by JoAnn Ross
“It’s not that easy.”
She did not, he noticed, argue the major point—that they’d shared a helluva lot more than their bodies. “Perhaps you’re making it more difficult than it is,” he suggested mildly.
“I explained to you how I’ve spent a lifetime watching my mother jump in and out of relationships. I’ve seen the harm it can cause to everyone.”
“Granted. And while this isn’t about Lilith, I can’t see her leaving Cooper.”
“No,” Savannah allowed. She stared out into the well of darkness. “I believe her when she says that Cooper’s her soul mate.”
“So, extrapolating from that, a reasonable person might suggest that when a person finds the right partner—her soul mate—she ought to just grab her chance at happiness. Carpe diem, go for the gusto, so to speak.”
“Now you sound just like a lawyer,” she complained. “Quibbling every little point.”
“I am a lawyer,” Dan reminded her. “Arguing and negotiating—”
“Quibbling.”
He gave her a mock stern look. “Negotiating,” he repeated, “is in our blood.”
She stared back out the window for a long, silent time. Dan had always thought of himself as an even-tempered, patient man. Indeed, his prosecutorial work had demanded it. The law was seldom tidy. Nor was it swift.
But he’d discovered another side to his personality, an impulsive side that had him wanting to drag her upstairs, tie her to his bed, and make mad, passionate love to her until she finally acquiesced to stay here with him where she belonged.
“I rushed into love with Kevin,” she murmured. “And that turned out to be a disaster.”
“I don’t think you were in love. Oh, I know you believed you were at the time,” he said when she shot him an accusing look. “But you were a young, romantic girl far away from home who had the bad luck to run into a charming louse who knows how to pick his victims, Savannah. You weren’t in love with the man; you were in love with being in love.”
The same thing had occurred to her. “You may be right. But if I’d only taken the time to get to know him better—”
“We’ve spent more time together than either my parents or my grandparents before they got married,” he cut her off with an impatient wave of his hand. “Besides, for the record, I’m not the weasel.”
“No. You’re definitely not, and I was wrong to make the comparison. But everything’s so unsettled in my life right now, Dan. Whenever I think I’m beginning to get things under control, some new crisis pops up.”
“Did you know that the Chinese use the same word for crisis and opportunity?”
“Perhaps I should have bought a damn lighthouse in China.” She sighed again. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you. It’s just that I need to stay focused,” she tried to explain. “If I’m going to open by Christmas, I can’t afford any distractions.”
Dan decided that he’d pushed enough. He’d planted the seed. Now, as John was always pointing out, he’d have to be patient while waiting for it to bloom.
“It’s only because I’m wild about you that I’m going to overlook the fact that the woman I’ve fallen in love with just referred to me as a distraction.”
He ran a slow fingertip along the ridge of her collarbone. “Since you seem to find this discussion not to your liking, I’ll even change the subject.” He drew her closer. “Do you realize how long it’s been since I kissed you?”
“Fifteen minutes?”
“At least.” His lips skimmed up her cheek. “Which is, in my book, about fourteen minutes and thirty seconds too long.”
“At least,” she agreed breathlessly as she placed her palms on either side of his face and brought his mouth to hers.
18
T he call came just before dawn, the phone shattering the darkness. Dragged from an erotic dream in which he’d spent a long, pleasurable time spreading warmed honey all over Savannah’s body and had just begun to lick it off, Dan extricated himself from her arms and snatched up the receiver.
“Yeah?”
“Dan, it’s Raine. I need to talk to Savannah.”
“Dan?” Savannah turned on the lamp. She sat up in bed, the tangled sheet down around her waist, her hair a wild mass of sleep and love-tousled curls. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. It’s your sister.” Dan handed her the phone.
“Raine?” He watched her face go unnaturally pale, then twist with pain, as if someone had just shoved a sharp blade into her heart.
“Oh, no.” She closed her eyes and sagged against him. “How bad…I see…. Of course.” Her exhaled breath was a ragged, tortured sound. “We’ll be right there.”
She looked up at him, her eyes bleak and terrified at the same time. “It’s Ida. Henry found her in the bathroom. She’s had a stroke.”
If Savannah had disliked the hospital the day she’d spent waiting for Ida to have her tests, she hated it now. At least in the examination areas the mood had been orderly, and if impersonal, at least efficient.
She prayed the emergency department was equally efficient, but it was difficult to tell, with all the people in white coats and different color scrubs running around. They all had an air of purpose, as if they knew where they were going, she observed.
She, on the other hand, was lost the minute she raced through the sliding doors beneath the lighted red sign.
They were headed to the window where a woman with impossibly red hair was seated at a computer, when Raine appeared.
“We’re in here,” she said, taking Savannah’s arm and leading her across the central waiting room. It crossed Savannah’s numb mind that there were a surprising number of people here for this ungodly time in the morning. “Fortunately, Gram’s name still pulls some weight. Mrs. Kellstrom—she’s the charge nurse—arranged for us to have this private waiting room.”
The walls of the small room had been covered in a blinding yellow burlap, which Savannah decided had been chosen in an attempt to lift spirits. It didn’t.
“It’s not much, but at least it has its own coffee maker, so we won’t have to drink that toxic waste from the vending machine.”
Trust Raine, even in the midst of a medical emergency, to have tracked down the person in charge and found coffee.
Lilith was sitting as stiff as a statue in a plastic avocado chair with chrome legs. Cooper was hovering over her and Jack was standing by the window, arms crossed, his face grim.
“How is Gram?” Savannah asked.
“The last we heard she’s holding her own. They’ve still got her in the examining room.”
“Can’t we be with her?” Savannah shot a look at Jack. “You’re the sheriff. Surely you can go wherever you want.”
“We were with her for a few minutes,” Raine revealed. “But when we seemed to be causing Gram more stress, Mrs. Kellstrom suggested it would be better if we waited in here.”
“They’ve got her stabilized, and they’re doing tests to determine how much damage the stroke has done,” Cooper informed her.
“Oh, God.” Torn between relief that her grandmother was still alive and fear for what state she might be in, Savannah sank into a pumpkin orange chair beside her mother and buried her face in her hands. She was vaguely aware, on some level, of Dan’s comforting hand on her shoulder.
She’d get through this, she assured herself. It was just one more hurdle in what seemed to be a year of emotional Olympic trials. The important thing was that she stay strong. For Ida. And her mother.
She glanced over at Lilith. “How are you?” Her mother looked terrible, pale as glass and hollow faced.
“A bit like Mother.” She managed a weak, feigned smile. “Holding my own.” When she dragged a trembling hand through her silver hair, her husband caught it and held it tightly, reassuringly, between his. “Thank heavens Henry found her.”
It should have been her, Savannah thought miserably.
“It’s not even five o’clock,” Raine arg
ued when Savannah admitted to her guilty thought out loud. “Even if you had been at the house, you would have been sleeping.”
“She didn’t cry out or anything?”
“Actually, Henry said that she seemed irritated that he’d found her, which is much the same thing the paramedics said. It seems she was determined to just brush it off and get back to bed.” Her laugh was flat and devoid of any humor. “That was pretty much impossible, since Henry said she was as weak as a kitten.”
“Oh God,” Savannah repeated. She glanced around the small room. “Where is Henry?”
“At home with Gwen and Amy. We couldn’t leave Amy all alone out at the farm, and we didn’t want to wait for a sitter to show up, so we just scooped her out of bed in her nightgown, wrapped her in a quilt, and drove her to the house. She never woke up.”
“I never thought I’d be grateful Henry was staying there.”
She also had never thought that she would have been grateful for the construction delays. Thank goodness the room she’d promised Henry at the keeper’s house hadn’t been ready.
Savannah sat there with the others, trying to remember everything the doctor had told them about strokes. She struggled to recall something—anything—positive about her friend’s experience. But her mind was fogged with worry, fear, and, as the clock on the bright yellow wall slowly ticked off the passing time, fatigue.
There was nothing for any of them to do but to wait. Savannah had never felt more helpless.
And wasn’t this just a fine kettle of cossacks? Ida lay on the gurney, growing more and more frustrated as the doctor kept asking her the same questions.
What was her name? Did she know where she was? Did she know what day of the week it was? Who was president? Over and over again. She answered him correctly every time—admittedly having to stop and think a minute before she realized that it must be early Wednesday morning—but for some reason she couldn’t make the answers sink into his stubborn head.
What was wrong with him? Ida scowled up at the face that was swimming in and out of focus. Was the idiot man deaf? She was tempted to just get up and walk out of here. The only problem with that idea was that she was strangely too exhausted to move. There was also the little matter of her right arm and leg feeling as if they’d turned to lead.
She’d just rest a bit, Ida decided. Since they seemed so damn determined to poke and prod at her, she’d let them have their fun. Then she’d leave.
“What are they doing in there?” Savannah leaned her forehead against the window, trying to keep herself from screaming. Beneath her initial fear, resentment began to rear its ugly head.
Dr. Ida Lindstrom had put herself through medical school, receiving her degree before the doctors and nurses working in the ER had even been born. She’d served the community of Coldwater Cove for more than five decades. She was a colleague of those very same people bustling around with a purpose they didn’t seem inclined to share.
Her grandmother was lying somewhere out there in one of those dark blue curtained cubicles, perhaps hovering on the brink of death, and not a single person in this entire damn building cared enough to let her family know her condition.
Outside the hospital, the weather was as bleak as Savannah’s mood. Another storm front had moved in over the mountains. A sky the color of bruises hung low over the town. A dreary drizzle streamed down the glass.
“She’s going to be all right,” Raine, who’d come to stand beside her, insisted for the umpteenth time since Savannah had arrived with Dan. Her nerves all in a tangle, Savannah turned to inform her sister that there were some things that even Xena the Warrior Lawyer couldn’t control, when a distressed look came over Raine’s face.
As she ran out of the room, Savannah shot a look toward Jack. His expression appeared sympathetic, but not overly concerned. The fact that he wasn’t immediately on his wife’s heels was explanation enough.
Savannah followed Raine down the hall to the restrooms and handed her a wet paper towel when she came out of the stall.
“Thank you.” Raine wiped her face, balled the towel and tossed it into the waste bin, then washed her mouth out in the sink. “Christ, my timing stinks.”
Savannah almost smiled at the self-reproach in her sister’s voice. Trust Raine to believe that morning sickness was yet another event she could schedule into her Day-Timer.
“Actually, the news will undoubtedly be just the medicine Gram needs.” She hugged Raine. “I’m so happy for you.”
“I’m happy for me, too. Or at least I was before Gram decided to scare us all to death.” Raine leaned back and gave Savannah a searching look. “Is this going to be a problem? After last fall?”
She’d gone to New York shortly after her miscarriage, seeking her big sister’s comfort. “Of course not. My miscarriage and your pregnancy have nothing to do with each other.”
“That’s a relief. I’ve been putting off telling you all week because I felt a little guilty. Since you’re the one who always wanted a large family.”
“I think it’s fabulous,” Savannah insisted. “Especially since I’ve recently discovered that I love being an aunt.”
“Then you should really love being a godmother.” Raine began digging around in her purse. “I hate morning sickness,” she complained as she popped a breath mint into her mouth.
“It’ll be gone by the second trimester. Meanwhile, the trick is to keep something in your stomach all the time and carry crackers with you.”
“That’s what all the books say.” Raine pressed her palm against her still flat stomach. “Can I tell you something? Just between us?”
“Of course.” Savannah was surprised she even had to ask.
“Ever since Henry called the farm with the bad news, I’ve been worried that this is my fault.”
“Your fault?”
“You know, one of those life cycle things.”
“Life cycle things?” Savannah stared at her. “Surely you don’t believe that Gram might die because you’re pregnant?” The ever practical, feet-on-the-ground Raine was the last person she would have expected to even come up with such an idea.
“Do you remember when Lilith was a Buddhist?”
“After she came back from filming that slasher movie in Hong Kong,” Savannah remembered.
It had been a short-lived religious infatuation, triggered, she’d always secretly believed, by her mother’s very public affair with her costar. Savannah had not been able to go into a supermarket for six weeks without seeing Lilith and her Chinese martial arts champion lover looking back at her from the covers of the tabloids at the checkout stand.
“She visited me for a few days during that time.”
“She did?” Savannah was surprised. Until recently, Raine and their mother had not been close. In fact, their relationship could have been described as just short of estranged.
“She was in town for a publicity event.” Raine shrugged. “I couldn’t exactly refuse to see her…. Anyway, she was positive she’d found the key to the secret of life. Quite honestly, she was chattering away—you know how she does when she’s in love—and I didn’t listen to much she said. But something has stuck in my mind all these years. She told me that every breath we take stirs the universe and creates a reaction. That nothing happens in a vacuum.”
“Are you talking about sort of a universal quid pro quo?”
“You’re laughing at me.” Which was, Savannah knew from childhood experience, something a person dared only at their own peril.
“No. I’m not laughing. Not really,” she insisted when her sister looked on the verge of arguing. “I just think that perhaps these are runaway hormones talking. Because, no offense to the Buddhists, who I’m sure are very lovely people, but I don’t believe life works that way.
“I also don’t think that you would have believed it either, before this morning.”
It seemed a little strange comforting her big sister. Strange, but nice, Savannah decided.
; “Besides, knowing Mother, she probably got the concept wrong, anyway.”
Raine managed a reluctant, self-conscious laugh just as the restroom door opened.
“The doctor’s finally seen fit to talk to us,” Lilith informed them. “He’s in the waiting room.”
Raine and Savannah exchanged a look. Then they followed their mother back down the hall.
Ida did not like being on the other end of the physician-patient relationship. She’d always known that there was no privacy in a hospital, but this was the first time she’d been the one lying naked beneath the impossibly thin pink blanket.
The ICU was annoyingly bright and as frigid as a meat locker. Someone should tell them to turn the heat up. Machines hummed, quietly monitoring vital signs. An IV bottle hung overhead, fluids dripping down the clear tube into the back of her hand.
“Let’s check your reflexes and see how we’re doing, dear,” a chirpy voice said. A moment later Ida was blinded by a bright penlight. She knew the nurse only wanted to see how her pupils dilated, but Ida instinctively tried to close her eyes against the glare. Stubborn fingers held her lids open.
“Good girl,” the voice said. “We’re doing just dandy, Ida, dear.”
As the nurse instructed her to push against her hand, Ida shoved as hard as she could—which, unfortunately, wasn’t very hard when it came to her right hand—and struggled to read the woman’s name tag. She wanted to tell this annoying female that she should give a person fair warning before she went shining lights into their eyes. She also had no right using a patient’s first name unless invited to do so.
Unfortunately, her vision, made worse by the bright light, was still blurry. The nurse’s pink face continued to fade in and out of focus.
She felt the pressure on her feet. Both feet, Ida realized. She knew that was a good thing, but couldn’t remember why.
Still struggling with the answer that was hovering just out of reach in the foggy mists of her mind, Ida drifted back to sleep.
