Beautiful Illusion

by Jacquie Underdown

  Beautiful Illusion

  www.escapepublishing.com.au

  Contents

  About the Author

  Acknowlegements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Bestselling Titles by Escape Publishing…

  Beautiful Illusion

  Jacquie Underdown

  A beautiful, spiritual story about a woman who meets the man of her dreams — and then wakes up…

  The last thing Leah thought she’d get out of a shocking car accident was the perfect boyfriend. But there was Brennan in the hospital bed next to hers — equal parts charm, cheek, and chocolate. Their relationship, their love, her life, is almost too good to be true.

  Then, to Leah’s horror, she discovers that it is. Her new life with Brennan is only a fabrication of her injured mind — a coma dream that ends when she wakes up.

  Struggling with injuries and grieving for a man that never existed, Leah battles to put her life back together. But a series of coincidences hint that for some people, love can transcend all barriers and achieve the impossible.

  About the Author

  Jacquie resides in sunny Brisbane with her husband and two sons. Numbers and practicality are a way of life for Jacquie as she works as an accountant by day. So it’s no wonder, for sanity’s sake, she balances this banality with words, characters and imagination in all other possible moments.

  Jacquie is an author of a number of novels including The Paler Shade of Autumn (also published by Escape Publishing) and writes Romance that is emotionally driven and possesses unique themes beyond the constraints of the physical universe. She strives to offer romance, but with complexity; spirituality, but without the religion. Her novels express a purpose and offer subtle messages about life, the spirit and, of course, love.

  Acknowledgements

  I give special thanks to Kate Cuthbert for, twice now, guiding me on how to improve my novels so they can be the best that they can be. And thank you to Bill B for his work editing this story. I must also give warm thanks to all of the team at Harlequin Escape for their input in bringing this story to publication.

  Thank you to my family—Brad, Seth, and Braith, for giving me time to do what I love; and extended family and friends—Mum, Ros, Jemma, and Jessica for reading the rough first drafts, pushing me, and giving me the belief that this novel was worth publication.

  For Mum.

  Without your words, ‘You can be anything you want’, I would not be where I am.

  Chapter 1

  I woke up. I must have, because I could feel my own awareness. You know what I mean? That little voice in your mind that sounds like you, saying all the things you are thinking, as you are thinking them. That voice told me I was awake and that I needed to brace myself for something. It said that I needed to get ready, because something horrifying was on its way. Something that had, an indefinable time ago, flung me over the ledge of consciousness into the black, cavernous mouth of…pain!

  My eyes snapped open as I sucked a rasp of air past my parched tongue and throat. It was pain I was bracing for—intense and burning, like a metal splint stabbing through my eye and into my brain. I waited, holding that breath deep in my lungs. I waited and waited, but the pain wasn’t there at all.

  I pushed my hand to my head, to the place I swore I had felt such excruciating agony only moments earlier; my fingers were met by a bandage but, again, no pain. Frozen memories began to thaw and trickle back in to my thoughts. I was back in my car watching in the rear-view mirror as the truck hammered towards me. I jolted as I relived the impact, the cacophony of metal scraping on metal. And then the ambulance, lights blazing, siren whining, hurtling from the opposite direction, directly for me.

  I shook my head to toss the memories aside. Reliving them now would be enough to completely unstitch me. I took three deep breaths in, out, and reflected on what I knew for certain: I’d been in a car accident, I was in hospital, and my head was injured. To what extent, I didn’t know.

  What else is wrong with me?

  I fiddled with the switches on the wall behind my head, flicked on a light and threw the sheets back. With a sweeping glance, I noticed I had been dressed in a white hospital gown, but I didn’t notice any other injuries. Not one bruise. Not one scratch. I looked up to the ceiling and sighed.

  Relief fled before another thought: Oh, god, please don’t let there be a catheter in place.

  I couldn’t feel any sensation between my legs but, then again, I also couldn’t feel the raging headache I had felt earlier either. Maybe I was on some type of medication that hindered all sensations, not only pain. I felt around under my gown and a slow smile crept onto my face as I fell back onto my pillow—there was no catheter.

  “Have you lost something?” A male voice.

  I grabbed at the sheets and lifted them to my chin, my eyes flickering over the room in search of the voice. Lying on the only other bed in the room was a man, face and body hard to make out amidst the dark shadows of the dimly lit space. A man? I have never been admitted to hospital before, but I’m sure they don’t place patients of the opposite sex together.

  I tried to find my voice, but it felt like I hadn’t spoken in a century. Like I had forgotten how. Eventually I was able to form my mouth into the appropriate shapes for speech. “What are you doing here?” My voice sounded strange to my ears: raspy and weak.

  “I could very well ask you the same question,” he said.

  “I mean, what is a male patient doing in the same room as a female patient?”

  “The hospital is low on beds, of course. And, from what I can tell, we have the same type of injury.”

  I pressed my hand to my head, felt the bandage under my fingertips, grateful, for the time being, that it didn’t hurt. The shadowed man flicked on the overhead light, and I could see that his head was wrapped in a bandage too.

  “Oh,” was all I could say.

  From across the room, I gathered that the man was in his late twenties, with deeply tanned skin. If I hadn’t been incensed by his obvious satisfaction in embarrassing me, and by being stuck in a hospital room with a man to start with, I may even have admitted that he was handsome, in a rugged kind of way.

  “You don’t need any help finding something?” he said, a taunting smile touching his lips.

  I glared at him. “I’m fine, thank you very much.”

  He grinned. “My name is Brennan Lee, by the way. You’re Leah, right?”

  I stared at him through narrowed eyes and nodded. How does he know my name?

  “You’ve been out of it for about a day now and you’ve had visitors who’ve mentioned your name,” he said. “It’s hard not to overhear. Very little privacy in these rooms.”

  “You’re right about that part.”

  He lowered his head and grinned.

  I contemplated not talking to him again out of protest, but my curiosity got the better of me. “So, Brennan, what happened to you? How did you end up in here?”

  “From what I’ve been told, your car hit the ambulance I was in.”

  Chapter 2

  It seemed that the only ability I had during my initial st
ay in hospital was being able to fall into a deep unconsciousness, and then abruptly snap out of it. I woke the second time to the sound of someone teetering around my hospital bed. I opened my eyes to see Dad standing beside my bed, his attention on the joinery of a chair he had upturned. I smiled. It was so typical of Dad, the eternal jack-of-all-trades, unable to resist the urge to assess and criticise the handiwork of others.

  “What’s the verdict, Dad?” I asked, voice weak. “A piece of half-arsed carpentry if you ever saw it?”

  He placed the chair down and joined me at my bedside, a smile on his generously wrinkled face. “Leah, honey. Welcome back to the land of the living,” he said, running his hand over my forehead.

  I smiled. It was comforting to see him here. I welcomed waking up to familiarity. “How long has it been?”

  “You were admitted yesterday morning.”

  “Wow. Nearly a whole day of unconsciousness.” I lifted my hand to my head, remembering the bandage. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “Do you remember the car accident?”

  I rasped a breath as cruel memories greeted me. I swear I could smell the burning rubber of my tyres as they bit in to the sodden bitumen, and hear the explosion of glass as the ambulance careened into my window. I waited for my head to start throbbing. Knowing the force of impact against the car window produced a pain like nothing else I had ever imagined. But the pain was kept at bay… blessedly.

  “Yes, I do remember. Too clearly,” I said.

  “You hit your head quite badly, honey. You’ve a few stitches, and a concussion. That’s why you’ve been unconscious all this time.”

  “Hah. Well, what do you know? My first concussion,” I said.

  “And hopefully your last. You gave me one hell of a fright.”I rolled my eyes. “It’s not like I meant for the truck to plough into me.”

  “No, honey. I know. You scared me. That’s all I’m trying to say.”

  The doctor walked in then, dressed in a white coat, complete with stethoscope. Impassively, he pulled the chart from the end of my bed and perused it.

  “Are you experiencing any physical discomfort?” he asked.

  “Um, no. Whatever you’ve given me is doing the trick.”

  The doctor wrinkled his nose and consulted my chart once more, nodding as he read. He looked at me and said, “We haven’t given you any type of pain medication since you arrived here.”

  I tugged at my earlobe. “You haven’t given me anything?”

  He shook his head.

  I nodded my head slowly. “Well then, no, I don’t feel physical discomfort.”

  He continued on with his line of questioning, shining his pen-sized torch into my pupils and writing on my chart.

  “You seem to be doing well now, despite having quite a severe concussion. I’ll keep you in for a couple more days for observation, and if everything pans out fine you should be able to go home. I’ll have one of the nurses take that drip out for you today, and I’ll be in to check on you again in the morning.”

  “Thanks, Doctor.”

  He replaced my chart and strolled from the room to repeat the same joyful routine with the next lucky patient.

  This particular thought of other patients made me think of the handsome, rugged guy who was strangely sharing my room. I glanced towards his bed. It was empty. Not feeling completely lucid, I wondered if the bizarre conversation had simply been a dream, probably induced by the very same imagination that had taken away my head pain. If the trade-off for not having excruciating pain is concussion-induced hallucinations - with attractive men as the main theme - then fine by me.

  “He sure was a bucket full of laughs,” whispered Dad, once he was sure the doc was out of earshot.

  “Tell me about it. Must be the flip-side of having brains—no personality.”

  “Honey, not everyone can have it all like us—brains, beauty and personality.”

  I grinned. “True.”

  “Anyway, love. I probably should get back to the hardware shop. We’ve a tonne of orders today and we’re down one man because Derek called in sick and…”

  “It’s fine, Dad.”

  “Are you sure, Lee? I could stay a little longer?”

  I rolled my eyes, but smiled. “Dad, I said I’m fine. Go.”

  “You sure?”

  “Positive. Go.”

  “Ok, honey.” He kissed me on the cheek. “I’ll drop in this arvo after I shut up shop.”

  ***

  After Dad left, boredom closed in on me immediately. I checked the bedside table and shelves for magazines, books, anything.

  “Can I help you find something, Leah?” came the familiar voice.

  I jolted, glanced towards his bed, met not with crumpled sheets on an empty bed, but Brennan sitting upright with an enormous smile on his lips.

  “It’s you again,” I said, my heart still beating a fraction faster.

  “Were you expecting someone else?”

  “No, but aren’t you supposed to be a figment of my imagination?”

  “I hope not,” he said.

  “I haven’t seen you at all this morning. I was starting to wonder if I made you up entirely.”

  “Ah. Well, I was off being a little naughty this morning.”

  I arched an eyebrow. “What can you do in a hospital that’s naughty?”

  He looked from left to right, out to the vacant doorway and said in a low hush, “I snuck down to the cafeteria for some decent food—a chicken and bacon burger with hot chips.”

  My stomach rumbled, the mention of food reminding me that I hadn’t eaten for what felt like weeks. “That sounds sooo good. I’m starving.”

  “I imagine you would be. You missed every cart that came through here yesterday, as well as the breakfast trolley this morning, and lunch won’t be served for…” he looked down at his watch, “for another two and a half hours.”

  My stomach rumbled again; it felt painfully hollow. “Come on now. Why did you go and say that?”

  He laughed. “Because I can help you.”

  “Unless you have another of those burgers stashed away somewhere, I’m not sure you can help.”

  “I can actually do better than a burger.”

  “Really?”

  “It will cost you, though.”

  “What? Like money?” I asked.

  “Not money. Answers.”

  I squinted. “What kind of answers?”

  “Don’t know yet,” he said, shrugging. “Five answers to five random questions, asked at my discretion, and they have to be answered honestly by you.”

  “What are we playing for?”

  “Clever girl,” he said. “Always know what the wager is.”

  Brenan reached into the top drawer of the bedside table and pulled out a plastic bag. Clad only in a white hospital gown he sat on the end of my bed, one leg curled up under his body. He looked at me and smiled, revealing one perfect dimple in his tanned cheek.

  I could see my first assumption had been correct about Brennan. In fact there were two words which sprung to mind , each perfectly capable of summing up this man—sexy and rugged. Rugged in the way that I appreciate: he doesn’t look afraid of an honest day’s work, having gained his bulk through physical labour rather than the gym, and not succumbing to the metro-sexual bullshit like shaved legs and arms, which I usually detest. I like men to be men, not close representations of women.

  The first thing I saw were his eyes: the colour of a stormy sky—pale grey against ice blue. But as my gaze unintentionally strayed further over his body, I noted his strong, square jaw line, masculine nose, and black hair peeking out from under his head bandage. He was long and lean, with strong arms and broad shoulders, his skin gorgeously tanned.

  The next time my eyes met his gaze, I could feel my cheeks warming. I was certain he could read my face and all that I had just thought about him. I expected one of his cheeky comments, but I assumed wrong.

  He turned the plastic bag upside-dow
n and poured the contents onto the centre of the bed between his knee and my legs. On the blanket was a king-size Snickers, a packet of Twisties, an apple, banana and a packet of mixed nuts.

  “I’m in. Ask me what you will.”

  He chuckled. “Good. But before you commit entirely, you must understand what the rules are—I can ask you any question I want and you have to answer it honestly.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said, waving my hand dismissively.

  “And, I have the discretion to ask you those five questions whenever I choose.”

  “Fine.”

  “And…”

  “And what?” I asked.

  The corners of his mouth curled into an almost insolent grin. “And nothing else. I was only joking.”

  I reached for the Snickers, unwrapped it, and took a big bite, all the while watching Brennan’s mischievous smile. It unsettled me. “Oh, God. What have I gotten myself into?”

  He shook his head. “The first one is easy. I’ll save the more intimate questions for later.”

  “Alright. Give it up. What’s your question?”

  “How old are you?”

  “Luckily for me, I’m not one of these women who actually care about telling people their age.”

  “Yes, lucky for you,” he said. “How old are you?”

  I smiled, holding my head high. “Thirty. I actually had my birthday two days ago.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “I just didn’t think you’d be that old.”

  “What do you mean by that old? Thirty is most certainly not old. You obviously don’t know that forty is the new thirty. That means that thirty is the new twenty.”

  He laughed loudly. “Only people who are concerned about ageing spit out tripe like that.”

  “But I don’t care about aging, I just read that somewhere.”

  “That’s why you’re getting all defensive—because you don’t care,” he teased.

  “Well, how old are you?”