Page 15 of Reasons Of the Heart

Dammit, she had forgotten she wasn't supposed to know! She flushed guiltily, turning on her heel and fleeing back to the kitchen. Ross followed her crowing with triumph. 'You owe me ten bucks!'

'Oh, no, I don't.' Fran grabbed the dishcloth and began wiping the bench diligently. 'I never bet. You're the gambler around here.' She'd been waiting thirteen years to make that taunt, but of course it sailed right over his thick head.

'And what other tidbits of information about me did you wheedle out of my unsuspecting chum?'

'I didn't wheedle. He mentioned it, that's all.' She crossed her fingers in the folds of her skirt. 'That's the only time I even thought of you all night.'

He grinned so jauntily she wanted to hit him. Instead she poked a stick into his weak spot. She had noticed how impatient he was for total recovery, it showed in the way he pushed himself and stubbornly refused to make concessions to his injuries or admit to feeling pain, snarling at her if she dared comment.

'How long do you think you'll have to take it easy? What will you do when you're completely recovered?'

'I'm practically recovered now,' he was quick to answer, scowling at her.

'Maybe you'd better think about finding yourself a proper job, then,' she said scathingly. 'Your old one might not support you in the style to which you're ac­customed. You might find that women baulk at paying top price for damaged goods.'

She saw his mouth tauten on a quick intake of breath. 'Bitch,' he said softly. 'That was below the belt.'

Francesca was suddenly ashamed. How could she, a nurse, an ex-nurse, mock someone's affliction? It went against every principle of her training, as well as viol­ating common human decency. It was just that he made her so mad!

'I'm sorry,' she said gruffly, avoiding the sudden darkness of his eyes. 'Er...what were your injuries, anyway?'

He continued to look at her for a moment in silence, as if to judge her sincerity, then leaned on the breakfast bar and told her, with an almost clinical detachment that both fascinated and repulsed her. He was talking about himself, not some nameless textbook case.

'I was lucky that I landed in bushy scrub which cushioned my fall; I was lucky, in fact, that most of the breaks were clean. I had a compressed fracture of the vertebrae but there were no complications. It's my left arm that's the problem, a vertical fracture of the hu­merus is pretty difficult to deal with.'

Fran wasn't interested in technica

l details, she was trying to cope with a rush of complex emotions—fear, relief, a bewildering empathy with his pain. 'You're lucky to be alive at all, let alone walking around,' she said shakily.

'I know,' he said gently, sunning himself in the brief warmth of her compassion. 'It's going to make the next jump that much more difficult.'

'You're going back up, after what happened?' Fran was milk-pale in disbelief. How could he risk putting himself, his friends and family, through that all over again?

'I have to.' He smiled wryly at her blank incompre-hension.

'Weren't you warned?' she asked feverishly. 'Didn't the doctors tell you that there'll probably always be a

slight weakness on that side—'

'What thoroughly boring, predictable lives we'd all lead if we allowed ourselves to be governed by probably,' he replied calmly. 'You wear blinkers, Princess, if you think you can make life safe by sticking to the straight and narrow. Hasn't your profession taught you that one can never be completely safe, that death, disease and accidents are appallingly random?'

'It's taught me a certain amount of fatalism,' she said, not entirely truthfully. When you're busy carving your own fate, fatalism doesn't have quite the same meaning.

He sighed and shook his head. 'Princess, you need drastic loosening up. You need to relax, or you're going to turn into one of those arid, iron-skinned, sour-tongued martinets that nurses and patients alike love to hate.'

What would he know? Francesca gave him a sharp look. Perhaps he had had one on the ward he had been in? It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him that of­ficially she was no longer a nurse, but he would probably give her that wretchedly smug grin and make jokes about abdication. And then he would ask what she was going to do and be even more impossibly smug that she was doing exactly as he told her she should.

She couldn't quite put her finger on it, but that con­versation seemed to mark a turning point in her re­lationship with Ross. His teasing became lighter, lacking the sullen, threatening undertones it had had since she had announced her decision to stay. However, instead of making her relax it made her more suspicious of him than ever, convinced it was merely a ruse to lull her into thinking he no longer cared whether she stayed or went.

Impossible as it seemed, Ross became even more casual around the cabin, until every crevice appeared to harbour evidence of his inhabitance: a discarded sock under the table, Sports Digest magazines migrating from room to room, shaving foam on the mirror, and food—he always seemed to be eating—which he would put down some­where and then forget about. He was always mildly apologetic when Fran pointed these things out to him, but he never changed one iota until at last she gave up nagging and resigned herself to cleaning up after the worst of his untidiness and resolutely ignoring the lesser irritations.

It seemed silly to prepare food separately, so they worked out a tacit arrangement whereby Fran provided breakfast, they got their own lunches, and Ross cooked the dinner. He was a far more imaginative chef than she was, not to mention a better cook, and Fran found herself thinking that if they lived together much longer she would have to start worrying about dieting again. She had no scales to weigh herself on, but just by looking at herself in the bathroom mirror she could see her ribs filling out.

Sometimes Ross would bring back his fishing catch for a meal and every now and then he would disappear in his rackety pick-up and return from a tour of the local roadside produce stalls laden with garden-fresh veg­etables. Fran made sure that the expense of their bought food was strictly shared. She had no idea what the state of his finances were; perhaps he was slipping into Whangarei on his outings to collect his unemployment benefit cheque, or perhaps he was still on Accident Compensation? Anyhow, once or twice he visited his parents and came back with a pie or a casserole, so perhaps his family were helping make ends meet. How awful, to be thirty and still living such an apparently meagre existence, she thought with a shudder. At least she would always have her training to fall back on. She might lose her savings in this new venture, but she need never be destitute.

The weather over the next few days continued warm and sunny, unseasonably so, and Ross had taken to stripping down accordingly. The first time Fran walked in and saw him standing there, dressed only in tight, cut­off denim shorts, she almost had cardiac arrest. He was behind the kitchen bench, the shorts slung so low on his hips that at first she had thought he was naked. There were a few scars and still some signs of deep tissue bruising, but even so he had a beautiful body! Fran could only see slight signs of softening from his months of curtailed activity.

'Does my body embarrass you?' He had raised inno­cent eyebrows at her dropped jaw, forcing her to reach for nonchalance.

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