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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."
"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
first of many innovations, I expect. I think that I have never felt such pleasure as I feel at this moment,
not only because such a device will assist me, but because it will assist so many others like me."
She burst into tears. She couldn't help it. Such a statement, coming from the hard, cold man of her
early days there, brought such joy that she couldn't contain it.
"Dana," he whispered, drawing her gently closer, rocking her. "Doesn't it please you to have reformed
me?"
She could hardly speak at all, she was so choked up. "Oh, yes, it pleases me," she said fervently.
"Gannon, what a beautiful thing to do!"
"Contamination," he whispered wickedly. "Being around you is making a civilized man of me. How
do you like that?"
"I like it very much," she replied, pressing closer.
"So do I," he murmured. His hands smoothed down her tumbled hair. "It is, at least, a beginning. For
now, Pratt has left me a device that we marketed last year. Come, I'll show you how it works."
She dabbed at her red eyes, following him to the desk, where a computer was sitting, along with a
printer.
He sat down in front of the machine, booted up the system and fed a disk into it. Immediately, a
mechanical voice began reading to him what was obviously a marketing report. He leaned back in his
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