“Oh, Robins?” Grant said pleasantly.
“Yeah?” the doctor said, belligerently facing him again.
“This is for all the times you brought her grief when I wasn’t there to do something about it.” Grant’s fist shot out and buried itself in Daryl’s stomach with a sickening thud.
The proud doctor bent at the waist, clutching his stomach. Mercilessly, Grant grabbed him by the collar, jerked him upright and dragged him to the door. He shoved him onto the porch and released him with as much respect for his dignity as one would give a dead rat.
Grant’s epithets were imaginative and explicit as he closed the door and locked it. But as he turned back to Shelley his expression softened. His arms were outstretched as he approached her. A moment later she was enfolded within them and pulled against his furred chest.
His index finger tilted her head up and he looked down at her face lovingly. “It wasn’t with candlelight and wine, I wasn’t down on my knees, but it was a proposal just the same. Marry me, Shelley,” he whispered urgently as he pressed her head into the curve of his shoulder.
Her arms went around him. She held him close, hugged him tightly. Squeezing her eyes shut in an effort to dispel Daryl’s smirking face, to obliterate his debasing words from her memory, she said shakily, “I don’t know, Grant. I just don’t know.”
He heard her indecision, understood her reluctance to get trapped again. Easing her away, he said gently, “Let’s take a hike in the woods. This room still reeks of Robins. With any luck, once you’re outdoors you’ll see your way clear to marrying me.”
“You’re very quiet,” he stated. At the caprice of the autumn wind, a golden-brown leaf had fallen on her cheek. He lifted it away with his little finger and stroked the curtain of hair that covered his lap.
“I’m thinking.”
They had taken a country road out of town and driven in contemplative silence until Grant parked his car on the side of the narrow, tree-lined road. “Let’s walk,” he’d said. After taking an old blanket from behind the seat of the car, he had helped her over a shallow ditch and into a wood burnished to a golden luster by the cool fall weather.
The fallen leaves made a thick carpet that rustled with their footsteps. Even as they tacitly agreed to spread the blanket under a sprawling oak he respected her need for introspective thought. He hadn’t pressed conversation on her.
She had lain with her head in his lap staring through the massive branches of the tree, not really thinking about what had transpired that morning, but enjoying the companionable silence, the strength of his thighs beneath her head, the whisper of his breath on her face.
“Good thoughts?”he asked, leaning over her now.
“Mostly.”
“Want to tell me about them?”
“I was thinking that I feel better when I’m with you than I ever have in my life.” She tilted her head back to see him better. “Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes.”
“I want to be with you all the time.”
“I fail to see the problem,” he said when he heard the anguish in her voice. He threaded his fingers through her hair. “I’ve asked you to marry me, Shelley.”
“I know, I know,” she said, rising to a sitting position. She rested her forehead against her raised knees. “But I don’t know if we should get married.”
“I see,” he said quietly. “Can you tell me why? Can we discuss it? Does it have anything to do with the scandal in Washington?”
“No, no.” She shook her head dismally, though she didn’t lift it. “I’ve told you that as far as I’m concerned, that never happened.”
He placed his hand on her back beneath her sweat shirt, moved it up to the base of her neck, then all the way down to her waist. Back and forth, lovingly. “Are you worried about becoming a second-class citizen again?” Her hesitation in answering told him more than spoken words could have.
He removed his hand from under her top. “I’ve told you we’d be equal partners. Do you think I’d want you meek and submissive, Shelley? I want a wife and lover, not a live-in servant. You’d have the same status in the household as I. You’ve made your niche in the world and are going to make a bigger one. I’m proud of that. I want to enrich your life, not take your independence away.”
Gently, he placed his hand beneath her chin and lifted her head. Her eyes were brimming with tears when they met his. “How is it that you’re so understanding?” she asked huskily.
“I’m so much older and wiser than you,” he said teasingly. When the corners of her mouth twitched with an answering smile, he said seriously, “Actually I’m not one of those men whose wife has to stay in the background so as not to threaten his ego. I can’t see how your success, in whatever endeavor, could do anything but improve my life.”
“What if I want to work my way up to be the president of a bank?”
“I’ll be right behind you, giving you little boosts up the ladder if you should become discouraged.” His hand slipped to her bottom and gently squeezed it. “A prospect I take delight in.”
She blushed, more at what she was about to ask than at his display of affection. “And if I decide that I want to stay at home and … and maybe have a family?”