Logan…saved me.
“Of course,” the doctor added, with a clearing of her throat, “a tracheostomy is a relatively simple procedure. You didn’t need anything exotic like pit’s-bladder saline bags or odd homeopathic remedies, but you still couldn’t have chosen a better hiking partner.”
Jenny pressed her head deeper into the pillow, drowning under the tsunami of revelations.
“You’re doing well,” the doctor continued, “but we’ll keep you another day or two for observation.” The doctor glanced at her watch and stood up. “Since this kind of allergic reaction to a wasp or bee sting could very well happen again, I’ll send an allergist down to talk to you about venom immunotherapy and other options. You’ll have to be extra careful from now on about stings, but the therapy is 99% effective. In the interim, you’ll have to carry an adrenaline shot for emergencies.”
Jenny nodded once, carefully, but heard nothing but a garble of words, none of which answered the question: Where was Logan? She needed to see him, hold his hand, and look into his face. Until then, this wouldn’t feel real.
“Try to rest,” the doctor said. I’ll call Dr. Macallister know that you’re up and responsive.” The doctor patted her on the shoulder before heading toward the door with a click of low heels. “Such a lucky woman, Ms. Vance, in so many ways.”
The nurse followed the doctor out of the room. Jenny didn’t feel very lucky right now. She felt sore and achy and fuzzyheaded and it was only just starting to sink in that she was in a hospital bed with an IV pinching in her arm with bruises the size of Kansas on her chest. One truth was rising up to her consciousness growing to block out all other information: But for Logan cutting into her windpipe in the park, right now she’d be dancing on the clouds with Granny.
She squeezed her eyes shut. She’d had an emergency appendectomy when she was twenty-three years old, and hated every moment she’d spent on her back in the hospital. Her parents had flown into Washington State from New York to ensure that her basic needs were met, critically examine the stitches, all while keeping the staff on their toes. But her parents were thousands of miles away right now, and it wasn’t them she was longing for.
She glanced at the clock on the wall. It read 9:35 pm. Was it the same day? Or had she been out for over twenty-four hours? Maybe her lack of understanding had something to do with pain medication. That would explain why her eyes were open but she was still groggy. Why her heart ached, as if it, too, had been bruised by the pressure of his hands during CPR. It would also explain why, when she blinked her eyes open again, the room had suddenly gone dim. She must have fallen asleep. She could barely make out the clock on the wall, which now read11:45 pm.
She heard a whirring sound. Something small vibrated against her leg. A burst of bluish light lit the air around her. Startled, she padded her thighs until she found her cellphone, buzzing.
She caught her breath at the name and tapped to answer. “Logan?”
“Oh, God.” Logan’s voice choked with relief “It’s so good to hear your voice.”
“Yours…too.”
“For more than one reason. What I did to you—” his voice hitched “--the tracheostomy. My utility knife is no scalpel, but it’s all I had. But you’re speaking now, thank God. No damage to the larynx. How’s the swallowing?”
She tested it out. Working her throat hurt a little less sore than when she’d first woken up. “It’s…okay.”
“No aspiration. Excellent.” She heard the scrape of something—his fingers through his hair? “I know it’s painful to talk, so let me do the talking—”
“Logan.” A hoarse interruption, but he paused. “You…saved me.”
“No—don’t.” He made a strange noise. “I don’t want gratitude. It’s just what I do. I kept you alive. You were strong, so strong.”
She pressed the phone against her ear, wishing he had called her by video so she could see the expressions on his face. His voice sounded weird. Uneasy, uncomfortable, a little frustrated. It brought to mind that heartbreaking evening in his work shed, when she’d asked too many questions about the carved birds, and about his work as an emergency doctor in the Amazon.
“Come,” she rasped, swallowing again. “To…hospital.”
“I can’t.” His voice short, clipped.
“Why…?”
A fraction of a pause. “It’s past visiting hours.”
He couldn’t possibly be worried about that, not considering how Dr. Nguyen had gushed over him.
She said, “Break…rules.”
“I already have.” Was that a sigh? “You’re talking to me through contraband. Cell phones aren’t allowed on the ward. I had to twist Dr. Nyugen's arm to slip it to you, so I could hear your progress myself.”
His stubbornness hurt, almost as much as her throat. Maybe he couldn’t tell how much she missed him, now that she was reduced to speaking in monosyllable. Clarity, then, she thought, mustering courage. Pride didn’t seem all that important right now.
“I need…you.” The word love she held bated on her tongue.
Silence throbbed on the other end of the line. She could tell he’d stopped pacing. She heard cicadas and crickets singing, and recognized the music. He was standing in the darkness under the stars. Maybe on the deck outside the cabin. Their cabin, where she’d fallen in love.
“Jenny.” His voice was strangled. She heard the undeniable sound of a screen door swinging open and then slapping closed. “You’re on powerful meds right now. We can’t have any reasoned discussion while you’re pumped up with sedatives.”
What did they need to discuss? She just wanted to hold his hand, to be with him, to feel his warmth.
“By the time I got there you’d probably be asleep.” His steps echoed, like he was passing through the hall that headed toward the bedroom. “Is there anyone you want me to call?”
I don’t want anyone else. A bud of worry began to blossom. Why wouldn’t he come?
He said, “What about your parents?”
“No.” Her parents would fly out and ask too many questions and never leave her a moment alone with Logan. “No…one.”
“Okay, but let me know if you change your mind.” He made restless, hurried noises, like he was gathering things, maybe cleaning up the cabin up. “Dr. Nyugen told me she wants to keep you for observation until the day after tomorrow. I can’t visit tomorrow—I have something I have to do. I’ll fetch you out of the hospital once you’re discharged, okay?”
A dark hand closed over her heart. He wasn’t going to visit tomorrow either? Not even for an hour? What was this thing he had to do that was more important than coming to the bedside of the woman whose life he’d just saved? She couldn’t imagine what. Nothing had seemed urgent to the Logan she had shared the cabin with. But she hardly knew him, really. She’d been with him for barely two weeks. Now she began to wonder if Dr. Nguyen knew more than she did about the man.
She pressed the phone hard against her ear, seeking whatever subtle message he was broadcasting that she wasn’t picking up, just as she heard a zipping noise.
The familiar, gut-wrenching sound of a suitcase being closed.
“The day after tomorrow, Jenny,” he said into the silence, his voice falsely bright. “Then, I promise, we’ll talk.”
The call disconnected. She let the phone drop from her hand onto the hospital bed. She turned to her side to curl around it like the leaves of a mimosa pudica, the touch-me-not fern that folded inward whenever wounded. She stared at the white room, at the blank walls and shining floors, at the IV bag hanging from the stainless steel pole, trying to make sense of a life turned upside-down. The sound of nurse’s footsteps came from the hallway, along with the murmur of voices. One hot tear slipped out of her eye and burned a trail down her cheek.
Logan had warned her. His life was in transition. He could offer her nothing beyond the two weeks in the cabin. A cabin he’d retreated to after what had happened in the Amazon, to spend months carving
wooden birds to occupy his doctor’s hands. Birds that looked like they could fly away. Unlike his terrible memories. And what had she done, then? She’d led him deep into the Pacific rain forest, only to collapse into anaphylactic shock and propel Logan right back to his own private hell.
She closed her eyes. She had fallen too fast and lost control of her emotions. It wasn’t the first time. She should be used to being abandoned by now.
That zipping noise was the sound of Logan saying good-bye.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Two exhausting days later, Logan pulled the car into a parking spot in front of the hospital and shut off the ignition. Before he went face-to-face with Jenny, he had one last phone call to make.
“Logan!” Dylan exclaimed, picking up his cell phone after one ring. “You’re on my calendar to call today. You beat me to it.”
Logan pulled a face. Back at their college reunion, Logan, Dylan, and Garrick had agreed to keep in touch with each other, but only Dylan, the history professor, would mark it in his calendar software like an assignment deadline. “I spoke to you just a week ago.”
“Yeah, so?” Dylan snorted. “I’ve got a canoe trip planned at the end of the summer, remember?”
“I remember.”
“And you agreed to be part of it.”
“I did. You also made me an offer of hospitality.”
“To come crash at the Adirondack cabin and help me build this birch bark canoe? Absolutely.”
“So the offer is still good?”
“Man, I’ll buy your first beer!” In his enthusiasm, Dylan had a voice as big as the man himself. “I could use some help stretching these bark strips over the frame of the canoe, they’re impossible to get on.”
That was Dylan the historian, all geeky and hand’s-on, building a vessel from scratch. “I appreciate the safe harbor.”
“Safe from what?”
Heartbreak.
“Logan.” Dylan paused. “Are you running away from something again?”
“I didn’t run away from anything.” He frowned at Dylan’s description. “I chose to leave.”
“Right.”
“And it’s not something. It’s someone.”
Dylan made a sucking sound. “That same someone as before?”
“Yeah.”
“Whoa, dude. Whoa.”
Dylan laid his head against the headrest of the driver’s seat, bouncing it off rhythmically as if to knock some sense into himself. “I think she’s the one.”
Dylan dropped something heavy, it sounded like a monster pile of logs. “When did this happen? When I last spoke to you, I thought you were talking about a girl, but I thought that was just a passing thing. That you were content in your manly solitude in the Pacific woods. What the hell happened?”
“My mind is on fire.” Jenny had branded him from the moment he’d laid eyes on her. “Do you remember that kayaking trip we made after we graduated?”
“Hell, yeah. That was one for the history books, but what does that have to do with this?”
“Remember when we hit the fork in the river? How we couldn’t figure out which way to go?”
“You wanted to go right,” Dylan said, “but I insisted we go left. And I nearly got us both drowned in the rapids.”
“Well, that’s where I am right now.”
“Drowning?”
“Staring down two separate paths and putting my future in someone else’s hands.”
“You’re scaring the hell out of me, dude.”
Logan stared through the windshield at the hospital, misgivings curdling in his stomach. “I’m not exactly feeling like Iron Man right now.”
“You know I’ve already had a wife, right?”
“Why do you think I’m calling you?” Logan figured Dylan was the only one who could possibly understand. Dylan had fallen hard and fast, and had good reason to divorce, but Logan hoped Dylan could inject a little sense into this scenario, before Logan played it out to its uncertain end. “The problem is that I’ve only known this woman for two weeks.”
“Holy hell.” The leaf-crunching steps Logan had heard through the phone stopped short. “You fell fast.”
“And hard. I’m about to tell her.”
His stomach clenched. He didn’t know what she was going to say, or how he was going to say it. All he knew was that it needed to be said.
“Call me up when she’s given you an answer, Logan. And don’t go planning a wedding day to interfere with my trip.”
“Is that all the advice you’ve got for me?”
“Answer me one question: Is your heart involved? And I mean your actual heart, dude.”
Logan thought of the intelligent woman with shifting amber eyes who’d cradled the wooden meadowlark in her hands. He thought of the little freckles like constellations across her shoulders. He thought of the hollow that had opened up in his heart when he thought, in the woods, he might lose her forever.
“Yeah,” Dylan breathed into the silence. “I hear you loud and clear, you poor soul.”
“I didn’t say a word.”
“Exactly. Take it from a pro. You’re toast.”
“I am in love with her.”
The words rolled off his lips, but the act felt dangerous. He sat in her Saab, which he’d driven here in case she wanted to drive herself away after the conversation with him. It felt dangerous to say those words aloud. They might sink into the leather upholstery and repeat in her ear when she was gone.
Suddenly, all his plans exploded in his head. “Dylan, I don’t know how to do this.”
“You’ll figure it out. No advice I tell you is going to make a damn bit of difference.”
“Really?”
“It’s a mysterious thing, this falling in love. You have to roll with it, even if it rolls you right off a cliff.”
Logan canted forward until the steering wheel dug into his brow.
Dylan sang. “I wish you luck, buddy.”
“I’m going to need it.”
“Uh-huh.” Dylan’s voice held an edge of glee. “And Logan, I can’t wait to meet her.”
Dylan disconnected. Logan slipped the phone back in his pocket, gripping the steering wheel, flexing and flexing until he forced an imprint of the leather into the palms of his hands.
Shoving the door open, he stepped out of the car and braced himself as he approached the entrance to the Spruce Woods Memorial Hospital. The guard at the security desk nodded and waved him to the bank of elevators without checking his ID or signing him in. Too distracted to question the oddity of that lapse, Logan waited by the elevator, half-listening to the conversations around him. He nodded to a resident who greeted him by name as he entered the elevator. He hadn’t had a chance during the emergency to take notice of individual doctors. He’d been so laser-focused on the Jenny on the gurney. Nor had he had the brain-space to do the glad-handling afterwards, as he gripped Jenny’s hand at her bedside, willing her to come out of the ordeal without any lasting complications, grappling with a thorn-infested bramble of feelings. He’d spend the last few days picking through that tangle, and now he’d pushed through with enough clarity to take stock of what had happened, who he was, and what he now had to do.
The wild card in all his plans was Jenny.
***
With her back to the door, Jenny stared blindly through the hospital window. She heard a ripple of excitement in the hall as the famous Dr. Logan Macallister arrived on the ward. His low voice cut through the noise as he murmured a few words to the nurses at the station, before setting his determined stride in the direction of her room.
She balled up the overlong hem of the hospital tee-shirt they’d given her to wear, her other shirt being too stained with blood to be saved. Squeezing the cotton in her hands, she eased her shoulders back and stretched her chin up as much as she dared without straining the bandage on her throat. She would need every ounce of self-control to get through the next few minutes. She had a pretty good idea of what was com
ing. But in life, as in science, there were some variables that couldn’t be controlled.
“Jenny?”
A quiver tugged at her chin but she smoothed it still. He’d probably meant the gentleness of his voice to be kind. She took it as a sign he was trying to soothe her before dropping the bad news.
“Hey, Logan.” She forced her voice even as she turned around. “I didn’t expect you quite so early.”
Logan stood just inside the doorway. He looked more like Dr. Macallister than the man she’d fallen in love with. He’d slung a suit jacket, the same dark blue as his crisply-creased pants, casually over a shoulder. He’d combed his overlong hair back. The sexy scruff of beard she loved had been neatly trimmed. The faint, musky scent of ambergris drifted across the gulf that separated them.
The doctor was in the house.
Perhaps it was better that he looked like a stranger.
“You sound better, Jenny.” He took a slow step closer and tossed the suit jacket on the bed. “How do you feel?”
“Fine.” As fine as a woman with a broken heart could be. “I’ve made a miracle recovery, so the doctors tell me.”
A frown knotted between his brows. He made no move closer. Her heart beat fast in her tightening chest. She made an effort to breathe slow and kept her gaze steady. It was an instinct, this coolness. It was the only way she knew how to protect herself.
A muscle moved in his cheek. “Are you ready to leave?”
“I can’t. Not yet.” She dropped the hem bunched in her hands. “Dr. Nguyen said she’d come by to sign the discharge papers by noon. Then you have to wheel me out in that.”
He turned to the wheelchair waiting by the door and looked the clear plastic bag on the seat. It held her post-hospital instructions and a new prescription.
He said, “Is that the adrenaline auto-injector?”
“The allergist prescribed it yesterday. Just in case I’m caught in the woods and don’t have Dr. Logan Macallister around to save my life.”
Alone With You (Cabin Fever Series Book 1) Page 14