Page 162 of Mangled Memory
“About what? Christian, right?”
His lids fall shut as if my words spear him.
His eyes are ravaged when he looks back to me. “About what to do right now. I know what I’d like to do. I know what I can legally do. But we’re…” he pauses. “We’re new. At least to you. So, I can do what I believe I should. Or I can do what my wife would want. But I need to know whatyouneed. Because the Ayla I know would want a choice.”
He holds my gaze, lines creasing between his brows.
“You speak like I’m two different people. Like I have multiple personalities.”
Liam pulls out his phone, gives me a quick nod, and silently exits the room.
My eyes follow his back before returning to the stunning man standing in front of me.
“Multiple personalities? Two different people? Hell, I don’t know.” He shrugs off the wall and begins pacing. “I don’t know how to explain what it’s like to know someone intimately, inside and out, know their heart and soul. Know their fears and failures, their highs and lows. Know the sounds they make when they come.” He stops his path and captures my gaze, holding me captive. “To be with them in their worst moments and in their greatest ones. And to have that person… your person, the one who’s your in-thick and in-thin, look at you with no recognition. I’m dying.”
“Christian—”
“So I’m asking, Ayla, because I know what I want to do… What do you need right now?”
“What would the Ayla you knew want?”
The anguish on his face would be heartbreaking if I had any connection to the stranger at the end of my bed. His pain is obvious.
But, like walking into a dramatic scene in a movie when you have no history with the characters, it doesn’t move me.
“The Ayla I know. Not knew. We are not past tense, Princess. And we never will be.”
The romantic in me would swoon if this were a movie. The feminist in me would fight if this were a book. But the woman in me in my very real life feels more threatened than loved by that statement.
I pull back, pushing my shoulder blades into the hospital bed, and move as far away from the danger at my feet. Like hell I’m going to be railroaded.
Not today.
“Don’t you threaten me?—”
Before I have time to finish my thought or he has time to reply, the hospital door swings wide and my larger-than-life dad pushes his way in with my mom hot on his heels. His frame fills the doorway. He’s a big man—tall with broad shoulders, and more than a bit of age settling around his softer middle. Even his feet are large. He’s a terrifyingteddy bear.
“Ayla.” His face pales, and he stops just inside the doorway as if he’s hit a glass wall.
“Ayla.” My mother rushes around him into the room and drops her handbag on the closest chair. She wraps me in a hug, apologizing for too-tight hugs and awkward angles but never lets up. Wetness hits the less bruised side of my head as her chest hiccups against mine.
“Mom, I’m fine.” I wrap my good arm around her. “Seriously, I’ll be fine. You can stop worrying now.”
“I’ll never not worry about you, sweetie. It’s a mother’s job.”
I look over my shoulder to see my dad standing stock still just inside the room. The fear and panic on his face is at odds with the relief in my mom’s body.
“Dad?”
Wordlessly, he lifts a thumb and forefinger over the bridge of his nose and rubs the tears that form there.
I can’t remember the last time he cried. My grandfather’s funeral, maybe, or my grandmother’s diagnosis—major things. But never over stuff like this.
“I’m okay, Dad. I’m sorry I scared you.”
He freezes in place. “You’re sorry.You’resorry?” His eyes register disbelief and something else I can’t put my finger on. “My precious girl, you have no reason to apologize to me.”
He enters the room and is nearing the foot of the bed where my angry husband has stopped his pacing. To say that the temperature in the room chills is an understatement. I can’t say for sure, but when two bull moose see each other in a clearing and size up the other as a competitor before locking antlers in a duel to the death, this is probably the sentiment in that moment before one dies and the other limps away the weary victor.
