When You Wish (Contemporary Romance) (20 page)

“Mistakes?” Em shrugged. “I’ve made a few.”

“Number four,” Grace muttered.

“Number one wasn’t my best moment, either. So what do you feel about Dan?”

“Green. He’s green. Steady and sure.”

“What’s the matter with that?”

“He’s also a stiff. Just like Jared. Just like the people at the hospital who won’t give me a chance. Dan thinks I’m a flake.”

“Does he really?”

“Yes.”

“I think you’re doing to him what you think he’s doing to you.” Grace cast a quick glance at her aunt, wondering if lusting after Dan’s body showed plainly on her face. Em continued. “You’re judging him on the surface. What he is to most people— doctor, research scientist, stiff, as you say—might not be
who
he is. You of all people should know better.”

Em let that sink
in for a moment before she continued. “I’m not any better. I looked at Olaf and saw a young man, a flirt—”

Grace choked. “Flirt? Olaf? Are you serious?” In her wildest imaginings, Grace could not imagine that.

“You’ve been in your own little world for a long time now, Grace. Who Olaf is on the surface is not who Olaf is deep inside. Inside, with me anyway, he is a great big flirt. Cute as a button.”

“Olaf. Big guy
? Hisses a lot? Shouts in Norwegian?”

Em nodded with an amused smile on her face. “Anyway, I couldn’t see past the age difference, but Olaf isn’t so narr
ow. He looked at me and saw ‘desirable woman who isn’t dead yet.’ He saw what was inside, the adorable man, and I’ll love him forever for that.”

“I think what’s on the outside of Dan goes all the way through to the inside.”

“And would that be so bad? You’re afraid he’ll die on you like your dad? Or that he’ll betray you like Jared?”

“Maybe both.”

“Take a chance. Live a little. Just because Dan’s different doesn’t mean he’s bad. Just different.”

“I know.”

“Do you? You’ve been trying so hard to be different from everyone else, to prove that different is okay, that different is somehow better, sometimes I wonder if you understand that being not so different is okay, too.”

Hmm
, Grace needed to think about that. Was she trying so hard to be different that she denied her true self? If that was true, then did she know her true self at all?

“And as for Dan, perhaps you need to look a little deeper inside that boy.”

“See what isn’t visible?”

“Find the man waiti
ng to get out. Discover the person he can be with you—the man he can become—and the woman you could become with him.”

Chapter
Twelve

Two weeks of working with Grace in the morning and seeing Grace in his dreams all night—Dan was losing his mind. He was no nearer to finding his cure, and the zone
escaped him, unless erotic daydreams counted as a type of zone.

At night, when he couldn’t sleep because all he could think of was her, he cruised the Internet, faxed obscure research facilities like his own, and put together a mu
ch better binder for Grace’s research than she had ever dreamed of having. Then he made phone calls and faxed more faxes.

If there was one thing Dan Chadwick knew, it was how to research something. He could prove any t
heory if given enough time. Except for his theory on paronychial infection. But he didn’t want to think about that right now.

Because right now Grace was late—again.

He stared out the window at the lane that led to his house. No car, no Grace, no nothing.

She’d been acting kind of strange since that day at the hospital. Whenever he turned to stare at her, he’d catch her staring at him. Instead of yanking her gaze away, as most people would, she’d continue to stare at him as if off in a zone of her own.

She kept her distance, too. No more accidental touches, no more passionate kisses. Grace behaved as if she were deep in thought all the time, trying to figure out the mysteries of the universe, or maybe just a mystery closer to home.

She’d told him Em and Olaf were getting married, a bit of information that had floored Dan, as it seemed to have floored Grace. He could only hope that obtaining the woman of his dreams would make Olaf a bit less likely to kick Dan’s behind into the next century, though somehow Dan doubted that.

He glanced at his watch again. Late, late, late. He was getting worried.

Dan put his forehe
ad against the cool glass. Actually, Grace was never
really
late, but she was never on time, either. Five minutes, ten minutes, today fifteen. Each day she had a different excuse—excuses he didn’t quite see as adequate, but she seemed to think they were.

The first day she said, “Baby ducks waddled across the road right in front of my car.”

The second, “The cornfield had tassels, and the wind made them dance.”

The third and the most confusing of all: “There were a thousand blackbirds in a freshly cut field. When they flew off, the sound of their wings filled the air and their silhouettes nearly blanketed the sun.”

He had no idea why these things explained her being late. He should no doubt lighten up, but punctuality was part of his life. If he left an experiment unattended for too long, even if the blackbirds were flying, he could ruin weeks of work. So Dan always made sure he set his bells and whistles, just in case he went into the zone and forgot the time. That hadn’t been a problem lately.

The crunch of tires on gravel announced Grace’s arrival—sixteen minutes late. Dan stepped back from the window and waited for her to come in. The fact that he was
actually looking forward to today’s excuse, as if waiting for the news flash of the decade, annoyed him. They had work to do, and, sadly, no time to smell the roses.

“Morning.” Her smile lit up his life. Unfortunately, this morning, he wasn’t in the mood for lighting up. And anyway, Grace went right to the computer. Once in the lab she never dawdled. She worked—plain and simple. If she wasn’t time-challenged, as well as such an incredible distraction to his libido, she’d be the perfect research assistant—intelligent, efficient, and quiet. Problem was, with Grace in the room his brain became mush.

“You’re late,” he said, surprising himself.

“I stopped to watch some kids going fishing.” She flicked on the comp
uter. A soft, sweet smile of remembrance lit her face, bright enough to rival the artificial light from the screen. “They looked like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Two boys, brothers I bet, with cane poles and a jar of worms, walking down the road. I watched until they turned off on a lane leading to one of the ponds. They were the cutest things I’d seen in a long, long time.”

“You like kids.”

She shrugged. “What’s not to like? The aura of a child is the purest sensation on earth. White—with hints of every color in the spectrum.”

Dan didn’t know what to say to that. He didn’t want to think
about auras—children’s or otherwise—he wanted to think about work. But because of Grace, he’d begun to notice all the things he’d been missing, and that was starting to annoy him.

“I wish you’d try to be punctual,” he said, and even to him his voice sounded stuffy. Very like his father’s. He hoped to God that invoking his father’s name, and his father’s style, while dealing with the hospital bigwigs had not caused an invasion of the body snatchers.

“I always try.” Grace didn’t seem very concerned.

“Can you try harder?”

She didn’t even look at him, continuing to shuffle through papers. “What the heck? Sure. I can always try harder.”

Dan sighed. “Grace, time that’s lost can never be replaced.”

She fixed him with an unreadable look. “My point exactly.” Then she turned around and went to work without another word.

She’d agreed with everything he’d said, yet Dan felt as if they’d been talking about two different things, and he’d come out losing the round. He had no doubt she’d still
arrive five minutes late tomorrow, and if he bothered to mention the lapse, she’d agree with him, and they’d start all over again. His head spun as it so often did when he was around Grace, for so many different reasons.

He had a week or less before Mrs. Cabilla, or Perry, her weasel-faced minion, showed up. Then what was he going to do; what was he going to say? If he didn’t have
something more to show his benefactress, Grace would win the grant. And though Grace’s project intrigued him, the thought of five wasted years terrified him.

Dan truly believed in what he was doing or he wouldn’t be doing
it. And there was the tiny problem of proving to his parents that he wasn’t the failure they’d always insisted he would become. Even though he hadn’t spoken to his parents in five years, and didn’t really miss them, proving them right, rather than wrong, about his ineptitude was not something he looked forward to.

Dan sighed and forced himself to cross the room, sit down with his back to Grace, and fiddle with his bottles and beakers.

Someone had to.

Grace was nearly done entering the data into the computer. Five years of research made a lot of paper. Dan was lucky there’d never been a fire. Everything would have been gone.
Poof!
Sometimes geniuses just weren’t the brightest bulbs in the box when it came to common sense.

She didn’t think
Dan had been taking care of himself, either. He looked tense, pale, as malnourished as a huge guy could look, which shouldn’t surprise her since he forgot to eat all the time and he never seemed to go outside unless he were jogging or chopping wood.

She’d discovered why the man had heavy calluses on his palms. When a problem nagged him too much he chop
ped wood—a manly version of crocheting, she assumed. When she’d asked him about the huge pile of split logs behind the lab, he’d mumbled something about a woodstove to offset the cost of air-conditioning. The more Grace learned about Dan, the more she found to like.

But she wondered. Had he always been this driven, or was it just the recent ultimatum that had gotten him so uptight?

Glancing at Dan, Grace found him hunched over his little glass tubes, mumbling. Her heart rolled over and flopped into her stomach every time she caught him muttering like a lunatic and mixing things.

When had she started to fall for him? It could have been at any one of a thousand moments. But the fact remained the same—she wanted Dan Chad
wick, and she really shouldn’t take him.

The past two weeks had been pure torture. At home, Em and Olaf were in love, and while she was thrilled that two of her favorite people had found happiness with each other, watching them make out all the time played havoc with her self-control.

Every morning she worked in Dan’s lab. She could hear him; she could see him; she could smell him. She became a model of efficiency trying to keep from staring at him. Since she’d had that talk with Em, all sorts of things were becoming obvious. Dan was not the man she’d thought him to be—he was a whole lot more.

Every night she dreamed of him. Amazingly erotic dreams she’d never believed herself capable of. She would awake hot,
damp and unsatisfied, with memories of Dan’s mouth on her body and his body on hers.

In her life there’d been one other man. He had been her first, a
nd when she’d discovered his betrayal, she’d vowed he would be her last, too.

Silly thought, she realized now, but she’d had it just the same. All the
bad things in her life had converged and she’d had neither the time nor the desire to mess with affairs of the heart again. Then Dan had walked naked into her life. And she had both desire and a mess on her hands.

Every day when she entered the lab, she wanted nothing more than to see him naked again, to touch that big, hard body, to taste that soft, smooth skin. And because she wanted those things so badly, she made herself stare a
t the computer screen like a robot.

The more she forced herself to work, the more interested in Dan’s work she became. The more she read his notes, the more she learned of the man. He was devoted to this project. He believed curing one infection could cure countless more—and he was probably right.

His muttering became louder, and she glanced at him again. So earnest and scientific, he’d run his fingers through his hair until the strands stuck up like cornhusks waving in the autumn wind. He hadn’t gotten a haircut yet, and he headed into ponytail territory. What would he say if she walked up behind him, smoothed her fingers through that hair, over his neck, down his shoulders and underneath his lab coat?

Grace stifled a moan. She had it bad.

Dan cursed beneath his breath, causing Grace to frown. He never did that. Things must not be going well. She suspected he worked harder than usual these days because of the time limit imposed by Mrs. Cabilla. Because if Dan worked this hard, all the time, he was going to die very young.

Just like her father.