“But you did?”
She laughed at the notion. “Sometimes I felt as helpless as if I was the infant, only there was no one to give me the answers or take care of me. I’ve been struggling to stay one step ahead of him ever since.” Without meaning to, she stepped closer. “He’s my own son and I can’t even understand what he’s saying half the time. I’ve got two months to figure out what’s best for his future and I’ll do whatever it takes to help him.”
“You must be desperate if you’ve decided to center your plan around me.”
“I am.” She didn’t think she’d realized just how much was at risk before she’d met him.
Abby had expected him to be different. But dealing with Robbie had made her believe that she could deal with different. She’d known she would be asking a lot of a man whose solitary life wasn’t exactly a secret, but for her son’s sake she’d been willing to try.
But this awareness of him had caught her completely by surprise. She told herself it was a result of her attempts to find out about the man behind the brain, but there seemed to be something more basic, more dangerous, about her reaction to him. And she was very much afraid it had nothing to do with his mind.
Abby might not know much, but she knew anything deeper between them was out of the question. She had enough problems without allowing another superhuman into a life that was already too far from ordinary. Besides, if her husband had thought she was stupid, she could only imagine what Jeremy would think of her.
He’d turned to tend the mysterious concoction he was brewing, remaining silent for a long stretch of time before responding. “For the sake of argument, let’s just say that your frivolous teen years did contribute, marginally, to the difficulties you’re facing now. Exactly what are you hoping to learn? Calculus for beginners? Quantum physics in twelve easy lessons?”
“I want to find out about you.”
His head bolted up. “You want to study me? What kind of aberration do you think I am?”
She stepped closer, only the counter separating them. “I think you’re a man who looks at a rainbow and sees sunlight reflecting through little drops of water.”
“Refracting,” he corrected.
Abby shrugged, conceding the point, believing her own had just been made. “I see a spray of reds and blues and greens floating across the sky. I wonder what I’d do with a pot full of gold.”
He looked bewildered by her response.
“I bet you fall asleep by adding columns of numbers in your head,” she challenged.
“If I’m lucky.”
Abby wondered what kinds of problems and anguish would keep a man like him awake. If they were anything like the nightmares that sometimes woke Robbie, they must be doozies. “You have experienced the kind of things Robbie is going through. You understand things I will never comprehend.”
Jeremy stared deep into the murky brown liquid in front of him, no longer seeing the mixture’s progress. Dear heaven, it was worse than he’d imagined. She did see him as a freak. Maybe they should put him in a cage and let children throw candy at his head.
Worse yet, when he looked across his kitchen at the stunningly beautiful woman observing him, his thoughts weren’t the least bit cerebral. Desire was strong and real, and completely unacceptable.
“So you’d like to make me into your own personal guinea pig?”
“Of course not. I just want to ask you some questions, see what makes you happy, what you would have done differently if you’d had the chance.”
She wanted to know what he would have done differently? He thought of the series of accidents and mistakes that had shaped his life. But the past didn’t matter. Not even the most brilliant minds in the world had figured out a way to turn back time.
However, the future still waited for Robbie and others like him. Jeremy had once thought he could make a difference. He’d been wrong.
She seemed to mistake his brooding silence as a sign to continue. “If I’m going to enroll Robbie in the fall, I haven’t got much time, so it wouldn’t require much of a commitment from you,” she explained, clearly having thought this out completely. “You wouldn’t have to do anything, really, just be yourself and tell me what it’s like.”
“Is that all?” he asked dryly.
“Well, I suppose it might be a bit of an inconvenience from time to time. I figured, with all I have to learn, that I might have to be here quite a bit.”
A bit of an inconvenience? He supposed that was one way of looking at things. “What possible reason would I have to agree to such an undertaking?”
“I understand that I’m asking a lot of you, but I’m not asking you to do it for free.”
“You’re planning to offer me a stipend for invading my life and dissecting it into little pieces?”
“Well, actually, I wouldn’t be able to pay you, but I would be willing to trade services. Your talents in exchange for mine.”
Because she was beginning to intrigue him, he made his expression purposely leering. “That’s an interesting proposition. What exactly are your special talents?”
She gave no indication that she noticed his double meaning. “I’ll clean your house for you.”
“You’ll do what?” he blurted. Her offer was the last thing he expected—or maybe the second to the last. The thought of her cleaning was almost too incredulous to be true. With those delicate features, dainty hands? “Sure you will.”
“That’s what I do. After my husband left, I discovered I didn’t have the schooling to get a job good enough to support us. I was a waitress for a while. You’d be surprised by the kind of money you can make just serving people food.”
Looking at her, Jeremy wasn’t surprised at all. He imagined people would throw money at her to keep her coming back.
“But waitressing caused me to be away from Robbie too long and too late. So now I clean people’s houses. It’s the perfect solution. I can make my own hours and be around for Robbie. I can work anywhere, there’s always somebody who needs help, and I’m good at what I do.”
He could see that she’d given it a lot of thought, but he couldn’t believe she’d chosen a path others would consider subservient. “What about your husband? Didn’t he provide support?”
“I didn’t want the strings he attached. He wanted me to send Robbie to boarding school, said he had the right to make the decisions if he was going to pay. I wasn’t going to send my son away.” She seemed to dare him to disagree. “We’re doing fine on our own. I started out with only a few houses, but the business grew so much that I hired a whole fleet of other women to work with me. One of them is taking care of the company until I get back. If I have to leave Pittsburgh permanently because of Robbie, she wants to buy it from me.”
She was serious. She was offering to do menial labor in exchange for his opening his life to her prying eyes. She had to know that if he had required domestic assistance he would have arranged it, yet she’d made the suggestion anyway, obstinately going after what she wanted in a way he could almost admire. He pictured the way she had examined his house so curiously before and realized her interest might have been more professional than personal, but that didn’t change the facts. Like the rest of the world, she saw him as nothing more than a mutant specimen.
“Why me?” he couldn’t help but ask. “There are a lot of smart people in the world. Most of them are better-adjusted than I am.”
“You worked with kids. I figure you saw what worked, what made them fulfilled and happy.”
“Not always,”