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everything from the color of the sky to the carpet that keeps tripping him up.”
    She drew in a slow breath. “Should I go in and see if I can calm him before your mother jumps off the balcony?”
    “I see you’ve figured Lorraine out very well,” he observed. “She’s very nervous when he’s in a temper-and he hasn’t been any other way since the accident.”
    “At least you believe as the doctors and I do: that it’s all a matter of making him realize he hasn’t lost his sight permanently.”
    “Oh, I agree, all right. But Gannon’s the one who has to be convinced. And, lady,” he added with a grin, “that is going to be a full-time job, and not without hazards,”
    “I’ve already found that out,” she said with a sigh.
    “Won’t you change our mind and come with me?”
    She looked up at him thoughtfully. “If you’ll take Mr. van der Vere along, too, I’ll come.”
    He lifted his eyes helplessly to the sky. “What a horrible thought.”
    “Will you?”
    He looked down, his head cocked, his eyes twinkling. “For you, lovely lady, anything.”
    “Not so lovely,” she murmured, touching the scar.
    “It hardly shows,” he argued. “And it’s healing.
     
    You’ll be left with hardly a memory of it in a few weeks.”
    “I suppose.”
    “Is that why you came here?” he asked quietly, stopping to watch her expression. “To hide your scars?”
    She stared at the sand under her own bare feet. “I suppose I did, in a way. My mother died in an accident a few months ago, you see. She’d been drinking, and I let her drive….” Her shoulders lifted and fell. “I got a few scars and I had a concussion, but everyone seems to feel that I killed her.”
    “Do they?” he asked thoughtfully, “or is it guilt that’s punishing you?”
    Her eyes flashed. “Guilt?”
    “Your eyes are tortured, Miss Steele,” he said softly, studying them. “You’re Very young to try to live with that much guilt. I’m a fatalist myself. I believe that the hour of death is preordained.”
    She swallowed. “Is it?”
    “Such things are best left to theologians and philosophers. But it seems to me a horrible waste to let guilt destroy your life along with your mother’s. Was she a happy person?”
    She shook her head. “My parents had divorced, my father had remarried and Mandy found it rough trying to live by herself.” She stuck her hands in her pockets. “She couldn’t cope. She wanted me to come back home, to take care of her.” She laughed bitterly. “I couldn’t even take care of myself….”
    He caught her gently by the shoulders and turned her to face him. “Try living in the present. You can’t change what was.”
    She felt her lower lip tremble. “The guilt is eating me alive.”
     
    74
     
    Blind Promises
     
    Diana Palmer
     
    75
     
    “Then stop feeding it,” he advised. “Stop hiding.”
    She searched his kind eyes. “Have you ever thought of becoming a psychiatrist?” she asked, forcing lightness into her tone.
    One corner of his mouth curled up. “I studied psychology for three years before I decided I liked electronics better and transferred to a technical college,” he confessed.
    She burst out laughing. “I should have realized,” she said. “You could probably do your brother more good than I have, you know.”
    “He won’t listen to me or talk to me,” he said, shaking his head. “But he’ll listen to you.”
    “Only when I yell.”
    “It’s a start. You really want to take him to Savannah? Okay. But you tell him, I’m not going back in there to save my life,” he chuckled.
    “I find that blatant cowardice,” she murmured.
    “No doubt. I call it self-preservation.” He strode back down the beach beside her. “Have you told him-about the scars?”
    “No,” she said simply. She swallowed. “You… won’t tell him?”
    He glanced at her. “You’re making too much of them, you know,” he said softly. “You’re a lovely woman. But if you don’t want