Authors: Jessi Gage
“That’s sick. Knock it off, asshole.” He backhanded Tony in the chest, disgusted, but at the same time the Cade part of him was so titillated at the coincidence of meeting his little sister on the road, he started laughing and couldn’t stop.
“Your sister’s destined to see my ass, man. It’s on my bucket list.” Tony arched up in the seat and yanked his shorts and boxers down to his knees. He began flinging his floppy dick from side to side and saying, “Hey, baby, come ride the Tony express!”
“Dude, you’re fuckin’ sick! Put that shit away.”
“Aw, wittle Cadie afwaid of Tony’s big dick? How about Tony’s ass?” He maneuvered himself in his seat so his ass was in the air, pressing in on Derek’s personal space. “Kiss it, dude. You know you want to.”
Derek wanted to throw this motherfucker out of the car, but he couldn’t keep from laughing harder. His eyes watered. He laughed so hard he started coughing. When he recovered, he noticed he’d driven into Camilla’s blind spot. Her signal blinked; she crept into his lane.
Shit, she didn’t see him. He tapped the brakes, but his reactions were too slow. She clipped the Mustang’s front bumper with her rear one.
“What the fuck, man?” Tony yelled, flipping over to plant his ass back in his seat.
Derek hung onto the wheel and managed to keep them from spinning out of control, but Camilla hadn’t been so lucky. Her Nissan careened off the road and into the ditch.
A fist pounded his breastbone, his heart telling him in case he missed it he’d messed up big time. He locked his gaze onto the rearview mirror, hoping to see headlights jump back up onto the road, but the only lights back there were other cars too far behind to have seen what had happened.
Tony started laughing and wheezing. “What’d we hit, dude? Yyou scratch my baby, you better have the dough to pay for body work.” Tony was so out of it, he didn’t realize they’d collided with Camilla’s car. “Fuck, why are my shorts on the floor?”
Cade’s thoughts invaded his head like ugly parasites.
No one knows but me–If I pull over, I’ll get arrested for DUI and lose my spot at UCLA-Law. I’ll get kicked off Crew. Cami’ll be okay. Probably drive back up on the road and be fine. If her car needs work, I’ll help her out with the cash and call it a high school graduation present.
“Dude,” Tony said. “Why you driving like my grandmother? Step on it, will ya? I can’t stop thinking about Chelsea’s tits. If I don’t have them in my hands in ten minutes, I’m going to punk you good next quarter.”
Derek wanted to pull over to help Camilla–and her father, whom Cade apparently hadn’t known was in the car–but he couldn’t affect Cade’s movements. It wasn’t like being in Camilla’s body, where he could easily override her. Cade was a confident bastard, and he gave Derek’s will a run for his money. Derek fought, but Cade pressed the gas pedal, his thoughts already turning to the party they were headed to.
He woke up to the pounding rush of blood in his ears. He sat up in bed, shaking, shirt soaked with sweat from the battle with Cade. He wiped a hand over his face and cursed.
Camilla hadn’t come to comfort him.
He had an alarming feeling she’d dreamt the same thing tonight. He launched out of bed, grabbed his keys and headed for his truck. His dream girl was the one who needed comfort tonight.
* * * *
From Derek’s house, Mercy Med was a fifteen-minute drive. Along Highway 44. But he was on schedule to do it in ten. Not difficult at two in the morning. As his truck sailed over the concrete, he glimpsed a scant handful of taillights up ahead and headlights behind. Even though it wasn’t raining and he drove on a different stretch of the freeway, he couldn’t help remembering the dream. Could he have somehow seen the truth of what happened the night Camilla lost her father?
Goosebumps up and down his arms told him he just might have. And with the sickening possibility, every impulse he’d had to like Cade came to a screeching halt. If what he’d seen had been real, then Cade had offered up his sister’s happiness on the altar of his selfish ambition.
And the bastard had the gall to become a prosecutor. He spent his days putting criminals behind bars when he was a criminal who had gone free. Fucking hypocrite.
His hands had a stranglehold on the wheel. He wished it was Cade’s neck. Anger banded his lungs, squeezing tighter and tighter. He didn’t think he could take another breath until he unleashed his rage on the one who’d earned it.
But pummeling Cade’s face wouldn’t help Camilla.
As he exited onto East Street and navigated the mile and a half through downtown, he counted to ten out loud. Several times. By the time he pulled into Mercy Med’s parking lot, he felt marginally less like smashing his fist into Cade’s cocky grin.
He forced breath in and out of his lungs, willing the muscles between his ribs to relax. He would be seeing Cade in a few minutes, and maybe Camilla’s mother, too. The short-term goal was to get to Camilla tonight so he could repay a fraction of the comfort she’d given him. The long-term goal was to get along with her family, because making himself a part of her life had become nonnegotiable. Acting like a self-righteous asshole wouldn’t help him toward either.
Keep your eye on the prize,
he coached himself as he strode to the fourth-floor IMCU, the last place he’d seen her. The receptionist asked who he was there to see.
“Ms. Arlington’s not on this floor anymore,” the woman said. She had on a lot of eye makeup and if she died her hair any blacker, it would start absorbing light. “She’s been moved to ICU.”
He cursed. ICU meant she was in rough shape, maybe even back on a breathing tube, or God forbid, in a coma. The urgency to get to her had him spinning around to head for the fifth floor. He remembered where to go from his trip to the hospital with Officer Reynolds.
“It’s family only in the ICU,” the receptionist said, stopping him in his tracks. When he turned to look back at her, she shrugged one shoulder. “They’re also pretty strict up there outside of visiting hours. Just wanted to give you a heads up.”
He thanked her and exited to the bay of elevators. He had two choices. Leave or lie.
He hit the up arrow. Failing Camilla tonight was not an option.
At the ICU reception desk, a heavy black woman in scrubs looked up over a pair of colorful reading glasses hung around her neck on a beaded rope. She raised one eyebrow. “It’s awfully late to be visiting an ICU patient.”
“It sure is,” he agreed. “This where I sign in?” he asked, picking up the pen and printing his name on the clipboard.
She eyed his name, looking unimpressed. “It’s family only this floor.”
“How do you know I’m not family?”
“Because I’ve got a memory like an elephant, Mr. Summers.” She stood up from her computer chair and braced her hands on the counter. “Last time you were here you had a police escort. You’re the hit and run who put Ms. Arlington in the hospital in the first place. I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
Damn. He’d been so focused on Cade Thursday afternoon, he hadn’t noticed the receptionist. He wasn’t going to be able to lie his way in. But he refused to give up.
“You’re right. I’m the one who put her in here. But she asked to see me that day and never got the chance. So I’m here now. Which room is she in?”
“Not going to happen. A, you’re not family. B, even if you were, there’s only one visitor allowed at a time after hours, and she’s already got one. Now, you’ll have to go or I’m going to call security.” She put her hand on the phone for emphasis.
“Excuse me.” A voice pulled their attention to the end of the reception counter. Cade stood there in a wilted dress shirt and with a day’s growth shadowing his face. His rounded shoulders suggested weariness, but his eyes were intense and worried. He noticed Derek but spared him only a nod. “Cami’s agitated,” he said to the nurse-receptionist. “Someone needs to come take a look at her.”
“What’s wrong?” Derek said. “Is she awake?”
The nurse stuck her head into a room behind reception and called, “Melissa, check on Ms. Arlington in five-twenty.”
Cade said to him, “They told us she was in a coma again, but she doesn’t seem right. She’s…I don’t know, having a nightmare or something. I can’t wake her up.” His gaze darted down the hall to the patient rooms, and a muscle jumped in his jaw. Derek recognized the look of a man severely pissed at himself. He’d felt that way too many times lately.
When Cade pushed off the counter and headed down the hall, Derek followed. He bit the inside of his cheek to keep from asking why the fucking hell Cade hadn’t called with an update on Camilla.
“Where do you think you’re going, Mr. Summers?” Nurse Bulldog said.
“To see Camilla,” he shot over his shoulder, not slowing. She needed him and he needed to be there for her.
He heard the nurse pick up her phone and say the words
situation
and
ICU,
but his focus was on Camilla. He followed Cade into a dimly-lit patient room that looked a lot like the one he’d seen on the fourth floor, but crowded with more equipment. As soon as he saw Camilla’s thin form swallowed up in the bed and her bruised, sleeping face pulled taut with distress, he passed Cade and pulled her into his arms.
He knew she was missing part of her skull, but he didn’t know where, so when he cupped her bandaged head in his hand, he was as gentle as he could be. “Easy, Camilla. It’s just a dream. You’re okay.” Was she having the same dream he’d had tonight? If so, what would she do when she woke up and saw Cade behind him? “It’s time to wake up, now, sweetheart. Can you do that for me? Can you come back to me?”
Her hands came around him. Her fingers dug into his back in the sweetest sensation. She breathed his name on a gasp and opened her eyes. They were as blue and vulnerable as he remembered.
His heart stuttered, and his chest tightened in a whole different way, which was pleasant and terrifying at the same time. He had his dream girl in his arms. At last. Everything hard in him melted, and he knew he’d do anything for this woman.
“Is it really you?” she asked, her voice like sawdust, reminding him she was in this bed, broken and thinner than he’d known her because of him.
“I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.” He couldn’t stop smoothing his fingers over her swollen cheek, her stitched eyebrow, her trembling chin, her pale lips. “I’m so sorry,” he choked past the lump in his throat.
A tear leaked from her eye. She tried to hide it from him by burying her face in his neck.
“God, I missed you,” he said.
“I missed you too,” she murmured near his ear. She clung to him, but her grip became uncertain. He didn’t complain. He’d take whatever she would give him.
Squeaking shoes and heated voices grew louder behind him. He spared a glance toward the door and saw Cade facing off with a uniformed security guard. “Like all California hospitals that accept Medicare and Medi-Cal,” Cade said, “Mercy Med’s family-only visitation regulations include non-spousal significant others.”
“That man is not Ms. Arlington’s significant other.” The hallway into the room blocked his view of the nurse who had been working reception, but he recognized her voice. “That is the man who put her in the ICU.”
“No,” Cade said. “I’m the one who put her in the ICU. She was downstairs a day away from discharge until I pissed her off enough that she got out of bed and fell down. Hell, I’ve been knocking Cami down all her life–”
Camilla tensed in his embrace.
He turned his attention back to her and saw pained confusion pass over her face.
“But just because I’m her brother I get a free pass to see her and this guy, the guy she’d much rather have at her bedside, he’s the one you turn away.” Cade made a disgusted sound.
“He loves you,” Derek whispered to her. “He’s not perfect, but he’s your brother. He’s grown since that night.”
Her gaze locked with his while the others kept arguing. “What night?” Her eyes were big and wary.
“The night he ran you off the road because he was too fu–frigging stoned to know what he was doing,” he said through gritted teeth.
She went still in his arms. “How did you know what I was dreaming?”
He hadn’t known for sure, but now he did. “Because I dreamt it too.”
Her surprise only lasted a second. Then her eyebrows knitted together. She shook her head. He saw denial in the set of her jaw. She didn’t want to believe Cade had anything to do with that night.
He, on the other hand, had no trouble believing it. All these years she’d carried the guilt of the accident he’d witnessed in his nightmares. She’d carried it all when she had no business shouldering any part of it. She’d carried it alone.