“Cass, can you hear me?”
Slowly, she nodded.
“You’re in the hospital. McDonough got you out. Do you remember?”
She had heard someone call her name. She had seen Chris’s eyes go lifeless. Her grandfather had told her it was going to be okay. But she hadn’t really believed him. How could she? She had felt so close to death. After that there had been nothing.
Guess her grandfather was right after all.
“McDonough broke through the window over the futon and managed to get the front door open. He pulled you out.”
“Spook. Nosey.”
“I had an officer take them to the vet. They’re going to be fine.”
Malcolm broke through the window over the futon to get to her. Something about that didn’t sound right. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine the apartment and what it had looked like at the end. Fire had consumed the futon and had progressed to the carpet. Smoke had filled the room so that she had barely been able to make out her hand in front of her face.
“No futon,” she whispered. “Fire. Too much fire.”
“Yeah.” Dougie grimaced. “He got pretty burned up.”
Frantic, Cass tried to sit up, but her body rebelled and she began to cough. It was as if her whole body were filled with smoke that was leaking out in spurts.
“Hey, easy. Easy. He’s okay. It’s just his arms. He’s down on the third floor getting patched up. I tried, Cass. I tried but I couldn’t get the damn door open.”
“Good locks,” she wheezed after a time, reminding him that he had been the one to suggest the extra dead bolt. The dead bolt that if she had only remembered to engage it when she had first gotten home would have prevented everything. Cass made a mental note not to let Dougie know about that.
She saw him smile at her answer and was pleased that the guilt-stricken look was gone. She knew Dougie enough to know that he would have hated to take the backseat to Malcolm, that he would have rather been burned than be considered less heroic.
He was a good man despite his faults.
“Can I see him?”
“Sure. He’ll be up soon, I imagine. Do you feel strong enough to tell me what happened?”
“She was from the institute. Dr. Farver’s patient.” The mask began to irritate her so she pushed it up and off her head. Gingerly, she took shallow breaths and found that as long as she didn’t inhale too deeply, she was okay even though her voice was limited to nothing more than rasps.
“She was Wallace Rockingford’s daughter,” Dougie told her. “I didn’t even consider her. She was only a kid, fourteen, when her father was killed. The cops closed the case on the wife, and she killed herself before sentencing.”
“Chris killed her father. She took out his tongue. She was abused. Raped. Beaten. God only knows. But she was also a medium.”
His eyes sprang open. “Are you shittin’ me?”
As if now would be the time to bullshit him. “No.”
He seemed to struggle with that.
“It’s how she ended up at the institute. With Dr. Farver. He promised her that there were others like her. He told her I could help her.”
“You’re saying she heard her father. In her head.”
“He was the monster,” Cass revealed. “Evil. She heard that there was someone that could help and she tracked me down. Dr. Farver didn’t have my new address until recently.”
“And the ticket to Baltimore?”
“She went back to my grandparents’ house. To look for me there.”
Cass waited for all the pieces to fall into place for him. Eventually, he nodded, satisfied. “Would you have been able to help?”
She could see his face scrunch in a way that suggested he probably didn’t want to know all the answers. “She said I distracted him. She wanted me to go away with her. It’s why she set the fire. But we struggled. She fell on me and the knife…Oh, Dougie. It was horrible.”
He reached for her hand, but instinctively she pulled it away. As soon as she had, she felt bad about it. It wasn’t her intent to dismiss him but to avoid contact. She didn’t have the strength for contact with anyone right now, and she was too skittish to risk what might have been a harmless touch.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized. “It’s not like you think. I just can’t…”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not. Not really. I don’t want to be enemies, Dougie.”
He looked away, then looked back and smiled softly. “We’re not enemies. We’re friends. Good friends, but just friends. If you can forgive me?”
She wanted to. She very much wanted to. “Friends. Just friends. Really?”
“Really. In fact I can’t stay with you much longer. Steve set me up with his wife’s sister. Apparently, Marilyn has decided I’m ready to get out there and date again.”
“Good for Marilyn,” Cass said.
“Okay. Well, I’m going to go. You sure you’ll be okay on your own?”
“Yep.”
He stood and walked to the door but looked over his shoulder at her. “I really hate to leave you alone.”
“She’s not.” Malcolm walked in at the same time Dougie was voicing his concern. Dougie took that as his cue to leave. Apparently joining together to rescue her hadn’t brought them any closer. No male bonding going on there at all.
“Later, Cass. I’ll be in touch if we need anything else from you.”
The door swung closed behind him, and Cass watched as Malcolm moved toward her. Her chest tightened and her throat clogged, but she doubted it had anything to do with smoke inhalation.
His forearms were covered in white gauze, and there was a clear gel smeared on his left cheek. There were other bright red marks on his forehead and chin but nothing else bandaged.
“Your face,” she whispered.
“It hurts like a son of a bitch,” he quickly confessed.
“My hero.” She smiled.
“No,” he said. “You’re mine. You did it, Cass. You held them both off. Just long enough for me to get to you.”
“How? I mean how were you there?”
“As soon as I hung up with you, I started pacing. I couldn’t stand it. I just knew something bad would happen, and this time I could try to stop it. I got in my car and drove over. Figured I would stand watch in case anyone tried to break in, but it was too late. She was already inside. I didn’t know anything was wrong until I saw the smoke.”
She saw his jaw clench and reached out to touch his arm to assure him it was okay, but this time he was the one to draw back when she made contact with his covered forearm.
“Sorry.”
“It’s all right. They’ll heal.” He wore an enigmatic expression on his face as if he didn’t know what to think of her reaching out to touch him first.
She wasn’t really sure what to think of it either. Hadn’t she just warned herself against contact? Somehow, though, with him it seemed safe.
“You remembered what I taught you?” he finally asked.
Limply, she nodded. But that wasn’t truly how she’d fended off the monster. It had been Gramps. Silently, she apologized to him for all the times she’d shut him out. For everything that had happened before that, too. It had been so easy to dismiss him at the time. She’d been young and hurt. She’d wanted so badly for him to believe her, but instead he had betrayed her. So she’d betrayed him back.
Through hindsight, though, she saw a different picture. He hadn’t really betrayed her. He had truly thought he was helping her. He’d never understood that she wasn’t sick. Cass felt him there at the edge of her consciousness, and this time she reached out to him.
You loved me.
I did. I didn’t know how to show it. I didn’t know how to deal with you. I thought you were sick, Cassie. I wanted to help. I’m sorry.
I’m sorry, too. For not being there for you at the end.
There is no end. Goodbye, Cassie. Remember, don’t ever fear love. Embrace it. It’s
a gift, too.
“Cass? Cass, are you okay? Do you need me to leave?”
Her sudden silence must have worried Malcolm as she had given her full attention to her grandfather. She noticed that the contact with him hadn’t hurt her at all. She wondered if Malcolm had something to do with that.
“Do you want me to go?”
“No,” she said quickly but then started coughing as her lungs seized.
“No? Then I’ll stay.”
After a few breaths, she was able to answer his original question. “I did remember. Everything you taught me. But it wasn’t just that. At first I was losing to the monster. It was too strong for me. I could duck one blow, but then there was another after that. Then Chris showed me a picture of him. I saw his face, and suddenly the monster was gone and it was just a man… Then I kicked the crap out of him.”
Malcolm chuckled. “Good girl.”
“It was my room, after all. Nobody messes with me in my room.”
He smiled and reached out to let an undamaged finger brush her cheek.
Her eyes drifted shut, but she tried to fight off sleep. She wasn’t ready to say goodbye to him yet. There were so many things that they still needed to talk about, but she quickly felt the option slipping out of her control.
“You need sleep.”
“My cats,” she murmured. “The vet.”
“I’ll get them.”
It was asking a lot. It was asking more than a simple favor. She wondered if he knew that.
“You don’t have to.”
“You’re right. I don’t.”
With that, she let sleep overtake her without a single worry about her cats. About anything, really.
The next day, Cass was released from the hospital under the instructions that she was to continue to drink lots of water and get plenty of rest. Her lungs would remind her for a while what she had suffered at the hands of a distraught medium, but eventually they would heal.
Eventually, she would heal, too.
Dougie had offered to pick her up, but she had gently declined. Instead, she had asked him how his date went, to which he had groaned loudly.
“Welcome back to dating,” she’d teased.
“This sucks.”
“It does. But sometimes things work out.”
“You and McDonough?” he had asked her.
But she hadn’t really had an answer for that. She’d just wished him luck on his next date and told him she would be in touch when she figured out where she would be staying for the indefinite future.
Her scooter nothing more than twisted metal now, she was forced to hail a cab. She climbed into the backseat and thought for a minute about her options. Her apartment was out of the question, considering it was burned beyond recognition. Her renter’s insurance would cover her for the scooter and the futon and her clothes, but other than that, she hadn’t lost much.
No, there was only one place she really wanted to go. And her cats were already there waiting for her.
“Gladwyne,” she finally told the driver.
The cab pulled into the circular driveway of the address she’d given the driver. Cass hesitated before getting out. Looking at the massive house, she couldn’t fathom calling a place like that home. There were so many complications it brought with it. But her cats were inside. And she suspected her future was inside, too.
She paid the driver and got out. She rang the bell on the front door and waited without having any idea what she was going to say.
When Malcolm opened the door, she could almost see the look of relief on his face.
“I wasn’t sure if you would come.”
“I wasn’t sure either,” she answered honestly. “But I didn’t really have anywhere else to go.”
He shook his head at her. “Sorry. That’s not a good enough answer. You need a place to go? I’ll build a house for you.”
He was dead serious.
“You’re going to make me ask?”
He folded his arms over his chest, careful not to put any pressure on his burns. “I think I have to. I think I need to hear from you that this is what you want.”
Bastard. Of course it didn’t help that he was right. She’d been the one to leave. She’d been the one to reject him. She didn’t see how it was possible that whatever they had between them could work, but the difference now was that she was willing to take the chance.
Don’t ever fear love. Embrace it. It’s a gift, too.
It was the best advice her grandfather had ever given her. That and to always buy regular gas.
“I want this. I want…you. I didn’t come here because I didn’t have any other place to go. I came here because this is the place I wanted to be.”
He smiled. “That hurt, didn’t it?”
Cass let out a slow, long breath. “Worse than getting beat up by a monster. But I think it might be worth it.”
Malcolm stepped back, opened the door wide, and Cass bravely stepped through it to the other side.
STEPHANIE DOYLE
a dedicated romance reader, began writing her own romantic stories, some funny, some adventurous, but all delivering the quintessential happy ending, at age fifteen. At eighteen she submitted her first story to Harlequin Books and by twenty-six she was published. Now in her thirties, she struggles between the demands of her “day” job, her writing and trying to find a little romance of her own. She lives in South Jersey with her two cats, Alexandria Hamilton and Theodora Roosevelt. She wants to get a dog, but the cats have outvoted her.
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