Page 12 of Blind Luck

“I do, but my brother deals with that stuff.”

“Is your brother in Las Vegas? Should I call him?”

“No,” she said quickly. “I don’t want to worry him, and he isn’t here anyway. He’s in California.”

“Okay. Okay, I’ll deal with it. We can sort out the details later.”

Once again, Rusty was grateful for the career he’d lucked into. Playing hockey not only meant he smiled going to work every day, but it paid enough money that he didn’t have to worry about balancing his chequebook anymore. Plus he’d been able to help out his family. His parents owned their home free and clear, his little sister was happy in college, and his older sister hadn’t needed to factor in affording a place to live after she left the moron she’d married. If Rusty struggled to understand women, then Penny was the same with men. Why else would she have married a writer who insisted the only reason his screenplay hadn’t been scooped up by a major studio was that he lived in Minnesota rather than Hollywood?

They’d moved to Los Angeles, where he cheated on her with a guy named Philip, and somehow it was all her fault for not being supportive enough. She was back home in Minnesota now, gearing up for a custody battle. Her good-for-nothing soon-to-be ex didn’t want a kid, but he did want control over her.

Anyhow, that was tomorrow’s problem.

Tonight, he had to make sure Erin’s eyes wouldn’t suffer any lasting damage.

“I’ll take care of everything,” he promised as a nurse arrived with a wheelchair. “Just do what the doctor says.”

Rusty handed over his credit card, then spent twenty minutes explaining to the uptight woman with the many, many forms why he couldn’t fill them in.

“Her name is Erin, that’s all I know.”

“You don’t have her surname?”

“No, I don’t. We only met tonight. Her name is Erin, and she’s staying at the Galaxy Hotel.”

The woman’s expression was a mixture of disgust and sympathy, and Rusty honestly couldn’t blame her for that. The Galaxy was a dump. He’d only been there to find out who a friend of a friend’s woman was meeting on her alleged business trip, and then he’d had to leave the bar before Kelsey even arrived. He sure hoped she wasn’t cheating. Silas Armstrong played for a rival team and Rusty had only met him half a dozen times, but he liked the guy.

And that was another problem for tomorrow.

Rusty would have to start over and hope Kelsey Dorrias didn’t wonder why he kept showing up in the vicinity. Should he buy a new hat? He should probably buy a new hat.

Seeing as he hadn’t managed to eat dinner either, he grabbed a bottle of water and a protein bar from the vending machines in the lobby while he waited. Peanut and caramel flavour, according to the label, but it tasted more like syrup mixed with the contents of a vacuum cleaner. He’d just eaten the last mouthful when Erin reappeared with a diagnosis of temporary irritation, a prediction of no permanent damage, and a bill for six and a half thousand bucks.

“Do the doctors here use gold-plated stethoscopes?” hejoked, but the nurse who accompanied her didn’t seem to find it amusing.

“She only put stuff in my eye and looked at it with a weird light,” Erin said. “I told you I should have gone back to my room.”

“Eyesight isn’t something you mess with. Do you feel up to filling in these forms? I don’t know anything about you.”

He held out the pen, and she just stared at it.

“Can you do it?” she asked.

“Vision still blurry, huh?”

“Nobody can read my writing.”

“All computers nowadays, isn’t it?”

The administrator who brought the forms had explained that they usually used tablets, but their computer system was glitching tonight and they couldn’t access some of the records, so they had to do things the old-fashioned way. A gremlin in the works, she said.

Erin shrugged, and Rusty picked up the clipboard he’d been left with. “Surname?”

“Kealoha.”

“K-E-A-L-O-H-A? Like the surfer?”

“He’s my brother.”

---