Blind Promises by Diana Palmer Page A

him as naturally as if she were walking into a room, feeling his big arm draw her close to his side with wonder.
    “Did it happen?” he asked, his voice mirroring the same uncertainty she felt. “Did you really agree to marry me?”
    She sighed and leaned her head against his shoulder. “I was out of my mind,” she confessed. “I should have said no. You’ll regret it…”
    “Never!” He turned her into his arms and stood holding her tightly, his breath warm and soft at her ear.
     
    “Never, not as long as I live. We’ll have a good life together.” He found her chin and lifted it. “Dana, you meant it? You do love me?”
    She swallowed. Where was her pride, her caution? He’d as much as admitted that he didn’t love her, that all he could offer her was companionship.
    “Yes,” she said anyway, studying the lines and angles of his face with soft, loving eyes. “Oh, yes, I meant it, Gannon.”
    His chiseled lips parted on a heavy breath and he seemed troubled. His hands moved up to her soft arms and stroked them idly. “I feel as if I’m cheating you,” he confessed. “Perhaps…perhaps we should call it off-now, while there’s still time.”
    She understood. He was telling her that he could never love her. But she was willing to settle for what he could give; even the crumbs of his affection would be more than she’d ever had in her young, lonely life.
    “I’m willing to take the chance-if you are,” she said after a minute, and the strangest expression crossed his hard features.
    “I’ll take care of you,” he told her. “That may sound ridiculous, coming from a blind man. But if you trust me with your future, I’ll do everything in my power to see that you don’t regret it.”
    She smiled. Hesitantly, shyly, she reached up to touch his face, her fingers cool and trembling where they brushed against his cheek.
    He flinched, and she started to tug her hand back, but he caught it and pressed it firmly against the warm, slightly abrasive flesh of his face.
    “No, don’t draw back, Dana,” he said on a whisper. “You startled me, that’s all. I like to be touched by you.”
     
    102
     
    Blind Promises
     
    Diana Palmer
     
    103
     
    “Your face is rough,” she murmured, studying it. “You have to shave twice a day, don’t you?”
    He nodded, smiling. “You’ll discover after we’re married that I feel like a bear early in the morning.”
    She blushed to the roots of her hair, and her breath caught. He heard it, laughing delightedly.
    “Oh, bright spirit,” he breathed. “What did I do in my life to deserve something as untouched and untarnished as you?”
    She felt tears warm her eyes at the unexpected words. “I’m only a woman,” she reminded him.
    He shook his head, and his eyes sought the sound of her voice. They were dark with emotion, narrow, as if he’d have given anything at that moment to be able to see her.
    “No, you’re something completely out of my experience,” he corrected. “The women in my life have been hard and jaded. I never realized that fact until we met. I think you’ve spoiled me, Dana. I didn’t know there were people like you left in the world. God knows, my world wasn’t peopled with them.”
    “Your world sounded very superficial to me,” she said quietly. “As if people walked around without really feeling deeply, or thinking deeply, or participating in life.”
    “That was so.” His hands moved up her arms to find her face and cup it. “I had nothing and never knew it. You make my darkness bearable, purposeful. I begin to understand what you said to me at the beginning about a life of service.”
    “You do?” she whispered.
    “That man who just left? He was my computer expert. We are beginning research on a unit that will outperform our present equipment designed to assist the
     
    blind. It will be a unit that can convert the printed word into sound-that can read text to an unsighted person.” He grinned delightedly. “The