Page 66 of Filthy Rich Daddies
And I’m here. And everything is weirdly…okay. Becausehe’sokay.
“I mean, not to brag,” Colin says, taking another sip of juice, “but this is the most dramatic exit I’ve ever made. Ten out of ten.”
I glare. “You’re lucky I don’t smack you again.”
“Tempting offer,” he says, eyebrows up.
“Behave,” Dean warns, but he’s smiling too.
There’s a lightness in the room now, something bubbling up around the edges. But underneath it is something heavier too. Something I can’t stop thinking about.
When I saw him fall, something broke open in me. And now that I’m here—now that he’s talking and breathing and mostly upright—I don’t know how to put it all back in the box.
These men…they were supposed to be temporary. An experiment. Something reckless and exhilarating, something I would maybe regret but definitely learn from. But it doesn’t feel like that anymore.
Not when Dean looks at me like I’m the first good thing to happen to him in a year. Not when Tic shifts his weight and softens the line of his shoulders the second I walk into a room. Not when Colin grins through pain and cracks jokes with a straw between his lips.
I’m falling. That’s what it feels like. A slow, messy fall I never planned for. And I can’t tell them. Not yet. Because what if this is just adrenaline? What if the fear of losing him is playing tricks on me?
What if I say the thing, and it ruins everything?
So I sit, and I listen, and I pretend that I’m just glad he’s okay, and not that my entire internal wiring has shifted because of these ridiculous, frustrating, completely irreplaceable men.
Tic’s the one who breaks the quiet next. He shifts away from the wall and says, “The doctor says you’ll be released tonight if you eat something that’s not in a juice box and stay conscious for more than four hours.”
Colin gives a lazy salute. “Copy that.”
“Think you can eat something?” Dean asks.
“If there are fries involved,” Colin says, “I’ll consider a full recovery.”
Arabella puts her phone away and stands. “I’ll go bribe a nurse.”
“No deep-fried anything from the cafeteria,” Tic warns.
“Too late,” she says. “Already planning my fried food siege.” She slips out the door with a wink in my direction.
I love her so much it hurts. Evidently, that’s the theme for the day.
Dean leans toward me a little. “You doing okay?”
I nod. Too fast. “Yeah. Just…scared me, is all.”
He studies me, and it’s not the kind of studying that people do when they’re suspicious or impatient. It’s patient. Careful. I hate how seen I feel when he does that. “It scared us too.”
I look down at Colin’s hand, where it rests on the blanket. I touch it lightly, just for a second.
I don’t know where this is going. I just know I want to be here to see it.
Colin dozes off twenty minutes later. Mid-sentence, actually. After Arabella delivers two large containers of gloriously fried everything and he wolfs it down, he’s telling some story about an intern who coded a reservation bot that started automatically booking tables at rival restaurants—“to steal the competition’s bandwidth,” he explains proudly—when his head just kind of…tilts. His eyes flutter shut, and he starts breathing in that even, open-mouthed way that says yeah, his body’s finally given up on being awake.
Dean adjusts the blanket. Tic kills the lights. Arabella shuts the blinds.
We sit in the soft glow of the heart monitor for a long while, not saying anything. I lean my head against the wall and let myself be still. It’s the first time today that my adrenaline doesn’t feel like it’s trying to crawl out of my skin.
The world narrowed when I saw Colin fall. It collapsed to a tiny square of screen and a single thought:Please don’t let this be the moment everything changes.And then I got here—and it did change.
Not because he’s hurt, or because it was dramatic, or because Arabella and I broke half the speed limits in the state to get here.
