Page 19 of If She Only Knew (The Cahills 1)

His mother offered him a smile that was somewhere between tenderness and crafty calculation. “Whatever the reason, it’s good to have you back, Nicholas.”

He took a sip of his drink. The smoky Scotch slid down his throat as easily as water, an acquired taste he’d been told, but one he seemed to have been born with.

“So tell me about Marla’s accident,” Nick suggested, as Alex turned his attention back to the bar and poured himself another stiff shot.

Nick was edgy. Marla had been awake; he’d seen it with his own eyes. It seemed as if they should be doing something, anything rather than sitting around this stuffy room and sipping drinks. “What exactly happened that night?”

“We assume Marla and Pam Delacroix, a friend she’d met recently, were going to visit Pam’s daughter down at UC Santa Cruz as they were headed that direction. It was just over six weeks ago, right after James was born. The day she was supposed to come home from the hospital. Why she decided to leave then, is beyond me.” Alex frowned into his drink, studying the amber depths as if he were a fortune-teller reading tea leaves. “Anyway, she just met Pam, got behind the wheel for God-only-knows-what reason, and took off. It was a nasty night. Fog and rain. And that stretch of Highway 17 is treacherous. It winds through the mountains. Lots of accidents all the time. Somehow Marla lost control of the car. No one knows why. Maybe because she wasn’t familiar with Pam’s Mercedes. Anyway the road was slick and wet and the car slid along the guardrail, finally broke through at a weak point and hurtled over the cliff. Pam was killed instantly. Wasn’t wearing the seat belt. Marla barely survived. Crashed her head on the side window, fractured her jaw in three places, lacerated the hell out of her face, but the air bag inflated and she didn’t end up with any other broken bones or internal injuries. She even lucked out with her teeth—none broken.”

“I doubt if she’d consider that lucking out,” Nick argued.

Alex finished his cigarette and tossed the butt into the fireplace. “The result was the broken jaw, a concussion, and a broken nose. Bad enough, when you get down to it, especially with the coma. The police identified her from the hospital bracelet that she was still wearing at the time of the accident—she must’ve forgotten to take it off.”

“That doesn’t sound like Marla.” The woman Nick remembered was always fastidious about her looks.

“Maybe she was upset. Who knows?” Alex walked to the bar, poured himself another shot or two. “The left side of her face is pretty mangled, but the surgeons are optimistic. They’ve already done a little reconstruction, to keep her face symmetrical, and she’ll probably want more once the wires are off and she wakes up.” He shook his head at the magnitude of it all.

Nick shifted from one foot to the other. Why the hell didn’t the hospital call? This standing around and doing nothing was driving him nuts. Nick glanced at his mother calmly sipping tea, her eyes cast on the edge of the Oriental rug where Coco was lying, chin resting between her white paws, her wary black eyes fixed steadily on Nick. “I think I should shove off—”

Footsteps sounded on the stairs and Cissy, dressed all in black, burst into the room. “I thought we were going to see Mom,” she said, stopping dead center when she spied Nick.

“Cissy, this is Nicholas. You remember him, don’t you?” Eugenia asked.

All petulant lip and suspicious eyes, Cissy gave him a quick once-over. “Don’t think so.”

“It’s been a long time,” Nick said, giving the kid an out. “Maybe ten years.”

She shrugged. Obviously didn’t care. “Are we going or what?”

“As soon as we hear from the hospital. Nick, here, said she woke up and talked to him. But I stopped by to see her and she’d lapsed back into the coma.”

“What? Can she do that?”

“She did it.”

“No way.” Cissy blinked hard. “I mean, once you wake up, you wake up, right?”

Alex downed his drink and touched her on the shoulder. “Dr. Robertson thinks it’ll be soon now.”

“He’s been saying that ever since the accident.” Cissy looked from one adult to the next, searching their faces, expecting to find lies. “This is nuts!” She dropped onto a camel-backed sofa of pale green velvet. “I just want her to wake up and everything be the way it was.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Alex said with more tenderness than Nick would ever give him credit for.

“Why’d this have to happen?”

“Cissy, we’ve been over this. It just did.” Alex’s nerves were beginning to fray and Nick was surprised. His brother had always been a cold, level-headed bastard; someone who could handle any situation with surprising calm. An old girlfriend, the one before Marla, had once accused him of having ice water rather than blood running through his veins. Alex, at the time, had considered it a compliment.

But tonight he was shaken. Big time.

Maybe he really does ca

re about Marla. Maybe he’d married her because he loved her, not because he was only interested in besting his brother.

“I could be at the ranch right now,” Cissy complained.

Eugenia snorted contemptuously. “You have school tomorrow. And it’s raining.”

Cissy muttered “Big deal” under her breath and stared out the window. The girl reminded Nick of a house cat sitting on a windowsill, tail switching, eyes focused on the birds sitting on a branch just on the other side of the window pane.

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