by Avery Flynn
Hank sped down the country road and flipped on the sirens once they hit the highway. As soon as they pulled up to the emergency entrance, a team of hospital staff streamed out of the double doors. An orderly yanked open the door, pulled Josie from Sam's arms and whisked her away on a stretcher.
He tried to follow, but Hank's hand on his shoulder stilled him. “They'll take care of her, don't worry.”
Sam paced the hospital waiting room, which was crowded with Laytons. Chris and Hank huddled in one corner with Hank's girlfriend, Beth Martinez, sending him sympathetic looks over their coffee cups. After the nurse had warned them they were in for a long wait, Claire and her fiancé, Jake Warrick, had gone to her restaurant, Harvest, to bring back food, but they'd be back soon. His parents, Glenda and Bob, maintained a silent vigil in the center of the room.
“Samuelson Aaron Layton, come sit down by me.” Glenda patted the empty lime-green chair. “The doctor said you lost quite a bit of blood before she stitched you up and you won't do Josie a bit of good if you pass out cold.”
He glanced down at the white bandage circling his biceps. Fifteen stitches. Josie might be dying and his mom worried about him passing out?
Heat flushed his cheeks and anger at his own impotence expanded in his chest like a hot-air balloon. Ugly words formed in his mind, but before they could leave his mouth, he saw the worry heavy in her tear-swollen eyes. The fury deflated in an instant and he shuffled over to the seat.
Glenda slid her hand into his and squeezed. “She'll make it, don't you worry about Josie.”
The door swung open and a doctor walked in. The already high tension level rocketed as everyone in the room focused on the tired man in front of them.
“I'm Dr. Coll. Have you been able to locate Ms. Winarsky's family yet?”
“Not yet.” Hank rubbed the back of his neck, remembering the frustration of finding only one contact number in her phone. “We left a message for her brother.”
Coll consulted his clipboard. “I see.” He stood silent for three long breaths before gazing back up and focusing on Sam. “Miss Winarsky is suffering from hypothermia, but we're bringing her core temperature back up and she's on a thiamine and glucose drip.”
The pressure in Sam's chest eased and he took the first deep, calm breath since Snips had knocked him unconscious this morning.
“However, there are complications.” The doctor paused, letting the revelation sink in. “She has frostbite in four of her fingers on the right hand. With this level of injury, the muscles, blood vessels, nerves and tendons in her fingers froze.”
Tension pulled his spine straight. “Will you have to amputate?”
“Not right now. We like to take a wait-and-see approach to frostbite injuries such as this. Most likely, nerve damage will be the worst she has to contend with.”
“And without that luck?” Sam hated to have to ask the question.
The doctor chomped on his gum and the grooves in his forehead deepened. “At worst there could be permanent numbness in those fingers and we may even have to amputate—but those cases are rare. She should be fine in a few weeks.”
“But she's a painter, if she can't use her fingers, how will she work?” After all she'd gone through and the sacrifices she'd made to paint, the news would devastate her.
“I'm afraid I can't answer that. She'll need to stay here for the next few days so we can monitor her heart for irregularity and treat the frostbite.” Dr. Coll turned and opened the door. “We just have to hope for the best.”
“Can I see her?”
The doctor shook his head. “Not until we get her core temperature to where it should be. Go home and get some rest.”
With that final bit of advice, Dr. Coll turned and left the room.
Shell-shocked, Sam couldn't move from his chair. His family gathered around him, offering the silent support of their presence.
“Why don't you come on home with us tonight, I'll make some mac and cheese and you can sleep in your old room.” His mother patted his knee.
Just the idea of leaving Josie felt like an additional betrayal. Even if he couldn't be with her, he wouldn't let her be alone again. “No, I'm staying.”
It was close to midnight when the hospital waiting room's taupe walls starting closing in on Sam. His mother and father had nodded off in their chairs. Everyone else had gone home for some shuteye hours ago. A jittery edginess had invaded his muscles and he needed to move. He'd take a quick trip to the cafeteria and see if there was a vending machine or coffee.
The wide hallway was deserted at this hour, but a group of women gathered at the nurses' station at the end of the hall. A woman laughed and Sam recognized the voice. Keely dePaul was the only woman he knew with such a husky laugh, made even deeper by the cigarette habit she'd had since they went to high school.
“Hey, Keely, can I talk to you a minute?”
Her gaze soft with sympathy, the same look half the town had given him when Michael died, she nodded and took a few steps away from the other women dressed in light-blue scrubs.
“How you holding up?”
“I'll live.” He flinched at his own words. “I need to see her.”
Keely glanced around. “Follow me.”
Their steps echoed off the walls as he followed her down the hallway. She passed five doors before stopping and opening one.
Josie lay on the bed covered in blankets and heat lamps circled her bed, making the temperature in the room warmer than it was in the rest of hospital. A heart monitor beeped in a steady rhythm next to the bed. Her face was swollen, and thick white bandages wrapped around the fingers on her right hand. He took a step into the room, but Keely's hand on his arm stopped him from going in farther.
“You can't touch her. We've raised her temperature and given her pain medication, but her skin is very sensitive. Imagine the pain of the pins-and-needles feeling when your leg falls asleep and multiply it times a million.”
“Will she be okay?” Just asking the question was like standing on the edge of the world knowing a strong breeze could blow him over and into oblivion.
“She’s strong, Sam. Her heart is responding well and she reacted well to the rewarming protocol. I can't make any promises, but the outlook is good. Try not to wake her up.”
Focused only on the woman in the bed, Sam didn't even realize Keely was leaving until the door clicked shut behind him. For once, Josie looked small and fragile, lying on the bed connected to an IV and heart monitor. The sight nearly killed him.
It was more than just a sense of failed responsibility. It was love. He'd known there was something special about her the moment he sat down at that bar in Vegas. Smart, vivacious and sexy as hell, Josie woke him up from a life of settling for good enough and made him want to be a better man, the kind of man she deserved.
“I promise I'll do whatever it takes to be that man.” His voice cracked and he dropped his face into his hands.
Tears wet his palms, the first he'd cried since Michael had died. Instead of stuffing the emotion back into a dark box, he let it go and his shoulders shook under the weight of his silent anguish.
Chapter Nineteen
Soft beeps invaded Josie's subconscious, pulling her from the heavy sleep. She blinked her eyes open and white filled her view. How had the snow gotten into the cave?
Her vision focused and she realized the white above her were ceiling tiles. The cold that had seeped into her bones had disappeared, replaced by a lethargy that numbed her body.
Once the strong odor of disinfectant pierced her consciousness, she recalled waking up in the hospital yesterday. The forced-air warming blankets they'd used to defrost her and the desperate yearning for Sam had been the first things she’d felt upon regaining consciousness yesterday afternoon.
Early morning sunlight filtered in through the partially closed blinds. It danced in lines across the white blanket covering most of her body. A needle stuck out from a vein on top of her left hand, connected by a tu
be to a bag of clear fluids.
She turned her head and there was Sam.
He was asleep in a chair across the room, his body twisted into an awkward position with his chin resting on his chest. His broad shoulders rose and fell in a steady rhythm.
“Sam.” Her voice sounded raw as she called out to him.
His head snapped up, tawny eyes wide. For the span of three beeps from the EKG machine monitoring her heart, they just gazed at each other. Josie never thought she'd see him again and relief rushed through her.
He jumped up from his seat and knelt beside the bed. “Josie, I'm so sorry. I should have stopped them. I should have found you sooner.”
“Shut up, Sam.”
His hazel eyes widened and his shoulders sagged. The idiot thought she was going to kick him to the curb.
“The only thing I thought about while I was on the run was doing whatever it took to keep them away from you. That was the most important thing in the world to me.” The light from the heat lamps surrounding her bed turned his hair into the color of a hot July sunset and she wished like hell she could touch him.
Before he could say anything, the door slammed open.
Cy, dressed in head-to-toe black, took up almost the entire space. A petite woman stood just behind him.
“Hey there, little brother.”
Cy strode into the room, stopping just shy of Sam, who quickly stood up. Not bothering to look at the other man, Cy kept his focus on her and completed a slow perusal of her battered body, taking stock of each minor scrape and major injury. By the time he reached her toes, an angry flush burned in his cheeks. The brunette slipped her hand into Cy's and squeezed.
“I'm going to kill that shithead Snips,” he bit out.
“He's down the hall with a police guard in front of his door, but I wouldn't bother. The doctors don't expect him to pull through.” Josie shrugged her shoulders, the small movement sending waves of pain rippling through her body. “Anyway, you'll have to stand in line behind Sam and me to get a crack at him.”
At this, Cy turned his attention toward Sam. He puffed out his chest and took half a step closer. “My sister is in this hospital because of you.”
Sam said nothing but the vein in his temple went into overdrive.
A heat wave swept through her body. “Cy, that's not fair.”
“Not fair?” he roared. “You almost freeze to death while this yahoo and his brother meandered about. Hell, if they hadn't lucked into finding Snips' car, you'd be a block of ice by now.”
“Stop being an asshole, Cy—”
“No, he's right.” Sam turned his hazel gaze on her. “I failed you.”
An ache started in her chest, making her throat close and her eyes water. If someone had ripped out her lungs from her chest, Josie couldn't have hurt more than she did at that moment.
When she opened her mouth to speak, he stopped her with an upraised palm. “Let me finish.”
She nodded, her heart fluttering.
Sam glanced at their company and the tips of his ears turned magenta. He drummed his fingertips against the outside of his thighs and chewed his bottom lip before refocusing all his attention on her. The self-conscious tension melted out of his shoulders. “You are exactly what I never realized I needed in my life. You're fun and adventurous and you wouldn't know how to go along to get along if you had an instruction manual. You make me want to be a better man. The kind of man who deserves you.”
The ability to form words deserted Josie and she stared dumbfounded at him. She needed to say something—anything—but her mind had gone completely blank.
“I'll leave now.” A wicked look darkened Sam's eyes and he smirked. “But I'll be back.”
He leaned down and brushed a feather-light kiss across her lips, then straightened and headed out the door. His footsteps on the linoleum floor kept time with the EKG monitor until the sound disappeared completely, leaving her listening only to the erratic beat of her own heart.
“Well, that was way too touchy-feely for my taste,” Cy said.
Josie relaxed her head back into the thin pillow, feeling about fifteen degrees warmer than she had a few minutes ago. “Shut up, Cy.”
He opened his mouth to speak, but the woman at his side quieted him with another squeeze. He looked down at her and his expression shifted from annoyance to something much softer.
The other woman approached her bed, a kind smile dominating her heart-shaped face. “I'm so sorry to meet you under these circumstances. I'm Marlene Truss.”
Everything clicked together. “The governor's daughter?” Cy had told her in Vegas he was protecting the governor's daughter from an assassination plot by the Callandriello family.
“Yes. If I'd have known everything that had happened was putting you in danger, I never would have let Cy come with me.”
“Like you could have stopped me.”
Marlene pushed her dark bangs from her face and stared up at Cy with her hands on her hips. She didn't say anything. She didn't have to. Cy, who stood at least a foot taller and was a hundred pounds heavier, grimaced and turned his attention back to his sister.
“Are you okay? How about the hand?”
“The doctors want me to stay another night, but after that, they said I'll be tired but recover completely. I'll be like my old self in a few days.” She lifted her bandaged hand off the bed, staring at it as if it were an alien. “As to the hand, I have to wait and see, but I'll be painting again. The only way I'll give it up is if I lose all my fingers on both hands, and then I'll figure out how to paint with my toes.”
“And is that what you plan to do? Go back to Vegas and paint?”
The plan gelled together in her head in an instant. It was perfect. She wanted him. He wanted her. Time to break out her kickass princess attitude and slay a dragon. “Hell no. I know exactly what I'm going to do.” And it wasn’t going to happen in Vegas.
Chapter Twenty
The end of the lunch crowd filled The Harvest Bistro to capacity and Josie weaved her way between the tables with a nine-ounce steak and rosemary potato wedges drizzled with olive oil in one hand and pan-seared salmon with mixed greens in the other.
When the doctors told her she’d be right as rain within a month after leaving the hospital, she figured they were full of shit. But true to their word, she felt fine. Her right hand got tired easy, but Dr. Coll said that would go away in time too. It had been four weeks since she'd last seen Sam Layton in her hospital room.
Four very long weeks.
Not that she'd been sitting around waiting for his call or chasing after him. No. Her plan involved doing the one thing she was sure he never expected. Ignoring him. Eventually, he'd break, she was sure of it, but she didn't know how much longer she'd be able to hold out. Odds were she'd be knocking on his door in less than forty-eight hours.
In the meantime, she'd sweet-talked Celestine into renting out the studio cabin to her for the foreseeable future and had spent the majority of her time painting. The thought of going back to Vegas after all that had happened make her sick to her stomach. She liked the pace and friendliness of small town America. Of course, now she needed a job and she figured waiting tables in Dry Creek couldn't be that different than in Vegas. She'd been filling out an application to work at Harvest when the lunch crowd had swarmed the place, so she'd offered to help out until it slowed a bit.
“So has that son of mine shown his face yet?” Glenda Layton spread her napkin on her lap and glanced approvingly at her salmon.
“I haven't seen him.” Josie put the steak in front of Bob Layton.
“No one has. I swear that boy has burrowed underground.” She eyeballed her husband of forty years. “I thought you were going to have a talk with him.”
“I did.”
She tossed up her hands in frustration. “And?”
“We talked.” He shrugged and concentrated on his lunch.
Glenda huffed. “Bob, getting information out of you is like pulling t
he teeth of a pissed-off bull.”
“You always were full of piss and vinegar, Glenda. One of my favorite things about you.” He started cutting his steak. “Well, that and your legs.”
A shadow fell over the table.
Josie looked over her shoulder to see Sam wearing a bright-red sweater and jeans with worn cuffs. Bits of blue paint had dried in his hair.
God, he smelled delicious, like hot, sexy man. All she wanted to do was slide her hands underneath the cherry wool and touch his hard chest or, maybe, her hands would travel downward to the button on his jeans. She clenched her thighs together at the mental image.
He smirked at her as if he knew exactly what she was thinking and completely approved.
In a heartbeat, she decided to bolt before she lost her battle with self-control. “Okay then, I'm gonna run and see if the waitresses need any more help.”
She spun on her heel to flee. Warm, strong fingers wrapped around hers. “How are you?”
Nervous. Excited. Horny. “I'm okay, how about you?”
“I meant, how are you feeling since you left the hospital?”
Except for missing you? Perfect. “I didn't believe the doctors when they said I'd be right as rain in a few weeks, but they were right. I couldn't take sitting around the cabin anymore and had to break out.”
“I heard you're staying in Dry Creek.”
“Yeah, despite everything, I like it here.”
“I like it with you here too.” He took a step closer, sexual energy coming off of him in waves. “And you already got a job, a place to live?”
Her clit throbbed between her legs. They'd never made it through a conversation without her wanting to drag him to the nearest horizontal location; hell, vertical would work too. “This is my audition, I guess you could say, so I better get back to it.”
