He rubbed at his face and shook his head. “I can’t.”
“Or won’t?”
His face tightened.
She knew she’d pushed too far. “I’m sorry. That was unfair. I’m asking too much with your father in the hospital.”
“My father’s the only family I have.”
“The same with Tyler.” She nodded abruptly and backed away.
One night of sex. She’d been like all his other women, no different. A woman from his past and little more than a pleasant, distant memory. Right this minute, she truly hated the idea of how easily she’d succumbed to the heat in his eyes and touch. “So this is it.”
He rose from the chair and made to step toward her.
She forestalled him with a hand in the air. “Don’t. I can’t handle your touch.” She sent him a wobbly smile, feeling hurt, used and alone, but she wasn’t about to reveal any weakness to him. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”
Skye didn’t wait around for his reply but pivoted and hurried from the bedroom.
~~*~~
David watched Skye disappear down the hall. He didn’t follow but continued to stand in the middle of the bedroom. Pain banded around his chest. Shit. He rubbed the heel of a hand against his temple as a headache pounded into his skull.
He should be relieved. Wasn’t that what he’d wanted? To be left alone? After all, he’d always found Skye a complication, a barbed cactus hooked into his side and a constant pain, no matter how deeply he found himself attracted to her.
He’d ignored her soft words, her plea for help. What else could he do? His father lay in the hospital, his life in balance. David couldn’t leave the only person who ever had cared for him. His mother hadn’t stuck around. His dad didn’t deserve someone else skipping out.
But he’d let a woman, vulnerable and terrified for her son, walk away to face a violent threat alone.
He swallowed down his guilt, but it rose back up like bile. If he were any type of man, he’d follow her or stop her from going. But not him. Because that would mean he’d have to delve into his past and the subsequent lies he knew he’d find. He couldn’t do it.
Chapter 17
Banging from the trunk reverberated through the interior of the car. Peter grunted. From behind the wheel, he adjusted the rearview mirror. The sun’s rays bounced off the top of the trunk, which remained closed. No thanks to the kid inside.
Damn. The chloroform had worn off. He couldn’t continue driving on the interstate with the kid rattling the back. Eventually, someone passing might see or hear.
“Hey!” he yelled over the hum of tires on asphalt. “You need to calm down, slugger.”
From the sudden silence in the back, the kid had heard him. Good. In an hour, Peter would pull off and check. If the kid hadn’t taken a leak, he’d give him some water, but only enough to keep the boy from dehydrating, because he sure as hell didn’t want the stench of piss inside the car.
The orders had been to keep the boy alive. Peter didn’t much care either way.
What he did care about was Skye’s reaction. He would have loved to see her face the moment she realized her son was kidnapped. He hoped the terror was eating away at her insides right about now.
Payback was a bitch.
The pounding in the trunk turned frantic.
What the hell was the kid doing? Using his legs like a damn battering ram?
Shit. Several hours out of Las Vegas and he had to play babysitter. Peter turned off at the next exit. Fifteen minutes later, with no sign of life for miles, he pulled down a dirt road that looked more like a cow path. The car bounced over packed dirt and dead shrub, drowning out the noise coming from the trunk until he stopped the car. After grabbing a flashlight from inside the glove compartment, he popped the trunk. As he stepped outside, desert heat coated him in its grip while a layer of dust did the same to the car’s exterior.
Hinges sighed as he lifted the lid with a cautious hand. He flicked on the light and shone its beam cautiously into the interior. On his back, Tyler lay bound, gagged, blindfolded and curled up in a fetal position. Seeing the boy hadn’t dislodged the pillowcase around his head, Peter relaxed.
He’d been warned the kid was dangerous without a blindfold. For now, Peter decided to believe Ferguson. It might have been the odd note in the other man’s voice that had convinced him. Peter didn’t want to take any chances. He’d seen some crazy shit over the years.
“We’ve got a long ride ahead of us. No more moving around like some damn worm on a line. Got that?”
He grabbed the front of the boy’s shirt and yanked the kid upward. The boy stiffened as if about to go into convulsions. Peter slipped the flashlight under his armpit, then slammed his fist into the boy’s face. Body once rigid, slumped. The boy’s head dropped backward, exposing the vulnerable column of his throat. His neck gleamed ivory against Peter’s flashlight. One quick twist and the boy would be no more.
Sighing, Peter dropped the kid back in the trunk and slammed the top closed. It wasn’t yet time.
Peter got behind the wheel, drove back along the dirt road and once again entered the stream of highway traffic. He shifted into a comfortable position against the vinyl seat and checked the review mirror once again. No movement, no sound. Still, he had one hell of a long drive. He fiddled with the radio until a station cleared. Monotone voices filled the car’s interior, while silence continued from the trunk.
~~*~~
David sat silently, waiting, watching. Next to him, his father lay beneath a white, disinfected sheet, the rise and fall of his chest in tune with the rhythmic beep of the machine to the right of the hospital bed.
People rarely came out of comas intact. Panic and pain banded around David’s chest. If the old man couldn’t function to his full capacity, he knew his father would shatter. Being reliant on David would poison his self-esteem until he became a brittle shell of his former self.
His dad might care about being partially paralyzed, but David didn’t. He just wanted his dad back. Alive. They’d been through so damn much.
Afraid to have faith or believe in miracles, David stared at the man who’d raised him, who’d sacrificed a rising career in the police department and relationships with the opposite sex. All because of a young son latched to his leg and a need to place his child above all else.
Gray, translucent skin covered a web of veins across his father’s temples and cheeks. A bruise, tinted red and purple, marked one cheek, while a bandage covered his temple and outer eyebrow.
His father’s eyelids flickered.
David snapped forward in his chair. There again. Barely a breath of movement from his lashes. But there. Not his imagination.
“Dad,” David whispered.
His father’s eyes flickered open.
David’s heart rate drummed against his chest as he cupped his father’s aged hand. Pleasure welled up his throat and made it impossible to speak.
His father turned his head against the pillow. When his gaze caught on David, he blinked. Then a frantic flash of desperation flared in the liquid depths of his eyes. He moved his lips around the tube. A hollow, unnatural groan emitted through the plastic.
More sounds issued from the tube as he dug talon-like fingers into David’s flesh. His father grimaced as pain lashed across his features.
Oh, shit. David grappled with getting air into his lungs. The pain, the vulnerability in his father’s face. David needed it to stop, he needed—
“Nurse.” With his free hand, David hit the call button by his father’s bed. “Nurse!”
The door swished open. A woman in her late thirties, dressed in green hospital garb and with a faded tattoo on her forearm walked briskly into the room and around the other side of the bed.
“That tube’s got to hurt. Can’t you take it out?” he asked as his father clawed at his mouth with his other hand. “He wants to say something.”
“I’m afraid not.” She sighed in resignation as she gently but f
irmly grasped his father’s wrist and placed it down by his side. She shook her head, sympathy softening the angular lines of her face. “They’re always like this when they come to. Always wanting to chat like a bunch of magpies. I tell you— Now stop that,” she admonished, grabbing his hand again before he reached for the mouthpiece. “If you need to talk, I’ve got an ABC board with letters of the complete alphabet. All you have to do is point to form the words you want to communicate.”
His father slapped at her hand.
“Mr. Bishop,” she raised her voice, getting his father’s attention. “You’re jeopardizing your recovery. You need to calm down. You’ve been in a chemically induced coma because of the swelling inside your skull.” The nurse continued to tell him the situation in a soothing but authoritative voice as she checked his vital signs. With each word, the wildness in his father’s eyes faded.
David sank back down in his chair, his father’s rigid fingers of his other hand still latched onto his. “Do you have that board?”
She came back a moment later with a flat board. “It’s not the most innovative, but it works.”
The moment David shifted closer to the bed and held up the board, his father started jabbing his finger at the black letters. An unnatural flush darkened his brow and cheeks.
“Dad. Slow down a bit.”
His father’s brow creased. A tremor rattled his arm as he poked a finger again and again.
A.D.O.P.T.
David frowned. “I know I was adopted.”
His father made a noise against the tube, which sounded strangely like disgust. David shoved down his impatience. “I don’t understand what that has to do with your attacker. Did you see who pushed you over the balcony?”
Y.E.S.
“Did you recognize him?”
His father jabbed at the board again.
N.O.
David grunted in frustration and noticed the nurse had disappeared from the room. Probably because she knew how irritating the damn board was in communicating.
His father exhaled through the tube, amplifying his fragility and the artificial quality of his breath. David rubbed the back of his neck. Helplessness seeped like acid through skin and muscle and deep into his bones.
More jabbing.
S.K.Y.E.
David’s chest tightened. “She’s gone.”
Parched skin tightened across his father’s knuckles as he clutched the board’s edge and stared at David with brows drawn into a fierce, gray line.
“Skye thinks her ex-husband kidnapped her son. She followed them to Boston.”
His father shook his head violently and shifted on the bed. The rustle of skin against cotton sheets meshed with air flowing through the plastic tube. A grimace of pain cut across his father’s face.
G.O.
“Go where?” Was his dad disgusted with him for bringing Skye into their lives? David could understand how—
G.O.
“Dad, I don’t understand.”
D.A.N.G.E.R.
“I know you’re in danger.”
His father rapped on the board with his knuckles.
S.K.Y.E. G.O.
“You want me to go after her?”
A frantic nod from his father. Then another round of jabbing on the board.
M.I.L.T.R.O.N.I.C.S.
“Miltronics,” David whispered. Foreboding scurried across his spine. He remembered the name from the article in the library. The foster home. The explosion. It sounded like his father was warning him that Skye was in danger and it all had to do with Miltronics.
A burst of energy exploded from his father. His hand slammed against the board, ripping it from David’s grasp to clatter on the ground. An invisible force wrenched his dad from the mattress. His limbs turned rigid beneath the thin cotton sheet. He convulsed, his eyes blank and sightless.
David jerked to his feet. A frigid wave of shock kept him momentarily frozen in place.
The nurse rushed into the room and slapped at the code blue button above his bed. “Mr. Bishop. You need to leave.”
“I can’t leave him like this.”
“Now.”
David backed away from the bed. Panic hit him in the chest. The heart machine flickered along with the overhead lights.
Snap.
He glanced across his father’s body to the window. A ragged crack had sliced a path across the glass. Fisting his hands at his side, David struggled to smother the maelstrom of emotions bombarding his head. He needed to haul back on his telekinesis before he killed his father or someone else.
Pop.
Shit. He had to get out.
A new fracture bloomed on the window and etched a dozen jagged stems outward across the glass.
Now.
Linoleum squealed as he pivoted on his heel. Stomach rolling, he hurried from the room and paced a path across the waiting area. He didn’t sit in the same, worn chair like the previous time with Skye.
No. This time, David stood alone when he desperately needed Skye’s strength and sympathy. He walked over to the window and glanced outside to the concrete parking lot from the fifth floor. Even though the sun had since risen, gray clouds filled the sky, and shadows clung to the cars, light poles and buildings beyond.
Go.
The one word echoed inside David’s head. His father had warned of danger, had mentioned Miltronics and the need to go after Skye. David rubbed the back of his neck, but the action did nothing to ease the tension knotted around his muscles.
Even when his dad was near death, unlike David, he’d focused on someone other than himself, concerned with a woman and a boy he hardly knew.
David dropped his hand to his side. What type of man had he become? Not one his father would be proud of. For too long he’d buried his head and never looked beyond what people could give him. Skye was no different. All he’d cared about was how she might screw up his life, and because of that, he’d let a woman cross the country after a kidnapper alone. He hadn’t once tried to talk Skye out of it.
“Mr. Bishop.”
David jerked around and discovered the same nurse had slipped into the room behind him. His gaze skirted away from the sympathy in her face and focused on her tattoo, a faded design of flowers and swords. Seeing her empathy would only weaken his already tentative control.
“We had to put your father under again. This time we were forced to switch from Diprivan to Ativan, which complicates the situation.”
Tension ground into the muscles of his back. “Is he going to be all right? Did he just have a heart attack?”
“His heart’s fine. His reaction can be typical in some cases, but at this point, I can’t tell you with any confidence what the outcome will be. I do know it’s very likely he’ll be under for a minimum of two weeks.”
“And what are the chances of him not waking up?”
The woman sighed. “Of course, there’s always that likelihood.” She glanced down the hall, which led to another section of the hospital. “We have clergy if you need to talk to someone.”
The nurse’s words felt like a knife to the gut and underscored his father’s fragile link to life. “No, I’ll be fine.”
A lie, but he wasn’t about to expose his despair and regrets to a woman who’d heard it all before from others.
“Can I sit with him?”
“Of course.”
David retraced his steps and stopped at the side of his father’s bed. It was like the last hour had never happened. His father lay as motionless as before, much of his frail body hidden by sheets and a hospital gown. Oxygen hissed in out of the tube, the heart monitor beeped, and the silence between hung in the air, thick and cloying.
Edging closer to the bed, David stared down at a man who’d fought like hell when he’d been struck with colon cancer. The battle had taken a lot out of him. So much so that David wondered if his dad had the will to fight this new battle.
How the hell could David look at himself again? He’d been a selfish bast
ard for as long as he could remember. Unlike Skye. He’d never met a woman so fearless. Even when things looked so damn hopeless, she hadn’t given up hope. Not Skye. The only option she chose was to fight back.
By doing nothing, he was condoning what they’d done to his dad and to Skye’s son. Turning a cheek, not because he thought it was the right thing to do, but because he didn’t want to get involved and upset his carefully constructed life.
Go.
His father’s urgent plea reverberated inside David’s head again.
Maybe it was time he acted like a man. A man who gave a damn.
Chapter 18
Skye flipped off the last of the lights and dropped down in a recliner in the corner of Jay’s living room to wait. Less than an hour ago when she’d knocked on Jay’s door and received no response, she’d used her telekinesis to slip past the locks and get inside. After scouring the two-bedroom apartment for Tyler or any sign of his presence, she’d found nothing. Not one hint her son had stepped through the front door.
Jay had been hard to find, but she hadn’t expected an easy search. For two days she’d hunted around Boston and the surrounding areas for Jay, his friends and anyone who’d crossed paths with him at some time in his life. Much of his old police colleagues proved useless, except for Mack Bennett, the only cooperative person she’d encountered. Even though he’d never stepped over the line while she was married, he hadn’t hidden his attraction, and she’d used it today shamelessly, flirting and charming her way to getting Jay’s address from him.
Night had fallen, and light from the parking lot lampposts speared through the window’s blinds to score paths across the opposite wall. She gripped the armrests and dug her fingers into the worn, gray velvet.
The rapid, drum of her pulse thrummed inside her head while her gut burned with anxiety. What if Jay didn’t take Ty? What if all along someone else had their eye on her son? A serial killer bent on his own sick agenda? Her breath backed into her throat. She couldn’t think that way. If Jay didn’t have Tyler, he’d know who did. He had to.
Savagely, she bit down on her lower lip to keep the tears at bay. Letting her heart and her emotions crowd into her conscious wasn’t going to get her son back. She needed a cool head and the brains to outwit Jay.
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