One Wild Night

by Melissa Cutler

  “What’s wrong with me? Everything hurts.”

  Nick sighed as though he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. “Well, your injuries are mostly superficial. You hit your head pretty hard and scraped up your stomach. But other than that, it’s just your hand, man. And that’s messed up bad. Real bad.”

  A look down his body confirmed it. His left hand was wrapped in a thick bandage. “What’s wrong with it?” But, really, it didn’t matter, until he figured out if Skye was all right. “You know what? Never mind about that yet. Get a nurse in here, would you? I need to know about Skye.”

  Nick pressed a call button on the side rail, and not a minute later, a worried-looking nurse bustled into the room. “Looks like our patient’s awake. Are you in pain?”

  Hell, yes, he was in pain. “Skye, the woman who was in the crash with me, where is she? Is she all right?”

  The nurse frowned down at him, which got his heart racing like crazy. Was she gravely injured? Was she alive? He tried to sit up, but only ended up flailing his arms, sending waves of pain through his left hand. “Tell me. I need to know. What’s wrong with Skye? Don’t you dare tell me she’s … she’s…”

  “Sir, you need to calm down. I’ll tell you, okay? But lie back and stop waving your arm before you hurt your hand any worse.” The nurse glanced at the door as though to make sure they weren’t being overheard. “I’m not really supposed to say anything to you about other patients unless you two are related.”

  “Yes, we are. She’s my wife,” he said, knowing that was the lie that would get him the information he needed about her. He shot Nick a warning glare.

  To his surprise, the nurse bought it. “In that case, I can tell you that she’s fine. You were both lucky. She has some minor injuries, but the baby’s safe.”

  Gentry’s relief quickly gave way to confusion. What baby? Skye wasn’t pregnant. They’d used condoms. They’d done everything right and safe and consequence free. He’d spent a whole afternoon with Skye before the accident, and they’d even talked about her previous pregnancy, but she’d made no mention at all about a baby. Not only that, but he knew she’d never get on the back of a motorcycle and take that risk if she was pregnant. Unless she hadn’t known either.

  Nick stepped forward. “Baby? Gentry, what the hell?”

  The nurse was staring wide-eyed and pale-faced down at Gentry with dawning awareness that she’d just stepped in it. “Oh, I shouldn’t have said that in front of your friend. But you knew she was pregnant, right? I mean, of course you knew. I would never—”

  “I need to see her,” Gentry croaked, tugging at his IV tube.

  Whatever the truth was and whatever their future held, he sure as hell wasn’t going to figure it out alone while painkillers were being pumped into his blood. If she was pregnant, then she’d be freaking out. This was the anniversary of the baby she’d lost, the reason she’d needed an escape with Gentry that weekend. She already blamed herself for her miscarriage, so he could well imagine the torture she was putting herself through about the motorcycle accident.

  The nurse stilled his arm, but it was Nick’s hands braced on his shoulders that kept him pinned to the bed. “Stop that before you hurt yourself,” Nick said. “Don’t make me knock you out cold.”

  He would do it too. “She needs me,” Gentry ground out. “You’re not helping.”

  “You can’t see her right now anyway,” the nurse said. “She’s in surgery.”

  Dear God. “What happened to her? I thought you said she and the baby were safe.”

  “It’s minor surgery. The doctors needed to clean out the road rash wounds on her legs.”

  In his mind, he saw her bare legs flopping on the road as she skidded. Red flashed behind his eyelids. Red like raw beef. “Shit,” he choked out.

  “Other than the road rash and a sprained wrist, all her wounds are superficial.”

  In other words, she was pregnant and broken and he knew with absolute certainty that she would never forgive him—or herself.

  He raised his hands to his face. Only then did he remember that his left hand had been hurt. Badly, according to Nick. Only his pinky finger and thumb were visible beneath the bandage, and now that he was looking at it and trying to move it, he was suddenly, acutely, aware that it hurt like a motherfucker—a stinging, awful pain that made his teeth throb in time with his whole left arm.

  “My hand. What happened?”

  He couldn’t remember what his hands were doing during the accident, where they flailed, how they hit the road or knocked against the bike. He didn’t remember his body at all. Only Skye. The contortion of her face in pain, the shredded, bloody flesh of her legs.

  “Like I said, your left hand’s pretty beat up,” Nick said, his eyes brimming with pity that Gentry didn’t want, didn’t deserve. “You lost a finger, man. Your middle one.”

  He lost a finger on his left hand, his guitar-playing hand, which told him all he needed to know about the grief-stricken expression on Nick’s face. In other words, he’d never play the guitar again.

  “We won’t know for sure until the surgeon’s get in there how bad the damage is,” the nurse added hastily. “But your friend is right. You lost your middle finger. It ripped clean off at the knuckle during the accident. The EMTs found it on the road and put it on ice, but the surgeon said it’s too damaged.”

  His guitar playing hand. He may never play guitar again. His career might be over, but he couldn’t muster up too much concern over that because the real crisis was that Skye was pregnant, and he knew how that would destroy her. She would think that this accident was punishment from God. He knew it as surely as he knew the sun rose in the east and set in the west. He needed to see her with his own two eyes, to talk her down from whatever ledge she was on after learning that she was pregnant.

  He swallowed. “How soon will Skye be out of surgery?”

  “Another hour or two, I’m guessing. Sometime during the night. I’m sorry, Mr. Wells,” the nurse said. “There’s nothing I can do to change that.”

  Nick braced a hand on Gentry’s right shoulder. “I’ll find out which room she’s in and keep checking with the nurses about her surgery, okay? For now, you just focus on healing.”

  Like hell he would. He would focus on Skye. On their baby. Whatever the fuck happened to him next didn’t matter. Not one bit except in his ability to provide for them.

  Goddamn it.

  What the hell had he done?

  * * *

  At the sound of papers rustling and the distinct sensation that someone was watching her, Skye peeled her eyelids open a crack. The fuzzy silhouette of a dark-haired man wearing white gradually came into focus. A visitor. Fine, even though all she wanted was to sleep away the pounding pain in her head and the dull, throbbing ache of her body.

  Every time she’d awoken that evening after a helicopter rescue had plucked her up off the side of the mountain, she’d had to piece together the facts. She was in the hospital. Which meant that the visitor in white was a doctor.

  She was alive. Alive and in pain, but alive. Gentry …

  All at once, her memory of the accident came rushing back. Gentry. His bike. That moving van. She remembered his guitar flipping up off the back of the bike, the blare of the moving van’s horn, and Gentry calling her name as the bike swerved and tipped, launching her off of it. Time had slowed as she’d skidded over the blacktop, right to the edge of the road. The memory of those moments of skidding glowed like white-hot light in her mind and tasted like iron in her mouth, then black and pungent like dirt as she slipped over the edge of the road.

  She’d drifted in and out of consciousness during the Life Flight to the hospital, and then in the emergency room, but she vividly remembered the warring emotions of relief that she was alive and fear that Gentry wasn’t. He was in the helicopter with her, but they’d kept her neck immobilized so her view had been reduced to the helicopter roof and whichever emergency worker was bent over her a
t the moment.

  She hadn’t been able to get a straight answer about his condition until right before she’d gone into surgery, and not until she’d wound herself up to hysterics over the hospital workers’ inability to give her a straight answer about seemingly anything.

  This doctor who was standing over her now so quietly might have an update for her about Gentry. She had to hope. The last she’d heard, he was going into surgery to try to save his badly damaged left hand.

  With some effort, she forced her eyelids to open even more and her vision to clear, then blinked several times when she saw who it was.

  Eddie Rivera. The man she was supposed to have been on a date with. What was this, a Ghost of Christmas Past moment? The man whose attention she’d spurned had come back to haunt her and help her see the error of her ways? Not necessary, because she was pretty damn clear about those errors.

  “Eddie?” she croaked, pushing the word up through a tender throat and dry mouth.

  His hand touched her arm. “You’re in the hospital.”

  “I know. But why are you here?”

  His lips quirked. “When you canceled our date, I decided to get some work done after hours.”

  That’s right. Eddie worked at a hospital. This hospital, apparently. Just peachy.

  She’s detected a note of bitterness in his tone, which made total sense. She’d lied to him about being too sick to go out. Worse, she’d lied because she’d wanted to be with a different man. She couldn’t imagine the damage to Eddie’s pride at that. He’d deserved better than her. Maybe he even felt like he’d dodged a bullet.

  “I’m sorry,” she rasped. “I lied to you. About tonight.”

  He tried to mask his flinch with a worried smile, but unlike her, he was a terrible liar. “Last night, actually. It’s early Saturday morning. You’re pregnant. Did you know that?”

  The words hovered in the air above her bed. No, she was not pregnant. She’d taken a half-dozen tests that said she wasn’t. Skye gaped at Eddie, waiting for him to crack a smile or take it back, but all he did was frown down at her with a tight jaw and sad eyes. “Who’s lying now?”

  His stiff shoulders dropped a few inches. “So, then, you didn’t know. That explains a lot.”

  “I’m not pregnant.” Which meant that either Eddie Rivera was pranking her—or he was a figment of her imagination, conjured by the meds she was on. He really was the Ghost of Christmas Past. “You’re not real. This is a hallucination or a bad dream. Whatever freaky strong drugs they’ve got me on, they need to dial them back.”

  She reached for the nurse call button, but Eddie touched her wrist. “Skye. I’m real. I’m right here. And you’re pregnant. I can show you the lab test to prove it. And I’m relieved to hear that you didn’t know, because otherwise you wouldn’t have gotten on that motorcycle, right?”

  Exactly. If she’d been pregnant, she would have never, ever done anything so risky. If she’d been pregnant, she would have been at home, praying for repentance and trying to figure out what she was going to do to fix her disaster of a life. So if Eddie was there to tell her that she was pregnant, it had to be a hallucination. Or, better yet, a dream. Maybe she didn’t even get in an accident. Maybe she’d fallen asleep at her desk. People had vivid dreams like this all the time, or so she was told.

  But if her subconscious wanted to argue with her about whether or not she was pregnant, she could indulge it. “That’s not possible. I took several pregnancy tests last weekend, and they were negative. Plus, it’s been almost three weeks since I last had sex and we used protection.”

  “But your period is really late, I’m guessing? That’s why you took the tests in the first place.”

  “Well, yeah, but I’m not a robot. Sometimes my cycle fluctuates.”

  Thank God this was a dream because she would not, never ever, want to talk about menstruation with the man she’d stood up for a date.

  “That’s probably because not enough time had passed,” he said. “Those do-it-yourself tests need at least two weeks or more for a positive reading. The tests we do at the hospital can detect a pregnancy much sooner.”

  He held out a piece of paper for her to read, but she couldn’t get her eyes to focus on the words. “It’s too soon to hear a heartbeat, but the OB/GYN at the hospital says your vitals are fine and she’ll monitor you in the hospital for the next couple days, because there’s still a chance you could miscarry. But there’s nothing else for you to do right now but rest and heal.”

  The word miscarry made nausea bubble in her throat, but she refused to succumb to the lure of hysteria. “Impossible, because I’m not pregnant,” she said as much to herself as Eddie. “I can’t be. I barely know him.”

  “Him … meaning the man you were on the motorcycle with? Gentry Wells, the musician?”

  She closed her eyes at the sound of his name. “Is he all right? A nurse early said he was going into surgery.”

  “He’s out of surgery, but he needs to rest and so do you. You can see him later today. One more thing, Skye. You should know that the accident made national news because of him. The hospital grounds and lobby are crawling with reporters and photographers.”

  I’ll bet. Then a stab of dread made her gasp. Just like that, her mind cleared. She grabbed Eddie’s sleeve. “You can’t tell anyone. About the…” She couldn’t say baby. “About this.”

  His smile was kind, in a professional, distant way. “Of course not. No one here is going to violate patient confidentiality, not for the media—and not even for worried families who are pacing in the hallway waiting for the green light to come visit you.”

  Oh God. Her family. What was she going to tell them? “Do I have to see them right now?”

  “No, you don’t, especially not everyone. But it might be nice to let your parents come see for themselves that you’re all right. They’ve been here since before Life Flight landed and they’re worried sick about you. And I think one of your aunts brought dinner, though it’s probably stone cold by now.”

  Now that he’d mentioned it, the stomach-churning smell of grease, tomato sauce, and cumin hit her nose. She lifted a hand to cover her nose, and hit herself with her cast. With all that was going on, she’d forgotten she’d sprained her right wrist. Pain coursed through her. “I’m definitely not dreaming this. Any of it.” Eddie, the accident, the baby …

  He set a hand on her shoulder and gave it a sympathetic squeeze. “No, you’re not. And for that, I’m sorry.”

  With her permission, Eddie opened the door and invited her family through. They rushed in, her mother leading the charge, followed by Gloria, several aunts and uncles, Mama Lita, and her father shuffling in last. They swarmed the bed, chattering at Skye in English and Spanish, until Eddie’s voice cut through the cacophony. “Quiet down! This is a hospital. And the best way to help a patient heal is to keep the atmosphere calm.”

  “You brought dinner. That’s sweet but…” It was too late. Her aunt Sylvia was already setting up a buffet on the counter near the sink.

  Eddie shot Skye a look of sympathy from the doorway. She attempted a shrug of resignation, but the movement hurt too much. The only way she was going to get through tonight was to shut it all down—her fear, her pain, the truth. She was pregnant and she’d almost killed her baby by getting on that motorcycle. Time to shove those facts in a tiny box, close the lid, and lock it up tight until she was alone again.

  Skye’s mom assumed the same place that Eddie had at her bedside, with her father next to her. Mom’s eyes were red-rimmed and her whole body quivered with emotion.

  “I’m okay, mama.”

  Except that you’re pregnant.

  No, she wasn’t going to think about that right now.

  Skye watched the expression on her mom’s face morph from fear to anger. Her mouth contorted into a cringe, looking as though she was trying to swallow peanut butter, but her throat was too dry. Finally she spit out, “Are you happy now?”

  “Yessica, do
n’t do this,” her father said.

  Skye wasn’t sure why she’d expected sympathy from her mom. She’d witnessed this reaction every time her dad hurt his back or suffered a medical setback and wound up in the hospital. Unable to handle the magnitude of her fear, her mom mutated it into anger. Skye would never forget the way her mom had raged for hours after her dad had a heart attack and had been admitted to the ICU.

  Well, like mother, like daughter, because Skye could feel her anger rising, pulsing up through her like a delicious drug. “Yeah, I’m really happy, Mom. Thanks for asking. I love it when my master plan to torment you works out even better than expected.”

  Her dad patted her leg. “It’s okay, mija. Don’t get yourself worked up.”

  Her mom’s nostrils flared and her frown was on the cusp of being a sneer. “No, it’s not okay, Beto. Your daughter went against God, the commandments. She went against the old ways.” She turned her sharp eyes on Skye. “That charm we summoned for you was no simple magic. Did you think there wouldn’t be consequences for ignoring the path you’d committed to?”

  Oh, brother. “Spare me your hocus pocus.”

  Her dad put his arm around her mom’s shoulders and gave a pull. “All right. We have to let the patient rest. Gloria, Mama Lita, where are you? Come take Yessica for a walk.”

  Her mom huffed and puffed, looking very much the part of a frazzled old wolf who’d just discovered that even all her hot air couldn’t blow a brick house down. For a minute, Skye didn’t think she’d leave. But her dad rarely ever issued commands, and when he did, Mom tended to follow them, especially with Mama Lita tugging her arm and issuing her own commands in whispered Spanish.

  “Fine,” her mom said, spearing a finger toward Skye. “But we’re not through talking about this, young lady. You could have been killed. Do you know what that would have done to me?”

  And there it was, the huge, loving heart that her mom fought to keep armored. It was almost enough to make Skye apologize for scaring her like that by getting herself hurt. Almost.

  Her mom let Gloria and Mama Lita pull her away, along with her two aunts. Leaving only her father and her mother’s two brothers-in-law in the room, both of whom were busy eating and looking out the window.