All he wanted was to feel normal again. He loathed the world passing him by, so that all he could do was watch it. Because inactivity left you with time to think. It left you feeling as if something was missing. He wanted to get back on the ski slopes. He wanted to pilot a plane again. He wanted the challenge of dangerous sports to fill him with adrenaline and make him feel alive again.
His mouth twisted as he levered himself off the bed.
‘Hand me my crutches, will you, Carly?’
She raised her eyebrows.
He gave a small growl. ‘Please.’
Silently, Carly handed them over and watched as he grasped them, straightening up to his full and impressive height. It still seemed strange to see a man as powerful as Luis needing crutches, but at least he was well on the road to recovery now. Almost unscathed, he had come through an accident the doctors said he’d been lucky to survive.
He hadn’t raced professionally for five years, but the lure of an enormous charity prize organised by one of the big car manufacturers had proved too much to resist. That, and an inbuilt arrogance that he was indestructible...and a nature which loved to embrace danger in its many forms.
She remembered the day it had happened, when she’d received the phone call to say he’d been rushed to hospital. Her heart had been racing as she had driven through the narrow country roads, reaching the accident and emergency department and fearing the worst, to be told that he’d been taken to Theatre and they weren’t sure how bad it was.
His entourage had been going crazy. There had been people rushing around all over the place and getting in the way of the medical staff. Security people. PR people. Diego, his swarthy assistant, had been dealing with the press, and his lawyers were busily engaged with threats of litigation, claiming that the racetrack had been unsafe.
Carly wondered if any of them had actually remembered that they were all there because a man was sick and wounded. And that was when her old pattern of wanting to care had kicked in. She had crept upstairs to the intensive care unit, where the nurse had let her sit with him and everyone else had been barred, on the grounds that any more excitement might hinder his recovery. She remembered thinking how alone he looked, despite all his money and success. There had been no family to visit. His parents were dead and he had no brothers or sisters. Carly had been the only one there for him.
All that night she had stayed put, holding his motionless hand and running her fingertips over it. Telling the unresponsive figure who dominated the narrow hospital gurney that he was going to be okay. But the experience had been a strangely powerful one. It had been a shock to see him looking so vulnerable and for a short while Carly’s feelings towards her irascible boss had undergone a slight transformation. For a while she had felt almost tender towards him...
Until he had started recovering and had become his usual arrogant self. She had been elbowed out of the way then, when the first of a long stream of women had arrived, all vying with each other in their tiny leather miniskirts—because everyone knew that the ex-world champion was turned on by leather. She remembered turning up at the ward one day to find a stunning blonde in thigh-high boots groping him under the bed-sheet. And Carly hadn’t bothered visiting again. She hadn’t seen him again until he’d discharged himself home against his doctors’ advice.
But she suspected that the accident had changed him, as she knew that near-fatal accidents sometimes did. Even though the house was vast, it had seemed overcrowded with his people mooching around the place, not sure what to do with themselves while their boss was recovering. And Luis had been even more bad-tempered than usual. He hadn’t liked people trailing in and out of his room to speak to him, saying that it made him feel like a dying king. Demanding peace, he had sent his entire entourage back to Buenos Aires—even Diego. Carly remembered their astonishment at being sent packing. And hers. Because once again, Luis Martinez really was on his own. Only this time, he was alone with her.
Emerging from her silent reverie, she realised that his eyes were trained on her and that he was waiting for the answer to a question which, in reality, was little more than an order.
‘Yes, I’ll do it.’ She sighed. ‘I’d better go and talk to Mary and get her to run over exactly what it is you need, though I don’t know why you couldn’t just have carried on paying for her to see you privately.’
She soon discovered why, when she found Mary Houghton in the garden room, staring rigidly out of the French windows at the rain-soaked gardens outside. The bright hues of the summer flowers looked like fragments of a shattered rainbow, but all Carly could see was that the physiotherapist’s shoulders were shaking slightly.
Was the cool Englishwoman crying?
‘Mary?’ she questioned gently. ‘Are you okay?’
It was a few moments before Mary turned round and Carly got her answer from the telltale glitter in the other woman’s eyes.
‘How does he do it, Carly?’ Mary questioned in a shaky voice. ‘How does he get usually sane women like me to fall for a man they don’t even like? How come he’s dumped me in the coldest way imaginable and I still end up thinking he’s the greatest thing since sliced bread?’
Carly tried to crack a joke, anything to lighten the atmosphere and to take that terrible look of pain from Mary’s face. ‘Well, I’ve never been a great fan of sliced bread myself—which is why I always make my own.’
Mary swallowed. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. Especially not to you. You work for him all the time—you probably deserve my sympathy, instead of me asking for yours.’
‘Don’t worry about it. You’re not the first woman he’s reduced to tears and you won’t be the last.’ Carly shrugged. ‘I don’t know how he does it, to be honest. I don’t think it’s calculated, or even intentional. He just seems to have that indefinable something which makes women go crazy for him. Maybe it’s inevitable when you’re that good-looking and rich and powerful and—’
‘Do you know,’ interrupted Mary, her voice suddenly urgent, ‘that I’ve never fancied a male patient before? Never. Not once. The thought had never even crossed my mind—though obviously not many men like Luis Martinez end up on the hospital wards. I can’t believe that I allowed him to see it.’ She bit her lip. ‘It’s so...so...unprofessional. And so humiliating. And now he’s asked me to go, and you know what? I deserve to be let go.’
Carly didn’t know what to say. She found herself thinking that things were rarely what they seemed. She’d always thought of Mary Houghton as cool and unflappable. She’d seen her as one of those composed Englishwomen who knew exactly what they were doing and where they were heading. And yet one lazy look from the smouldering black eyes of Luis Martinez and she was as jittery as a schoolgirl who’d just seen her pop-star idol in the flesh.
Carly looked at her. Maybe she should be glad of the hard lesson she’d learned all those years ago. Because didn’t they say that heartbreak was almost as painful as bereavement? And who in their right mind would want to be going through what the physiotherapist was clearly going through right now?
She looked at Mary. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
Mary pursed her lips together. ‘Oh, I’ll get over it. And maybe it’s all for the best. Maybe I’ll start dating that sweet young doctor who’s been asking me out for weeks, and forget about a man who’s famous for breaking women’s hearts. Now,’ she said briskly. ‘Let me show you what you need to do to get Luis back to full fitness.’
‘If you’re sure you’re okay?’
‘Carly, I’m fine!’
But Carly noticed Mary delving into her handbag for a tissue and that she blew her nose for a suspiciously long time afterwards.