Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
And yet this austere four walls and a ceiling had become a safety blanket of sorts.
When they were here, if something happened medically, there were people who could help, ready at a moment’s notice.
Who needed 911 when you had an entire team and a state-of-the-art medical facility thirty feet underneath you.
“Do you want something to eat?” she asked again.
Daniel’s lean face scrunched up with distaste, his half-mast eyes nearly disappearing. “God, no.”
On reflex, she measured the distance to the marble bathroom. As they’d come in, getting him to lie down had been the most important thing, so he was on her closer-to-the-door side of things. But if he was going to be sick? The trip around the base of the mattress to get to the loo was going to add a couple of yards. Which was no big deal. For most people.
For Daniel? It might as well have been a fifty-mile trek uphill at a dead run.
Fear crept up her spine and tightened the base of her neck. “I can get Dr. Lipsitz back if you’re going to throw up? You can have a—what do they call it?”
God, her brain was just shorting out all over the place.
“Antiemetic. And no, thanks.” Daniel stretched his opposite arm over his head and arched his back, as if he were trying to make room for the nausea in his abdominal cavity. Like it was a tangible object he’d swallowed. “I’ve had it with the poke-and-prodding—hey, you know what C.P. needs to make next?”
“What.”
“That scanner thing Bones had on Star Trek. He’d just move it up and down over the person and know everything.” He resettled the limb at his side and closed his eyes completely. “I still remember the little electronic whirring sound it made. I can’t tell you how much I’m into noninvasive now. Did you ever watch Star Trek?”
She traced his gaunt face with her eyes, and was relieved that there was a little color in his cheeks—until she remembered the ride up the Northway and the squall of snowflakes. It was likely windburn.
“Is that the one with Darth Vader?” she mumbled as she told herself to stop counting his frailties.
“No, Captain Kirk. James Tiberius. The starship Enterprise? Does that ring a bell?”
When the doctors and nurses had been examining him, they’d made him take off his jacket, sweatshirt, and t-shirt, and there were so many bones showing through such thin skin—and then there was the bruising and the puckered scar from his Hickman line’s removal on his upper pec. They’d taken the access out how long ago? After the chemo didn’t work? Things should have healed by now.
“My grandfather didn’t have a TV in our house,” she said numbly. “And C.P. goes by Cathy now, I think.”
“She’s still C.P. to me.”
“Me, too.”
There was a long period of silence. Then he squeezed her hand. “Lydia.”
“Yes?” She was afraid to meet his stare for fear everything she was thinking was in her eyes. “Are you going to be sick—”
“You know they’re not going to find anything at that condo.”
Oh, what a great change of subject. Something to lighten the mood.
“Well, maybe they can call…” She let her voice drift off. “Of course they’re not going to call the police, are they.”
“No, and C.P.’s guards have better forensic training than local law enforcement up around here anyway. Still, no matter how hard they look, they won’t get anywhere. That was a professional job.”
As her throat tightened like a fist, she choked out, “Is Gus dead?”
Funny, how that rhetorical could come out as a question. And how unfair. As if Daniel could dispel the sole rational conclusion to all that had happened.
“You need to go to the mountain tonight.”
Lydia frowned and immediately shook her head. “I’m staying with you—”
“Blade will be up there—and as much as I hate you being anywhere around him, you need to go find him. He’s the only one who can help us right now, if Gus is going to have any chance at all.”
Even though she fought it, the image of a powerful male in red robes, lurking in the shadows of the summit, staring at her, talking at her, would not be denied. He had seemed to understand instinctively that she was of two things, both tame and wild—and that moment between them hadn’t lasted. The attack had come from out of nowhere, gunshots ringing out, some kind of cyborg nightmare that made no sense nearly killing them both. Blade had been injured, and she had helped him—and his sister.
The next day, Daniel had jumped to conclusions that had made sense only on a surface level, and everything had fallen apart for her. For the two of them.
She had not, and would not, ever be with Blade.
His attraction, his obsession, with her was a one-sided figment.
Lydia shook her head and got to her feet. Even though the last thing she was going to do was leave the room. “I’m not in a big hurry to see that man—or whatever he is—ever again.”