by Lainey Reese
Chapter Fifteen
That night after the play, Riley was up to her chin in bubbles. The play was much more than she could have hoped for. It was an experience that was larger than life, and she had been instantly addicted. She had pleaded with huge liquid eyes as soon as they left the theater, and did not stop until they promised to take her again next week.
Now they were back in the penthouse, and Riley was soaking in a bubble bath while they fed her crème brûlée and champagne. When they had gotten home and saw the stiffness with which she moved, Trevor had rushed to the bathroom and started the tub while Cade had asked her if she wanted dessert. He’d called and ordered it for her, shocked when she had said she’d never had it before.
Now, she wallowed in the pampering of her two men and purred her contentment as Cade fed her bites of the creamy stuff and Trevor rubbed her bubble coated feet. She didn’t have the heart to tell them that she didn’t like the dessert. It was good at first, but it had a funny taste that didn’t seem to belong with the other flavors in it. The cook in her wondered what it was and why someone had not figured it out and removed whatever it was that was ruining an otherwise delicious dessert. But oh well, she thought, maybe it was like caviar and only rich people liked it. Everything else about this day had been perfect and she wasn’t going to let a little after taste bother her.
Fifteen minutes after her bath, Riley was feeling queasy. Her face felt numb, and her stomach was roiling in a greasy, rumbling boil. She was snuggled naked between them and decided that she probably ate too much and just had an upset tummy. Or maybe she drank too much because her limbs felt heavy and her thoughts were foggy. She pushed herself off the couch and shuffled off toward the bed quietly. She did not want the boys to worry sure it was the mix of champagne and sweets that wasn’t settling. She left them watching a late night program and hoped that she could just fall asleep quickly to escape the sickness filling her entire body with surprising speed.
She didn’t make it to the bed. Halfway down the hall, something sharp and vicious stabbed thru her side like a knife, and it crumbled her to her knees with a cry. She was in such pain and misery that she only vaguely heard the boys shout as they vaulted from the couch and barreled toward her. They bent over her with worried faces and gentle hands. It was the last clear image she had.
Cade had never felt panic the way he had when she’d cried out. He was basking in the day and all the joy they had shared. Gloating even, in the fact that she loved them and wanted to stay. It was a fairytale for them, and he felt like a damn prancing rooster—he was so high on his good fortune of finding her.
Then, in a split second, it had shattered with her cry of pain. He and Trev had been frozen for an endless second at the sound, and then when they heard her body thump to the floor they galvanized into action. He’d vaulted over the coffee table from his sitting position and reached her in a few long strides, Trevor right at his side.
The sight of her curled in a little ball of agony ripped through his gut with helplessness. She was covered in sweat and quaking while cramps clenched her body and brought pitiful sounds of anguish from between lips that had turned an alarming blue. Trevor and he locked eyes over her and both recognized the terror in the other. Trevor raced for a phone while Cade tried to get her to speak to him, thinking that if she were talking then that would mean she was going to be okay. But she couldn’t answer, or even shake her head in response to his questions.
Trevor dialed 911 on his cell and raced back to Riley. Her lips and chin were blue, and her breathing was getting alarmingly raspy. It took three rings for the phone to be picked up but it seemed like thirty to him. “I need an ambulance, fast,” Trevor said after the operator answered, he gave the address to the penthouse and snarled at the operator for suggesting that he calm down and tell her what was the nature of the emergency. “It’s our girlfriend. She collapsed. Her face is turning blue, and she won’t talk to us.”
“Is she breathing, sir?” the frustratingly calm voice asked.
“Yes, but it’s raspy, not very deep.”
“Can you check her pulse for me? Do you know how?” she asked. He did and found it feather light and way too fast. Then he swore and dropped the phone when Riley’s eyes rolled back in her head, and she started convulsing. Her tiny little body shook as if it was in the jaws of an invisible dog, and both men felt bone deep fear that they might be losing her right before their eyes.
“Sir? Sir? You have to listen to me. Sir?” Trevor only dimly heard the voice from the phone as he and Cade tried to hold Riley down thru the spasms, but he grabbed for the phone, hoping she would tell him something to do that would help.
“I’m here. I’m here. She convulsing, and now I don’t think she’s breathing anymore. Oh God! Help her. Please.” He had no idea that tears were spilling down his cheeks as she flopped back and her mouth worked without any air or sound coming from it. Her face was ghost white. He thought if they didn’t do something soon, they would lose her. The operator told him to check her mouth for obstructions. He relayed it to Cade. Cade cradled her head back, opened her mouth and swept his finger in.
“There’s nothing in there,” Cade told him, tears of his own leaking unheeded from his eyes. “I don’t think anything’s blocking her breathing.” He followed instructions and opened her mouth as wide as it would go and pushed on her tongue. A tiny gasp could be heard. At least some air was going in and out. Then Cade was instructed to hold her nose and give her two deep puffs. As he did, she was caught again in the grip of convulsions, and her violent jerking cut his lip on her teeth. He didn’t feel the pain, even as blood flowed freely from the split. He sat back and watched, helpless, as she writhed. Her body bowed backwards at an impossible angle until they heard joints popping, and he thought the spasm was going to crack her spine.
After what seemed like hours, the paramedics were there, and Cade ran to open the elevator and let them in. Before they knew it, she was strapped to a gurney with tubes in her arm and a bag on her face, while a medic asked them what drugs they’d given her.
“What?” Cade growled at the man, affronted.
“Look,” the medic continued, apparently unfazed by his bravado, “if you don’t tell me what she’s on, she’ll die. I’m not the cops, and even if I were, are you willing to let her die over this?” he said, pumping the bag.
Cade fisted his hands at his side and fought the urge to pound them into him. He knew the man was trying to help. If he killed him, it would take time away from helping Riley.
“We don’t do drugs, man,” Trevor broke in, a dead calm icing his veins with dread. “We sure as hell wouldn’t drug our girlfriend. Do whatever you have to do and fix her.” Before the tech could respond, she convulsed again and her body thrashed hard enough that it almost flipped the gurney that she was strapped to.
They were moving as they talked. They had reached the outside of the building when the other tech said, “Shit. She flat lined.” He jumped onto the gurney and began to perform CPR on Riley.
Cade and Trevor froze in helpless panic. Gripping onto each other’s hands they watched for four endless minutes as the two medics worked to bring Riley back from the dead. Cade rushed to her despite the medics and whispered furiously in her ear. “You come back. You hear me. Now, or I swear to God, baby, I’ll hunt you down and drag you home by your hair.” The last of this was a garbled mess as he felt everything in him crumble at the thought that she was truly going to leave them. The desperation was blinding him. Trevor was on his knees, praying while tears silently ran down his face as they worked tirelessly on her poor little body.
The medic with the bag shouted at Cade, “Get over here and pump this. Watch me. Do it just like this. Understand? Don’t stop.” As soon as Cade did what he’d ordered, he shoved the gurney to the ambulance while the second medic stayed crouched above her and kept her heart beating. Then he grabbed the paddles and charged them. He yelled for them to move. “Clear.” When Cade didn’t move he
shouted again and the other tech pushed Cade’s hands and the bag back. The two paddles were placed on her, one in the middle of her chest and one on her side. ZAP. Her body bucked and strained against her restraints, and Trevor shouted out a curse from the door of the ambulance. Zap. “Bag,” he ordered, and the other tech took the bag from Cade and started pumping again.
One of them placed his scope on her chest and waited. Then, “I got a pulse!” Cade collapsed to the side of the ambulance while Trevor crumbled to the pavement. Then the medics ordered and the two scrambled in. Finally, they were flying down the dark streets of New York, sirens blaring and lights flashing while the woman they loved clung to life by a thread.
Chapter Sixteen
At the hospital, they were told to wait outside. It didn’t go well when they first tried to take her away. A large no nonsense nurse informed them that they could wait in the waiting room or at the county jail. It made no difference to her. The wait was an intolerable torture to them. Trevor took over the mundane paperwork that seemed a cruel exercise to him at a time like this. But he made sure that her bills would be covered without question. They sat side by side for a while, wordless, pressing into each other’s side to draw on and give what support they could to each other. It didn’t take long for them to be up and pacing like caged tigers, snarling and growling at any medical personnel who come by without information for them.
A young, harried looking doctor in wrinkled scrubs stopped at the entrance. “Gentlemen? I’m Doctor Baylor. Are you the two who came in with Riley? She’s been revived. It was a close call there for a while. But after the blood work revealed that it was heroin we were able to administer an antagonistic to counteract the drug and bring her back from the brink.”
Trevor couldn’t fathom what he was hearing. There was an almost euphoric rush of relief at hearing that she was revived, followed by the fresh horror that she had been drugged. An angry confusion was building in him and it was a dangerous mix indeed.
Trevor held up a hand and asked, “Can we see her? Is she awake?”
“We have her sedated now,” the doctor answered. “Her body’s suffered a lot of trauma tonight and it needs the rest. We’re going to keep her overnight to run tests on her liver and kidneys. We want to make sure there hasn’t been any damage to those organs before we let her go. But yes you can see her as soon as she gets transferred to her room.”
Cade grabbed the man’s arm, needing to look him in the eye when he asked his next question. “You’re sure it was heroin?”
“There is no doubt.”
“Were you able to tell how it was given to her?” Cade asked, a terrible suspicion growing in him.
“Orally, from what we could gather. It’s the reason I think we were able to save her actually. The body dilutes a large portion of it when taken that way, which is why addicts prefer to shoot it. If she had been injected, we wouldn’t have been able to save her.” He stopped and took a good look at Cade. “That’s a pretty bad cut. Let’s go back here, and I’ll stitch it up.” He reached out, his thumb pulled on the side of the split and he whistled at the depth of the gash. “Don’t argue with me. That is not going to heal without a few stitches. C’mon.”
Cade and Trevor followed. Cade thinking about the only thing that Riley had eaten that he and Trev hadn’t.
“I think it’s time you tell me about what’s been bothering you so much at work,” Trevor said. The two locked eyes over the doctor’s head and a silent message passed between them. Someone was going to pay and pay with his or her life if they had any say in the matter.
It took three stitches to close Cade’s lip and when it was done they were finally directed to Riley’s room. She was pale as the sheets that surrounded her, a tube still in her arm. She had a band on one arm that periodically checked her vitals and there were the unsettling sounds of machines beeping and whirring in the room. Both of them stood frozen in the doorway, waiting for their brains to process the sight before them.
Trevor felt shaken to his core at how close they’d come to losing her. He couldn’t help but flash back to the first time he’d seen her. She’d been hidden under the comforter, curled against Cade and as he’d come to her side of the bed the anticipation he’d felt was heady. When Cade had revealed her to him, she’d taken his breath away. If he had been allowed to pick out each body part and facial feature, she would’ve looked exactly as she did. Then those beautiful eyes had opened, and he hadn’t been the same since. Her lovely spirit and fiercely loyal heart, her sense of humor and the way she cried at sappy stuff all combined to make her the one woman that they could not live without.
Now, he tried to accept the sight of her here, attached to wires, pale and bruised and back from the dead, literally. Trevor didn’t know he had it in him to feel this deeply. He only knew that if there were doubts about them before, they were now abolished and nothing was ever going to take her from them. Nothing.
Cade felt an ice-cold fury settle in his veins. He spoke to Trevor in a hushed voice so he didn’t wake her as he walked to her bedside and gently took her hand.
“Someone has been stealing from the club and restaurant. I stumbled onto it by sheer luck a couple of days ago. I’m sure this was meant for me. The son of a bitch better be in fucking Afghanistan by now, or I’m going to kill him.”
“Fuck,” Trevor said. He looked as disturbed at the thought that someone had tried to kill Cade as he was that Riley had gotten hurt. “Do you know who did this? Any guess?”
“Not a fucking clue,” Cade answered. “I have been quietly going back through the invoices and trying to see if there is a pattern to the thefts and the person signing. I can’t find one. Some of the thefts have shown up during inventory checks and not deliveries. There hasn’t been one employee who’s shown up more than any other has. It’s a fucking mess.” Cade ran a tired hand thru his hair as the last of his energy drained from him.
The night had been an emotional one, and he didn’t think he had the energy left to do anything more than listen to the reassuring sounds of Riley breathing in and out. Trevor slouched in the chair on the other side of Riley and seemed to be in the same shape as he. They would deal with finding the bastard tomorrow, for now it was enough that she was alive. For now, that was all that mattered.
It was early in the morning when the nurse came in to wake Riley. They had been doing it regularly all through the night, but she had been under the influence of the medications and had only been vaguely aware. This time however, her groggy mind fought to clear itself and comprehend what was going on. The first thing she noticed was the painful state of her body. She felt as though she had been beaten bloody, and wondered if she’d been in a car wreck. A pitiful moan garbled out from between her cracked lips, shocking her with its raspiness. She couldn’t remember ever sounding like this before.
The next thing she became aware of was that she was in a hospital and there was a nurse hovering over her. The woman had a kind if somewhat distracted manner as she checked tubes and machines and told Riley it was time to wake up and try to go to the bathroom.
“Huh?” Riley looked around painfully, surprised at how much energy it cost her to turn her head. “Wha…happ’n?” Her mouth couldn’t get around the words she was trying to say and her heart monitor sped up as fear crept its way into her.
“Hey, babe.” The welcome and familiar presence of Cade at her side helped ease her panic. “Shhh…we’re here. You’re going to be fine, sweetheart.” He looked terrible to Riley, his face was pale, drawn and covered in stubble. He looked like he’d been up all night.
“What happened?” She wrinkled her brow and tried to reach out to his swollen, bandaged lip.
“Nothing to worry about, sugar,” Trevor said from the other side of the bed. He stepped close, and Riley saw he looked just as shot as Cade. “He was too good looking anyway. Besides, knowing his luck it’ll only make him look better.”
“Step back, guys,” the nurse instructed as she lowered
a bed rail. The whole hospital was swimming with speculation about this threesome. To her, there was no way she believed that these men would have drugged this girl. Maybe she was a softie, but men who were as frantic and worried as these two would not have put her in danger in the first place.
It was titillating and decadent to her that they both claimed to be her boyfriend, and if she were honest with herself, all she felt about that was envy…aside from ending up in the hospital. She thought this was one lucky girl indeed.
“C’mon, honey. Let me help you up and that way you can go pee.”
Riley whimpered as she was helped to a sitting position and both men’s faces tightened at the sound. They looked as if her pain affected them. Riley became determined that she was not going to make another sound. She was not going to be a whiner and watch them sweat over her discomfort.
One painful step after another, Riley made it to the restroom with the nurse’s arm around her. Her head felt stuffed with cotton, and her body was throbbing like a sore tooth. There was an enormous pain in her chest and as she sat on the toilet she pulled the gown away to see what was wrong. For the life of her, she could not think of any explanation for the grotesque bruising and circular sores on her chest. She pulled herself up to the sink and washed her face, taking time to rinse her mouth out a couple of times as well. She felt marginally better and hoped that it was a sign that soon everything else would get better too.
When she got back into bed, the doctor came in and smiled.
“Hi, Riley.” He said it with so much cheer that she wanted to punch him. She was feeling too miserable to understand why he could be so happy. “You probably don’t remember me. You were pretty much out of it last night. I’m Dr. Baylor; I worked on you when you came in. Do you remember anything?”