Page 43 of Exposing Adonis

“Easy, man,” Geordie said. “She’s got her own wounds to tend to, and so do you.”

“What?” I almost sat up in my seat before my body reminded me that it was hurt, and pain shot up my side. “She’s hurt?”

“She had trouble getting your fat arse up the stairs, I hear. She almost collapsed when she handed you over to the doctors.” He said with a grin. “Her brother’s insisting she get checked over for a bang on the noggin’.” He leaned back in his seat.

“Callum,” Pippa came to the side of the bed and looked down at me. I did not give her a chance to speak.

“Why are you here?” I shouldn’t be so glib with her, but our engagement had ruined our friendship, and I didn’t think we could ever get it back.

“Alex invited me. I thought … with everything, you might need … and Chloe, she would want …”

“Pippa …” I groaned, shaking my head in disappointment. I rubbed my forehead with my hand. “You deserve better than a man who wakes up from near-death, calling for another woman.”

From the corner of my eye, I could see Geordie’s jaw square, the muscle ticking like he was grinding his molars into powder.

Pippa had no business clinging on to us. A relationship that made us both unsatisfied and miserable. I could no longer be an outsider in my own relationship. I didn’t want to be a stranger in my own marriage. Even the prospect of touching her, as beautiful as she was, left me cold. Not like the bleached blonde woman with eyes as black as night. The woman who smelled of jasmine and should have been here with me when I opened my eyes.

“Is she really the one for you?” She interrupted my thoughts. “This … nurse.”

“Her occupation is irrelevant.” She was an assassin, and a nurse, and a woman who unlocked desires that had long lain dormant. The viciousness I had repressed and carried like baggage I could unleash on her and she could welcome it and turn it right back around. “But, for your own sake, be careful how you speak to her.”

I smiled at the thought of my woman being so jealous that she’d kill her rival. But I knew better than to try it out.

“She’ll never fit in. Not with your family, with your expectations, or the …”

“Stop.” I said, quietly. Disappointed, as always. A feeling I had had with Pippa for so long that it was habit. “I’ve known you for decades. Since we were children. I know you have a good heart because you love Chloe. But you have to stop looking outwards for your worth.” I sighed, long, and harsh. “Your father is a cunt. His values shouldn’t be yours.”

It was hard, sometimes, to look at this grown woman and not see the little girl in a plaid skirt, with her big blue eyes, just hoping for someone to give her half a chance. Looking for her place in the world. How her parents had rubbed their dullness on her shine, and what was left was an empty vessel, flitting from one expectation to another, but never having any of her own.

“You deserve to be happy, Pip.” I finally said, hoping that she would get the hint, and not cling to the hope that marrying me would make her father proud. “And it’s not going to be with me.”

Her face went stone cold, as perfect and impersonal as the one she put on the magazines or when she stomped down a fashion runway. She was a moving statue.

“Before you commit to this,” she said, slowly, with that methodical, logical candidness that had gotten us engaged in the first place. “You have to remember that she has a family. And they’re not like ours. We live publicly, with eyes on us at all times. But we are weighed down by secrets. We carefully keep a tent on our circus.”

I froze, staring at her as she spoke with the authority of a fucking prime minister. The circus? She couldn’t possibly mean Vauxhall Cross. She wasn’t one of us. I would have known. I would have seen signs if she was in MI-6. Wouldn’t I?

Her face was blank as she continued, but in that blankness was a heaviness of unuttered words.

“Make sure that this is a fate you want to doom her to, before you place that on her shoulders,” she glanced at Geordie, before looking back at me. “We live one way that gave us very little to lose. She has a whole life, and a rich, colorful, vibrant existence to leave behind. If you were her, would you have chosen this life?”

She walked out the door, her back ramrod straight like she was wearing the heaviest of crowns on that perfectly styled head. She was a queen making a grand exit from a hostile cabinet.

“Pippa …” Geordie said, his hand reaching out to her. He pulled it back when she didn’t look at him, but we both stared at the door as it closed shut.

The circus. No. It was a common enough phrase. I shouldn’t read too much into it. It was Pippa, after all. I had known her since she wore knee-high socks and neckties, paired with daisy chain crowns that she and Cabbage would put together. I would have known. She would have told me.

Geordie and I sat in silence. He sipped his coffee.

“I’ll find Lea and send her in.” Geordie got up and left, leaving me alone with the beeps, the machines and all the sterile white noise, trying to puzzle together everything that was happening around me.

Chapter 20

Lea

TheTVinthehospital’s dining facility was at a low volume. I stared up at the screen from my lonely little table.

I was banished from Callum’s side when Dr. Laurent screamed that I wasn’t family. She got into their computer, and printed out the legal documents naming Pippa Fox as Callum’s emergency contact. For her part, the Lady Pippa actually seemed embarrassed, but didn’t fight Dr. Laurent as she pushed me from the room.

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