“Senora. Senora!” The voice came from beyond the door, followed by pounding.
Malory sat up on the bed, still dressed, the TV still on. She looked at the cell phone in her hand to see what time it was, but sometime after she’d fallen asleep her phone had died.
The woman at the door pounded again, and Malory hurried to her feet.
When she pulled it open, a short Mexican woman stood before her with a piece of paper in her hand. She wore a name tag that said Maria, Mexico City.
“Senora, a message for you.” She handed her the piece of paper and hurried back to her front desk duties.
Malory looked down at the note. Hospital. Now!
Her stomach clenched and she felt ill, violently ill. Tears stung her eyes, and her hands shook. She glanced back toward the clock on the nightstand. It was a minute past midnight on Christmas morning.
Malory found her shoes and turned off the TV. If she could kill a few more minutes, she knew she could prolong the moment when they told her he was gone. Her body shuddered at the thought.
Maria called her a cab, and twenty minutes later Malory was standing in the family room of the hospital waiting for her father and Maggie to find her.
She’d expected them to be waiting for her, or at least her father to be in the waiting area.
She watched for them, but when the sliding door to the ICU opened a man walked out. He smiled at her and she recognized him as the man from the restaurant and the man from the cafeteria. He disappeared with a smile around a corner.
“Wait! Wait!” She called after him, but when Malory reached the corner he was nowhere to be seen.
“Ms. Wilson?”
Malory turned back to see a nurse, pale and frowning. “You can go back now.”
Her heart sank into the pit of her stomach. Where was her father? Where was Maggie? She should be there with her as she’d always been in times of crisis.
Tears flowed freely from her eyes, and she clasped her hands together to keep them from shaking.
The ICU was dark. Sounds from monitors in other rooms and the murmur of people talking in low tones buzzed in and out of her head making her dizzy.
She walked to his curtain and stopped. There he lay, so still, in the bed. Tubes were still taped to his arms, but the one in his mouth had been taken out. The monitors stood silent, their screens blank.
The moonlit sky cast a silvery light over the room through the small window.
She sat down by his bed and dropped her head and wept.
“Well, I guess this was how it was to be. I got as far as forgiving you for breaking my heart, but we’ll never have the chance to move past that and spend our lives together.” She fought for a breath between sobs. “I will always love you until the day I die.”
“And I’ll love you until the day I die.”
The voice was weak and airy, but at the sound of it Malory’s head snapped up.
“Chris? Chris!” She jumped from her chair and stopped short of leaping onto the bed next to him. “You’re okay? You’re okay.”
He moved his hand just enough that she took it.
“Well, I’m far from okay.”
“But you’re not dead.”
He smiled weakly. “They said it was a Christmas miracle.”
“That’s what I asked for. I did.” She laughed as she wiped away fresh tears, but more of them continued to fall. “A man with a white beard and blue eyes . . . Oh, never mind.”
She touched his face. “I’ve never wanted anything so much as for you to wake up.”
“I’m awake and I’m never playing another game of hockey.” When she laughed again, he smiled, this time from the heart. He closed his eyes, obviously working to gain his strength. “Here,” he said opening his hand slowly. “I think this belongs to you.”
Her necklace lay coiled in his palm.
“I wanted it to protect you no matter where you landed,” she said, taking it from his hand.
“I landed where I belong. With you.”
“Yes you did. Don’t you ever leave me again.”
“I promise.”
He took another breath and she could see he was growing tired. “You need to rest. I should go.”
“Not yet.” He gave her hand a weak squeeze. “I wanted to tell you yes.”
“Yes?”
“I heard all that babble about me not asking you fast enough. You’re just impatient. So I say yes, and as soon my mom and your dad get back from the valley, I’ll give you your ring.”
She covered her mouth with her other hand. “Oh, Chris.”
“C’mon, you didn’t think I wasn’t going to ask again?” She shrugged. “I was going to ask at the end of the game. Plans got changed. So I didn’t get to ask, but I did get to answer.”
“I thought you’d left me forever.”
“I left you for a little while, but I had a guardian angel looking out for me. I knew I was on thin ice and he wasn’t going to let me fall through He wouldn’t let me leave you. Not after I finally caught you.”
“So you’ll marry me?” she asked, drawing herself closer to him and brushing a gentle and trembling kiss on his lips.
Slowly, as if it took all the energy he had, he lifted his hand to her cheek. His dark eyes gazed into hers and he smiled. “If this didn’t stop me, nothing will.”
Meet the Author
Bestselling Author Bernadette Marie is known for building families readers want to be part of. Her series The Keller Family has graced bestseller charts since its release in 2011, along with her other series and single title books. The married mother of five sons promises Happily Ever After always…and says she can write it, because she lives it.
When not writing, Bernadette Marie is shuffling her sons to their many events—mostly hockey—and enjoying the beautiful views of the Colorado Rocky Mountains from her front step. She is also an accomplished martial artist with a second degree black belt in Tang Soo Do.
A chronic entrepreneur, Bernadette Marie opened her own publishing house in 2011, 5 Prince Publishing, so that she could publish the books she liked to write and help make the dreams of other aspiring authors come true too.
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