“Yes to the look and yes to the hot. It’s just … she’s here. And I’m not, usually.”
Blake could also hear Hawk’s blond eyebrows rise through the phone line. “You’re going to call time on something promising because of geography? When you’re a billionaire who can have 25 houses and as many private planes, if you want? Sorry, Blake. I call bullshit.”
“It’s not just that,” Blake muttered, stepping off the boardwalk. In the distance, he heard a construction worker yell something, but that, and his own next words, were cut off by a sharp, piercing pain shooting up through his leg, so painful that his knee gave out on him and he toppled over into the sand. Confused and in agony, Blake began, “What the f—”
There was a violent rattle, followed by a hiss, and Blake felt another sharp sting, and then another.
“Sir! SIR!”
Vaguely, he was aware of multiple voices racing toward him, just like he was aware of more pains darting up and down his bare calves and thighs. With each bite, his chest got tighter, so he couldn’t even yell anymore.
His eyesight went fuzzy, whether from the intense pain or the poison he wasn’t sure. He could hear Hawk yelling something on the line, and then there were people rushing up, also saying things that didn’t quite compute.
Blake stared blankly up at the construction site guys as they hauled him bodily off the sand and carted him off, every step sending more jolting pain through him, like lightning bolts zigzagging through.
He tried to say something but it came out all garbled.
Kelly, he thought as his vision faded to black. Then that was all there was he let go of reality and sank into painful, blistering hot darkness.
Chapter Twenty-One
Kelly
One Week Later
Kelly stared at the phone, then looked at Miska and Annie, her mood picking up for the first time since Blake had left her apartment the morning the storm had finally blown over, his goodbye awkward and terse after three days of constant lovemaking. They shouldn’t have, but keeping their hands off each other had proved an impossibility. And in between they’d talked and talked, but never come close to resolving whether there could ever be an ‘us.’
She hadn’t heard from him since and figured he’d done what he’d originally intended to do, booking it off the island as fast as he could to get away from her. The pain of that memory receded briefly as the message on her phone finally registered in her brain.
“I got it!” She jumped to her feet, dancing with elation, arms waving wildly. “I got the job!”
Her friends whooped and hauled her in for a tight embrace, talking simultaneously so she could barely make out what either was saying. It didn’t much matter; all that did was that Blake’s leaving had finally provided the impetus she’d needed to get out of Element Island. She’d applied for a secretarial job at a lawyer’s office in Myrtle Beach and after two interviews, had now been officially offered the job.
As her friends went back to their own responsibilities at the hotel at last, Kelly sagged into a chair in the lobby, on lunch break. Giddy with elation, nerves nevertheless set in as she considered everything she’d now have to do, starting with pulling up all the roots she’d set down here and moving to the mainland.
In her mind, she heard what she was sure Blake would have said, back before he was being an asshole and a coward.
You can do it. They’ll be lucky to have you. Show them what you’re made of.
Impulsively, because that was her middle name, she pulled out her phone and sent Blake a text. She’d sworn she wouldn’t, but after a week, surely it was okay. They’d said they would stay friends …
To her surprise and delight, there was an almost immediate response to her text. Kelly looked eagerly at her phone and her smile faded into uncertainty.
Are you Blake’s girl?
Warily, she texted, Who is this?
His younger brother, Hawk. Are you his girl? Kelly, right?
He’d mentioned Hawk quite a few times, so she felt more secure as she responded, I’m not his girl. Just a friend.
Well, just a friend, your not-guy’s pretty damn sick.
What? Why?? she texted in shock.
Easier if you come to the hospital. MB Main. Meet you in the lobby. I’m wearing an Eagles’ tee.
Hospital?!
Kelly ran from the hotel, not even telling her manager she was going. She had a new job anyway, so if she got fired before she quit, she could claim severance. More to the point, she didn’t care. Her entire concern was in getting to the mainland to the hospital.
***
An endless ferry ride, followed by a seemingly unending cab drive, and Kelly ran up the steps into the hospital. Immediately, she spotted the Blake-look-alike wearing an Eagles’ T-shirt.
“What happened?” she demanded, hurrying over to him. “I’m Kelly. Is he okay? What happened?”
Hawk, who looked like a far younger, less stressed version of his big brother, shook her hand with a formality that didn’t seem to fit his demeanor.
“Hi, Kelly. I’m Hawk. He stepped off the boardwalk onto the sand at the construction site, the day after the storm.”
Kelly gasped, fully aware of what had to have happened. The storm would have blown the region’s fair share of deadly pit vipers every which way, and more than a few would have been hiding under the boardwalk. It was likely Blake had literally stepped into a nest of snakes that had just emerged to themselves in the aftermath.
“How many?” she asked, hurrying after Hawk as he took off toward the elevator.
“Nine,” Hawk said grimly. “He was seizing by the time he was airlifted here. He’s been in and out of consciousness ever since. I wouldn’t have even known if I hadn’t been on the phone with him when he got bitten. If there hadn’t been some construction guys at the Magnolia, he would’ve bit the—sorry. Not an intentional pun.”
“Oh, God,” Kelly whispered. She didn’t even want to think about what might have happened if the men hadn’t been there. “Can I see him?” she asked, her voice shaking.
Hawk nodded. “Yeah, in a little while. Doctors are doing something or other right now. Some kind of, uh, draining procedure, I think. They kicked me out.” He looked gray at the thought.
Kelly was sure her own face was just as pale. “Why—why did you text me? I’m so glad you did,” she added hastily. “A whole week he’s been here and I didn’t—” she broke off, looking away as her voice cracked.
Beside her, Hawk rested a big hand lightly on her shoulder. “I thought you would want to be here.” She turned and met his gaze, blue like Blake’s, and kind, though there was nothing of the heat that Kelly had long come to associate with Blake. “Would he want you here, Kelly.”
“I don’t know,” she said honestly, swallowing hard. “I don’t know. Things are strange between us right now.”
“My brother has a tendency to make everything twice as hard as it should be,” Hawk told her. “He’s a good guy. Just takes on way too much responsibility for everyone. I’m guessing you got the ‘he’s not good enough for you’ speech.”
Even though Blake was sick, possibly dying, Kelly managed a slight laugh. “Maybe a slight variation of that. But the truth is that maybe I’m not good enough for him. Not because I don’t have plenty to offer, but he seems to want a certain woman by his side … a business woman, I guess.” She pulled away and walked over to the vending machine, staring blankly at the sugary, salty treats.
“If Blake can’t pull his head out long enough to see how much you love him,” Hawk said quietly from a few feet away, “Then he doesn’t deserve you. I can see it, and we’ve known each other for all of three seconds.”
Kelly cleared her throat and closed her eyes. A moment later, a gruff voice came from the doorway, heavily accented with a mainland drawl. “Mr. Parker? May I speak with you, please?”
She heard Hawk walk away and mindlessly purchased a bag of pretzels, stuffing them down as if somehow k
eeping her mouth occupied could keep her heart off the realization that she could lose Blake. And not just to his business. Forever.
Fighting desperate tears, Kelly balled the pretzel bag into her hand and slammed it into the garbage can, grateful no one was nearby to witness her actions. “He can’t die. He can’t die,” she whispered over and over, unable to fathom how the man she’d fallen in love with so completely could ever leave her life forever, to where she couldn’t even reach him with an occasional friendly text—
“Kelly.”
She turned and saw Hawk in the doorway, a relieved smile on his face. Not daring to hope, she started toward him. “Is he—”
“They think he’ll make a full recovery. It’ll take some time, and they’ll leave in the induced coma a while longer to give him a chance to recuperate, but they say he was brought here fast enough and the antivenin did its job.”
She couldn’t say anything. If she’d dared speak, she would have broken down and wept right then and there.
Seeming to understand, Hawk nodded at the hallway. “Come on. We can see him now.”
As relieved as she was, a chill of dread went through Kelly as they approached Blake’s room in intensive care. Hawk stopped outside the door. “I’ll wait out here and give you a minute alone with him.”
Throat still locked down tight against a mixture of dangerously strong emotions, Kelly walked into the dimly lit room and slowly, very slowly made her way over to where Blake lay in the hospital bed, his big body covered from head to toe in every manner of tubing and machinery, to where she could barely get close to him.
“Oh my god.” She covered her mouth, shaking at the sight of the man she loved so very clearly still at the edges of death. Reaching out without thinking, needing to touch him, Kelly touched his shoulder, the one place he didn’t seem to have a needle stabbing him.
“Blake.” What she’d feared came pouring out and she stood at his bedside and wept for a good 10 minutes, staring down into his beloved face, so still, so silent, while machines kept time with his heartrate.
Finally calming, Kelly wiped the mess off her face and leaned down to whisper to him. “Blake. I didn’t know. I would’ve been here so much sooner. But you might not have wanted that.” His words came back to haunt her, as they had for days. “I want to be by your side as you recover, Blake. But you won’t let me, will you.”
Realization touched her and slowly, her tears dried as a kind of numb acceptance took over her. “I want to fight for you. I want to make you see how good we are. But you need to focus everything on recovering. I … I’ll just distract you from getting healthy. And then you’ll be so upset that you’re behind on business …”
Kelly shook her head and leaned down to very gently kiss his cold cheek, lingering on the hard line of his jaw, even more defined now that he’d lost several pounds.
“I love you. That’s why I’m leaving. I have to. Goodbye,” she whispered, and turned and fled from the room, bolting past a startled Hawk before he even had the chance to call out her name.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Blake
“You’re an ass,” Cole informed him yet again, as Blake gritted his teeth and forced his way through yet another painful prescribed exercise with a rubber tube, designed to rebuild the muscles that had withered and atrophied post-snake bites.
“Shut up and grab me a sweat towel,” he snapped, already drenched from just a few minutes of rehab.
“Not until you admit it.”
“Fuck you,” Blake snarled, dropping the tube and reaching for his cane, his hated cane, which he might very well always have to use in the aftermath of Element Island’s parting gift.
Cole just watched him as he hobbled over to the counter, limping every painful step, though his left leg was now largely recovered. His right still slowed him at every turn. He grabbed the towel and smeared at his face, shaking from just the miniscule effort but refusing to sit down and catch his breath.
“Call her,” Cole said for the hundred thousandth time. “Don’t be an idiot, Blake. For fuck’s sake. Answer her calls.”
“Have you forgotten that she’s the one who walked away?”
“If you weren’t a cripple, I’d belt you,” Hawk said frankly, walking into Blake’s kitchen and helping himself to one of the beers Blake had been indulging in far too frequently in the month since he’d been transferred to a hospital back home. “You know damn well why she bolted.”
Refusing to think about Kelly—just as he refused every painful night when he couldn’t even toss and turn because his leg kept him immobile as images of her ran on a nonstop through his mind—Blake managed to muster enough strength to limp over and snatch the beer from Hawk’s lips.
He downed a long, cold sip and groaned with relief, sagging back against the counter. Feeling both his brothers’ eyes on him, he muttered. “How’s Dana?”
“Pissed at you.”
“Just like Kathryn,” Hawk added. “Dude. Wake up. How many messages has she now left?”
At least a dozen, by Blake’s last count, and none of which he had read. Then there had been the messages she’d left at work for him, which he’d refused to listen to his secretary recite.
“You want to know why she left?” Cole stalked over and yanked the beer from Blake’s startled hand, very nearly upsetting his precarious balance, so he was forced to flail for a drawer handle to stay upright. “Because she didn’t want to see this.” He waved at Blake’s unshaven, disheveled state. “That girl knew what you’d turn into as soon as work could no longer be your only life source.”
“Maybe. Not completely,” Hawk cut in before Blake could protest. “See, I eavesdropped,” he said shamelessly. “So I know exactly why she left—”
“I don’t fucking want to hear it!” Blake exploded, snatching the bottle back from Cole and sending it smashing against the opposite wall in a shower of glass and fragrant hops. “At least my arm hasn’t withered! FUCK!”
There was a brief silence before Hawk calmly continued as though he had never been interrupted. “She left because she was afraid that you’d be wrestling with your feelings for her and your worry about work and that all that would take your focus off what she knew would be painful rehab.”
Blake had known it deep in his gut, even as he’d fought his way out of the coma, once the sedatives had been counteracted; even as he’d opened his eyes for the first time and seen his brothers’ concerned blue gazes, rather than Kelly’s warm black eyes. Even as he’d struggled through the agonizingly painful first weeks of rehab. Even as he’d insisted on attempting to still follow up on the Magnolia, until his brothers had categorically cut him out of the project, even going so far as to warn site managers not to communicate with him. Through it all, he’d known exactly why Kelly hadn’t been by his side. And he’d hated himself for driving her away even as he’d irrationally faulted her for not sticking it out and making him see reason.
Gripping the head of his cane so tightly that his arm ached—no lack of muscle there, anyway—Blake stumped away from his brothers, all the while knowing he might get away from then, but never from the memory of Kelly.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Kelly
One Month Later
“I’m sorry, ma’am. Who was it you said, again?”
Kelly stifled a sigh and answered the question for the umpteenth time. “Yes. I’m trying to reach Blake Parker.” The owner of the company. Maybe you’ve heard of him?!
“This isn’t Mr. Parker’s preferred method of contact, ma’am. He has a designated secretary for his business dealings—”
“No, this has nothing to do with business,” Kelly cut in. “I’m just an old … friend of his.” And even that was a lie at this stage. Friends occasionally answered each other’s messages, she’d been brought up to believe. “If you could be so kind as to tell him that I called and I am eager to reach him. There is something important that I need to speak with him about.” Again, she paused,
listening to the official voice on the other side of the line.
She’d been through multiple voices in the month since he’d left Element Island. So many voices that she’d thought she knew all the talking heads at Parker Industries, until this new one had surprised her.
“This is highly irregular, ma’am. May I take a message and convey it through the problem channels?”
“No, I don’t want to state what it is over the phone.” She barely kept a snarl of frustration out of her voice. It wasn’t this lady’s fault. “Yes, I understand that, but if you could just please do me a favor and let him know that I called. Please. It’s important. Very very important. Very. Urgent, actually. Kelly Landor, that’s right. Thank you.”
Kelly let out an exasperated sigh when she hung up the phone, and she tossed it on the counter.
She walked over to the chair and plopped down in it before looking at her phone in disgust. She’d lost count of how many times she’d texted, emailed, and called Blake in the days following his accent. Had it done been for Hawk texting her to let her know that Blake was recovering slowly but steadily, Kelly might honestly have thought he was dead. She’d known he would cut off contact, but somehow a part of her had apparently still assumed he cared just a little bit.
“What is going with you, Blake?” she said to no one, slouching lower in the chair and rubbing her temples, fighting an incipient headache. “Friends return other friends’ urgent messages. Even shitty friends.”
She wondered whether he had known that she’d been at his bedside and left before he woke up. Yeah, Hawk had probably told him. He might be angry with her for that, but somehow, Kelly didn’t think that was what was preventing him from answering her calls. It seemed more and more like he just didn’t want to talk to her, and that meant that she had done the right thing by leaving the hospital that day. If she had been the one to walk into his room as he recovered, it probably would have only brought him more stress.
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