Page 23 of Kissing Danger

A surge of frantic energy burned through my veins, my hands moving seemingly without the input of my brain, and I latched onto Nathan’s lapel.

“I need to go to the hospital. I need to see her.”

Nathan carefully grabbed my hands and removed them from the fabric but didn’t push me away. “Okay. We’ll go.” Helping me stand, he looked over at the officers with a stern expression. “I assume we’re done here.”

One of the officers stepped forward, closely flanked by the other two. “We still have more questions. For you, and...” The officer trailed off, and whispered to one of the others, who answered in an equally hushed tone. “For you, and Mister Millar as well. You’ll both need to come down to the station.”

I opened my mouth to argue, the words halfway off my tongue, when Nathan squeezed my shoulder to silence me.

“Are you arresting us?” he asked.

None of the officers said anything, but the looks on their faces were answer enough.

Sighing, Nathan led me toward the door. “If you aren’t arresting us, then we don’t have to come with you. I’ve already answered your questions. If there’s anything else you need to know, we can come down to the station later. For now, we’re needed elsewhere.”

If the officers tried to stop us, I never knew. Nathan practically marched me out of the studio and slammed the door behind us before I heard another word from the officers. Keeping an arm around my shoulder, he brought me to a car in the parking lot that had a driver waiting next to it.

At first, I thought he’d called an Uber when I wasn’t looking, but once we were inside the car and Nathan addressed the driver personally, I realized this wasn’t hired transportation. This was Nathan’s personal car and personal driver.

Is this what it was like being rich?

Paying someone to specifically wait around and be ready to take you anywhere you needed to go at the drop of a hat?

It seemed a little weird, but it was also very convenient. We were able to get to the hospital with minimal hassle.

My feet carried me through the building’s sterile hallways like I was gliding rather than walking. I didn’t remember taking a single step. I didn’t even remember asking the nurse at the front desk for Kiki’s room, but soon enough, I found myself standing at the foot of her hospital bed.

There were a bunch of wires and tubes hooked up to her, and her face looked much more pale and gaunt than it had that morning.Only a few hours had made such a difference to her appearance. Even her blonde curls seemed to hang limp on her head.

Her makeup was also horribly smudged. Mascara streaked from the corner of her eyes, creating artificial crow’s feet, and her lipstick was so mucky her mouth looked like it was about to fall off her face.

She would hate being seen this way.

After my very first job working with models, I’d started keeping makeup wipes in my pocket at all times. It came in handy now as I sat beside her bed and started cleaning up her face. I wished I had new makeup to apply, so she could look as perfect as usual when she woke up, but at this point a bare face would still be better than the mess she currently wore.

Nathan didn’t immediately follow me into the room, and instead, stayed out in the hall talking to a doctor. I’d cleaned off most of Kiki’s makeup by the time he stepped inside, though he stayed near the wall to give us space.

“The doctor said that she must not have handled the fabric very much, because the dose of poison she received wasn’t very high. The poison was extremely concentrated, so it still affected her, but they expect she should recover just fine in a few days.”

I nodded, relieved, but I still couldn’t bear to look away from her.

“We met in high school.” I laughed, only to find tears filling my eyes and a lump clogging my throat. “The only two gay kids in a very conservative school. We were each other’s beards for years.”

Heavy silence emanated from Nathan’s corner of the room.

“Beard?”

He said the word like he was turning over each letter, looking for a hidden message. It made his accent, usually so faint it was barely noticeable, stand out much more prominently.

“I know the word but... I’m afraid I don’t know this term.”

I laughed again, and wiped my cheeks clear of tears that hadn’t fallen in the first place. “I mean, that we pretended to date each other in order to pose as a straight couple and hide the fact that we were gay. We fake-dated all through high school. Even when I got a boyfriend, she covered for me. Then, when we graduated, we left it all behind and moved to Las Vegas. Religious families. College funds. Easy lives where everything was already decided. We gave it all up to live freely in the city of sin.”

The first tear finally fell. Once the dam broke, I expected more to come, but they didn’t. That single tear carved a lonely path down my cheek as I finally looked away from Kiki to stare up at Nathan.

“I don’t have anyone else. She’s all I’ve got, and someone tried to kill her.”

The tears that hadn’t fallen still sat behind my eyes, boiling hot as they slowly changed from sadness to rage.

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