Summer privately decided that she preferred that method, as well, but she chose to keep that thought to herself.
Derek patted his lap. “Put your leg up here. I’ll massage it for you.”
“Oh, I don’t—”
“Dammit, woman. Must you argue with everything I say?” he roared. “Give me the damned leg!”
Summer gave him the damned leg. “You’re so bossy,” she accused him resentfully.
Derek’s long fingers began to work magic on her aching knee. “And you’re so stubborn. Why did you push yourself so hard this afternoon? Your leg started hurting almost an hour before the rehearsal was over, didn’t it?”
She sighed. “It was the Cyndi Lauper dance,” she confessed. “I got a little carried away.”
“Why didn’t you stop? You could have rested for a few minutes.”
She shrugged. “If you take a break with those kids, you’re liable to lose them entirely. I didn’t want to risk messing up a great rehearsal. Wasn’t it terrific? There wasn’t even a major fight among the performers this time. Some of the kids really show talent, don’t you think?”
“They’re not bad,” Derek conceded, watching her face as he continued to massage the slender leg in his lap. His fingers were warm through the soft denim, and the tense muscles under them were slowly beginning to relax. “But you were the one with the talent.”
Summer found herself contending with conflicting sensations. Derek’s skillful massage was wonderful, the all too familiar ache in her leg receding under its effect with magical speed. Yet the movement of those long fingers on her thigh and knee were bringing another kind of ache deep in her abdomen, an ache that threatened to be infinitely more serious than the twinges of an old injury. Infinitely more dangerous. “Uh, thank you,” she said, remembering that he’d complimented her. Concentrate on the conversation, she ordered herself sternly.
“It’s really a shame that you abandoned your talent when you had the accident,” Derek commented, still watching her face for a reaction.
“Oh, I think the entertainment world is surviving without me,” Summer returned lightly. “Tell me about your travels with your government job, Derek. It must have been fascinating seeing all those different parts of the world.”
“Hotel rooms and smoke-filled offices look pretty much the same everywhere,” he replied, using the stock answer that he’d been throwing out for the past ten years or so. He had become an expert on evading questions about his former line of work simply by making it sound too dull to discuss. “You’re good with kids. Have you ever thought of teaching theater arts to young people?”
“You’re good with open-faced sandwiches. Have you ever thought about becoming a short-order cook?”
Summer almost flinched from the look of anger that Derek turned her way. “Will you take nothing seriously?” he demanded. “Don’t you ever get tired of turning every statement into a stupid joke?”
“Don’t you ever get tired of giving advice to other people about how they should conduct their lives?” she retorted evenly. “I’m not one of your clients, Derek. I haven’t hired you to offer your valuable services. Save it for the businessmen who want to hear it.”
“So you’re perfectly content drifting along the way you have been, working in a job you dislike, donating a few hours of your time to good causes, wasting the rest of your life playing games and making jokes?” His fingers had ceased their soothing motion and were gripping her leg in a white-knuckled clench that clearly expressed his frustration.
“Yes!” she answered hotly. “Face it, Derek. I’m exactly the shallow, empty-headed party girl you’ve thought I was all along. I know you’ve hated admitting that you might actually be attracted to such a person and you’ve tried to find a frustrated career woman inside me. It’s time for you to realize that she isn’t there. I’m exactly what you see, and I have no desire to be anything else.”
“You are a fraud, Summer Reed.” Derek’s voice was cold as he lifted her leg from his lap to set it with care in front of her.
She immediately scooted back to put more space between them, watching him warily. “What do you mean?”
“Just what I said. You’re a fraud. A fake. An actress putting on a twenty-four-hour-a-day performance. You act like an airhead hedonist to hide the fact that you were devastated by the accident that left you lame and took away your hopes of a career in entertainment. You continue to find dead-end jobs because you know there’s nothing you really want to do other than sing and dance and act. If you can’t have that, you don’t want anything. Right?
“You pretend that your hours with the kids at Halloran House are just a favor to your buddy Clay, not anything that brings you fulfillment. You keep avoiding serious relationships with men on the pretext of looking for a nonexistent hero, when the truth is that you’re scared. Because one jerk couldn’t deal with your physical imperfection, you assume that no other man could, either.”
“Stop it!” Summer shouted, appalled. Her eyes were a brilliant blue in a face that had gone white. “Who the hell asked for your opinion of me, Derek Anderson? What gives you the right to act like you know me so well?”
“Because I do,” he answered implacably. “I’ve watched you, Summer. I’ve read the shadows in your eyes, the expressions that crossed your face when you thought no one was looking. I saw the wistfulness there when your friends abandoned you in a corner while they danced at your party. I saw the courage it took for you to circulate with the people you didn’t know at my party, the tiny spasms of pain whenever one of my guests would innocently inquire about your limp. And I saw the sheer joy in your beautiful eyes this afternoon when you were working with those kids, singing and dancing and performing.”
Summer clasped her hands in front of her in an exaggerated show of amazement. “Derek, that’s incredible!” she jeered. “How long have you been a mind reader? You should work up a nightclub act, and I could be your assistant since I’m nurturing all these hidden desires to perform that you’ve told me about.”
“Dammit, Summer, stop it!” he shouted, dropping his hands on her shoulders and clenching his fingers as if he’d like nothing more than to shake some sense into her. “Can’t you stop joking even long enough to get mad at me? Curse at me or hit me or something, but stop hiding what you’re feeling behind this idiotic clown act!”
Summer felt something break inside her head, releasing a torrent of emotions that had been safely dammed for a long time. With the flood came an outpouring of words, furious and twisted and tumbling as they flowed from her mouth almost against her will. “What do you want from me, Derek? Do you want me to fall apart and sob into your shoulder about the cruel trick life played on me? All right, dammit!
“I hated waking up in a hospital with a bloody pulp where there had once been a pretty nice-looking leg! I hated the fear I felt when the doctors told me they might have to amputate! I hated the pain that was so excruciating that I screamed and cried and begged for drugs to make me sleep so that I wouldn’t feel it! I hated having the man I thought I loved look at me with pity, then tell me that he couldn’t deal with an invalid!
“I hated those months in bed, and the operations that left me with more artificial parts in my leg than real ones. I hated being in a wheelchair. I hated the walker and