Passion's Baby. Catherine Spencer

of the occupant’s identity beyond the fact that he wasn’t trying to hide his untidy presence.

      It had to be a “he,” she’d reasoned. The sweater in the living room was too large for a woman and only a man would treat his clothes so carelessly or leave his sleeping bag in wrinkled disarray from a night’s sleep.

      “Still,” she’d told Bounder, “whoever he is could at least have taken down the shutters and given the room a bit of natural light, not to mention a breath of fresh air. It’s musty as a cellar in here.”

      By way of reply, Bounder had let out a low whine and pricked up his oversize ears, a clear signal that he’d heard someone approaching the house. Realizing her initial concern had crossed the boundary into outright infringement of privacy, Jane had made a beeline for the bedroom door, anxious at least to get as far as the living room before she was caught intruding. But the dog, tail thrashing in excitement, yanked himself free of her hold, snatched up the nearest piece of clothing, and raced ahead of her.

      “Bounder, no!” she begged in an appalled whisper. “Oh, Bounder, please! Drop that! Give!”

      She might as well have been speaking Swahili for all the attention he paid. Using his great paws as launching pads, he plowed on his merry way, leaving mayhem in his wake. She caught up with him on the far side of the living room sofa and had barely managed to rescue the item he’d filched from the bedroom when a shadow darkened the patch of sunlight shining across the floor from the open front door.

      Straightening, she prepared to offer an introduction-cum-explanation for her uninvited presence. In fact, the words, “I’m Jane Ogilvie from next door and I just stopped by to say hello” were all ready to pop out of her mouth, but her attempt to appear nothing more than a friendly neighbor welcoming a summer visitor faltered and died before she uttered a single syllable.

      The man had stationed himself on the cottage threshold, making escape impossible, and the cold, unwelcoming stare he directed at her would have silenced a thunderbolt. But it was neither the justifiable indignation in his eyes, which were the same translucent blue-green as the sea on a cold winter’s day, nor the embarrassment of finding herself caught brazenly snooping through his home, that left her speechless. Instead she stared mutely at his legs, knowing she shouldn’t, but unable to help herself.

      From the way he let her squirm in the ensuing silence, it was her guess he was the kind who thrived on other people’s discomfiture. Finally, when she was about ready to choke on humiliation, he said, in a voice so larded with bitterness that she recoiled, “What’s the matter, Goldilocks? Never seen a man in a wheelchair before?”

      Oh, yes, she could have told him, had he been at all interested in hearing her answer. But he was much too busy cursing with stunning vulgarity as he navigated the furniture and maneuvered himself farther into the room.

      Knocking aside a wooden kitchen chair, he propelled himself around the table and only just missed wheeling over the tip of Bounder’s tail in the process. “Move it, hound!” he snapped, not even pausing to consider that Bounder, had he been equally ill-tempered, could have taken a chunk out of his unshaven face.

      Instead, the dog tried to lick the hand which clearly wouldn’t have fed him if he’d been starving. Deciding sensitivity was wasted on such a man, Jane adopted a more confrontational approach. “Does the owner of this cottage know that you’re living here?” she inquired, folding the garment she still held in her hand and fixing him in a forthright stare.

      “What business is it of yours?” he shot back. “And what the devil do you think you’re doing with my undershorts?”

      She thought she’d already scaled the upper limit of human embarrassment but the realization that she was absently fingering underwear belonging to a man whose name she didn’t even know taught her the folly of that assumption. “Uh…” she mumbled, switching her horrified gaze from his face to the scarlet maple leaves emblazoned on the offending garment. “Um…oh, dear, I didn’t realize that’s what these are.”

      “Cripes!” He rolled his rather beautiful eyes in disbelief. “You’ll be telling me next that you didn’t know you were trespassing on my property.”

      “But it’s not your property,” she said, latching onto any excuse to change the subject. “It belongs to Steve Coffey who is an old friend of my grandfather’s and whom I’ve known since I was five years old.” Then, realizing she still hadn’t introduced herself, added, “I’m Jane Ogilvie and I’m staying at the house on the other side of the cove.”

      “No, you’re not,” her ungracious host said flatly. “I’m Liam McGuire and when I signed the lease on this place, Coffey assured me I’d have the beach to myself all summer.”

      “Then we’ve both been misled, because my grandfather told me the same thing. But if you’re worried I’m going to make a nuisance of myself, you can relax. I’m no more anxious to be neighborly than you are.”

      “Uh-huh.” He looked pointedly at his boxer shorts. “Is that why you’re having such a good time fiddling with my drawers?”

      The flush which rode up her neck rivaled the underwear’s maple leaves in color. “I most certainly am not fiddling…!”

      “The hell you’re not,” he retorted with grim amusement. “The way you’re stroking them is downright indecent. You’ll be asking me to model them next.”

      She dropped them as hurriedly as if they’d suddenly caught fire. “I don’t think so!”

      “Why not?” he asked, his voice laced with slow insolence. “Because it’s not polite to recognize that a man in a wheelchair exists below the waist?”

      “No,” she said, refusing to submit to that particular brand of emotional blackmail. “Because you’re not my type.”

      “Why not?” he repeated in the same lazy drawl. “Because I’m in a wheelchair?”

      “No. Because you’re arrogant, unpardonably rude, about as unappealing as a cockroach, and apparently enjoy living in a pigsty.”

      He smiled. At least, she supposed his sudden display of flawless teeth amounted to that. “May I take it then that you won’t feel obliged to stop by every morning to make sure the unfortunate slob next door hasn’t accidentally fallen out of bed during the night and broken his miserable neck?”

      “You may safely assume exactly that,” she said recklessly. “In fact, you may wheel yourself right off the end of the dock and drown, for all I care!”

      And grabbing Bounder by the collar again, she’d marched past Liam McGuire and out of his house without so much as a backward glance. Not for the world would she have let him see how rattled she was by his attitude, or how appalled at her own behavior. Only when she reached the cover of the rock behind which she now huddled had she allowed the rigid set of her shoulders to relax and the shame to flood through her.

      How could she have said such things—she who knew better than most the frustrations and agony of being confined to a wheelchair? Where was the compassion which had come so easily to her when Derek was alive?

      It dried up with his death and I will not be drawn into such a web of pain again. I could not survive it a second time.

      She closed her eyes, as if doing so would silence the truth echoing through her mind. But one thing she had learned too thoroughly ever to forget: turning away from the facts did nothing to change them. Like it or not, the man next door was disabled. How seriously, she didn’t know, but she understood now why the shutters remained in place over the windows, and why he hadn’t hung his clothes in the closet.

      And with a defeated sigh, she knew that, no matter how unwelcome he might find her visits, sooner or later she’d come knocking on his door again, because she could no more ignore him or his plight than she could turn back the tide creeping up the beach.

      “Son of a bitch!”

      He slumped in the wheelchair and glared