepodge of belongings. A lamp, but no table to put it on. A mattress, but no bed. Her grandma’s sacred red-velvet antique love seat, but no silverware. A few dishes, but nothing she could boil water in. Greg had asked if he could help her carry things. She’d snarled out a no.
He’d chosen to ignore her and simply started toting things in, making trip after trip for no thanks. Eventually it became obvious—even to her—that a puppy could have packed better than she had. For all the stuff she’d mounded together, she lacked even the basics to get through a single day. She didn’t have a broom, didn’t have a spoon. And when she realized that she’d been so stupid as to even forget shoes—plenty of clothes, but no shoes beyond the pair on her feet—she’d plunked down on the porch steps and cried. Greg had plunked next to her and doled out tissue, as if coping with a rude, fruitcake neighbor having an out-of-control crying jag was nothing unusual in his day.
Looking at his white-bandaged face now made her feel fierce and angry. He’d been there for her so many times. She wanted to shoot whoever had done this to him, strangle them with her bare hands, do something. Not just because she owed him, but because she loved the big lug. “Are they giving you enough pain juice in those tubes?” she asked lightly.
“Too much. My head’s in la la land. You don’t have to stand there, Rach, sit...”
“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