Yours to Keep: A Loveswept Contemporary Romance

by Bell, Serena

  “You’re not angry?”

  Ethan sighed. “I’ve seen more polite exits. But you might’ve had a point. I should have told you. I—I knew how upset you’d be, and I was too knocked on my ass, and I’m sorry. It was wrong of me.”

  “Leah’s was pretty cool.” Theo had been hanging back at the doorway between the living room and kitchen, but now he sat on the arm of the couch.

  Normally Ethan would have told him to sit properly, but this wasn’t the moment.

  “Leah has a big family. Lots of cousins.”

  That made Ethan’s chest ache. “I would have liked us to be a bigger family. Your mom and I wanted more kids. She had a couple of miscarriages, though, and then she was too sick to risk getting pregnant again.”

  “You could still get married and have more kids.”

  “It’s kind of late for that. You’re almost all grown up.”

  “I bet Ana wants kids.” Theo stood up and took a few steps away from his father, facing into the far corner of the room so that Ethan couldn’t see his face.

  Ethan’s throat tightened. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner that Ana and I broke up. I know you’re probably very angry at me right now. But—”

  He felt very old. He shook his head. “Some things aren’t meant to be. Ana’s family and our family are too different. Her life—there are things about the way she has to live to survive here that are a hundred and eighty degrees from what it’s like for us. Sometimes you can’t fix all those differences.” He’d made this speech to Theo’s back, but he could tell from a shift in Theo’s shoulders that he was listening.

  “Do you love her?”

  Ethan took a breath. Then another. It had been like that all week, a struggle to keep doing what had to be done. He loved her so much that breathing had become a chore.

  Theo turned and gazed at him, his expression as curious and open as Ethan had ever seen it.

  “Yes,” Ethan said, finally. “But it’s only a nice fantasy to think that love overcomes all that other stuff.”

  Theo was very quiet. Ethan suspected that he was thinking about Leah, about his new feelings for her. Ethan remembered what love had felt like at fifteen, roaring through his head and body like a freight train. And was it so different now, really?

  “She went to see Leah’s uncle again,” Theo said suddenly.

  For a moment, Ethan couldn’t understand.

  “I overheard Leah’s uncle telling her mother. I eavesdropped. I knew I wasn’t supposed to, but—” He put out his hands, palms up.

  “It’s okay,” Ethan said.

  “She’s going to try to get her status changed. Even without getting married.”

  A chill eased its way into Ethan’s bloodstream. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. Leah’s uncle said she’s probably going to get sent away.”

  “He said that?” It came out louder and harsher than he’d intended, and Theo shied away and nodded.

  What the hell was she thinking? She’d lived this way for twenty years, and suddenly, suddenly it was urgent that she put things right?

  Even if he couldn’t see her, the idea of her gone for ten years was unbearable. He wanted someone to blame. Ricky, his thuggish friend. That expired visa, the broken immigration law, the whole fucking system.

  Himself. And Ana, too, because they’d both been too chicken to do what was needed.

  “Dad?”

  Ethan regarded his son, who was peering at him, the bridge of his nose crinkled with worry.

  “Are you okay?”

  He was not okay, hadn’t been okay since the moment he laid eyes on her, except for the times he held her in his arms, buried himself in her. She’d taken okay away from him, and now she was going to pack it up and export it to the Dominican Republic, where, for all he knew, it would live for the rest of his life.

  And hers. Everything she’d worked so hard to build—her classes and the tutoring and that pathetic veggie-burger box of cash in her freezer, the shaky well-being of a family held together by strength of character: gone.

  “Dad.”

  The phone rang.

  Theo ran to the kitchen to pick it up. “Hello?” He listened for a moment. “Oh!” he said. And then, “Dad—”

  It took a tremendous effort to mobilize his limbs to walk toward the kitchen. Theo met him halfway and thrust the phone into his hand. “It’s Ana.”

  Chapter 29

  She was talking incredibly fast and lapsing into Spanish.

  “Slow down,” he said. “Start over.”

  He heard the slight edge of hysteria as she took a breath and slowed down. “Marco has food poisoning. He’s thrown up so many times we’ve lost track; it’s all bile now. I’m worried that he’s dehydrated—he drank a few sips of water and threw up again. The nurse at his pediatrician’s says not to worry, but he’s acting weird and Cara’s freaking out and, Ethan, I’m so scared!”

  Her fear slipped under his skin, cold and writhing. Then the doctor in him took charge, shutting out all his other impulses. “What did he eat?”

  “Pork, tostones—that’s plantains—habichuelas, like I made for you.”

  He heard her pain as she said it, an echo of his.

  “Was the pork cooked through? What about earlier in the day?”

  “He had eggs for breakfast before the football game, but that was so long ago, it couldn’t be—”

  But his mind had latched on to the key fact. “He played football today?”

  “Yeah. The pork didn’t have any pink in it. Cara always overcoo—”

  Ethan interrupted. “What position does he play?”

  “Wide receiver,” Ana said irritably. “He had peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for lunch. That wouldn’t have—”

  “Did he take any hard hits?”

  He heard her take a deep breath. “It was a brutal game,” she admitted.

  “Did he get hit in the head?” Ethan demanded. “Did he black out at all? Lose consciousness?”

  “I don’t think so.” She hesitated. “He was slow to get up one time.”

  His heart sped up. “Can you ask him if he blacked out?”

  She called out to someone nearby. He heard silence, then a flood of Spanish.

  When Ana spoke again, her voice shook. “Cara says he’s not making any sense.”

  “You need to call an ambulance. Right now,” Ethan said urgently. “Hang up with me. Call an ambulance. Tell them he had a bad injury in a football game this morning and you’re afraid he has a subdural hematoma. Subdural hematoma,” he repeated. “Will you remember that? It means bleeding near his brain.”

  “Subdural hematoma.”

  “Don’t let them put you off. If they’re not paying attention to you, you call me. Right away. You hear me? Now go!” And he hung up on her.

  The paramedics argued between them about whether to put Marco on a backboard or whether, because of the vomiting, he should be on his side. In the end, he struggled so much when they tried to help him onto the stretcher that they decided he’d be better off restrained. “It’s good that he’s conscious,” a short, fat paramedic with a mustache said to Ana. Marco had yelled obscenities at the paramedics but was now silent, his eyes darting from side to side, panicky, as he fought against the straps.

  Ana and Cara rode in the ambulance with him, Cara in the back and Ana up front with the driver. Ernie and Ricky followed in Ernie’s car. The cars pulled over to let them by. The driver pressed the button that paralyzed the traffic light, and the siren spun up to blare their approach. Ana felt stunned and dizzy.

  She expected the paramedics to rush Marco on his stretcher through the doors of the ER and down hallways, the way they did on TV, but when the ambulance arrived they unloaded Marco and parked him in a big room with a center desk. Triage nurses bustled all around them but paid no attention to the black kid spouting nonsense on the backboard. Ana looked around; there was a burly biker holding a blood-soaked T-shirt to his arm, a mother weeping ov
er a feverish child, a skinny blue-black man with two swollen eyes and a nose dripping blood. None of them looked as if they were in serious trouble. She couldn’t imagine Ethan using the voice he’d used on the phone with her about any of them. He’d been stern, his tone steely. “Don’t let them put you off. If they’re not paying attention to you, you call me.” She found her phone and dialed his number.

  Theo answered. “He’s already on his way. He told me to tell you to call his cell.”

  She called his cell, and he picked up before she heard the ring.

  “We’re here, but they’re not seeing us,” she said.

  He swore. “Go grab a nurse’s arm and tell her that Dr. Hansen told you it was a subdural hematoma. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  She interrupted a nurse who was pulling supplies off a cart. “My nephew’s over there. Dr. Hansen says it’s a subdural hematoma.”

  The nurse looked at her in brief shock. Then she snapped into action, moving swiftly around the cart to Marco’s side, checking his pupils and reflexes and asking him questions. He answered now as if he were drugged, slowly, slurrily.

  “Page Dr. Emmelin,” the nurse called out, and things happened much faster. Nurses yelped urgent orders. A gray-haired white-coated woman swept in and took over. Before Ana could ask a question, Marco was surrounded by people, a release form on a clipboard was shoved into Ana’s hands, and her nephew was wheeled away.

  “What’s happening?” Ana asked the nurse.

  “They’re taking him to surgery,” the nurse said. “Sign that form.”

  She signed.

  She felt Ethan arrive before she saw him, sensed his pull on the individual molecules of her body, smelled his anxiety in the acridness of his sweat. He touched her hair briefly and she turned to look up at him, and for a split second she saw the light and heat in his eyes before his lids lowered, shuttering his emotion. “I’m here. I’m going to go check on him, okay?”

  He took off at a trot, lean and athletic, beautiful in motion.

  “You should be in the waiting room,” a nurse said sharply, taking the clipboard back. Ana took Cara’s arm—Cara was obviously in shock, as still as a statue, expressionless—and guided her into the waiting room. Ricky and Ernie were there, and as soon as she and Cara appeared in the doorway Ricky crossed the room with long strides and demanded to know what the hell was going on. Ernie was right behind him.

  She told them what she knew.

  Cara began to cry, and Ricky put his arms around her. She couldn’t make sense of the look on Ernie’s face; it was panicky, fixated on a spot behind her. She turned to look and saw that Ethan had come back.

  “It’s good that you got him here so quickly,” he told her.

  Then his gaze shifted—and grew harder—as it took in Ernie and Ricky and Cara. His mouth was set in a straight line, and his fists were clenched at his sides.

  Was he surprised, even after she’d warned him, by how black they were? She ought to have known that, no matter how liberal and open-minded he imagined himself, it would be different to be confronted with the reality. She turned away.

  “Ana.”

  She turned to look at him, saw something like despair in his eyes, and panicked. “Oh, no!”

  “No, Marco’s going to be fine. He really is.”

  Cara broke free from Ricky’s grasp and came close. Her face was tear-streaked, but she watched Ethan alertly.

  “He was bleeding, but he’s in surgery, and he never lost consciousness or seized. As long as the surgery goes well, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t, he’ll be fine.”

  “Gracias a dios,” Ana murmured.

  Cara was now doing what Ana wanted desperately to do—she’d thrown herself into Ethan’s arms and was crying and thanking him over and over. Ethan gave Ana a brief glance over her sister’s head. “He’s still not out of danger,” he said quietly, and Cara, with visible effort, calmed herself.

  Ethan gently removed himself from Cara’s grasp.

  “Thank you,” Ana told Ethan. “I think you saved his life.” She knew that everything she felt for him was in her eyes, but she couldn’t help herself.

  For a moment, she saw it all reflected at her. Then his gaze flickered past her to her family, and the shutters came down again. “I’d better go,” he said.

  Ethan pressed the button to release the locks on his car.

  “Wait!” a voice behind him called.

  He turned to see Ricky.

  Fury gripped Ethan. “Really?” he demanded. “Because I’m getting a little tired of being accosted in parking lots.”

  Ricky’s hands were fisted at his sides. He opened and closed his mouth. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry about that.”

  “I should have you arrested. You threatened my kid.”

  Ricky had drawn himself up to his full height at the mention of arrest, and his posture and expression were menacing. But Ethan didn’t give a fuck. He knew this guy wasn’t going to beat the crap out of him in a hospital parking lot while his nephew bled into his skull a couple of hundred feet away. He knew—maybe because of the way Ricky had held Cara, or the way the agony had lifted from his face when he heard that Marco was going to be okay—that Ricky would never lay a finger on him or Theo.

  “I came out here to say thank you.” Ricky’s shoulders slumped, his head, capped by a black-and-white-patterned do-rag, hung.

  “It’s what I do,” Ethan said coldly. “I’m a doctor.” He opened his car door. He wanted to get the hell away from here, from Ricky and his apologies and thank-yous, this disturbing show of abjectness.

  “You didn’t have to come out here on a holiday to help a random kid.” Ricky lifted his head but didn’t meet Ethan’s eyes.

  Ethan hesitated, on the brink of sliding into the car. “I did it for Ana.”

  “I know. Look—” Ricky examined his hands as if he’d never seen them before and had no idea what to do with them. “I saw her face when she looked at you.”

  Ethan had seen it, too, and it had slugged him in the belly.

  All the grief, the fear, the rage that Ethan had been carrying around since Friday suddenly saw a target. “You asshole. You selfish, greedy, motherfucking”—this last slipped out before Ethan could think better of it—“loser. How dare you threaten me and my kid and then try to talk to me about Ana’s feelings?”

  His heart pounded in his chest, and his vision was narrow, a black tunnel. He caught his breath. “You had your chance to worry about her feelings.”

  He didn’t want to go out of here yelling. He wanted to walk away with some dignity. He took a breath.

  “Please don’t break her heart because of me,” Ricky said.

  He said it gravely, sincerely, and for the first time his eyes locked on Ethan’s. They were wide and pleading. Ethan knew that it was the closest Ricky Travares ever came to begging.

  He waited to feel a softening in his heart, but none came. This guy had scared the hell out of him. Threatened him and his son. Taken Ana away. And now he wanted Ethan’s mercy. Fuck him.

  “You had my ear Friday. I was listening. Now? I’m done listening.” And Ethan slid into his seat, started the engine, and drove away, leaving Ricky standing in the middle of the hospital parking lot with his arms hanging at his sides.

  Theo was waiting for him when he got home. He was sitting at the kitchen table, a mug in his hands.

  “Be glad you weren’t there,” Ethan said. “Be glad I left you here.” Theo had wanted to come along, but Ethan didn’t want a fifteen-year-old to spend any more time in a hospital ER than life made necessary.

  Theo shrugged. “It was hard, waiting. Is he okay?”

  “He’s going to be. He had a subdural hematoma, like I thought.”

  “You’re good with diagnosis stuff, aren’t you? They could give you your own show. Like House.”

  Ethan laughed. “I don’t necessarily do much more than any other good doctor,” he said. “I’m good at asking questions, and I’m s
low to judge.…”

  But he thought of Mary Freyer and wondered if that was true. He’d gotten himself stuck in that case, mired in a particular interpretation—of Nicole and who she was, of himself and who he was. On the surface, it seemed that it shouldn’t matter what labels he’d slapped on himself and Nicole. But it did. Diagnosing an illness was all about not being misdirected, and he’d let the obvious keep him from seeing the truth.

  “Do you want me to make you some hot chocolate?” Theo asked.

  “Sure.”

  Theo went to the refrigerator and took out the milk, crossed to the cabinet with the mugs, and poured some in. “Does he have to stay at the hospital?”

  “Oh, definitely. Probably for a week. He wasn’t even out of surgery when I left.”

  “You left Ana at the hospital alone?” Theo asked, disappointment pricking his voice. He’d crossed the kitchen again to put the mug in the microwave, so Ethan couldn’t see his face.

  Ethan sighed. He took a deep breath. “Theo, the reason Ana and I broke up—or one of the reasons, anyway, is that on Friday Ana’s brother came to the parking lot at work and threatened to hurt you if I didn’t break up with her.”

  Theo frowned. “You broke up with her to make sure no one hurt me.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Well.” “Our worlds are so different. I don’t belong in yours. And you don’t belong in mine.” “I didn’t exactly break up with her.”

  “She broke up with you?”

  “It was mutual. There were too many forces working against us. But it wasn’t that I didn’t love her.”

  Because he did love her—painfully, ridiculously, permanently.

  “That sucks. But it makes a lot more sense.” Theo thought for a moment. “You kinda broke up with her to make sure no one hurt me,” he said again, sounding as if he were trying it out.

  “I could never do anything that might get you hurt.”

  “Wow. I can’t believe you did that for me.” Theo bit his lip. “I didn’t even want you to do that for me.”