Affair of the Heart by Joan Wolf Page B

said to Caroline, and she nodded mutely and watched him all the way down the road to the barn.
    * * * *
    She didn’t see him again until they were all sitting together around the dinner table. Caroline was very quiet, listening to the sound of the men’s voices, aware with every fiber of her being of the blue-eyed man seated across the table from her. He was telling his father about something that had happened to him when he was out in the mountains. He was so casual, so amusing, that the very real danger of which he spoke appeared negligible. His father said something, and Jay suddenly smiled. It was the smile she had seen but rarely, a young, infectious, radiant smile, and Caroline felt her heart stop, thump once loudly, and then begin to beat again quickly.
    No, she thought wildly. No. It can’t be. It’s not possible. She took a bite of steak and looked at Joe, clinging desperately to ordinary things as a shield against this new and frightening knowledge that was threatening to overwhelm her. “What do you think, Caroline?” Joe asked, and she blinked and stared at him blankly.
    Ellen laughed. “She’s a million miles away.”
    “Wake up, Caroline!” said Jay. “You look like a sleepwalker.”
    She blinked again, transferred her stare to him, made an effort, and drawled, “When you say that, smile.”
    Joe began to laugh, and after a brief second Jay did smile, this time directly at her, and Caroline could hide the truth from herself no longer. There he sat, Joseph Alan Hamilton, Jr., her obnoxious stepbrother, and she loved him.
    How had it happened? She lay in bed later, wakeful and bewildered, and she wondered. She had always thought that love was something that grew out of affection and admiration. It was what she had kept expecting to happen to her with Cliff and Gerald. And instead it had come like a bolt of thunder, with the blaze of a man’s smile and his dark-blue eyes. Until now she had always thought Romeo and Juliet was all bosh. “Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!” God.
    What was she to do? Could she just go quietly away, knowing now what the true nature of her feelings was? She had thought her reaction to him was purely physical. It wasn’t. Lying sleepless in bed, she knew with utter certitude that she would never feel this way about any other man. The question was, what was she going to do about it?
    Caroline was heavy-eyed and tired the following morning, and strong coffee only helped marginally. She looked at herself in the mirror and dispassionately decided that the doctor would probably put her back in the hospital, she looked so ghastly. She applied a little more blush to her pale cheeks, pulled her hair back from a center part with two tortoiseshell barrettes, put a lime-green blazer over her striped shirt and white slacks, and looked again. She still looked ghastly. “The hell with it,” she mumbled and made her way downstairs on the hated crutches. Joe was to drive her into Sheridan at ten o’clock, so she went out on the terrace to wait for him.
    It wasn’t until the station wagon stopped in front of her that she realized the driver was not Joe but his son. He got out of the car and came around to her. “I’ll take you in,” he said. “Can you sit in the front, or do you want the back?”
    “The front will be fine,” she answered and swung herself over to the car door. He took the crutches from her and held the door as she got into the front seat. Once she was established he opened the rear door, put the crutches in, and came around to slide in behind the wheel. He backed the wagon expertly down the long drive and turned it, and they began the two-hour drive to Sheridan.
    “The swelling seems to have gone down,” he remarked after a few minutes of silence.
    “Yes.” She glanced down at her sandal-clad foot. “I still can’t get my foot into a proper shoe, though.” She looked out the window at the mountains. “If I don’t get some exercise soon,