The Invitation

  “Jackie!”

  She wasn’t surprised to hear William’s voice, shouting for her with some urgency. As a child he’d been able to sense when she needed help. And no matter where she was, he could always find her.

  “Here,” she shouted up toward the ridge of the arroyo, but her voice didn’t come out as a shout. It sounded weak and helpless, as though she were a shadow instead of a real person. But William obviously heard her, for he appeared at the top of the arroyo, high above her head, stopping for a moment, his back to the setting sun, as he looked down at her.

  She had no idea how bad she looked until she saw William’s face. He was as pale as she felt. Glancing down, she saw blood all over her—on her shirtfront, on her trousers, and no doubt on her face—and her hand didn’t seem to be in any hurry to stop bleeding. An unending supply of fresh red blood seemed to be slowly making its way out of her palm.

  Jackie closed her eyes for just a moment, but it was long enough for William to make his way down the arroyo. As though he were far away, she heard him tearing down the hillside, rocks flying. Dreamily she smiled and wondered if the rocks were moving out of William’s way.

  “Jackie,” he said softly, “wake up. Do you hear me? Wake up.”

  “I’m not asleep,” she answered, but she felt odd, as though she were in her body yet not in it. “Haven’t we done this before?” she said, smiling. “Are you going to rescue me again?”

  “Yeah, kid. Hang on and I’ll get you out of here.”

  She smiled at his calling her kid. Charley used to call her kid. In fact most all men she came to know very well called her that at one point or another. She was vaguely aware of William moving about her. When she heard the sound of ripping cloth, she opened her eyes as wide as they would go, which didn’t seem to be very far. William was bare-chested, his broad chest covered with nothing but clean, smooth muscle, no hair on his chest to speak of, just that lovely warm-looking skin.

  “Listen to me, Jackie,” he said. “You’ve lost quite a bit of blood and you seem to be going into shock. I want you to concentrate and do what I tell you. You understand?”

  She nodded, smiling a bit, but she came alert when he quickly tied a tourniquet about her wrist, using strips of his torn shirt. There hadn’t been any pain before, but that thing hurt.

  “Does it hurt?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she answered, trying to be brave.

  “Good. The pain will keep you awake. Now I’m going to get you up and out of here so a doctor can stitch you up.”

  “It doesn’t need stitches. Really. It’s hardly a scratch. Just a little cut. A bit of tape will fix it.”

  “Coward,” he said, as he hoisted her over his bare shoulder and began the climb up the hill.

  Jackie thought that her entire body was the same width as one of his shoulders. She was coming out of her initial shock, and her hand was beginning to hurt. “If your father fires you, you can get a job rescuing damsels in distress. Of course, it will be hard on your wardrobe. William, aren’t I awfully heavy?” She practically purred the last remark, hoping he’d say that she weighed nothing at all.

  “Yes, you are. You look rather thin, so one would think you’d be light, but you’re not. You’re quite substantial.”

  What had she expected from a man who organized everything inside her kitchen cabinets by size? Whimsy?

  “You know, I can walk. I cut my hand, not my foot, and I’m feeling better now. If I’m too heavy for you, I should walk.”

  “No” was all William said.

  When he reached the top of the steep arroyo, she thought he would put her down, but he didn’t. Instead, he held on to her and walked back toward the house. She really was all right now, except that pain was shooting up her arm and beginning to fill her entire body. Her arms were hanging down William’s back, and there was so much blood on her hand that she couldn’t see the cut very well, but she told herself it wasn’t very deep. Surely it wasn’t deep enough to need stitches. She had always bled a great deal, hadn’t she? That was just a sign of her good health. In fact, she didn’t see any need to call a doctor. A little soap, a good tight bandage, and she’d be fine.

  As though he were reading her mind, William said, “Stitches and no argument.”

  With a grimace, she put her hand back down and stopped looking at it.

  Three hours later, stitched up, as she said, like a Hong Kong suit, and ensconced in bed, Jackie felt like an idiot. How could she have been so stupid as to fall down the side of a canyon?

  While she was contemplating her lack of intelligence, her bedroom door opened and William entered carrying a tray of food, which he placed over her knees.

  “Chicken soup, crackers, salad, lemonade, and chocolate pudding for dessert. Now eat and get well.”

  “Really, Billy, I am perfectly capable of feeding myself. Anyone would think I’d just had a bout of typhoid fever from the way you’re acting. I’m going to get up and—” While William watched with a knowing expression on his face, she pushed the tray away and started to stand up. Immediately she felt light-headed and dizzy. The back of her hand to her forehead like the Victorian dainty she felt like, she lay back down on the bed.

  “What were you saying? You’re not feeling bad are you, Jackie? It’s just a little cut, a mere twenty-six stitches, and the loss of enough blood to keep three vampires healthy for a month. So why are you in bed? Why don’t you take a plane up? Do a few stunts?”

  She was sure she deserved his sarcasm. After all, she had acted like a baby during the stitching. Young Blair had raced to her house, driving his father’s car as though it were a grounded airplane, and the moment Jackie saw him, she had started trying to talk him out of sticking needles in her skin. Young Blair—called that to distinguish him from his mother, also a doctor and also named Blair—had blinked at her a few times, but then he had looked at William as though for permission.

  “Stitch. I’ll hold her.”

  And that was what was done. Young Blair stitched while William held Jackie in his strong arms and soothed her as though she were an infant. He stroked her hair and asked her really dumb questions about airplanes. He seemed to be trying to make her angry or to make her laugh, or maybe he just wanted to distract her. To some extent he succeeded, for after the twentieth stitch, William’s constant questions, added to the pain, annoyed her to the point that she said, “William Montgomery, you don’t know anything about airplanes. You might as well have stayed with paper airplanes for all you know about flying. You have no talent, no feel for the machines or the air.”

  “Why won’t you enter the Taggie?” he shot back, taking advantage of what she was going through to find out what she refused to tell him.

  “Because—Oh! What are you using? A needle for stitching saddles? That happens to be my flesh you’re gouging.”

  Young Blair didn’t pay any attention to her as he continued stitching her hand. “Almost finished. This is a very bad cut, Jackie, and I want you to use your hand as little as possible for the next few days. I want you to give this time to heal. And that means no flying.”

  “But—”

  William cut her off. “I’ll take care of her.”

  “And who is going to take care of a youngster like you?” Jackie shot back, in so much pain that she didn’t care what she said or whose feelings she hurt.

  William didn’t seem in the least bothered by her nasty remark. “I’ve hired an eighteen-year-old virgin to change my diapers. Do you mind?”

  Jackie could feel her face turning red as she looked at Young Blair’s head bowed over her palm. He didn’t look up, but she could feel him smile. William had implied that she was jealous and that they were lovers—which of course was far from true. She wanted to explain to the doctor, but she couldn’t think of what to say.

  After the stitching was done and Jackie was at last free to rest her head against the pillows, she couldn’t help feeling annoyed that Young Blair had taken William aside and talked to
him as though he were Jackie’s husband or even her father. “Keep her quiet,” she heard Young Blair saying softly. “She’ll be okay in a day or two, but she’s going to need looking after until then.”

  “Of course,” she’d heard William say, as though it was understood that this young—very young—man would take care of her.

  So now William had prepared her a meal and was insisting that she eat it. “I’m not hungry,” she said, and even to her own ears she sounded like a whining child.

  William stood over her, looking down at her from his great height. “All right,” he said softly, “have it your way. I’ll call a nurse and pay her to take care of you for the next few days. I won’t impose myself on you further.”

  “I can take care of myself,” she said defiantly.

  “Can you?” He arched an eyebrow. “How are you going to wash your hair with one hand? I guess you could leave it full of dried blood. Of course you might attract flies, but what does that matter? You’re tough. You can take it. How are you going to feed yourself with one hand? There isn’t enough food in this house now to feed a goldfish much less a hungry female. I think I’d better call a nurse. I believe I heard that Miss Norton is free.”

  At that name Jackie paled. Miss Norton was every child’s nightmare of a nurse: big, strong, utterly unsympathetic. She had been born full-grown, with steel gray hair, wearing a starched white uniform and looking about fifty years old, and she’d never aged a day since her birth, which had to have been over a century before Jackie was born.

  “I…Uh…Couldn’t someone else come? Whatever happened to dear, sweet Mrs. Patterson?”

  “Some of the mothers in town figured out that that cough syrup she was giving the kids was straight whiskey. We suggested she might be happier in a town other than Chandler. You can put up with me, I can call Miss Norton, or you can find your own nurse. But one thing I won’t do is leave you here alone to take care of yourself. Not that you deserve my assistance after what you did to me today, but I cannot leave you here alone.”

  He cocked his head to one side. “What is your problem with me anyway, Jackie? Have I made an improper gesture toward you? Have I said anything to make you think that I have depraved intentions toward you?”

  “Nooooo,” she said, using what willpower she had to keep from blushing. Considering how much blood she had lost today, it was a wonder she could blush.

  “Then what is wrong? Do you think that I might make advances toward you? After all, as you constantly remind me, I am just a boy. How could a mere child like me do any of the things you seem to think me capable of? Besides, you’re an old woman, remember?”

  “Yes,” she said hesitantly. “I guess so. I mean, yes, of course.”

  “All right, Jackie, I’ll be honest with you. I’m a Montgomery, remember? Have you been away from town so long that you’ve forgotten the pride of my family? Do you think I’d try anything with a woman who has made it crystal clear that she can hardly bear the sight of me? Today you went to a great deal of trouble to show me that you wanted nothing to do with me. You showed me that you’d rather end a lifelong friendship than be around me. Do you know how you made me feel this afternoon?”

  “You were rather explicit on that point,” she said, trying hard not to remember all the things he had said to her. She had never felt so small as he had made her feel today.

  “Okay, so you made me feel bad, and I gave you some of your own back. You’ve made it clear that you don’t want me, that you never have, that I am and always will be a boy to you. So be it.”

  She was trying to read the expression on his face but couldn’t. Even as a boy, Billy had been unreadable. He’d followed her around, but she’d never understood whether he liked her or just thought of her as an oddity.

  “Right now you need help and it’s easy for me to give it. Young Blair said you could move your hand in about a week. I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll stay, or I’ll leave and hire someone else to take care of you, whatever you want. If I stay, it will be on terms of…”

  He smiled. “Remember all the times you baby-sat me? Maybe now I can return the favor. I’ll baby-sit you. Doesn’t that seem like a fair trade?”

  “I…I don’t know,” she managed to say. The entire right side of her body hurt, her hair itched, and she was extraordinarily tired. She didn’t want to make decisions now. She just wanted to be clean and to sleep.

  “Come on,” he said, reaching out for her uninjured hand and pulling her out of bed. “You can’t think now. You’re going to take a bath, I’m going to wash your hair, and then you’re going to sleep.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “You rarely do. You act first and think later.” When she was standing in front of him, he looked into her eyes. “Jackie, do you really think I’m the kind of boy who’d take advantage of a woman when she’s hurt and in pain?”

  Something about what he said made her frown. Maybe it was the use of “boy” and “woman” together. But no matter what bothered her, she knew that he would not take advantage of her. He wasn’t the type of man a woman had to be afraid of. It was more likely that William should fear women.

  “You can’t wash my hair,” she said at last. “I can do it.”

  “Not with one hand you can’t.”

  What he was saying and what he was doing confused her. Maybe she shouldn’t have compared him to Charley, but Charley was the only man she’d ever really known. Charley had been a great father figure, he’d given orders and made decrees, said no more often than yes, but as a mother he was the worst. Thank heaven Jackie had almost always been as healthy as a pilot after the first solo, because during the few times she was ill, Charley had been annoyed and had stayed out of the house until she was well. She remembered running a fever, being horribly weak and in the kitchen trying to open a can of soup.

  Maybe the men you knew well in your life shaped your ideas of what men should and should not be, because now she wondered if it was really a masculine thing for a man to wash a woman’s hair. Which of course was absurd. If a man did “women’s things,” did his male body parts fall off? Or shrivel up until they were useless? Of course not. It was just that the two men in her life, her father and her husband, had spent their lives sitting on chairs asking her to bring them things. And maybe that was what she’d come to expect of men, that the woman was to give and the man to receive and when a man gave, it was somehow…not right, or not wholly masculine.

  William had his arm around her shoulders in a companionable way, a nonsexual way, and she found his touch very confusing. This morning he had been yelling that he loved her, had loved her, but now he didn’t even like her very much. Yet he was leading her into the bathroom to…what?

  “Stop thinking so much,” William said as he opened the bathroom door. He left her for a moment as he got a glass of water then took a pill from a little jar on the side of the sink. “Here, take this.”

  “What is it?”

  “It could be a drug made from an ancient herb found in a tomb in South America, guaranteed to make a woman do anything a man wants her to do. Or it could be a painkiller that will make you feel the pain in your hand less. What do you think?”

  She didn’t even smile as she took the pill from his hand and swallowed it with the water.

  “Okay, now off with that bloody shirt.”

  Jackie opened her mouth to say something, but what could she say? She had on a brassiere, and that certainly covered what little she had on top. And hadn’t she often appeared in halter tops in public in the summer? What was the difference?

  Abruptly, William grabbed her shoulders and turned her to face him, his nose to her nose. “Jackie, I am not a rapist. I am not a man who would take advantage of a woman who has lost a lot of blood. I am not so…so needy of female companionship that I have to resort to trickery to get a woman’s clothes off. All I want to do is to wash a couple of quarts of blood off of you. You are a disgusting sight and you stink. Now will you be sensible
and take your shirt off? You can wrap a towel around yourself so I won’t see anything, but whatever you do, let’s get you clean.”

  The pill had begun to take effect: the pain was lessening and she was starting to feel woozy. With a little smile she started to unbutton her blouse, but it was difficult to do with only one hand. Pain shot through her when she tried to use her bandaged hand. In the end, William efficiently unbuttoned her blouse and slipped it off her shoulders. After that, she didn’t give him any difficulty. One minute she was a thirty-eight-year-old woman and the next she was a child in pigtails leaning over a basin having her hair washed.

  Jackie was startled to find that the most sensual thing in the world was having a man wash her hair. When she went to the beauty shop and a woman washed her hair, she did a good job, but she was always in a hurry because she had six other women lined up waiting to use the sink. But as every woman knew, men knew that the world would wait for them, so they took their time.

  William’s strong hands massaged her scalp. No fingernails to hurt her skin, no rushing, no feeling that he wanted to get this over with. The pain pill made her feel dreamy, as though she’d had a couple of drinks after a hard day’s work. She wasn’t drunk, but she wasn’t quite sober. She just felt relaxed, and her body grew warm and soft with the pleasure of the massage that William was giving her. His fingers caressed her scalp, then her neck muscles; he seemed to know exactly which muscles were tight and where to rub to make her relax.