Page 67 of You Complicate Me

Gage shoved a hand through his hair and shifted back into doctor mode. “Alright, what’s going on here?”

Brad glanced at Lucille, wide-eyed and panicked. She gave him an encouraging nod and said, “Go ahead and show him, honey. It’ll be OK.”

Honey? Grace thought. When had that happened? But then Brad lifted the paper towels off his groin and Grace had to stifle a shriek at the sight that assailed her poor, unsuspecting eyes.

“Holy Mother of God,” she said, barely resisting the urge to trace the sign of the cross over her chest. “What is that?”

Gage cocked his head to one side and after a moment said, “Huh. That’s a penile fracture. You don’t see one of those every day. Caused by blunt-force trauma. How did that happen?”

Brad started sobbing again, so Lucille answered for him. “Well, we were, you know, having an intimate moment. He was there on the counter and I was, you know, on top of him,” she said, twirling a strand of hair around her index finger, “and then we heard sort of a popping sound. I got off him, and that’s when he rolled off the counter onto the floor.”

Gage winced. Brad sobbed louder.

“Misalignment, huh?” Gage asked. “Came down on him wrong?”

Lucille straightened and raised a brow at him. “I can assure you I came down on him just right. But, yes, he slipped out and might’ve, uh, gotten bent under me at an odd angle.”

“I promise I’ll never be curious again,” Grace muttered fervently.

“Can you fix him, doc?” Lucille asked.

Gage shook his head. “No. That’s a surgical fix, and I don’t have privileges at any hospitals around here. Grace, can you call 911, please? We’ll need an ambulance.”

“Couldn’t we just drive him to the hospital?” Grace asked.

“We could,” Gage answered, “but I don’t want to.”

Well, it was kind of hard to argue with that logic.

Half an hour later, Brad was loaded into an ambulance and on his way to a local hospital. Lucille stayed at his side the whole time. Her devotion would have been touching…if she hadn’t broken his penis and all.

Gage threw an arm around Grace’s shoulders as they made their way back through the hotel’s lobby. “Well, that was fun.”

She snorted. “If by ‘fun’ you mean terrifying and possibly permanently scarring. Then, sure, it was fun.”

“Hey, we had a fucking horrific day. The woman who is maybe, possibly…something to me ran away without a word, my cousin punched me in the face, and the only flight home I could get us isn’t until tomorrow and it has a three-hour layover in Detroit. And your whole thing with Nick was a shit-show of epic proportions. That penile fracture was a gift from Karma herself. We deserved that penile fracture. We earned that penile fracture today, Grace.”

“He’s going to be alright, isn’t he?” Grace asked, biting her lip. “I won’t feel right laughing at him unless I know he’s going to be alright. Because that would be bad karma for me.”

“He’ll be fine. It’s a relatively easy fix with typically good surgical outcomes.”

Oh, well, in that case…

Grace’s quiet chuckles mixed with Gage’s deeper ones. Before long, Grace was giggling and gasping for breath while leaning on Gage for support.

She knew she only giggled like this in times of high stress. It was the kind of giggling that kept her from crying. But it wouldn’t work forever. It was like trying to plug a hole in a dam with a piece of wadded-up chewing gum.

Eventually the dam would break and the flood would come.

Gage must have known what was about to happen because his laughter stalled out completely. Without a word, he tugged her into his arms and wrapped her up in a tight hug. Unfortunately, that little bit of kindness and understanding was all it took to break her.

“It’ll be okay,” he told her over and over again as her laughter melted into sobs.

Chapter Thirty-six

Nick read Sadie’s letter seventeen times. Seventeen times. It wasn’t that the letter was so complicated it required seventeen reads. But every now and then, as Nick was learning, it took a while for the human brain to comprehend even the simplest of messages.

Especially when the messages told him he’d been a complete dumbass who now owed the mother of all apologies to the woman he loved.

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