Only His: A Second Chance Romance (Second Chances Book 2)

by Amelia Wilde

  She sighs, a hand going to her chest. “Then you got out with nothing but a few scratches. Thank God.”

  “Thank Crosby is more like it.”

  “Crosby?” Mom pulls up one of the chairs to the side of the bed, settling in next to me.

  I look down at the sheets pulled over my legs. I can’t wait to get out of this damn gown and back into regular clothes. I’m going to be spending the next few days in regular clothes—Dr. Howard has been pretty clear on the fact that I’m not to come back into the ER until all the concussive symptoms have cleared up. “Yeah. Crosby.”

  “What did he have to do with this? He was fixing your floors.”

  My mom always liked Crosby back when we dated in high school, but when I told her about the breakup she turned on him. “What an ass,” she’d said, pursing her lips. “He strung you along all that time, only to—”

  I’d had to cut her off. “He wasn’t stringing me along.”

  “Well, better be rid of him early.”

  Now, in the hospital room, I feel like it’s time to tell her.

  “He was doing more than fixing my floor.”

  She gives me a sly look. “How much more?”

  “We were dating.”

  Her eyes go wide. “Were?”

  “Things ended. This morning, actually.”

  “Then—”

  “He didn’t want me to come into work today. He said the roads were too dangerous.”

  “And you were too stubborn to listen to him.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And he was too stubborn to let you go.”

  “I told him that if he was going to play the boyfriend card, then we were over. And then I left.”

  My mom clicks her tongue at me, but she’s smiling. “Lacey Jane, I don’t understand you.” I raise my eyebrows. “You’ve been all hung up on him for years, and you’re going to kick him to the curb for that?”

  “I thought you’d be happy.”

  She shakes her head. “Why would I be happy? You don’t date people who don’t make you happy.”

  “No.”

  “So what’s your deal?”

  Now my eyes start to fill with tears. “I was…” I can’t get the words to line up in my mind. “I was afraid that he would leave me again, in the end.”

  “Did he do something to give you that impression?”

  “We had a…tiff.”

  “Over…”

  “Work.”

  She nods sagely. “Was he pissed because you’re so busy?”

  “Not…pissed. He just thought maybe I should find a less demanding career.”

  “He didn’t push you to find some specialty that makes more money than general practice?”

  “Not even once.” It’s dawning on me now, slowly, that Crosby was worried during the fight at the Mexican place, and he was terrified this morning. He didn’t want me to run myself into the ground working in the ER. It wasn’t about control. It was about having a good life. That’s all he’s ever wanted for me.

  And how did I reward him? By breaking up with him, and then driving off like an idiot, drawing him out into the storm, and now…

  “He came after me when I left this morning.” My voice is choked tight with tears, and my mom reaches out and pats my hand. “I got stuck on the bridge at Evergreen and M-66.”

  “Oh, shit,” she says softly, and it makes me laugh—a little. Tears escape from the corner of my eyes.

  “There was—” I take in a deep breath, trying to calm my heart. It was such a damn near thing. “There was a car coming down Evergreen, right at me. I don’t know how he got there in time. I don’t know why he—” I press my lips together, trying to keep the sobs from escaping. I succeed, but only barely. I swallow them back down hard. “He put his truck between the Jeep and the other car. He let it hit him to save me.”

  My mom looks into my eyes, her face open with sympathy, not a hint of suspicion in her face. “He always did love you like that, didn’t he?”

  I nod. I can’t speak the words out loud. Instead, I lay my head back on the pillow and close my eyes, trapping the tears.

  My mom sits next to me in her chair. The silence between us is comfortable.

  My dad pokes his head back in, a styrofoam cup in his hand. “Are you ready, Maggie?”

  We both sit up straight. “Only if Lacey is. We can stay until you get discharged if you want, honey.”

  I want to tell them that I’ll be fine, that I’m absolutely fine, and they should get out of here, but the truth is that I’m probably going to need a ride home.

  “There’s a family waiting room down the hall that’s really comfortable,” I say, trying to keep the pleading sound out of my voice. “If you wouldn’t mind, I could use a ride home.”

  “No problem.” My mom pats my hand again, businesslike. “You probably have a visit to make first, right?”

  Cold dread washes over me. What if he’s really, really not okay? But it’s followed by a hot desire to be near him, at any cost. “Yes. I do.”

  Chapter Forty-Four

  More dark night

  Crosby

  What time is it?

  The question floats up into the silence of my mind like a drop of water into a far-off sink. It’s irritating, because I don’t have an answer, and the words keep dripping in, again and again, in an incessant beat.

  What time is it?

  Finally, I force my eyes open.

  It’s dark in the room, but that doesn’t mean anything. It’s fucking winter, which means this could be the early morning or the afternoon. For a while, everything around me swims in front of my eyes.

  Did I blind myself?

  No, it’s just dark, and I’ve been sleeping.

  The hospital room isn’t actually as dark as I thought it was. There are various machines in here, all of them glowing with red and green lights.

  How fucking festive.

  Something has its claws in the back of my mind, but in the room, in the bed, the sheets loosely covering me, I can’t figure out what it is.

  So I try.

  The next question is, what am I doing here?

  Clearly, I’m in the fucking hospital.

  My left ear itches, and I raise my hand, but my skin collides with the hard plaster of a cast. What the fuck?

  It’s heavy, unwieldy, but I force it up in front of my face and stare at it.

  Yes.

  The arm.

  The truck.

  Lacey.

  The memory of what happened comes screaming back in a twist of metal on metal, and my heart practically jumps out of my chest, pounding so hard I think it’s going to burst out of my body. An alarm goes off, an urgent beeping, and a nurse rushes into the room.

  “Mr. King, are you all right?” She flicks a light on—it’s not the main light in the room, thank Christ—and peers into my face, and then she hits a button on the machine. The alarm goes silent.

  “I think.”

  My voice is thick and clumsy. How long have I been here? When I talk, pain arcs through my nose. Fucking airbags. They’ll save your life, but they’ll punch you for the privilege.

  The nurse looks at me through narrowed eyes, but after a moment her gaze softens. She pats my right arm, then checks the IV that’s inserted in the vein there. “Just try to stay calm. You’re going to be all right. It’ll take a few weeks for all the bumps and bruises to heal, but you’ll be fine.”

  “What—” I don’t think before I try to turn toward her, and another bolt of pain arcs across my left side.

  “Careful, careful. You’ve got stitches above your left hip.”

  “What the—”

  “I’m told part of the truck’s frame was crushed in and pierced the skin there. Missed anything major, thank goodness.”

  I roll my eyes. “Well, isn’t that a silver lining?”

  She laughs. “All right.” Then she glances back toward the door. “As long as you’re feeling all right…you have a vis
itor. Should I show them in?”

  I feel like shit, actually, and I probably look worse, but my heart flutters in my chest. Not enough to set off any alarms. Just enough. “Okay.”

  The nurse leaves the light on and steps outside the door. The low tones of her voice float back into the room, and then the doorframe darkens.

  It’s my dad.

  We haven’t been that close since my mom died. Marci’s death shook him up more than he let on, but it wasn’t until the cancer finally delivered the final blow that he really withdrew into himself. We don’t talk much, but I text him once or twice a week just to see how he’s doing. He spends most of his time working—he won’t retire from his job at the post office—and going to the bar with his good buddy Frank.

  Like father, like son.

  “Hey, Dad.”

  He hesitates for another second in the doorway and then comes in. The cold from outside pours off of him, like he walked here as fast as he could from the hospital entrance. After all this time, he’s still my emergency contact. They must have called him when I got checked in from the ambulance.

  “It’s pretty shitty out.” He comes to stand by the side of the bed, hands in his pockets, looking down at me. His forehead is wrinkled with worry, his eyes bright with it. “What the hell did you go driving for?” There’s a half-smile on his face, but I hear the strain in his voice.

  “I was trying to be a damn hero.” I try to give him a cocky grin, but it falters.

  He clears his throat. “Did you succeed?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I tell him about Lacey. He already knows about the Lacey of the past, but I haven’t been keeping him up to date on the Lacey of the present. Now I wonder why the hell I’ve been avoiding it.

  “—so she broke up with me, and then went driving to work.” I shrug. “It was stupid.”

  My dad takes a deep breath in, then lets it out. “Yeah. It was stupid.”

  “I get it, Dad.”

  “It was pretty fucking brave, though.”

  This time, it’s a genuine smile on my face. My dad shifts his weight from one foot to the other.

  “She worth it?”

  “You mean, is she still worth it?” He nods. “Yeah. She’s worth it. I just don’t know if—”

  “Shit. Your girl’s still alive, isn’t she?”

  “I think so.” I haven’t been awake very long, but somehow I have the sense that Lacey’s okay. Someone might have told me that in the middle of one of the hazy transitions from ambulance to emergency room to regular hospital room.

  “Well, is she going to take you back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  My dad laughs, like this is the funniest joke he’s ever heard. “Shit, son. She’ll take you back.”

  “She might not. She does things her own way.”

  “On the way up here, the nurse was telling me that you put your truck in between her and the car that would have hit her and probably killed her. Is that true?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then she’d be a fool to let you out of her sight, ever again.”

  Something wells up in my chest, a tightness I’m not expecting, an ache that’s not from any of the injuries I got from my little stunt. “It’s not like—” I swallow hard. “It’s not like I won’t fuck up again.” We both know what I’m talking about.

  My dad looks me in the eye. “Son, everyone on the planet fucks up. But nobody does it with a bigger heart than you do. I think even Marci would say so.”

  Then he leans down and wraps his arms around me, carefully, so he won’t jostle anywhere that hurts.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  The big convo

  Lacey

  I don’t recognize the man bending over Crosby’s bed, but I know I’m interrupting something. Still, I can’t stop myself from reaching up to knock at the metal doorframe. I have to see him. I need to see him right now, because if I have to wait another moment to know whether or not he’s all right, I’ll combust in my own skin.

  One of the nurses on shift, Sarah, gave me the Cliffs Notes version—that he’s okay, that he’s stable, that he’s going to be fine—but then an alarm went off in another patient’s room and our conversation came to an abrupt end.

  My hands are trembling. It feels weird to be here as a visitor and not as a doctor.

  The man straightens up and turns to face me.

  Crosby’s dad.

  “Lacey O’Collins,” he says, and I take that as an invitation, stepping across the threshold into the room.

  “Hi, Mr. King.” I never knew Crosby’s dad very well. His mom was the one who would come sit at the kitchen table with us, bringing us whatever snack she’d made for the day. She died of cancer while I was in med school. I couldn’t make it back for the funeral, but my parents went and sat in the back.

  I don’t remember Crosby’s dad as being particularly affectionate, but he crosses the room, puts his hands on my shoulders and looks down at me. “Are you all right?”

  I can’t speak, my throat is so tight. I just nod.

  He gives me a hug, his solid arms wrapping all the way around me, and then he steps away. “I’ll leave you two alone.”

  Then his footsteps are receding down the hallway, and I’m looking across the vast space of the hospital room at Crosby.

  His green eyes are alight with a fire I’ve never seen before, but they’re bounded by two black shadows. His left forearm is in a cast, and from the nurse’s description, I know there are more bandages hidden underneath the sheets. My chest heats up just looking at him, but it’s tempered by a sick, cold guilt that settles in my gut and wraps its claws around my insides.

  He just looks at me.

  This could go on forever. And part of me wants it to go on forever. Because I broke up with him, I left him, I was harsh and cruel and stupid and selfish, and even though he came after me, maybe that was just to prove—maybe he doesn’t really want to be with—

  “Get over here.”

  His voice is rough, but those three words are packed with so much heat and love that my heart breaks open inside my chest, it shatters, and then it comes together with such a powerful burst of relief that I think I might die from it.

  I cross the room in four strides, ignoring the tears escaping from the corners of my eyes, and drop my coat on the floor next to the bed. I want to throw myself on top of him, curl my arms and legs around his body, but instead I hesitate at the edge of his bed. I don’t want to hurt him, so I snatch up his right hand and press it to my face, leaning hard into it.

  “Oh, my God.” It’s all I can bring myself to say, even though I feel like I’m doing a masterful job of containing the sobs that keep threatening to take over my torso. “You could have died coming after me.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I could have died driving in that stupid storm.”

  “I know.”

  “Why did you come after me?” The last question is almost a wail, but my heart is breaking again with an ache that I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to contain.

  “Because I love you.”

  It’s the first time he’s said it out loud in eight years. We might have danced around the subject that night at my house, but it was never that explicit. I think both of us were too afraid to cross that line. But now Crosby is no longer afraid.

  I can no longer hold them in and the sobs escape.

  He holds his palm to my face for another long moment, then wraps his arm around me, pulling me down against the side of him that didn’t get punctured by the jagged edge of his own truck. He smells like the sanitized industrial clean of the hospital gown he’s wearing, but underneath he’s the same Crosby that he’s always been, my Crosby.

  Finally, when I can control myself, I take a deep breath and kiss the side of his neck. Then I drape one arm carefully across his collarbone. I don’t know what kind of bruises have been left there by the seatbelt, but they’
re probably pretty painful, if the state of his nose is any indication.

  “Will you please—please—let me take back what I said this morning?”

  “That was only this morning?”

  “Yeah. It’s—” I twist my head around, squint at the clock on the wall. “It’s eight o’clock.”

  “Eight o’clock at night.”

  “Yes.” When I turn my head back to him, Crosby is grinning. “Did you just change the subject to screw with me a little bit?”

  “A little bit.”

  Then there’s a pressure from his arm, guiding me back to him, and I tilt my head toward his.

  When our lips meet, it’s the best thing I’ve ever felt. He’s alive and he’s going to be okay, and he covers my mouth with his like he’s never going to stop. Heat sizzles from the top of my spine down between my legs, and as the kiss deepens, a tiny moan, more of a mewl, escapes from my mouth into his.

  Crosby laughs. He laughs like he feels lighter than he ever has in his life. “Lacey O’Collins, are you trying to have sex with me in the hospital?”

  I let my mouth drop open in faux-shock. “I would never.”

  Then his grin turns wicked. “Never?”

  I look over my shoulder, and just then, a nurse passes by in the hallway. I straighten up. I have to get hold of myself. I work here at the hospital. I can’t be in a patient’s room, making out with him like there’s no tomorrow, even if I’m not on duty and even if that patient is Crosby.

  “Hey. What’s this about?” He pouts at me, indignant.

  “I shouldn’t be…doing this. I work here.”

  “You know what?”

  “What?”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever cared about anything less.”

  This time, when he kisses me, I don’t stop for anything.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  More big convo

  Crosby

  Lacey kisses me for so long that it verges on becoming a problem. There’s very little to contain my cock, other than my boxers and the flimsy hospital gown, and all I want—after five continuous minutes of passionate kisses—is for her to climb right up on top of me and fuck me gently until we’re both as satisfied as we’ve ever been.