by Tess Oliver
Eliot straightened with the blanket corners in her hands. She waved it once like a bed sheet, in an attempt to get it folded, but the breeze was working against her. “Damn it,” she muttered as she arced her arms again to smooth out the blanket.
I picked up my pace and grabbed the other two corners just as they tried to make their escape. Eliot looked surprised to see me. We matched corners, and I walked toward her with my end. As I neared, I noticed her hands were trembling. She was obviously still shaken.
The back door on the ambulance slammed shut, pulling our attention that direction for a second. We watched as it drove slowly over the unpaved road and then picked up speed on the asphalt.
I turned back to Eliot. She finished folding the blanket and didn’t look up from her task.
“Hey, El, job well done up there. The paramedics say the cola kept her from slipping into insulin shock.”
“Guess those college classes come in handy sometimes.” There was no mistaking the tremor in her voice. She shoved the folded blanket under one arm. Her free hand reached up to swipe at the curl, which had grown even more rebellious in the breeze. Her fingers were shaking as she drew them away from her hair.
I took hold of her hand and held it tightly. I had no real explanation for my constant habit of touching her, but it just wasn’t something I could control.
She stared down at the ground.
“El, not one other person, myself included, had a clue what was happening to Linda. Give yourself some credit for being fucking amazing. Even if you only allow yourself to think it for the next few hours, let it sink in for awhile that you are an incredible person.”
Her shoulders jerked and a sniffle followed.
I knew I had no right to do it, but she was upset and Eliot was someone who I couldn’t stand to see distraught. I wrapped my arm around her, and for a brief second, she allowed herself to lean against me.
Voices and clamor from the crew rained down from above. Eliot stiffened and pulled back.
She wiped her eyes quickly. “I need to get this stuff picked up for Jackson.” She finally gazed up at me. “I’m glad the day went better for you.”
“Me too. Hey, you should come by tonight to talk. I know I’ve got time but I think I’ve got the field narrowed down to four women.”
My words sent her back to her clean up task. “That’s great.”
“Don’t you want to hear who they are and why?”
“You bet. It’s just I’ve got a lot to do.”
I grabbed the corners of the next blanket.
“Jackson might have gone a little overboard on the linens. It’s like a Bed and Bath store exploded out here,” she grumbled as she worked to secure her corners. I walked my half up to her.
“Come hang out tonight. I hate sitting alone in that house.”
She smoothed the blanket into a perfect square and added it to the pile. “I can’t. I’m working.”
“Again. Damn, Eliot, when are you ever going to slow down and—”
Her face popped up. “And what? Smell the roses?” As tough and resilient as she was, she had still not recovered from the earlier trauma with Linda, and now, it seemed, I’d only upset her more. “Every time I slow down, life catches up to me again. Then I find myself clawing my way back up from the hole.” Her voice was trembling, and I wanted to kick myself.
“Sorry, El, I didn’t mean to upset you. You’re right. And it’s none of my business. I guess I’m just disappointed I won’t see you later.”
She took a steadying breath. “No apologies. I’m fine. Just a little out of sorts from the day. I’ll see you tomorrow. Then you can tell me all about the chosen few.”
“Looking forward to it. What else can I do to help?”
Eliot looked around. “I’m done. You’d better go up before you miss your ride back. Although I doubt Doug would leave behind his star attraction.”
“I don’t know about that. After I yelled at him about the camera, I’m pretty sure he’s just waiting to see the backside of me. Guess I’ll see you tomorrow.” I headed back up the grass hill and stopped a few feet from the top. Eliot was piling blankets into a basket. “You know, El,” I called down to her. “Only one woman really left an impression on me today.”
She looked up and swept her fingers over the curl. “She does have a lovely accent.”
“Who?”
“Lilly.”
I gazed down at her and again she brushed away the curl.
“Yeah, that’s not the woman I was talking about. See you tomorrow, El.”
Chapter 18
Eliot
Sometimes I was so busy with everything, like taking care of Mom and Georgie, keeping up with bills and studying for my classes, I hardly had time to think about my daytime job. I felt as if I was doing it rather half-heartedly. Something I hated to feel.
Rafe let me know right from the start that he wasn’t terribly demanding and that had turned out to be true. Unfortunately, his lack of needing to be pampered left me with a light, almost embarrassingly easy, work day. Jackson had always been running around like a madman trying to keep up with the demands of his appointed bachelor but then my good friend did tend to overdramatize everything. At least I hoped that was the case.
The one thing that Rafe always seemed to want was conversation. Early on, he’d decided I would be his main friend on set. His wingman or confidante or buddy, whatever word seemed to work best. I hated them all. I loved the idea of being his friend, but I hated being the sounding board about the women on the show. I knew he wanted to talk about his four top picks, but I wasn’t much in the mood to listen. I hoped a trip to the studio gym would get his mind off the topic. At least until I could work up the courage to hear about it.
I walked up to the door and knocked.
“Come on in, Eliot,” he called.
I opened the door and walked inside. Rafe was pulling on a shirt as he walked out of the bedroom. It was kind of crazy to think that just a week ago we were complete strangers, and now we’d been thrown into a situation where it felt as if we’d been friends for a long time. I felt completely comfortable around Rafe, a man who I would normally not even have the confidence to talk to or smile at in a crowded bar.
I clapped my hands together. “You look very nice. Now change. I’ve just arranged for you to have an hour alone in the studio gym. That is, if you feel like working out.”
“Hell yeah. I’ll be right back.” He turned back down the hallway. “Have you heard any word about Linda yet?” he called from the bedroom.
I scooted halfway down the hall so I wouldn’t have to shout back. “Yes. She’s stable and feeling much better. I actually stopped by the hospital on my way here.”
He came back out of his room dressed in shorts and carrying a shirt. He was always breathtaking, but the narrowness of the hallway made his shoulders look even broader. The man was a masterpiece from the top of his head to his feet. Even his tattoos were so perfectly placed it looked almost as if he’d been born with them.
“Wow, that was thoughtful of you.” His stomach muscles rippled as he pulled the shirt on. “Wish I wasn’t a prisoner here. I would have liked to visit her too.”
We headed back down the hall. “She told me to tell you thank you for being such a prince yesterday.”
“If I was the prince then you were surely the knight in shining armor.”
He’d meant it as a compliment, but something about being compared to, yet, another male character left me feeling deflated. I sure had grown overly sensitive in the last week. And I wasn’t great at hiding my emotions anymore either, a skill that I’d always had down solidly.
“Or whatever the female counterpart of a knight would be,” he amended quickly. “A knightess?”
He opened the door and I brush
ed past him. “Don’t think that’s a word.” We reached the golf cart and climbed inside. “Unfortunately, Linda might be in some legal trouble with the studio. As you know, a doctor’s letter of good health is required to be on the show. Her doctor, or whoever signed the letter, did not mention the diabetes. She kept it hidden from everyone. It was a pretty reckless thing to do.” I backed the cart up and circled it around to the driveway.
“Guess this was something she really wanted. I can see the studio’s reasoning, but it seems wrong not to let people with certain health problems participate. Even if it’s a liability, it’s a form of discrimination.”
“You’re absolutely right.” I thought about Georgie and all the things in life she was missing because of the paralysis. As much as the country tried to make things fair for disabled people, there was still such a long way to go.
Rafe raked his long hair back with his fingers, a habit that I’d grown used to, and for some damn reason, it made my stomach flutter every time. Jackson was right. It really had been too long since I’d been with a man. And how ironic that after my long stretch of celibacy, I’d been thrown into the inner circle of a man who was purely and simply the hottest man I’d ever met in person.
We limped along toward the back gate of the studio. The cart tended to struggle when Rafe was sitting in the passenger seat. I was worried he would start up a conversation about the bachelorettes and I decided to bring up a different topic, one that actually interested me.
“Your program, or the thing that made you a nice chunk of change, for lack of a classier phrase, it had something to do with medical records, right?”
He grinned over at me. “You still haven’t read that briefing package, eh?”
“I skimmed it here and there.”
“I see. Guess it didn’t interest you.”
“If you had ten chapters of biology and food science to annotate every week, would you have read it?”
“Nope, probably not.” Rafe leaned back, and as always, tried to figure out exactly where to place his long legs and big feet in the cramped golf cart. “Global Medic Connect was an idea born out of tragedy, something that happened when I was in Afghanistan.” His tone changed, it deepened and became more serious, and it seemed he was drifting back to that time in his life. “My partner, Mason, and I had been undercover, acting as black market smugglers to keep track of a stolen cache of weapons. On one particularly hot as hell afternoon, we were hiking back through the mountains. We had the coordinates and the names of the main players in our sting operation, so we were heading back to base camp, thrilled to be done with the covert mission and excited to get back to the green zone for showers, real food and shelter. Shit. Especially shelter away from that hot fucking sun.” He glanced over at me. “I have no scientific proof, but I’m convinced that the sun is much closer to Earth in that region of the world.”
“I’m thinking there probably isn’t much scientific evidence to back that up.”
“Other than the fact that it’s hot as fucking Hades over there. Anyhow, we had a good twenty mile trek until we reached the spot where we would meet up with the other members of our team. And as long, hot and daunting as the hike ahead of us was, we were still amped to be finished. We were talking about the things we missed back home, like double cheeseburgers, cold beers and women. Both Mason and I had women high on our lists of priorities once we were back in the states.”
“That’s quite understandable.” We reached the back gate. I’d left it open so I drove the cart right through and veered off onto the cement path that would lead us to the central hub of the studio.
“And so, you and Mason were waxing poetically about burgers, beer and women . . .”
“Right.” Rafe stopped and looked down at a scar on the back of his hand. He rubbed his thumb over it. “Mason did love life. He was one of those guys who could have a good time even if shit was falling down around him.”
“Was?” I asked reluctantly.
Rafe nodded. The slight movement shook the cart so that it hopped forward on the smooth cement. I waited for him, not completely sure he was going to fill in the missing details. It was obvious this story had turned him around a dark corner in his memory. A short dry laugh shot from his mouth. “Twenty fucking miles. We’d been hundreds of miles through the most dangerous and remote areas of the country. We’d been dealing with some of the worst, shadiest people, and we’d made it through unscathed. Mason stepped on an IED, probably something that had been sitting there for months just waiting for a convoy or the right foot to trigger it. I was blown off my feet and pelted with metal shards, but Mason lost his left leg from the knee down. The shrapnel had ripped him up pretty good too. Even with a tourniquet, he was going to bleed out long before I could get him to base camp.”
We were nearing the gym, but I slowed down as he finished the story. It seemed now that he’d started it, he was determined to finish. I had a sense that he hadn’t told it often or in its entirety to many people.
“I knew that just five or so miles back the way we’d come, a volunteer medical team, those amazing brave doctors who travel to the worst places on the planet, had set up a makeshift hospital to help the locals. It was Mason’s only chance. I hoisted him up over my shoulder and hiked back the five miles. Felt like a hundred. I kept talking to him, trying to keep him conscious, but he faded off about twenty minutes before I reached the medical outpost. Two doctors, one who even spoke good English, raced out. They carried Mason into the tent.”
I parked in front of the gray building that housed the workout room. Rafe was still lost in his story. It was heartbreaking to visualize him carrying the limp, bleeding body of his friend through what had to have been rough and blistering hot terrain.
Rafe lifted his face and stared ahead at the building, but I was sure he wasn’t actually seeing it. “They put Mason on an IV and immediately started pumping antibiotics into him.” Rafe’s throat moved as he swallowed hard. “None of us knew. We’d been undercover. Our dog tags had been left behind. Mason was allergic to penicillin. He went into anaphylactic shock. The doctors tried to reverse it, but he was already so weak from the injury, he died right there on the table.”
“I’m so sorry, Rafe. I can only imagine how horrible that must have been for you after getting him back to medical help and then having that same help be the cause of his death.”
He sat forward and took a deep breath. “It spurred me into action. When I got back home, I teamed up with my sister, Jill, a veritable computer genius, and we created Global Medic Connect. It gives even the most remote hospitals access to a worldwide database. It started with just military personnel and people who worked overseas for charities, missionaries and other organizations, but now private and public hospitals are using it. If a trauma patient comes in unconscious and there’s no one to speak for them, the GMC warns doctors of allergies or any other conditions that could harm their chance of saving the patient. We hadn’t really considered it for profit, but once the hospitals and health insurance companies were clamoring for it, a data company offered us a deal we couldn’t turn down.” He pointed to the building. “Is this the place?”
I was still sitting in complete awe of his story, and it took me a second to comprehend his question. “Yes, sorry, yes. I’ll show you to the gym.” We climbed out. Rafe held the door for me as I slipped inside. I led him down the hallway and waved to Kit, the security guard who’d helped me arrange for Rafe to be alone in the gym. We reached the door.
I gazed up at him. I’d already developed a sense of who the man was, pleasing to the eye, charming, well-read and a bit of a playboy, but his story had added so many layers that it was hard not to find him anything but extraordinary.
I glanced at my watch. “You have until noon.”
“And then the golf cart turns back into a pumpkin?” he asked.
“Somet
hing like that. And trust me, you do not want to stick around for my transformation back into a lizard. Or was it the rat that became the coachman?” I laughed. “I swear I have never been cast in so many male roles as I have since becoming the bachelor’s butler.”
“Trust me, El, there is nothing about you that says man . . . or guy . . . or male. Thanks so much for this. I really needed it.”
Chapter 19
Rafe
“You look very handsome,” Eliot said as she fiddled with the collar on my shirt. She spun around, plucked my coat off the seat and held it up to me.
It was still hot outside, but I pulled it on. The formal suit was a requirement for the invitation ceremony.
The workout had relieved some of the tension I’d been feeling about the afternoon’s taping. It would be short and simple, at least in as far as what would transpire in front of the cameras. But during those few stress packed minutes, I had to invite twelve bachelorettes to stay and continue ‘the journey’. The writer’s words. Not mine. None of this had felt like a journey as much as it had felt as if I’d been stuck into a speed dating nightmare where I had just seconds to fall in love and choose someone I wanted to spend my life with. After today, four women would be finished with the competition. Linda was out, but I had to send three more home. I only hoped, like me, that they hadn’t become too invested in the whole process yet. I was still a stranger to all of them, and I certainly hadn’t formed an attachment to any of them.
Eliot motioned toward the studio door, and I thought back to Doug’s threat to remove her from the assistant position. I smiled thinking how I’d be sending a few women home tonight, but if he’d sent Eliot to another position, this whole damn thing would be unbearable.
I straightened the sleeves on my coat. “You haven’t asked me who I’m sending home yet.” We stepped inside the building.
