by Jillian Neal
“I’m so sorry,” Fionna apologized for the fifth time in the distance of a mile.
“Fi, baby; I’m the one who’s sorry.”
“I didn’t know I would do that. That only happens to me when I’m around black energy, and no one in there has used that.”
That was true. Felsink didn’t house rapists or murderers. It was reserved for lesser crimes, but it was also rather full at the moment.
“I think there was enough dark energy there to have gotten to you.” Dan leaned forward and narrowed his eyes, trying to see through the pouring slush. “I should have left you at home. This is all my fault. I’m sorry, sweetheart.” Dan felt the remorse swirl into a maelstrom in his gut.
“I would have been scared if you’d left me there,” Fionna confessed timidly.
Dan’s heart swelled as he reached for her hand. “Then I should have let my dad get Lindley, and I should have stayed with you.”
“Is she going to be okay?” Fionna shivered convulsively again. Dan swallowed back regret. He longed to reheat the syncs in her coat, but her fever was raging as her body tried to regulate her energy. He didn’t answer her question because, truthfully, he didn’t know if Lindley was going to be okay this time. Whatever she’d taken was much harder than Angel Dust. She’d turned a corner, and they would all have to wait and see if she was going to reach back out to life, or if she was going to continue to consume her own death.
Keeping his eyes locked on the empty road ahead of them, Dan reached and pulled another bottle of water from his pack. “Here, baby, keep drinking.” He had to keep her hydrated, or he was going to have to get Garrett out of bed on Christmas morning to take her to Georgetown. Fionna Styler being admitted to the hospital the day before the biggest Summation exposition of the year would be the headline in every paper in the Realm.
Dan popped open a power bar and inhaled it. He had to cast her as soon as he got her inside, and he was dry. She could use his ample stores of energy to regulate her own. He just had to get her home.
After what seemed like an endless drive, Dan pulled the Expedition into the garage beside the Ferrari. He sprinted to help Fionna out of the car, and prayed that his energy would keep up after being at Felsink.
“Come here, baby.” Dan put one of the blankets he’d packed between her and his soaking-wet clothing. He was freezing, but felt he deserved the biting pain. He carried her up the stairs and laid her tenderly in their bed.
“Let me take a quick shower and get dried off so I can keep you warm. You keep drinking that water. I’ll get you some more.” He raced to the kitchen and pulled off his coat and sweats on his way.
Quickly easing her into a sitting position, he plied her with more water.
“I’m so tired.” Her entire body shook violently.
“I know, baby. Try to relax for me. I’ll be right back.” In less than two minutes, he’d showered and dried himself as best as he could.
He reached and lifted her sweatshirt off. “I’m so sorry, honey.” He felt cruel, robbing her of clothes when she was freezing, but he needed access to her skin.
He gave her some medication to lower her fever, praying that her energy was stable enough for her to keep it down. It would help him heal her faster.
He slid into bed beside her, with a fervent prayer that his waning energy would be enough. Cradling her to him, he pushed his shield out over her, using every ounce of power he could muster.
She stopped convulsing. Her body went lax against his. She certainly didn’t have any fight left in her, so he pushed his energy through every available surface, without her having to consciously let him in at all.
Her body calmed, and her fever broke an hour later. She was covered in sweat, but sleeping soundly. Dan used all of his concentration to regulate her energy, until her rhythms became steady on their own. Just after six, he gave out and fell asleep, with Fionna cossetted in his arms.
Dan awoke from his exhaustive sleep, and blinked in the blinding sunlight that had followed the storm.
“Merry Christmas,” Fionna appeared beside him, holding two mugs of coffee.
“Are you okay?” Dan panicked as he pulled himself upright in the bed. Fionna seated herself beside him and handed him the coffee.
“Just a little weak.”
“What time is it?” Dan tried to clear his throat by sipping the soothing liquid.
“It’s almost eleven.”
He watched her take hesitant sips of coffee. Her eyes closed as she allowed her favorite beverage to restore her.
“You really need to eat something, baby.” Dan rubbed her back and tried to determine if her fever was gone. She was wary of him. He couldn’t figure out what had happened in the last few hours. The loss settled on him harshly.
“I had a few crackers when I was downstairs making coffee. I was going to make sure those would stay down.” Her face colored, this time from embarrassment instead of fever. “I look terrible. I need a shower.”
Dan studied her, desperate to dissolve the invisible rift between them that seemed to contain nothing more than rumpled sheets.
“I always think you’re beautiful.” He was completely honest without any exaggeration. She was always astoundingly beautiful. Her soul was beautiful; the rest of her was icing on the cake.
Rolling her eyes, Fionna shook her head. She did look rough. She was pale and drawn. Her voice was strained and her eyes were watery, swollen, and red. Her hair was mussed from her fever breaking in the night, but Dan still didn’t think he’d ever seen anything more beautiful.
“Come back to bed with me, please.” He just needed to hold her until they felt like them again. That was all his mind offered him, as a way to heal the space between them. “You need to rest if you’re going to challenge tomorrow.” He felt another round of guilt settle harshly in his throat.
“Tomorrow night is just the banquet dance thing. We challenge Sunday.” She looked mildly disappointed that he’d had to be told again.
“I know, honey, but I’m not sure how much sleep you’re going to get in Vegas.”
With a great deal of hesitation, she set her mug on the bedside table and let him hold her on his chest. He could feel the abhorrent absence more intensely. She was blocking him out completely. She’d retreated back into the shield her body had developed out of necessity. Scalded from the loss, Dan tried to modulate his voice to a calm intonation.
“Fi, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” There it was again. She poured vinegar in the wound. Staring at the bed, she was unable to look him in the eye and lie to him outright.
“Hey,” he lifted her face in his hand, and gave her little option but to look into his eyes. “Don’t lie to me, please. What’s wrong?”
She jerked her head out of his hand, defiantly.
“Fionna.” Panicked, he clenched his jaw and ordered himself not to demand anything from her. The sting of her combative move angered him.
Her chin trembled as she fought to blink back the tears that darkened the golden flecks in her sienna eyes.
Realization softened his irritation. “How long have you been up?” Her eyes weren’t weak and red from her fever or getting sick several hours before. They were red because she’d been sobbing.
“A while,” she tried desperately to choke down her emotion.
“I’m sorry about Lindley, and that I took you out there. I wasn’t thinking. I’ve ruined your Christmas,” Dan immediately spewed forth everything he could think of, that could possibly have upset her so much. She loved Christmas, and he’d stayed in bed until eleven, on top of everything else.
“No, that’s not it.” She drew a haggard breath.
Dan felt his heart ache physically, not just emotionally.
“Help me out a little, then, because you’re scaring the hell out of me, Fionna.”
Angry, frustrated, humiliated tears overthrew her tenacious grip on her emotions.
“Baby, please!” Dan continued to beg.
“I’m not too weak to be with you!” she broke down completely.
Utter confusion permeated Dan’s entire being as he held her. Her tears ran down the chiseled lines of his abs.
“What?”
She convulsed against him, and held his biceps in a death grip with her hands.
“Fi, honey, what are you talking about?”
She shivered in his arms. “I can handle it. I just have to learn how!” Racking his brain, trying to determine what on earth she was talking about, Dan rubbed her back and wiped away her tears.
“What do you have to learn how to do, honey?” Patience had never been his virtue, but he ordered himself to try.
“To go places like that, and be around criminals or whatever. I can learn how; I’m not too weak,” she fumed. Her tears turned furious. “I’m not too weak to be your girlfriend!”
Dismayed over her take on the night before, Dan tried to formulate the words to express to her that he’d never thought she was weak.
“Fionna, honey, I think you are one of the strongest people I’ve ever met. I always have.”
She shook her head in abject defiance. “Last night, I just made everything so much worse.”
“Honey, you didn’t make anything worse. You never could. Please, just listen to me. It means the world to me that you were willing to go out in a snowstorm with me to get my little sister out of prison. I feel horrible that I took you out there, and didn’t realize that, with your exceptional abilities, it would affect you.”
He sighed out his deep regret. “And why on earth would I want you to put yourself through hell, trying to learn to be around people like that?”
She lifted her head and stared at him. “Because that’s your job, and you love your job. I want to be with you forever, so I have to learn to deal with your job, even if I hate it.” She laid out everything that she’d been crying over, downstairs, alone.
He felt his heart shatter as he watched her cry.
“And I can, and I will!”
“I don’t want you to,” he soothed quietly. “But you’re right. It is my job to deal with people like that, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t be the most important thing in the entire world to me.
“And you know what else, Fionna? My most important job right now, and I really hope for the rest of our lives, is to make sure that you’re safe, and healthy, and happy. So, if, at some point, my being the Chief of Iodex gets in the way of all of that, then I’ll quit in a heartbeat.” He held her gaze with his own. He wanted no doubt in what he was saying. “You let me finish off Wretchkinsides, and I’ll walk away. That’s all I want.”
“I don’t want you to quit because of me.”
Dan smiled. “I can’t fathom another situation where you would ever have to be near Felsink, or any other prison. I sure as hell don’t want you near people I arrest and take in, so how about if we let my work stay at work, and you and I exist outside of all of that.”
Fionna nodded and, in her relief, Dan felt her internal shield begin to give way. It brought cleansing breath back to his parched lungs. His own shield eased inside him.
Dan scooted down in the bed and kept her tucked to his chest. He hoped he could soothe her back to sleep. They laid there in peaceful silence for a long while. Her breathing steadied, and her tears dissipated, but she remained awake.
“Will you tell me something?” The ease that had engulfed the tension in her voice brought him another round of relief.
Smiling down at her, Dan kissed the top of her head. “Of course.”
She gazed up at him with a sweet grin. “Your dad told me about the time you went camping with Will and Garrett, and you all got drunk and you got sick.”
Dan laughed from the memory as he nodded.
“He was trying to make me feel better because I was so embarrassed.”
“You are really hard on yourself, you know that?”
She ignored his reminder.
“Is that what guys always do when they camp or have a sleepover or whatever?” She wanted to hear the other side of the story.
“I’ll have to thank my dad for sharing some of my finer moments with you.”
She giggled, but looked extremely curious. Smiling, Dan caressed the soft features of her beautiful face. Her healthy, olive glow was making a triumphant return.
“In that case, we were all complete morons, who got shit-faced drunk and then passed out.” He shuddered at the memory. “Wes Willow and Garrett got this brilliant idea that, instead of bringing beer, which was the standard fare for our campouts, we would all steal stuff from our dads’ liquor cabinets and make our own mixed drinks. Only Wes and Garrett failed to understand that occasionally a mixed drink contains things that are not alcohol, so we just mixed straight liquor like the idiots that we were.”
“I threw up pure alcohol for two days straight. And you think it burns going down? My God!” He could still recall the event, down to the clothes he was wearing.
“Oh, you poor thing,” Fionna hugged him gently. Her genuine sorrow over his pain touched those places in his heart that she’d brought back to life.
Dan felt her relax completely against him. He allowed himself a moment to revel in the peace and love he could feel from her once again.
“Yeah, well, where were you back then? Because I got no sympathy; trust me.” He laughed again at his own stupidity. “As soon as I got my head out of the toilet, about three o’clock Sunday morning, my dad made me go to school the next day, and then come to the Senate and work after my classes. Will, Garrett, Wes, Levi, and I emptied every trashcan in the entire freaking Senate. Then we had to scrub the dumpsters.”
Fionna gazed at him adoringly once again, and wrinkled her nose. “I take it you didn’t do that again?”
“Uh, no, we kept it to beer and Playboys until we graduated.”
Fionna giggled again. “Why is it that, whenever groups of teenage boys are together, there are pictures of naked women?”
“Because teenage boys are pigs and, at eighteen, are mostly unable to think with the head above their belt line; although we’re actually better at eighteen than, say, fifteen.”
Fionna gave him a wry grin and narrowed her eyes. “And how are they at thirty-two?”
“If I’m lucky enough to get to see you naked, honey, then I sure as hell don’t need a Playboy. But,” he sighed and tucked her closer still. “How about we save all of the other stories of my knuckle-headed adolescence for another time, and I go make you some breakfast and then I hold you and you go back to sleep for a while?”
Her rhythms were still weak and, though they’d steadied in the early morning hours, they were still distressed.
“No,” she poked her lip out in a pout. “I need a shower, and then I want you to open your presents.”
Knowing that he would never be able to argue with that adorable pout, he grinned. “You eat something for me, something with protein. I’ll give you a shower, and then we’ll open presents. But then we’ll take a nap.” Though he tried to sound as if he were offering a negotiation, he was not.
“We have to pack.”
“Fi, you have to get better, baby.”
Narrowing her eyes, she wrinkled her nose in consideration. “A nap on the couch.”
“No.” He stared her down.
“You have to stay in bed with me the whole time I sleep,” was her next try.
“You got it.” He winked at her, glad to give her more ground.
Presents
Dan managed to make scrambled eggs with cheese, under Fionna’s guidance. He made her stay seated at the island as he worked.
They’d showered, which had greatly improved her mood, and then dressed in sweats and moved towards the tree.
Feeling complete contentment wash over him, Dan reveled in the heavenly sense, one he never thought he would feel ever again. Fionna’s excitement had him grinning as he moved her gifts towards her.
“You got me way too much,” she fussed yet
again.
“Would you hush and open one?”
Her eyes sparkled as she beamed at him. Certain that was the precise look she would’ve given her parents on Christmas morning growing up, Dan began to understand her father’s strict hold on her. She was so precious and fragile in her all-encompassing strength. The juxtaposition was both fascinating and exhilarating. It drove him. She needed his ultimate protection, but needed no help to stand firmly on her own.
“Which one did you say was more for you than me?”
He pointed to a large, square box. When she’d continually fussed about the number of gifts under the tree for her, he’d offered up that cryptic clue, trying to calm her.
He knew she would assume it was lingerie, so he braced and hoped that she wasn’t going to be disappointed. Her brow furrowed as she lifted it onto her lap.
“This is heavy.”
Dan smiled and wished she’d started with a different gift.
“You’ll like the other ones better.”
“I have you, and the most beautiful pearl necklace I’ve ever seen. I don’t need anything else.”
“I had fun spoiling you, Ms. Styler.”
She tore the paper to reveal a brown cardboard box. She started laughing as soon as she opened the lid.
“Well played, Officer Vindico.”
“I thought so,” Dan agreed as she lifted the motorcycle helmet out of the box.
“Does this mean I finally get to go for a ride?” she sassed flirtatiously. He cocked his right eyebrow at her and winked.
“Depends on what you want to ride, baby doll, but today you’re not doing anything more than eating, opening presents, and sleeping.”
She gave him a dramatic eye-roll. “You open one. I had fun spoiling you, too.”
Concern plagued Dan as he wondered what she’d purchased him. He reached for the smallest box, and Fionna blushed violently.
“No, not that one!”
“Okay,” Dan wondered what the difference a few minutes was going to make, but she seemed quite adamant. “Which one?”
“That one,” she pointed to a large, rectangular box. Her bottom lip slipped through her teeth. “I hope you like it.”