Tangled Web by CATHY GILLEN THACKER Page A

as she wished. Her voice shook emotionally as she responded, “It’s very blurred, almost black.”
    Looking at her, Chase bet she’d have a hell of a time trying to do anything right now but lie in bed.
    â€œIs it better when you keep your eyes closed?” Chase asked, aware that his own pulse had picked up as rapidly and unconscionably as his thoughts. And that neither should have. Fighting for control of his own spiraling emotions, he reached out to touch a hand to her forehead. Her skin was cool, signifying a reassuring absence of fever. He felt a whisper of relief.
    Hope swallowed listlessly and another tear rolled down her cheek. She responded to his question about keeping her eyes closed. “It’s a little better when I do close my eyes, yes.”
    Chase studied her, determined not to overlook anything. “Any other symptoms? A stiff neck? Sore throat? Pain anywhere else?”
    They went down a whole list of possibilities. To Chase’s unexpressed relief, Hope denied having those symptoms, and a number of others. She hadn’t fainted recently. Nor did she have a history of food allergies or anything else that could explain her current disabled state, just a history of migraines and no more. “When was the last one?” he asked, the diagnostician in him already looking for a pattern. He hoped to help her avoid such pain-racked episodes in future, if indeed her headache was stress-related, as Hope seemed to think.
    Hope lifted a hand, and let it fall limply across her abdomen. “I don’t know. After Edmond’s funeral, I think.”
    Chase wasn’t surprised; he knew how emotionally grueling that period had been for them all. “Before that?”
    She started to shake her head dismissively, then stopped abruptly, uttering a small despairing moan that made him want to drop down beside her and cradle her in his arms. “It had been years,” she murmured hoarsely, fighting not to cry again.
    For once, he was glad her eyes were closed. He didn’t think hecould stand to look into their dark blue depths or get any closer to her bare, trembling mouth.
    With supreme effort, Chase forced his attention back to the medical issues at hand. “When did you have them?” he asked gruffly, feeling all the more impatient with himself for his unprecedented lack of concentrated professionalism. It wasn’t like him to think about the gender of a patient he was examining in anything but the most clinical way, yet with Hope, as inexcusable as it was, that was exactly what was happening.
    â€œI had my first when I was in my late teens,” Hope admitted, then grimaced blindly at the renewed burst of pain inside her skull.
    Her attacks had started when she was still living on Morris land, and occurred again, during the first months she had lived in Houston, before her marriage to Edmond. Only later, after Joey was born and she was happily settled into her new life, had they stopped for any length of time. But they had stopped before, and they would stop again, Hope reassured herself firmly as a new flood of helpless tears rolled down her cheeks.
    And though it was unnerving, having Chase here in her bedroom, letting him see her like this, it was also reassuring. She knew she could lean on him and trust him to help her for just a little while. She had been independent for so long. It was nice to have a man to lean on again, even briefly.
    Oblivious to her thoughts, Chase asked with an efficiency that was so brisk it was almost cutting, “What do you usually do for them?”
    â€œI take aspirin. Lie down in a dark room. Wait it out.” As she spoke each word, Hope felt a renewed thundering in her skull. It was all she could do not to cry out. She tried not to think about the emotional trauma that had precipitated this attack. It had been being threatened by Russell again that had brought it on. She couldn’t tell Chase that, not without telling