by Em Petrova
“Mr. Hepburn, you’re awake.”
He stared at her.
“We need to find someone to come and get you. We need the hospital beds, and you’ve been released by the doctor to recover at home. But if you don’t have someone at home, we can move you to a facility.”
That word hit his brain like a blast.
His favorite uncle had spent his final hours alone in a facility, drugged on painkillers with nobody near him.
“No! Goddammit, no facility! I’ll leave on my own.” He swung his legs over the bed.
“Is there someone we can call? A relative?”
His mind latched onto his momma, a short drive away. She hadn’t been informed of his accident or she’d be here with him.
He also wouldn’t drag her away from Kyle. He needed her more right now.
Hep slashed a hand through the air, causing the nurse to step away. “I won’t go to a facility.” His voice sounded rough from disuse.
His uncle had been on a reconnaissance mission in South America, and he’d eventually succumbed to injuries sustained in combat.
“Then tell me who to call to come get you.” Her blue eyes burned with concern.
“There’s no one.”
“Maybe you just can’t remember right now. Is there a contact in your phone I might find?” She glanced at his bedside table.
Pivoting his head came with an accompanying wave of dizziness, followed by the nausea he was damn sick of feeling, but he saw his phone sitting there.
He plucked it off the table and tossed it at her. “Passcode’s 0527. Knock yourself out. When you can’t find any numbers, you might as well enjoy the videos on the camera roll. I thought I sounded fab cranking out ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ on karaoke night.” He lay down again, his eyes slamming shut on the spinning world.
Next thing he knew the nurse shook him awake. “Mr. Hepburn, we found someone and she’s on her way.”
He grunted, drifting for several seconds before he realized his momma’s number wasn’t in his phone. He didn’t carry his phone on missions, but he kept the personal numbers of his family locked in his brain—at least up until a few days ago when a steering wheel tried to knock them out.
He played the nurse’s words on a loop in his mind.
She’s on her way.
She’s on her way.
Who’s on her way?
Sascha brought her homemade iced coffee to her lips, but since her gaze locked to the computer monitor, the straw stabbed her cheek. Without removing her eyes from the frames of film she was editing, she directed the straw to her mouth and sipped.
Should she delete this film clip? Did it fit with the emotions she attempted to convey in her documentary? She tilted her head in contemplation.
In her graduate class on filmmaking, she’d learned that the deletions were more important than the additions. Editing and streamlining films, especially documentaries, proved to be the key to a successful end product.
She tapped the delete button. The next frame came into view, and she sighed. This didn’t exactly fit either. Frame by frame, her project shrunk. When comparing it to her thesis, she wasn’t sure if it fit anymore.
Setting aside her drink, she reached for her thick binder. Some slips of paper fluttered out, along with a napkin from the coffeehouse she’d scribbled a note on. She considered herself a nerd of a student, and she spent more per year in office supply stores than she did on groceries. So irritation rose up at seeing how disorganized she’d become.
She didn’t exactly have an open schedule for a complete office overhaul, but land’s sakes, did it need it. Looking at the cluttered bookshelves, her desk piled with old mugs and stacks of papers, she could almost hear her momma in her ear, telling her to organize her life and everything else would fall into place.
The clock shaped like a heart on her wall ticked away more minutes than she could afford to spend away from her documentary. The room already filled with afternoon light, and she hoped to finish early and go out with friends later.
With a shake of her head, she dumped all the contents of the binder on her desk. If she purged, she might as well do it all, right?
The slip of paper with her thesis statement scribbled on it fluttered out, and she snatched it up to read it.
Glancing from the screen to the paper, she read it out loud twice.
No, it didn’t seem to match up to the end product, which would be a documentary on suicide rates and mental health issues among the LGBTQ community. When she selected this as her final project to earn her doctorate in filmmaking, she dreamed the film would break barriers and shake up the world.
Looking at her project—now twenty minutes short of content—she had to ask if deleting all those clips was the right choice.
“Trust the process. It will turn into what I want,” she told herself.
Ignoring the mess she’d added to by dumping the binder, she reached for her coffee again. When she sipped, the straw made a slurping noise in the empty cup.
More caffeine would help her get through this mess and help her focus.
No, she needed a nice, calming mug of tea to soothe her nerves.
In her small apartment kitchen, she set the teapot on to boil. Too many ideas blasted through her mind—which direction to go tonight? Glancing through all those notes in the binder only left her mind bouncing like a rubber ball, and she was the first to admit she fell down rabbit holes of research easily.
Long ago, she acknowledged her style to be a bit of a mad scientist when she worked, but she needed to calm down and focus. Maybe a mug of chamomile would do the trick. Also, some lavender incense to help with creativity and open up her chakras.
After she lit the stick of lavender incense that jutted out of a tiny hole in a ceramic elephant holder, she leaned over to inhale the fragrant smoke curling up. The floral scent always reminded her of her momma, and she thought about calling her. But ever since Ethan’s death, Sascha had difficulty talking to her.
She’d moved on from her grief over her brother’s death years ago, but her mom needed more help and support than Sascha was able to give.
The heavy weight of guilt draped over her shoulders just like it did each time her mind touched on her family. Throwing herself into the work Ethan would be proud of her for, always helped.
The teapot whistled, and she fixed a mug of chamomile, added a bit of honey and carried it to her home studio. When she sat down with the tea cradled in hand, she didn’t immediately commence work on her project or begin the task of cleaning her office. Instead, she pulled up another video, this only a few minutes in length and filmed by Ethan.
His smiling face shot onto the screen first, and she automatically smiled in return every time she saw those happy creases around his eyes. His skin tanned from the Middle Eastern sun, and his head of thick brown hair shaved away into a military buzzcut so different from the mop he sported in his youth. But she loved seeing this side of her brother.
He panned the camera to a group of buddies kicked back in the sand. They were laughing and joking, and while Ethan wasn’t the greatest cameraman, his film left the viewer with a deep connection to the people on screen.
She knew their names but had never met most of them in person. Only River Hepburn had stuck by her brother’s side. After high school, Ethan informed her mother he wasn’t attending college like she urged him to do—he planned to join the Army with his friend River.
The pair were inseparable that summer before basic training, and their bond was still evident on this short video.
She laughed at something one of the guys said and harder at Ethan’s smart-ass comeback. When she got to the end of the video, she started it over again.
Maybe she was using nostalgia to avoid her own work—work toward a degree Ethan had encouraged her to pursue. A few months after he lost his life in Afghanistan, she enrolled in the graduate program to make that dream come true.
He’d loved her videos and regularly told her tha
t people were missing out on seeing the world through the lens of her video recorder. She never got a chance to tell him that he had the same talent, and even a short video between Army buddies revealed so much.
The motto of ‘this we’ll defend’ projected onto the screen in the bonds of brotherhood.
When she set aside her tea, several of the notes piled on her desk slipped to the floor and scattered across the hardwood. Sascha reached to pick them up, but her phone rang.
Thinking it might be her momma, she grabbed the phone. The unfamiliar number blazed back at her. She brought the phone to her ear.
“Hello, is this Sascha Lacey?” a woman asked.
“Yes.”
“My name’s Erin, and I’m a nurse at the Paris Regional Medical Center.”
She sucked in a harsh breath.
“I’m calling about a patient named River Hepburn. Do you know him?”
For an eternal heartbeat, Sascha sat stunned. What had the nurse said? She shook her head. This woman hadn’t mentioned her only other living relative—Momma? Maybe Momma had gone out of town without telling Sascha and got into an accident.
The name settled in her brain, followed with relief that it wasn’t her mother. But the person named made her equally disturbed.
River Hepburn. She’d just watched him on Ethan’s video, but she hadn’t seen or heard from him in the years since her brother’s death. Had she somehow conjured him up by watching that video?
“Yeah, I know him.” Her voice sounded as a rough rasp.
“He had an accident a few days ago. He suffered from a moderate head injury, and he requires care. You’re the only contact in his phone we can reach.”
Sascha blinked, not seeing the mess of her office or the documentary she avoided working on.
She was the only contact?
“We need to release Mr. Hepburn to make room for other patients. We offered him a spot in a rehab facility…but he strongly protested. Are you able to care for him?”
Her pulse raced, and all the blood in her body must have drained to her fingertips, because they started to throb. She shook off the fog of shock and locked on the rest of the nurse’s words.
“He shouldn’t be alone. He needs someone to come get him and commit to caring for him. Can you do that, Ms. Lacey?”
River’s face loomed in her mind. Handsome, with that twist of a smile that always knotted her up.
But he didn’t come for Ethan’s funeral or get in touch with her family other than to deliver the bad news that first night it happened.
He needed someone, and she was all he had.
“Y-yes… Yes, of course,” she said in a stronger voice. “I can be there in a couple hours.”
“My shift ends soon, but the next nurse will be here to pass on instructions.”
“Thank you.” As she ended the call, Sascha’s brain shot off at seventy miles an hour down a highway of memories.
River…her brother’s best friend. A man she crushed hard on that last summer before they shipped out for basic.
She tried to envision the big, virile tough guy laid up in a hospital bed with a head injury bad enough he required personal care.
Abandoning the mess of notes on the floor and desk, her cooling mug of tea and her final project to earn her graduate degree, Sascha jerked into action. She ran to lock the back door and make sure she’d extinguished the incense before she tossed things into a big purse and rushed out the door.
Over a hundred miles separated her from the man she hadn’t set eyes on for years.
The man who she was charged with taking care of while he healed.
Her late brother’s best friend.
Chapter Two
Hepburn practiced standing without the room spinning.
He wasn’t getting any better at it.
He braced his legs wide and rode out the wave of vertigo. The harder he pushed himself, the faster he could return to Alaska and his team. The guys needed him.
When the world started to tilt, he found that focusing on his surroundings helped to center him. He threw out his senses, taking in the pale sun filtering through the film on the hospital windows. It gave the room a murky, underwater appearance they probably used to urge their patients to get better faster so they could get the hell out of here.
The stale aroma of hospital food assaulted his nose. He hadn’t eaten, but the nurse insisted on leaving the tray on the rolling table.
Somewhere at the end of the hall, people were talking. A cart started to roll on the tiled floors.
A sudden metallic crash stabbed straight through his aching skull, and he flinched.
The feminine voice reached him. “Oh God. I’m so sorry. Let me help with that. Is it broken?”
He swung to look at the door and the room came with him this time. A good sign, right? He’d succeeded in one out of two shots so far.
Seconds later, a woman appeared in his doorway. Hepburn sucked in a breath.
A blast from the past—Sascha Lacey.
She froze in the doorway, her face in shadow, but he felt her gaze pinned on him.
He never thought to see her again, and damn, she’d changed from the girl he remembered that summer they shipped out for basic.
She stepped inside his room and the walls started to shift again. He lowered himself to the edge of the bed, watching Ethan’s little sister approach.
Though her face was unmistakable, everything about her had changed. Rather than the cutoff shorts and tank top he recalled, her shirt bore a band logo and she’d tucked it into a flowy white skirt. She wore sandals, and her toes bore several gold rings.
Latching his stare on her, he said, “You cut your hair.”
A soft smile graced her full lips, and she lifted a hand to touch the short brown strands that used to be thick and long. The haircut accentuated her delicate features and made her blue eyes appear huge.
“Yes, I cut it ages ago. How are you, River?” She stepped closer to the bed where he sat feeling as if he’d crashed into an alien planet.
“Could be better,” he ground out.
When she smiled again, he saw the same Sascha, always bubbling with some spring of life that infected everyone who came in contact with her. He always thought it made her seem a bit naïve and young…but the direct way she looked at him showed a new seriousness in the depth of her eyes.
Suddenly worn out, he pivoted on the bed to lie down. Just as he began to recline, the pillow slipped.
She rushed forward and grabbed it. “Let me fluff this for you.” When she moved, her elbow came within an inch of swiping his cup of water into his lap.
He reached out to catch it, and she stepped back.
“Oh no. Sorry. I didn’t see it there.”
Her words lodged in his mind, and he realized he’d just heard her say it a few minutes before—right after the crash in the hallway. Whatever she knocked over, she’d apologized in the same way.
With the pillow in place and his ice water still in the foam cup, he settled back to eye her.
Sascha pulled up the chair that nobody had sat in during his hospital stay, since nobody visited him. He still had a hard time believing he had her number in his phone.
Or that she’d actually come.
Once seated, she looked him over closely, taking in what he knew from his reflection in the bathroom mirror to be a pale, bruised face and ugly blue hospital pajamas.
Her brows creased, and he had to look away from the expression that ran so close to Ethan’s.
“A nurse called me.” Her voice came out soft and feminine. The sound carried him to that summer when she’d tagged along with him and Ethan, going fishing and mudding on ATVs. She’d ridden on the rear of Ethan’s ATV, smiling the entire ride, holding onto his waist, her hair flowing in the Texas breeze.
“I’m surprised you came. It’s been a long while since we talked.”
She nodded and plucked at the cloth of her skirt. “They said you have a head injury. How a
re you feeling?”
“Good as I can be when the world won’t stop spinning.”
“I bet that’s uncomfortable.”
“It makes me…” He couldn’t find the word. The sensation weighted the pit of his stomach, but he wasn’t able to snatch the word from the fog of his mind. He pointed to his stomach.
“Nauseated?”
“Yeah. I can’t remember things all that great either.”
“I’m sure it will come back. I had a friend in high school who suffered a concussion from basketball and it took her a few weeks to recover, but she recovered.”
Listening to her made some of the confusion of being in the hospital clear away—a shuttle had landed on this alien planet with a life form he understood. She was really here.
“You don’t have to feel obligated to actually take care of me, Sascha. If you can just drive me somewhere to get another car—”
She shook her head, interrupting his speech. “Not a chance, Hepburn. You’re coming with me. I have a spare room in my house, and you’re welcome to use it as long as it takes for you to get on your feet. I’m pretty sure we can go now that I’m here. Why don’t we get you up and dressed?”
She stood and went to the closet. He hadn’t opened the door but now saw his belongings taken from the rental car there—a bag filled with his clothes and the things he’d been wearing the day of his accident.
When she pulled the duffel out and set it on the bed, she damn near knocked over his water a second time. To make sure he didn’t get soaked, he rolled the table out of the way.
Maybe she felt just as nervous as he was. To look at her, though, he couldn’t tell. She appeared to be calm and collected as she unzipped his bag and removed garments. When she got to his boxers, he stopped her.
“I’ll get what I need.”
“Okay.” She pushed the bag across the bed, and he withdrew a set of clothes.
He tipped to his feet and stood beside the bed, eyeing her. “You don’t have to help me.”
“I’m not leaving the room. You could get dizzy and fall. I’ll turn my back. Let me know if you need help.” With that, she twisted to the window.