by Lauren Esker
"Chloe?" he said, surprised.
"Yep, after Casper called her from the construction site. She tried to get hold of you, couldn't, and jumped to exactly the right conclusion about what her brother was up to, even if she didn't know that Casper had me as well as you."
"Huh," Fletcher murmured. "Go Chloe, I guess."
"According to Nia, the police showed up at your office and caught Janice in the act of shredding every file she could get her hands on. They got Casper and his henchman when they came back from the building site. You shouldn't make too much of a big deal out of me getting us out of that shaft," she added, looking embarrassed. "They probably would've been out there no later than morning, if not sooner, depending on how long it took them to pry the story out of Casper."
"Given the shape I'm in now, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have made it that long," he said quietly. "You saved my life. I'll never forget that."
Her cheeks pinked again. "Well, that part I can do, but don't expect any mopping of your fevered brow. I'm a terrible nurse."
Despite these claims, she brought him a cup of water with ice in it. She was still sitting in the chair by the bed, her foot propped up on a second chair she'd brought in from the waiting room, when he fell asleep.
***
A nurse woke Fletcher when she came to take his vitals. He found Debi exactly where she'd been when he fell asleep, sitting in the bedside chair and quietly reading her magazine with her glasses perched on the end of her nose. Her mass of hair was drawn back in a sloppy tail secured with a plastic clip.
"You don't have to stay," Fletcher said after the nurse left. Fumbling around for the bed controls, he finally managed to find the right button and raised the head of the bed to a half-sitting, half-reclining position. He felt a little more awake now, a little less like he'd been thoroughly beaten, punched in the stomach, and dropped off a cliff.
"Of course not," Debi said, stretching. "However, I'm on medical leave from the accounting firm, so I don't know where else you expect me to go. My apartment, unlike yours, is not exactly conducive to relaxing in."
"You could stay in mine," he said before he could stop himself.
Debi looked startled. "Without you there?"
"Sure. I can give you a key. Er ... I should say, I'll give you a key when I figure out where my keys are. If they don't turn up, you can get one from the building super, or from Mrs. Cox on the first floor—you met her when we were handing out cookies. She watches Lydia and waters my plants when I'm out of town."
"Lydia—? Oh. Your snake." Debi gave her head a quick shake, but it seemed to be more confusion than negation. "Fletcher, I'm—"
"Someone I'd very much like to move in with me, once I'm out of this hospital bed," Fletcher said gently. "So there's no reason why you can't start early. My plants probably need watering anyway."
Debi hesitated, and doubt washed over him.
"If you don't want to ... I know we're moving fast."
"Shifters often do," Debi said. "It's not too fast for me. No, I'm just having some trouble getting my head around the idea that this is really happening. And there are going to be things to straighten out, like telling the SCB." Fletcher must have looked baffled, because she clarified, "They need to know where I'm staying. It's part of the terms of my release."
"Oh," Fletcher said, startled. "You mean that's—I didn't realize that was still on."
"Why wouldn't it be?" She raised her uninjured leg and pointed to the wide black band. He'd been too distracted by her cast to notice it before. "See? New monitor, new ankle. They're going to have to stop soon, though. I'm running out of legs."
"And I'm calling my lawyer. Where's my phone? Or any phone."
"Fletcher, wait, stop!" Debi caught him as he tried to stretch far enough to reach the room phone, which was sitting on the bedside table. "What are you doing?"
"Calling Teddy Hannigan. My lawyer. There's no way you should be stuck on an ankle monitor after you broke your own leg to save my life."
Debi pushed him gently but firmly against his pillows until he stopped trying to get up. "There are a few things you're forgetting."
"Such as?" Fletcher sulked.
"Such as you can't tell your lawyer the truth about me being a shifter."
"Oh. Right. Okay, fine, I'll give you that. But that doesn't mean I can't get him working on the fact that you're being unfairly detained after saving my—"
Her startled burst of laughter interrupted him. "Fletcher, it's not unfair. I'm a criminal!"
"The hell you are," Fletcher said flatly. "I don't care what you used to be. You aren't now, and we're getting that thing off you, one way or another. You told me you can show up in court with witnesses and get it taken off. Is that deal still on?"
"Well ... I guess so. Nobody said it wasn't. But, Fletcher—"
"Then I'm getting a lawyer, and we're scheduling a court date, and I'm going to walk into that courtroom and tell them to take it off you or else."
Debi's blush was a flaming sunset, but she still gave a short laugh. "Or else what? Are you planning to threaten the U.S. government?"
"If I have to," Fletcher said, perfectly serious. "And I'm definitely planning to stand up in front of all those people and tell them you're a law-abiding citizen and a good person, a brave person, a hero, and you deserve to be free."
"You're willing to stake your reputation on that," she said softly.
"I'm willing to stake everything I have, including my life. Which I wouldn't even have if not for you."
"Fletcher—" Debi began, but a soft knock at the door interrupted her.
Of all the things Fletcher was expecting, Chloe's sleek dark head peeking around the half-open door was not one of them. Chloe seemed equally unsure about it; she looked nervous and not at all sure of her welcome. But the child in her arms had no such concerns. "Daddy!" Olivia squealed, holding out her arms.
Debi gave Chloe a terse nod—one rival to another—and with that tacit permission, Chloe sidled into the room. Fletcher held out his good arm, and Debi pushed back her chair so that Chloe could get on Fletcher's good side to put the little girl on the bed next to her father.
"Daddy, Mommy said you were sick," Olivia reported, burying her face in his shoulder.
Fletcher pressed his cheek against her curls, breathing in the familiar, beloved smell of her baby shampoo. "I'm not bad sick, sweetheart. You don't have to worry about—er, Livvy?"
The child's dress collapsed inward, and suddenly there was a small brown snake draped across his shoulder, half buried in ruffles.
"Oh no," Chloe sighed. "Livvy, honey, we talked about this."
Fletcher had instinctively gone tense. Debi was leaning forward in her chair; both women, in fact, looked poised to snatch Olivia off the bed if anything went wrong.
Olivia's small, dry snake nose was pressed against Fletcher's collarbone above the hospital gown. Hesitantly, he put his hand over the middle of her ropy body. He was startled to find that she was trembling. He hadn't even realized snakes could tremble.
How much did she know of what had happened to him? he wondered. She was only four. Had she heard the adults talking around her? Did she know he'd been bitten by a snake?
Did she blame herself?
It was hard, very hard, to relax with Olivia's little snake-nose inches from his carotid artery. If she bit him there, he wasn't sure if even being in a hospital would save him.
But the worst had happened. He'd taken a bite from an adult of Olivia's family. It wasn't an experience he cared to repeat; he still felt weak, shaky, and terrible. But he'd survived. And Olivia was much smaller, with less venom.
It was true that she could kill him, if she bit him in exactly the wrong place, if help couldn't get there in time.
But Debi had been right when she'd pointed out that Olivia didn't want to hurt anyone; she only had to learn how to control herself so she could shift without being dangerous. At some point, he was just going to have to trust her to be abl
e to do that.
Strangely, the worst having already happened made it easier. If she did bite him, 99% of the time he was going to be able to get help in time and make a full recovery. What he was risking wasn't death, as he'd always feared. It was just an unpleasant illness. And what parent wouldn't willingly make that exchange for their child's happiness?
"It's okay, Livvy," he murmured, stroking her. She was really very nice to touch, dry and slightly warm from his body heat and the residual heat of her clothes. "It's all right. Daddy's going to be okay. You're going to be okay."
Chloe came back from closing the door in case of passing nurses. "Livvy, do you want to shift back for Mommy and Daddy now?"
A ripple ran through the tiny snake, and now there was a naked little girl with her arms around Fletcher's neck. His hand that had been petting her as a snake was now resting on her back.
"That's my girl," Fletcher told her. "You want to help Mommy put your clothes back on?"
"Don't want clothes."
"That's also my girl," Fletcher admitted with a sigh.
Between the three of them, the adults managed to get Olivia back into her dress, tights, and buckle shoes with only one more shifting incident that necessitated starting over again from the beginning. Once they had her restored to her fully clothed state, Chloe gave Debi an unsure look. "Could Fletcher and I talk alone for a minute, if you don't mind?"
Debi looked at Fletcher. He took her hand, pulled it to his lips and kissed the back of it. "If you're okay with it," he told her.
"I'm okay with it." She reached for her crutches and hoisted herself to her feet. "Come on, Olivia. Want to take a walk with me?"
"What's wrong with your feet?" Olivia asked.
"I broke my ankle."
"Owie," Olivia announced. "I broke my finger. Look." She held up her hand to display her pinky finger with a tiny, mostly-healed scrape on it.
"Owie indeed. That looks like a major wound. Crippling, even." Debi freed a hand from the crutches to open the door. "Come on, kiddo. Let's go for a walk. You want me to show you where the candy machine is?"
Olivia's entire body perked up. "Candy?"
"No, wait—don't give her—oh, nevermind," Chloe muttered, watching them leave. "If the worst she does after everything that's happened is give me back a toddler on a sugar rush, I suppose I got off lucky." She glanced down at Fletcher. "Olivia really likes her, doesn't she?"
"Yeah. And it's mutual. Debi's great with her."
"I'm ... glad." Chloe seemed to be pushing the words out with effort, but when she gave him a hesitant smile, it looked genuine. "She deserves that. You deserve that." The smile dropped away from her face. "We've had our differences, Fletcher, but you're a good man. You didn't deserve what my family did to you."
"I didn't deserve being poisoned and thrown down a well shaft in the rain? What a ringing endorsement of my worth as a human being."
"Okay ... yes ... things have really gone beyond the pale in the last few days. But even before that." Chloe folded her arms over her chest as if putting up a barricade, bolstering her defenses to force the next words out. "I didn't sign your paperwork. This morning, I shredded it all."
Fletcher felt around for the controls and raised the head of the bed to a full sitting position. It was hard to have this sort of conversation while partly reclined, and it also gave him something to do as he got his thoughts sorted out. He wasn't sure whether to feel hope or despair. "You're taking me back to court?"
"No. I'm doing what you tried to do before. I'm signing the company over to you. The paperwork is being drawn up even as we speak." She grimaced. "It's the Banerjees' last official act as my family's lawyers. They're refusing to represent us in court."
Fletcher barked a dry laugh. "I always knew I liked them." Sobering as another thought occurred to him, he asked, "How much trouble are you in?"
"Oh, probably not a lot," Chloe said airily. At the expression on his face: "No, seriously, I'll get through it. I'm cooperating fully, I really didn't know what was going on, and I don't expect prison time. Maybe I'll get a tracking anklet like your girlfriend."
Hot anger curled in his chest. "Don't ever talk about Debi that way. Not ever, Chloe, or you can walk out that door and never come back."
Chloe looked surprised. "You really do love that woman, don't you?"
"I ... do." It was the first time he'd admitted it to himself. "Yes. I do."
"Good," Chloe said quietly. "Good. For you and for her. You know, Fletcher, I'm not sure if you'll believe me, but this entire battle over the company ... I didn't even really want the damn thing. It was just that I didn't want you to have it, and even after I would have been tempted to let it drop, Casper kept pushing and pushing. He wanted us to keep it in the family. Now I know why. But he's going to prison, probably for a long time, and I don't want it, Fletcher. It's always been your baby. I think half the reason why our marriage broke up is because the company was more your baby than I was ..." She trailed off, and then looked at him, her dark eyes suddenly intent. "I wasn't wrong, was I? You were willing to sign over the company for Debi."
"Yeah," Fletcher admitted, not sure if he was about to be confronted with jealousy.
But her only response was a slow smile. "Good. I mean, it hurts. I'd be lying if I said it didn't. I can't imagine you ever doing that for me, even back when things were good. But I'm glad you finally got your priorities sorted out."
"Thank you," he said at last.
"Oh, Fletcher, for God's sake, let's not use kid gloves with each other." Chloe sat down in the chair Debi had vacated. She looked a little lighter, as if she'd finally gotten something off her chest that had been lurking there for a long time. "We know each other too well for that. Now, the other thing I wanted to talk about ... I'll sign the paperwork on the company, but first, I wanted to get things straightened out about Olivia."
"If you think I'm giving you sole custody in exchange for the company—" he began, anger flaring again.
"No," Chloe said quickly. "No, I'm not asking for sole custody anymore. With all the legal stuff I have going on right now, it's not a good idea anyway. But I was wondering if you'd be willing to agree to something more uneven than fifty-fifty joint custody. Two-thirds of the time with me, maybe, and one-third with you?"
His initial, heated reaction was flat refusal, but he forced himself to stop and think it over. He was still a workaholic; even if he had more family-oriented priorities now, he couldn't see himself changing that much. Debi was just as ambitious and driven. If anything, she was going to encourage that side of him, rather than putting the brakes on. And there was a lot of work ahead, getting the company back on its feet.
As much as he wanted Olivia with him, it wasn't fair to expect her to spend all day, every day in daycare in exchange for a couple hours of Daddy time in the evening. Chloe worked from home. She was always there. Even though he'd mocked her for pawning Olivia off on the housekeeper, the actual fact was that Mommy was never more than a couple of rooms away, and Olivia could interrupt her anytime. He'd never seen Chloe get impatient when her daughter wanted her attention.
As much as it galled him to admit it, Chloe really was a good mom. And while things might change in the future, especially after Olivia was old enough to make up her own mind about who she wanted to live with, right now Chloe was better positioned to deal with a small child.
"Maybe you could have her during the week, and we can trade off weekends?" he suggested. "I could ... come over, maybe. When it wasn't my week. Or you could bring her over for an evening or two."
"I think I could do that." Her smile was a little less unsure this time. "In a year she'll start kindergarten, so we might need to work out a new arrangement once she's going to school."
"That's a ways off, though."
"Not as much as you might think. It seems like yesterday she was just a tiny baby wrapped up in a pink blanket."
"That awful pink and orange blanket your great-aunt made, with the s
callops around the edges ..."
"Hey, it might have been an eyesore, but it was soft. I used to put that blanket over my shoulder when I was breast-feeding her."
"Yeah," Fletcher said quietly. "I remember."
They looked at each other, and for a moment all that history was there between them, everything they'd shared, so tangible he could almost touch it. A large part of his adult life had been wrapped up in this woman. They had a child together. They were never not going to be tied to each other in certain ways.
There was a swift tap at the door and then it cracked open to admit Debi, crutching along with Olivia's small fist tightly clamped on her skirt. Debi's golden mane was like sunshine in the room, a shaft of light that warmed him just by having her here.
Fletcher looked away from her, back to Chloe, in time to see his ex's face go through a strange mix of emotions; there was jealousy for an instant, but it faded away to a sort of calm resignation. "The way you light up when she comes into a room," she murmured, for his ears only. "I thought I wouldn't be able to stand it, but I'm glad I got to see that. It makes things easier, somehow. Knowing that you're happy with her."
"I am. Very happy."
"I'm glad," she said. "I really am." The realization seemed to surprise her. She stood up quickly. "Well, dinnertime is coming up, and I have a child to feed—who's not going to eat a thing, judging from the chocolate around her mouth." At this, Debi looked both defiant and unrepentant. Chloe scooped up Olivia. "Come on, honey. We should be getting home."
"I want to play with Debi," Olivia whined.
"You can play with Debi tomorrow ... tomorrow is good?" Chloe asked, looking at both of them.
Debi looked at Fletcher, who nodded. "I don't know when I'm getting out of here. Call in the morning and we'll coordinate."
"Okay. You want to give Daddy a hug goodbye?"
Olivia clung to his neck until she was pried off and carried out. In the hall, Fletcher heard her high-pitched voice, as Chloe tried unsuccessfully to shush her: "Nooooo! I want to run!"
"I am impressed by the inventiveness of your revenge," he told Debi, turning to her as she settled back in the chair and leaned her crutches against the wall. "Remind me not to get on your bad side."
