by Kris Calvert
“Thanks.”
Using the controller on the bed, I sat up and took a good look around my room and shook my head. The last thing I remembered was being in the library at Winter Haven, Lena crying and Magnus pacing. Where was Win?
“There you are.”
I looked up and found his smiling face in my doorway. Wearing a suit, no tie and a gun now strapped to his belt, he was all business and he was the best thing I’d laid my eyes on all day. “I was just thinking about you and you appeared.”
He walked into the room and kissed me on the lips. “I’ve been all over the hospital looking for you. I waited in the the Emergency Room and they said they’d tell me where you were going, but then no one did. I had to come find you.”
I smiled, but even that hurt. “I have a concussion and fifteen stitches in my head. But that’s all I seem to know.”
Pulling up a chair to my bedside, Win brushed my hair from my face, running his fingers across my cheeks. “I’m so sorry you ended up in the middle of all of this.”
I shook my head and gave him a heavy-lidded gaze. I was tired and drugged. “We need to talk.”
“Shhhh,” he said kissing my lips to stop me from speaking. “You don’t need to do anything but lie here and rest. I’ll take care of everything at the house. We can wrap up the investigation in the next couple of days.”
“But,” I began again.
“No buts. No talking. Only rest for you,” he said looking over my face with a loving gaze. I knew he loved me. I could feel it. This time it was different than before. I now knew all the family secrets and he could be himself. He no longer had anything to hide. Raw and open, he gave his unburdened heart to me.
“Well, look who’s awake.” The doctor’s voice boomed in my head loud and clear, and I wondered if that was the standard greeting to those coming out of a catatonic state, coma or concussion.
“You’ve had a pretty bad blow to the head, Virginia,” he stated, looking at my name in the chart.
“Ginny,” I corrected.
Pulling a pen light from his white coat, he began the task of checking me over. “We stitched you up and your CAT scan looks good. A little swelling, but that’s to be expected with the couple of blows you took. We want to keep you here tonight—keep an eye on your vital signs.”
I nodded.
“We’re probably going to wake you up a bunch tonight and ask you some silly questions. It’s just our way of making sure you’re healing up properly. Any questions?”
“No.” I ran my free hand through my bloodied and matted mess of hair.
“You can use water to rinse out any blood or dirt particles over the next two days. After that you can shampoo normally. The stitches will come out in about five days or so.”
“I’d like to stay with her tonight if that’s okay,” Win said.
“I’m fine.” My eyes wouldn’t stay open and I was finding it hard to protest anything either of them said to me. I only wanted to sleep but one person kept coming up in my head. Lena. “Where’s Lena?”
“Don’t worry about Lena. She’s fine. You are the most important thing, Ginny. You are the only important thing in my life.”
“I don’t care if you stay,” the doctor offered. “The floor is pretty quiet tonight—not a lot of patients. There’s even a bed in here—it’s a semi-private room—if you want to catch some shut eye. But do me a favor and pull the curtain. The nurses sometimes get bent out of shape.”
“Deal,” Win said.
“I can’t hold my eyes open,” I mumbled.
“We gave you a little something for the pain. It’s gonna make you loopy.” The doctor’s voice seemed to call to me from deep inside a tunnel.
Win kissed my lips. “I’ll be right here if you need me.”
“Win?” I murmured.
“Yes?”
“Your sister,” I slurred, the pain medication sucking me into a pit of oblivion.
“Get some sleep, Ginny. You’ve had a tough day.”
I tried to fight the darkness that pulled me in like a vacuum, but I couldn’t. From what seemed like a tunnel, I heard Win’s voice. “I love you, Ginny.”
“Miss Grace?”
A voice called to me in the darkness.
“Miss Grace, I have to wake you up and ask you a couple of questions.”
“What is it?” My voice was barely articulate.
“Can you tell me your name?”
“I need my cell phone. I need to call Knotts.”
“You’re not calling anyone. Name, please.”
“Virginia Grace?” I didn’t know if I was answering the question or asking it.
“And where do you live, Virginia?”
“New York City.”
“Can you remember the three words I gave you earlier tonight?”
“Bathtub, hamburger and shoe. Now may I please have a phone?”
“No. You need to rest.”
As soon as the nurse left the room, I pulled back the curtain that separated me from the bed next to me. There he was—dead to the world. Win was on his side facing me—sleeping like a baby. Shutting the curtain again, I sighed.
I closed my eyes, the pain medication taking me away from consciousness one more time. When I felt cool hands on my wrist once again, I couldn’t help but chastise the nurse. “Seriously?” I mumbled. “Give me my phone or leave me alone.”
The cobwebs from the pain meds filled my head and before I had a change to fight, my wrists were buckled to the hospital bed, duct tape sealed my lips.
“Mmmmm Mmmmm!” I did my best to scream.
“Look at you. Valley Springs, Kentucky hasn’t been very kind to you, has it? You ended up with two big bumps on your head. But that’s what happens when you start to meddle in other people’s business,” Lena said, now circling my bed.
“You had to ask a bunch of questions, didn’t you? You had to be all smart. Interviewing Piper—she was a whore. She was a whore who slept with my father. And poor John Lee? I couldn’t wait to get rid of him. Who needs a bastard child laying around—it was my dad’s idea to employ him. I guess he felt guilty for having his mistress run out of town, when in reality she was run off the road,” she giggled. “Off the road and into a shallow and watery grave. Besides, I already have one brother who’s a bastard, I didn’t need another.”
I struggled against my bondage, my fingers straining the few inches I needed to hit the nurses’ call button.
“But the best part for me was killing my dad. At least I thought it was until I got Magnus’s blood on my hands. Yeah, he wasn’t too smart either. You know, come to think of it, it’s always the women around Winter Haven that are the smartest. I mean look at us. Me. You.”
“Mmmm! Mmmm!” I did my best to wake Win in the bed next to me, knowing it would take an earthquake or a miracle.
“I could tell by the look on your face the very first time I met you—you didn’t trust me. So congratulations for that, I guess. But now you’ve got to go. I was so pissed at Magnus for not doing away with you in Piper’s office. Yeah,” she whispered, coming close to my face. “You lucked out there. If I’d found you instead of Maggie, you’d be lying on a slab in the morgue. But, that was just bad timing.
I shook my head violently, screaming through the tape. My heart was pounding, and I prayed the automatic blood pressure cuff that had been annoying me all night would wake up and do its thing. My pulse rate had to be off the charts.
“Anyway,” Lena said with a sigh, climbing on my bed to straddle my body. “It was nice knowing you. Not.”
I swallowed the excess saliva trapped in my mouth—my tears hot against my skin. My last thought was to close my eyes, but I wanted to look her in the eye. If I was going to meet death tonight, I was greeting it without fear.
Lena took several deep breaths, psyching herself up to do the deed. Then, raising the five-inch knife with a serrated edge above her head with both hands, she hesitated and I stopped crying. A peace like I’d ne
ver known came over me and I knew—this was how it ended for me.
32
WIN
Ginny moaned and I wondered if the nurse was back to check on her. Rubbing my scruffy face with my hands, I opened my eyes and focused. The light from the bathroom cast a silhouette on the thin curtain that separated us.
Astride Ginny was a body. High above her head a knife hung in the air ready to plunge through her unsuspecting body.
I didn’t have time to think, I only had time to react. Reaching for my gun, I cocked and locked without saying a word, shooting three times through the hospital curtain.
Coming to my feet, I threw back the drape that separated us and watched in horror as the bloody body of my own sister slumped forward onto Ginny’s chest.
“Oh God!” I yelled as the room filled with hospital personnel.
In slow motion, two nurses pulled Lena’s body onto the floor, immediately checking for a pulse. An orderly carefully pulled the tape from Ginny’s mouth and began to unbuckle her wrists from the bed.
I backed away, sliding down the wall into a heap on the floor. Tossing my gun to my side, I watched in anguish as they tried to revive Lena.
On the floor of the hospital lay the knife and every shred of decency I ever thought I possessed. I’d killed my own sister.
“Win?” Ginny cried out to me.
Deep inside I found the courage to stand—to walk to the woman I loved and console her.
“Win, I’m so sorry,” she bawled. “I’m so sorry.”
“Oh my God,” I cried in shock. “Lena.”
We held each other tightly and sobbed. It was over. It was finally over. It had to be. There was no one else left.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered into Ginny’s ear. “I’m so sorry.”
Six months later…
I stood on the steps of the old chapel and wondered how the Winterbourne men before me survived their predetermined course in life. As the engraving on the table in the safe room read, Men at some times are masters of their fates. The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves.
I carried the burden of many lost lives on my shoulders. It was my hardship to bear for the rest of my life—one I may never wear comfortably.
When it was all said and done, I finally knew the truth about Winter Haven. It had been filled with lies and deceit just as I’d always said, but I believed in the wrong lies, the wrong deceit.
My father was a confused and bitter man and my mother, his mistress, and even Piper fell victim to his selfishness. Magnus was a pawn—spending his entire life trying to be a part of the very family I’d done my best to distance myself from.
And Lena. My sister was ill. No one ever knew she witnessed the murder of our mother that night. She was never the same and now that she was dead, I would never be the same either.
When her room was cleared out and her special belongings placed in a new trunk in the safe room, something miraculous was discovered; the three-carat red diamond that went missing from my mother’s hand the night of her murder—the Aegis stone. A tiny Lena took it and kept it along with her secret for the entirety of her short life.
When it was brought to me, Cee Cee took me back to the safe room and we placed it in its proper box—the very one I’d found in Marshall’s trunk. Today I held a different stone in my pocket.
I’d met with Jackson, Ginny’s brother, the morning after I shot and killed my own sister. Apologizing for everything Ginny had been through at the hands of my family and even me. I promised him that day I would always take care of Ginny. And I asked for his blessing in the midst of all the chaos to make her my bride.
He’d called me a few choice names but in the end, I’d sacrificed my own sister to save his. He gave up on calling me dickless piece of shit, especially when he realized his sister would be coming home to Kentucky to put down roots, leaving the New York mob behind.
Ginny spent the first three months piecing together her father’s case from twenty-three years ago. Cee Cee helped her to fill the blanks. It didn’t bring her closure on her father’s death—she’d come to grips with that long ago. What it did was to connect her to him. She finished what he started. She could never find a connection between his accident and my father, and I was thankful for that. So was she.
We’d decided to put our past where it belonged—in the past—and focus on our future. With everyone gone except Cee Cee, we had the unique opportunity to begin anew while utilizing all the important pieces of our families to create our own legacy.
I’d filled the chapel with red roses—leaving the yellow ones behind. The crisp autumn air brought their heady scent to me each time the trees bowed in the wind to drop their leaves. I’d gone over everything I’d wanted to say a thousand times. Still, I knew it wouldn’t do Virginia Grace justice. There was no way I could tell her what was in my heart or make it through the speech I’d rehearsed without shedding a tear. Words had never been invented to describe someone as exquisite as my Ginny was inside and out. Still, I’d spent the night in my room at Winter Haven contemplating how I could ever express my love for her in a few short sentences.
Cee Cee encouraged me to just tell her how I felt about her. But today was too important. I had to get it right. After everything I’d put Ginny through, I, at the very least, owed her that.
Walking into the Chapel from the front steps, my nerves started to get the better of me. Staring at the obscene number of red roses at the front of the tiny chapel, my heart beat in a nervous flutter, my breathing shallow and erratic. I swallowed hard. I took a seat in the front pew and waited.
“Win?”
I stood, moving into the aisle to meet her voice. “Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for you?”
She shook her head.
“My entire life.”
“What are you talking about now, Win Holloway?” she said sauntering up the aisle, her blue dress trailing in the breeze from the open windows.
“I’m talking about you. And me.”
I took her hands and led her to the end of the aisle. “Do you remember the first time I brought you here?”
She nodded.
“In my mind I fantasized you would someday walk down the aisle to meet me—right here.”
“Win, what are you saying?”
“You know, I practiced this a thousand times last night in my room, but nothing seemed good enough for you—for this moment—so I’m just going to say what’s in my heart.”
She nodded.
“I’m unsure about a lot of things, Ginny. But I’m certain about a few things too. I know I’m a Winterbourne and my place is here, at least for awhile. I know I’m a better man today for what I’ve lived through in the past couple of months—what we’ve lived through. And I am certain I love you. In fact, I fall in love with you every day.”
Tilting her head, Ginny smiled at me and my whole world lit up just as it had the first time I met her.
Taking her hands in mine, I brought them to my mouth one at a time, greeting them each with a tender kiss. “Virginia Grace?”
“Yes.”
“Do you love me?”
She paused, looking to the ceiling to keep the tears from rolling down her cheeks. “God help me, I do.”
Dropping to one knee, I finished the job I started over a year ago.
“Virginia Grace, you’ve been the light of my life from the moment I met you. You’ve already loved me through good times and bad. You loved me when I couldn’t even love myself. I said goodbye to you once and I vowed if I ever had you in my arms again, I’d never let you go. You’re my beginning and my end. I’ll love you until I take my last breath. Will you do me the honor of being my wife?”
A single tear rolled down her cheek and she nodded before she said the word, “Yes.”
I stood, forgetting the ring was in my pocket.
Pulling out the antique gold box Cee Cee had given me, I couldn’t wait to show Ginny what was inside.
I opened it and
watched the shock on her face. A four carat brilliant cut stone sparkled in the sunlight. “Cecil Winterbourne gave this ring to the love of his life, Priscilla. Their love was blessed. Just as our love is blessed.”
Sliding the ring on her finger, I kissed her hand and then her lips. “Be Mrs. Winterbourne Marshall Holloway the Fourth?” I asked.
“As long as we get to make a Winterbourne Marshall Holloway the Fifth,” she replied kissing my lips.
“I wouldn’t want it any other way.”
Coming Soon
Kris Calvert is a former copywriter and PR mercenary who after some coaxing, began writing novels. She loves alliteration, pearls and post-it notes. She’s married to the man of her dreams and lives in Lexington, Kentucky. She’s Momma to two grown children and is also responsible for one very needy dog. When she’s not writing, she’s baking cupcakes.
