Page 49 of Sexy as Sin
“I’ll ask,” he said. “It’s not that big a hospital.” He gathered his crutches and stood, and she thought that she should probably be sorry that she was making him run around the corridors in his state, but couldn’t manage it.
She’d made people sick. Possibly dozens of people. She needed toknow.
Fifteen minutes later, she had her IV out and was checking into the wisdom of sitting up with the help of a nurse when he came back in, looking not one bit tired and absolutely unruffled.
“Not much change,” he said, setting his crutches against the wall and leaning against it himself. “I talked to the groom. Attenborough. I explained that you were in here suffering from the same thing, and told him you were going to get to the bottom of how it could have happened. I also told him how upset you were. His daughter’s being kept as a precaution, his mother’s stable but guarded, and he and his wife didn’t get sick at all. I said it couldn’t have been the meat, then, since surely they both ate that, and you didn’t. Or the dessert, either. I got his number and asked him to call if there was any change.”
“Thank you,” she said, tried to think things through logically, and gave up. She wanted to ask what Calvin Attenborough had said about her, but she was fairly sure she knew. It didn’t matter anyway. It had happened, and she needed to find out why. Tomorrow. Just now, all she wanted was to lie down again. She also wished, as she slid off the bed, clutching at her shirttails, and leaned against it for support, that she had something else to wear. Getting into a car was going to be awkward.
Oh.
“I could ring Azra,” she said, “for a lift. I just realized that we don’t have a way to get out of here.”
Brett said, “I’ve got it handled,” then turned to the nurse and asked, “What do you think about letting us borrow a sheet to get Willow home?”
“Hospital property,” she said.
Brett smiled at her. He had a great smile, or maybe it was that way he had of focusing on only you. “But you can let us borrow it. I’ll bring it back in an hour, if you need it in the laundry tonight.” He looked at her name tag. “Vanessa. One hour. Scout’s honor. What do you say?”
The nurse, a middle-aged lady who should probably have been more resistant, was trying not to smile back, but she wasn’t succeeding. “Oh, go ahead. And I don’t believe you were ever a Scout.”
He laughed. “You’re right. But I’m extremely honorable. I have a driver outside to take us home, and I’ll have him return this to you as soon as he does.” He was already trying to wrap it around Willow, not the easiest job one-handed.
She said, “I can do it,” and did her best to arrange it around herself like a skirt. How had he known how large her semi-nakedness had loomed just then? Was he actually psychic? That was a daunting thought.
The nurse had to help, in the end. “We’ll tuck in the bit that has the hospital’s stamp on it,” she said. “Dunno what I was thinking. Take care your frienddoesbring it back.” When the aide was helping Willow into the wheelchair, though, the nurse leaned over, adjusted the sheet some more, and told her in an undertone, “I’d keep that one.” And she thought,Yeah. For two more weeks.After that, she closed her eyes against the vertigo, let herself be rolled down the passage, and tried not to think about her reputation, her career, her judgment, and her heart.
She’d get some sleep, and then she’d get it all sorted. She’d find a way. There was always a way, and she always bounced back.
You bounced back, or you fell apart. She was bouncing back.
Brett’s driver Dave was standing in the pickup lane, holding the SUV’s door, when Brett followed Willow’s wheelchair out into the warm night.
As usual when his emotions got involved, he deliberately slowed everything down to binary form, yes/no, and focused on the next decision.
“You think you’re calm, but what you really are is cold,” Nia had flung at him during that last terrible day, just before she’d walked out the door. “You don’t feel, you only think. A woman needs a man tofeel.”
She’d apologized for that later, and he’d said, “Never mind. If that was what you thought, I obviously wasn’t conveying what I should have been.”
She’d sighed and said, “There you are again. Brett. This is why I left. Do you ever have an unfiltered thought? An unfilteredemotion?”
No,he thought now.It’s how I’m made.Something he’d have sworn he’d come to terms with years ago. “Put her in the front seat,” he told the aide, who was hovering on the pavement with the wheelchair. “You could lean the seat back for her, if you don’t mind.”
He didn’t face the next challenge until they were both in the car, he’d got himself slewed around so his left leg was on the seat, and Dave, whose previous efforts for him had mainly involved messenger duty, but who hadn’t complained about getting called out of bed for this, asked, “Where to?”
“My place,” Brett said, and Dave nodded and pulled out of the lot. Good. Brett liked quiet drivers.
Australians didn’t tip. Too bad, because this night deserved a tip. Gift certificate, then.
An effort for another day, because Willow spoke for the first time in five minutes, but what she said was, “I should go home.”
He kept it calm. “I’d rather you stayed with me. It’s already two in the morning.”
She hadn’t even reacted to what he’d said back there. He knew she’d heard. He spared a moment to think about her lack of expectations and what they said about her history, and then about the potential awkwardness of being the kind of guy who said too much too soon—the kind of guy he’d never been in his life—and refocused, because thatwasthe kind of guy he was. “Two people are in the hospital with this thing, and Azra has a job to go to in the morning. What if you’re sick again?”
“You remember her name,” Willow said. “Here’s a test. What’s her job?”
He laughed. He knew how worried she was, and he had a pretty fair idea of how bad she still felt, but she was still trying. “Too easy. Clothing designer, working with a surfer-chic company whose name I unfortunately do not recall. Specializing in snaps up the sides of T-shirts and men’s briefs in a size too large. In the waist, of course. And I’d like you to stay. I’ll feel better about it.”
