Abilene had had enough. And she said exactly that. “Enough.” She closed her files and ejected her memory stick.
“Excuse me?” came the deep voice from behind the screens. He sounded vaguely amused.
She shot to her feet. Upright, at least she could see the top half of his head—the thick, dark gold hair, the unwavering gray-blue eyes. “I waited a very long time for this. But maybe you’ve forgotten that.”
“I’ve forgotten nothing,” was the low reply.
“We were to have started at the beginning of last year,” she reminded him.
“I know when we were scheduled to start.”
“Good. So have you maybe noticed that it’s now January of the next year? Twelve months I’ve been waiting, my life put virtually on hold.”
“There is no need to tell me what I already know. My memory is not the least impaired, nor is my awareness of the passage of time.”
“Well, something is impaired. I do believe you are the rudest person I’ve ever met.”
“You’re angry.” He made a low sound, a satisfied kind of sound.
“And that makes you happy?”
“Happy? No. But it does reassure me.”
He found it reassuring that she was totally pissed off at him? “I just don’t get it. There’s such a thing as common courtesy. You could at least have allowed me to finish my presentation before you started ripping my work apart.”
“I saw enough.”
“You saw hardly anything.”
“Still. It was more than enough.”
By then, she just didn’t care what happened—whether she stayed, or whether she threw her suitcases back into her car and headed home to San Antonio. She spoke with measured calm. “I would really like to know what you were doing all year, that you couldn’t even be bothered to follow through on the fellowship you set up yourself. There are kids out there who desperately need a center like this one is supposed to be.”
“I know that.” His voice was flat now. “You wouldn’t be here now if I didn’t.”
“So then, what’s up with you? I just don’t get it.”
Unspeaking, he held her gaze for a solid count of five. And then, bizarrely, without moving anything but his arms, he seemed to roll backward. His torso turned, his arms working.
He rolled out from behind the massive desk—in a wheelchair.
Chapter Two
A wheelchair.
Nobody had mentioned that he was using a wheelchair.
Yes, she’d heard that he’d had some kind of accident climbing some snow-covered mountain peak in some distant land. But that was nearly a year ago. She’d had no clue the accident was bad enough for him to still need a wheelchair now.
“Oh, God. I had no idea,” she heard herself whisper.
He kept on rolling, approaching her down the endless length of the room. Beneath the long sleeves of the knit shirt he wore, she could see the powerful muscles of his arms bunching and releasing as he worked the wheels of the chair. He didn’t stop until he was directly in front of her.
And then, for several excruciating seconds, he stared up at her as she stared right back at him.
Golden, she thought. He was as golden up close and personal as in the pictures she’d seen of him. As golden as from a distance, on a stage, when she’d been a starry-eyed undergraduate at Rice University and he’d come to Houston to deliver an absolutely brilliant lecture on form, style and function.
Golden hair, golden skin. He was a beautiful man, broad-shouldered and fit-looking. A lion of a man.
Too bad about the cold, dead gray-blue eyes.
He broke the uncomfortable silence with a shrug. “At least you’re no doormat.”
She thought of the apology she probably owed him. She really should have considered that there might be more going on with him than sheer egotism and contempt for others.
Then again, just because he now used a wheelchair didn’t mean he had a right be a total ass. A lot of people faced difficult challenges in their lives and still managed to treat others with a minimum of courtesy and respect.
She returned his shrug. “I have a big mouth. It’s true. And my temper rarely gets the better of me. But when it does, watch out.”
“Good.”
It wasn’t exactly the response she’d expected. “It’s good that I never learned when to shut up?”
“You’ve got guts. I like that. You can be pushed just so far and then you stand up and fight. You’re going to need a little fighting spirit if you want to have a prayer of saving this project from disaster.”
She didn’t know whether to be flattered—or scared to death. “You make it sound as though I would be doing this all on my own.”
“Because you will be doing this all on your own.”
Surely she hadn’t heard him right. Caught by surprise, she fell back a step, until she came up against the hard edge of the drafting table. “But …” Her sentence trailed off, hardly begun.
It was called a fellowship for a reason. Without his name and reputation, the project would never have gotten the go-ahead in the first place. The San Antonio Help the Children Foundation was all for giving a bright, young hometown architect a chance. But it was Donovan McCrae they were counting on to deliver. He knew that every bit as well as she did.
The ghost of a smile tugged at the corners of his perfectly symmetrical mouth. “Abilene. You’re speechless. How refreshing.”
She found her voice. “You’re Donovan McCrae. I’m not. Without you, this won’t fly and you know it.”
“We need to carry through.”
“You noticed. Finally.”
A slow, regal dip of that leonine head. “I’ve put this off for way too long. And as you’ve already pointed out, there’s a need for this center. An urgent need. So I’ll … supervise. At least in the design phase. I’ll put my stamp of approval on it when I’m satisfied with what you’ve done. But don’t kid yourself. If it gets built, the design will be yours, not mine. And you will be following through in construction.”
Abilene believed in herself—in her talent, her knowledge, and her work ethic. Yes, she’d hoped this fellowship would give her a leg up on snaring a great job with a good firm. That maybe she’d be one of the fortunate few who could skip the years of grunt work that went into becoming a top architect. But to be in charge of a project of this magnitude, at this point in her career?
It killed her to admit it, but she did anyway. “I don’t know if I’m ready for that.”
“You’re going to have to be. Let me make this very clear. I haven’t worked in a year. I doubt if I’ll ever work again.”
Never work again?
That would be a crime. She might not care much for his personality. But he was, hands down, the finest architect of his generation. They spoke of him in the same breath with Frank O. Gehry and Robert Venturi. Some even dared to compare him favorably to Frank Lloyd Wright. He blended the Modern with the Classical, Bauhaus with the Prairie style, all with seeming effortlessness.
And he