The Secret Brokers (11 page)

Dallas stopped chopping and stared at her. “So being with your horses and animals is a fulfilling life, and you don’t need anyone. Is that what you are saying?”

She took another piece of carrot. “People tend to fill up your life, not fulfill it.”

Dallas shook his head. “Explain that concept to me.” He placed the knife down on the cutting board.

“You can have a fulfilling life without having people in it. People clutter up your life. They bring all of their drama, problems, and opinions with them. Soon you don’t know where your life begins and theirs ends.”

“I thought that was called sharing your life with someone.”

“No, that was called marriage, and I don’t recommend it for anyone.”

“But you were married to a man who was using you to hide his sexuality from the world. You can’t judge the concept of marriage from your twisted experience with it.” He paused as her eyes darted nervously around the room. “Or are you talking about another marriage you witnessed, like a friend’s, or maybe your parents’?”

She turned away from the counter. “Let me know when that stew is ready,” she insisted as she walked toward the kitchen entrance.

“You know I’m not judging you, Gwen. Parents tend to dump a lot of stuff on their kids. Resenting them or even hating them for the memories we are left with is not a sin. It’s part of being human.”

She turned around to face him. “So you think
that
just because I don’t want to talk about my mother I resent her?”

Dallas glared at her with his icy eyes. “Do you?”

Gwen squared her shoulders and crossed her arms over her chest. After a few tense moments she smiled. “Nice try, Dallas. But my past is just that—my past. Talking about it with you, or anyone else for that matter, isn’t going to change it.”

“But it might make it easier to digest,” Dallas suggested. He placed his hand on his hip as he directed his eyes to the floor. “When I was in college, both of my parents were killed in a boating accident. They went out for an afternoon of sailing and got caught in a storm.” He ran his hand through his short-cropped, dark hair. “I was furious with them for a number of years for leaving me the way they did. Took me a while to forgive them, but I eventually did. As I have gotten older I have seen them less as parents and more as human beings, just as flawed and misguided as the rest of us.” He looked up at Gwen, trying to discern if his words had cracked through her defenses.

“You seem awfully interested in dissecting me like some frog in a laboratory. Why?”

He turned back to his cutting board and picked up his knife. “You’re getting defensive again. I was just trying to be helpful.”

“No you’re not. You’re trying awfully hard to get something out of me. Why don’t you just ask me what it is you want to know?”

He tossed the knife down on the cutting board. “I’m trying to figure you out, that’s all. It seems to me you’re a woman with a hell of a lot to give, but you live shut away in this world of yours, afraid to let anyone in. I just want to know why.”

“I thought your job was to protect me, not figure me out.” She turned and exited the kitchen.

Dallas picked up the knife and began pounding into the carrots with a growing sense of frustration. As he went over their conversation in his head, searching for a way to get closer to the woman, the knife slipped in his hand and he sliced his left index finger.

“Damn it!” he cried out.

Gwen stuck her head in the kitchen doorway. “What is it?” Then she saw the blood flowing down his hand as he grabbed for some paper towels next to the sink.

Gwen rushed to his side. She pulled his hand over to the sink and began rinsing the cut with water.

“You did a good job on yourself there,” she commented as she examined the wound. “You’re going to need stitches.”

Dallas tried to pull his hand away from her, but she was stronger than he had anticipated.

“I don’t need stitches. You got any gauze and some tape around here? I’ll tape it up and it will be—”

“You need stitches,” Gwen pronounced. “Lucky for you I’ve got sutures and
a
medical supply cabinet up in my bedroom.” She grabbed some paper towels from the spool and wrapped them around his finger. She then pushed his hand back to him. “Keep pressure on it while I grab the vodka.”

“What do you need the vodka for?” Dallas asked while holding his finger.

“Pain killer,” she stated as she reached below the sink.

“Gwen, I don’t need stitches,” he argued.

Gwen stood up, holding the bottle of Stolichnaya vodka in her hand. “Dallas, this is the country, and you’re going to be working in a barn for the next two weeks. That cut could easily get infected, and then you would have a whole lot more to deal with than stitches.” She patted his shoulder. “Come on, I promise to be gentle.”

Dallas apprehensively followed Gwen upstairs to her bedroom. He didn’t want to allow the woman within ten feet of him with a sharp object, but every time he unwrapped the paper towels from around his finger and inspected the deep cut, he became more and more convinced that perhaps she was right. And maybe by allowing Gwen to place a few stitches in his finger, he might be able to get through to her by appealing to her nurturing instincts—that is, if she had any nurturing instincts. At this point he wasn’t so sure.

Dallas was surprised to find Gwen’s bedroom was larger than his guest room. The walls were painted with alternate stripes of blue and white, and there was a matching blue and white bedspread on her king-sized bed. Delicate lace curtains hung from the windows, while a white throw rug with small blue flowers covered the hardwood floor.

“This doesn’t look at all like you,” Dallas commented as he took in the bedroom.

There was a bathroom on the right, and next to the bathroom a walk in closet. Except for a bed, a nightstand with a blue and white lamp, and an armoire, there wasn’t any other furniture in the room. Gwen placed the bottle of vodka down on the nightstand and walked over to the armoire.

“I was in one of my experimental decorating phases when I did this room,
”
she commented as she opened the armoire. “So don’t judge me by the décor, because it’s not permanent.”

Inside the armoire, Dallas spied a plethora of medical bandages, medications, surgical instruments, gloves, IV fluid bags, and syringes.

“What are you doing with all of this stuff?” he asked as she retrieved a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, hemostats, and pack of black nylon suture from the armoire.

She shrugged. “I’m a nurse and I have sick horses on my farm, as well as getting a lot of sick wildlife in every now and then. I find it’s easier to have everything I need here; cuts back on having to call the vet out for every little thing. I have another supply cabinet in the barn filled with medications.” She took the supplies in her hand over to the bed and placed them down on the nightstand next to the bottle of vodka. She patted her hand on the bed, encouraging him to have a seat.

Dallas warily observed Gwen from the bedroom door. “When was the last time you sewed up a human?”

“Two months ago.” She rolled up her sleeve to reveal a red scar along the outside of her wrist. “I caught my arm on a nail in the barn. I gave myself a shot of antibiotics and put ten stitches in my arm.”

Dallas walked further into the room and inspected her scar. “That looks more like a knife wound than a tear from a nail.”

She rolled her sleeve back down. “And how would you know the difference?”

Dallas took a seat on the bed. “I’ve seen enough knife wounds in my day.”

“Quite a profession you have there.” Gwen unwrapped the paper towels from around his finger. “Guess I wouldn’t be the first to tell you that maybe you should consider a career change?”

Dallas sucked in a painful breath as Gwen probed the cut on his finger. “No, you wouldn’t be the first.”

She reached for the bottle of vodka next to her and began unscrewing the cap. “You had a tetanus shot recently?” She held the bottle out him.

“A few years ago,” he told her.

“Take a couple of swigs from that. It will help ease the pain,” she instructed, nodding to the bottle in her hand.

Dallas shook his head. “I’m fine. I won’t need it.”

Gwen picked up his right hand and placed the bottle in it. “I know you would like me to think you’re tough and all that, but I really don’t need any of your macho crap right now. So just drink the goddamned vodka.”

Not wanting to argue with a woman about to jab a sharp needle into his skin, Dallas took two long sips of vodka while Gwen cleaned his wounded finger and then put on a pair of sterile rubber gloves. She pulled a long black piece of nylon suture with a needle connected to it out of a plastic package, placed the scissors on the bed, and reached for her hemostats. She kneeled down on the floor next to the bed as she pulled his left hand under the lamplight.

“This isn’t exactly sterile, but I can
give
you a shot of antibiotics to make sure it doesn’t get infected. Are you allergic to anything?”

Dallas shook his head as he watched Gwen set the needle in the teeth of the hemostats. He winced as she took his injured finger in her hand and pressed the edges of the cut together.

“This is going to hurt a bit,” Gwen stated and quickly pushed the needle through the flesh around his cut.

Dallas’s jaw clamped down as the bite of pain roared up from his finger to his brain. He felt the pull of his flesh around his finger as she closed the first stitch and tied it off. The sweat began to bead around his upper lip as she pushed the needle through his skin for the second stitch.

“You gonna make it?” she asked, never taking her eyes of his finger.

“Fine,” he whispered through his clenched jaw.

“Three more to go after this one,” she informed him.

Dallas noticed how Gwen’s blond hair shimmered beneath the lamplight. “Where did you learn to do this?”

“Doug taught me. He said he wanted me to know how to suture properly in case he ever needed me to sew him up at home.” She looked up into Dallas’s face. “He was always accident prone.” She turned her attention back to his finger.

“What else did Doug teach you?” He tried to focus his mind on the job he was hired to do and not the searing pain in his finger.

She shrugged as she pushed the needle through the skin for the third stitch. “He taught me about art, how to fly planes, how to select the best wines from a restaurant wine list, to appreciate opera, and to be a little more patient with people.”

“That sounds like quite a list,” Dallas said as he let out an uneasy breath.

“He was quite a guy.”

“Then why did you leave him?”

Gwen tied off the third stitch and cut the nylon with her scissors. “I was tired of pretending,” she answered in a soft voice. She pressed the edges of the laceration together as she drove the needle into his finger once more. “I couldn’t live with the lies anymore. I was tired of people asking when we were going to have children, knowing we had never…” her voice faded.

Dallas said nothing as he observed Gwen’s delicate features. She had a refined quality about her, he decided, something that made her appear as if she came from some wealthy blue-blooded English stock. Her creamy skin and pink cheeks reminded him of portraits done of corseted Victorian women who were prized for their femininity and social graces.

He placed the bottle of vodka on the nightstand. “So why haven’t you found someone you can have a real relationship with?”

Gwen tied off the fourth stitch. “I don’t think you need anymore stitches,” she reported, avoiding his eyes.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

Gwen sat back on the floor. “Dallas, I’m no good with people. Haven’t you figured that out by now? I married a gay man because I thought I would be safe from getting hurt, but in the end I hurt myself because I wanted more from Doug. I guess I fell in love with him in a way, and when I realized what had happened, I had to walk away. Staying with him would have only hurt more.” She began to quickly gather up her equipment. “There, are you happy now? You’ve humiliated me, just like you wanted.”

“I didn’t mean to humiliate or embarrass you, Gwen. I was just trying to understand—”

“What?” she shouted, cutting him off. “Why I was stupid enough to marry a man I knew I could never have?” She marched into the bathroom.

Dallas got up from the bed and followed her into the bathroom. “You weren’t stupid for marrying Doug. No more stupid than I was. I fell in love with a woman I knew loved another man. But I thought, like you, that maybe I could make her love me. But I couldn’t…just like you couldn’t change Doug.”

Gwen threw the scissors and hemostat in the bathroom sink. Then she tossed what was left of the suture and her gloves into the garbage. “We need to dress that,” she said while pointing at his finger. She walked out of the bathroom.

Dallas followed her back into the bedroom. She stopped in front of the armoire and pulled out a tube of ointment. After squeezing the ointment on to his sutures, Gwen placed a piece of square gauze on his finger and reached for a roll of clear tape.

“Talk to me, Gwen,” Dallas pleaded. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”