From the evening that Tess and Dane had first met—so long ago, at a restaurant where their parents had invited them to get acquainted—they saw very little of each other except on holidays. Dane and his wife, Jane, were not getting along. And even his mother, Nita, had mentioned cattily that Jane had been seen with another man. It was almost as if it pleased Nita to know that Dane’s wife was being openly unfaithful to him….

Those days had not been good ones for Dane. Then, on the morning that Wyatt Meriwether and Nita Lassiter announced their engagement, Dane had walked into a shootout with some bank robbers and had wound up in the county emergency room fighting for his life.

Tess had rushed to the hospital as soon as she knew. Her father drove her, but when they discovered that Nita was still at home and that Jane couldn’t be found, he’d left.

But Tess stayed, that night and the next day. Once she convinced a floor nurse that he was going to be her stepbrother, and that he had no one else, they allowed her to see him in intensive care. She held his hand, smoothed his brow and cringed at the damage the bullets had done, because she’d had a look at the torn flesh of his shoulder, spine and leg where the bullets had penetrated.

“Will I walk?” he managed in a pain-laced voice when he regained consciousness.

“Of course,” Tess said with a gentle smile. She touched his lean face and pushed the hair away from his forehead with a possessive feeling.

His eyes closed and he groaned. “Where’s my mother?” he asked harshly. “Where’s Jane?”

She hesitated.

His black eyes opened again, fury in them. “She was sleeping with my partner,” he said harshly. “He told me….”

She grimaced.

He laughed coldly and went back to sleep.

In the weeks that followed, Dane’s life changed. Jane came to see him once, stiffly apologetic, only to inform him that she’d filed for divorce and was remarrying the minute the divorce was final. His mother peered in the door, remarked that he seemed prepared to live after all and went sailing with Wyatt.

Tess, infuriated with the rest of the family, devoted herself to Dane’s recovery.

God knew, he needed someone, she thought. What he’d found out about Jane had very likely distracted him enough to get him shot. Then Jane walked out on him. His own mother had deserted him. Not only that, but he even lost his job, because the surgeons agreed that he might never be fit enough for full-time work again because of the damage to his spine.

When they told him the bad news, he almost gave up, he was so depressed.

“This won’t do,” Tess said gently, recognizing instinctively the lack of life in his lean face. She knelt beside the chair where he was sitting up for a few minutes and took his hand in hers, holding tightly. “You can’t give up, Dane,” she told him. “They only said that you might not be able to work—not that you will. You can’t let them do this to you.”

“Can’t? They already have,” he said tersely, averting his eyes. “Why don’t you get out, too?”

“You’re my almost-big-brother,” she said. “I want you to get well.”

He glared at her. “I don’t need a teenage sister.”

“You’ll get one, all the same, when our parents marry,” she said pleasantly. “Come on, cheer up. You’re tough. You were a ranger, after all.”

His face closed up. “Was is right.”

“So you won’t be in prime condition for a while. So what? Listen, Dane, there are plenty of things you can do with your law-enforcement background. God doesn’t close doors without opening windows. This can be an opportunity, if you’ll just look at it in that light.”

He didn’t speak. But he listened. His dark eyes narrowed as they searched hers. “I don’t like women,” he began.

“I guess not. With all due respect, your life hasn’t been blessed wtih nice ones.”

“I married Jane to spite my mother. Not that I didn’t want her at the time. She was all set to settle down and have children. That was all she wanted.” He averted his face, as if the memory of her desertion was killing him. “Get out, Tess. Go play nurse somewhere else.”

“Can’t.” She shrugged. “Who’ll keep you from wallowing in self-pity?”

“Damn you!” he snapped, his eyes flashing warning signals as they met hers.

She grinned, refusing to be intimidated. That was the first spark of interest she’d seen since they’d told him he couldn’t work. “That’s better,” she said. “How about a cup of coffee?”

He hesitated. But after a minute, he gave in to the irritating need to be fussed over. He nodded and she almost ran in her haste to get to the coffee machine down the hall. He stared after her with helpless need. He’d never been treated like this by a woman, by any woman. It was new and unsettling to have someone care about him, want to do things for him. With his mother, and especially Jane, it had been, “What can you do for me?” Tess was different. Too different. She was getting under his skin, and not just with her warm affection. He looked at her body and felt a kind of desire he hadn’t experienced in years. She aroused him as Jane never had. That, he thought worriedly, could present some problems later on. She was only nineteen, even if she was probably experienced. Most girls were these days. He closed his eyes. Well, he’d cross that bridge later. Not now.

He began to think about what she’d said, about a new profession. His lips pursed thoughtfully and all at once he began to smile as wheels turned in his mind.

As the weeks passed, Tess came with time-clock regularity, sitting with him, talking to him. He accepted her presence and finally began to let his guard down with her. They grew closer, even as he fought his headlong attraction to her.

The attraction slowly began to undermine his efforts to be kind to her. He was overly irritable one Monday morning when she came to his apartment and found him lying listlessly in bed.

“You again? What the hell do you want?” he’d asked coldly.

Used to his flashes of temper by now, she only smiled. “I want you to get well,” she said simply.

He lay back and closed his eyes. “Go away. Aren’t you late for school?”

“I graduated. It’s summer.”

“Then get a job.”

“I’m going to secretarial school at night.”

“And working during the day?”

“Sort of.”

His head turned on the pillow. “Sort of?”

She smiled. “Dad thinks I’m doing enough of a job helping you get back on your feet.” She didn’t add that her father had only agreed absently with her own comment on that score. Nita had been to see her son just that once, and had stayed less than five minutes. But Tess adored him. She’d worked to lose weight, to improve her appearance, so that he might notice her during his long recovery. It hadn’t worked, but she was hopeful that it might one day.

“Are you qualified to practice psychiatry and physical therapy?” he asked with biting sarcasm.

It bounced right off. She knew he was hurting, so she didn’t mind being a target. She put her purse aside and stood up, her ponytail swinging as she leaned over him.

“My father is going to marry your mother. When that happens, you’ll be my big brother. I need to practice looking out for you,” she said.

He glared at her. “I don’t need looking after.”

“Yes, you do,” she replied pleasantly. Her eyes went to the visible scars on his upper arm in its white T-shirt. There were worse ones on his back. She’d seen them, though he didn’t know she had. “It must hurt terribly,” she said, her voice as gentle as the look she gave him. “I’m sorry you got hurt, Richard.”

“Dane,” he corrected. “Nobody calls me Richard.”

“Okay.”

“And I don’t need a schoolgirl for a nursemaid.”

“Why doesn’t your mother come to see you more often?” she asked curiously.

He averted his eyes. “Because she hated my father. I look like him.”