That was a relief. “How ’bout her face? It didn’t look good.”
Plum turned his attention back to the chart. “Plastic surgery isn’t my specialty.” He shook his head. “I’m not optimistic. Some serious damage to her left cheek and the wound is ragged. They’ll do their best, I’m sure.”
Jay exhaled. He’d been afraid of that. “Any chance I can see her?”
“Not now. They’re just taking her up to surgery. The OR has been going full blast all night.”
The next day he tried to call Kim, but the telephone operator reported Miss Lydell wasn’t accepting calls. No visitors either. He sent flowers and included his phone number on the card.
But he didn’t hear back.
That was okay. She’d probably gotten hundreds of flowers from her fans. Jay was just another guy with a crush on her.
He didn’t even mind the guys at the station razzing him about rescuing the prettiest woman in town, at least not much. He’d been doing his job. That’s all any man could ask of himself.
And he’d do it all over again in a heartbeat if it meant keeping Kim Lydell safe.
KIM HAD STOPPED answering her door four months ago, right after she’d come home from the hospital. Isolated from the world, she’d been content with books to keep her company and her amateur efforts at sculpting clay to express her artistic nature. It wasn’t that she was vain, although she’d always taken pride in her appearance.
Despite the doctor’s best efforts, her scars hadn’t healed properly. Her fair complexion meant every jagged line showed even with heavily applied makeup—which only made her look like a wax reproduction, as though one side of her face ought to belong to a macabre clown.
No, she didn’t answer the door any longer.
Except whoever was out there now was damn persistent.
She slipped quietly to the window and eased back the curtain. The house she’d so proudly purchased when she’d first landed her job at KPRX-TV was small but secluded, perched on a hilly five acres covered with California live oaks. From her porch on a clear day she could see the sunset on the Pacific through a notch in the coastal range.
Unfortunately, a man now occupied that porch and he wasn’t one to give up easily.
She sighed. From her days of reporting local news, she recognized Paseo del Real’s fire chief, Harlan Gray. She couldn’t ignore him.
Opening the door, she stood back so he couldn’t see her clearly through the screen.
“Chief. What brings you out this way?” As far as she knew, no wildfire was about to burn over the top of the ridge. And she’d cleared the brush from around her house per local regulations.
He took off his hat, revealing a head of almost white hair that he kept neatly cut in a butch. “Good morning, Miss Lydell, it’s good to see you.”
“Is it?” Not everyone would think it a pleasure to look at her these days; certainly looking in her own mirror was a less than pleasant experience.
“I wonder if I could come in?”
“I’m sorry, Chief. I’m afraid I don’t entertain much these days.”
“I see.” Idly, he fingered his cap. “Well, then, did you happen to hear about the explosion at the plastics plant a few days ago?”
“I rarely watch the news any more.” It was too much of a reminder of the career she’d strived so hard to achieve and then had lost.
“One of my finest men was injured in that explosion. He’d given his helmet to a victim he was trying to get safely out of the building and some glass containers blew up on his face.”
“I’m sorry.” She was. Truly. But she was barely coping with her own disfigurement. How could she possibly help—
“The young man was blinded—the glass cut the corneas of both his eyes. We think the blindness is temporary but the doctors can’t be sure.”
Blinded. Guilt gave her a sharp jab to her conscience. She’d been so devastated by her own problems, she sometimes forgot others were far worse off. “I am truly sorry, but I don’t understand why—”
“The young man is Jay Tolliver. I think you may remember him.”
It was almost as if the fire chief had struck her. The air left her lungs; her knees went suddenly weak. Fate had played an odd trick on her to have the boy—now a full-grown man—on whom she’d had a huge crush in high school be the one to rescue her after the earthquake. She’d known as an adolescent, as she knew now, it was not a relationship she’d ever be able to explore. Not because in the past she hadn’t cared. But because he’d barely acknowledged her existence. And now it was too late.
When she didn’t respond to the chief’s revelation, he said, “Jay tends to be a little macho. He’s out of the hospital but he won’t let any of us help him. He’s got this burr under his saddle that makes him want to be independent, even if it kills him. Almost literally. He’s determined to do everything he’s always done, despite the fact he can’t see.”
“I don’t see how I could—”
“Miss Lydell, after the earthquake Jay talked about you for days—even when his buddies gave him a hard time about it. If he would accept help from anyone, it would be you.”
Panic shot through her like a thousand-volt current.
She couldn’t! The fire chief was asking too much of her. For months she’d only gone out of the house to doctors’ appointments and then only when wearing dark glasses and a scarf to cover as much of her face as possible. Not that the medical profession had done her much good. Everything else she needed, she ordered by phone to be delivered. As much as she might like to help Jay…
She began to tremble. Dear God, she couldn’t! The thought of anyone seeing her. Pitying her. Or more likely being revolted by her appearance was too much to bear.
“I’m sorry….”
“He needs someone, Miss Lydell. I’m afraid—”
She shoved open the screen door and stepped out onto the porch. Into the afternoon sunlight. It took all of the courage she possessed to lift her face so the chief could get a good look. She had to make him understand so her own guilt wouldn’t rest so heavily on her shoulders.
“Do you really think anyone who looks like I do could help anyone else?”
Unflinching, she waited while the chief studied her.
“He’s blind, Miss Lydell.” He spoke quietly, persuasively, as a father would. “I don’t think he’ll care.”
Chapter Two
What in the name of heaven was the man doing?
Shortly after noon on the day of the chief’s visit, Kim pulled her car up to the curb in front of Jay’s house. It was a small wooden structure in a neighborhood of modest homes, each one featuring a porch with a swing perfect to enjoy on a warm summer evening. The front yard boasted a postage-stamp lawn, which Jay was now mowing.
Mowing with a power mower that was spewing exhaust and cut grass out the side.
Either Chief Gray was wrong about Jay being blind, or Jay was totally crazy. Not that he didn’t look thoroughly macho in his cut-off jeans, his legs muscular and roughened by dark hair, and a cropped stenciled T-shirt that revealed a washboard stomach. Just the thought of running her palms over that hard expanse of abdomen made Kim shiver. The reflective dark glasses he wore and a few healing cuts on his cheeks took nothing away from the sexy image he created.
Her