Hidden Riches

helpless pain broke him.
    “I can’t stand to see you hurt.” Shielding her arm, he gathered her close. “I just can’t stand it. It rips at me, Dora, every time I think of it. Every time I remember what it was like to see you on the floor, to have your blood on my hands.” He began to tremble, all those honed muscles quivering like plucked strings. “I thought you were dead. I looked at you and I thought you were dead.”
    “Don’t.” She soothed automatically. “I’m all right now.”
    “I didn’t prevent it,” he said fiercely. “I was too late.”
    “But you weren’t. You saved my life. He’d have killed me. He wanted to, as much as he wanted the painting. You stopped him.”
    “It isn’t enough.” Fighting for control, he gentled his grip on her and stepped back.
    “It suits me pretty well, Jed.” She lifted a hand to his cheek. He grasped at it, pressed it hard to his lips.
    “Just give me a minute.” He stood there a moment, with the air cool and crisp, whispering through denuded trees and sleeping winter grass. “You shouldn’t be standing out in the cold.”
    “It feels great.”
    “I want you to come inside. I want to finish this inside.”
    “All right.” Though she no longer felt weak, she let him support her as they went up the walk. She thought he needed to.
    But it was he who was unsteady as he unlocked the door, opened it, led her inside. His nerves jumped as she let out a quiet gasp of pleasure.
    She stepped onto the welcoming Bokhara rug. “You’ve put things back.”
    “Some.” He watched the way she ran her fingertips over the rosewood table, the curved back of a chair, the way shesmiled at the fussy gilded mirror. “My landlord kicked me out, so I took a few things out of storage.”
    “The right things.” She walked on into the front parlor. He’d put back a curvy pin-striped settee, a lovely Tiffany lamp on a satinwood table. There was a fire burning low in the hearth. She felt both a surge of pleasure and grief. “You’re moving back in.”
    “That depends.” He slipped her coat carefully off her shoulders, laid it on the arm of the settee. “I came back here last week. It wasn’t the same. I could see you walking up the stairs, sitting on my window seat, looking out the kitchen window. You changed the house,” he said as she turned slowly to face him. “You changed me. I want to move back in, and make it work. If you’ll come with me.”
    Dora didn’t think the sudden dizziness had anything to do with her healing injuries. “I think I want to sit down.” She lowered herself to the striped cushions and took two careful breaths. “You’re going to move back here? You want to move back here?”
    “Yeah, that’s right.”
    “And you want me to live with you?”
    “If that’s the best I can get.” He took a small box out of his pocket and pushed it into her hands. “I’d like it better if you’d marry me.”
    “Can I—” Her voice came out in a squeak. “Can I have some water?”
    Frustrated, he dragged a hand through his hair. “Damn it, Conroy—sure.” He bit back on temper and a terrible fit of nerves. “Sure, I’ll get it.”
    She waited until he was out of the room before she worked up the courage to open the box. She was glad she had because her mouth fell open. She was still staring dumbfounded at the ring when he came back in carrying a Baccarat tumbler filled with lukewarm tap water.
    “Thanks.” She took the glass, drank deeply. “It’s a whopper.”
    Disgusted with himself, he fumbled out a cigarette. “I guess it’s overstated.”
    “Oh no. There isn’t a diamond in the world that’s overstated.” She laid the box in her lap, but kept a hand possessively around it. “Jed, I think these past few weeks have been as hard on you as they have on me. I might not have appreciated that, but—”
    “I love you, Dora.”
    That stopped her cold. Before she could gather her wits, he was beside her on the settee, crunching several bones in her hand. “Goddamn it, don’t ask me for another glass of water. If you don’t want to answer yet, I’ll wait. I just want a chance to make you love me again.”
    “Is that what all this has been about? The presents and the phone calls? You were trying to undermine my defenses when I was down.”
    He looked down at their joined hands. “That about sizes it up.”
    She nodded, then rose to walk to the window. She’d want tulips out there in the spring, she thought. And