by Joss Wood
Mariella narrowed her eyes at him. “Get a second opinion. Get the best in the world. Get them here, get them now. Once those doctors have examined him, I will listen again, but, until then, we will have no talk of the possibility of your father dying. Are we clear?”
“I am a doctor. I do know what I am talking—”
Mariella couldn’t listen to any more. This was her life partner, his father, Luc was discussing. He wasn’t another patient; her life lay in a hospital bed beyond those doors. If she didn’t believe, who would? “I said, am I clear?”
Luc’s eyes slid away to look at Joe, but Mariella didn’t drop her gaze. Until Harrison recovered, she was head of this family. Luc closed his eyes in frustration, and when he opened them again, he gave her a curt nod. “As you wish, Mariella.”
Dammit, he only called her Mariella when he was pissed off with her. Mariella held out a hand to grip his, but Luc took a step back, retreating into his cool, calm shell. Luc handed her a mocking smile. “Rafe needs you. He’s taking this hard.”
He didn’t say it out of concern for his brother, Mariella realized as she walked toward Rafe, who stood by the window, ignoring their conversation. As she always did, she ignored Luc’s subtle dig about her preference for Rafe. The two boys were born competitive, and growing up their sibling rivalry had sometimes descended into outright war. But Luc refused to see that he had the advantage over Rafe, that the prosaic, unemotional attitude he’d inherited from Harrison made the world an easier place to deal with. Luc was an oceangoing liner, steady, stable, and Rafe was a rickety raft, at the mercy of the ebbs and swells of life. If all was well, he could be charming and ebullient, but when the tide turned, and he was faced with criticism and rejection, he didn’t have the resilience to ride the waves. She was his life jacket, his rescue craft, the person he leaned on. It made Mariella feel like she still had value as a mother.
Rafe turned to her, his gaze filled with despair. But when his arms went around her, when his hand rested on the back of her head, Mariella knew that he was trying to comfort her, to ease her pain. Darling Rafe. He was trying to be brave, but Mariella felt the shudder that passed through him, and she tightened her grip. She was his mother—it was her job to provide strength and comfort, leadership. She could do this—she could support Rafe, and the rest of her family, through this horrible time. Mariella drew big circles on his back, wishing that Rafe had a man in his life, someone who could comfort him, support him, when she wasn’t around. But he didn’t, and right now she was his chief source of comfort. No matter how much she had to do, how worried she was, she’d take on that role with alacrity. After all, she’d been doing this for most of his life, and she was damn good at it.
It only took a minute or two, and Rafe’s grip on her eased. He sniffed, lifted his head and sent her a watery smile. “Mom.”
Mom. The sound from those lips still had the power to melt her heart. She would die for this boy, she realized. She would die for any of her children. They were the beat of her heart, the reason she did what she did, the essence of who she was.
Mariella pushed Rafe’s hair off his face and swiped her thumbs under his eyes, wiping away the traces of moisture with her thumbs. She planted a kiss on his mouth and squeezed his cheeks. “Your father will be fine. Do you hear me?”
Rafe nodded, gratitude in his eyes. He’d needed someone to tell him that, Mariella realized. Luc had probably just hit him with the cold, hard facts. She didn’t doubt, not for one second, that Harrison was in grave danger, but she also believed in the power of positivity, in the strength of the human spirit and its will to live. Harrison still had so much he wanted to do; he would fight to stay in this world.
Seeing that Rafe was, mostly, composed, Mariella kept her hand on his back and turned back to face Luc and Joe.
“Where is Elana?” she demanded, realizing for the first time that her youngest wasn’t present.
Luc pushed his hand through his straight hair. “I’ve been calling and texting, but she’s not picking up. I’ve called Thom and told him the situation—he’s trying to reach her, too.”
Dammit, her wild child. Mariella’s lips thinned as she heard her phone ringing from her designer bag dangling from her shoulder. Pulling her cell out, she scrolled through her many missed calls. All clients. Nothing from Elana. She pulled up Elana’s number, dialed it and lifted the phone to her ear. Today was a workday and Elana should pick up a call from her or Gabe. Mariella felt her frustration rise when the call went directly to voice mail. Maybe Gabe had spoken to her...
Mariella’s head snapped up. “And where the hell is Gabe?”
Luc and Rafe exchanged a look that set Mariella’s teeth on edge. “Neither of you called him, did you?”
Luc, at least, had the balls to look her in the eye as he answered her. “He’s not exactly family, Mom.”
“He lived in your house, ate at your table, attended school with you since he was ten years old. He is my nephew, and our most valued employee. He. Is. Family.” Mariella enunciated every word. Her eyes flew from Luc and Rafe and back again. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I’ll call Gabe,” Joe said, doing what he did best and defusing the tension between members of the Marshall family.
Mariella shook her head. “Thank you, but I’ll do it.” She glanced down at her phone and quickly accessed Gabe’s number. Unlike Elana, Gabe answered before the first ring could be completed.
“Tía?”
Mariella pushed her fist into her sternum, trying to push away the flare of rising acid. “Gabe, I need you at St. Aloysius. Harrison had an accident, and he’s in bad shape.”
Gabe swore. “What the hell happened? Is he okay? How bad is bad?”
Mariella looked up when Joe touched her arm. She followed his pointed finger and saw a doctor approaching, his face weary and so very, very grave. “It’s bad, Gabe. I have to go. Get here as soon as you can.”
“I’m on my way,” Gabe replied.
Mariella lowered the phone as the doctor stopped in front of her, holding out his hand. “Mrs. Santiago-Marshall, I’m Dr. Grant. We should speak. Come and sit down—you might need to make some decisions.”
* * *
Mariella, holding Luc’s hand, stepped into the corridor leading to Harrison and took a moment to steady herself. She could do this—she had to do this. No matter their differences, the arguments, the fights over control and power, Harrison was her husband. Her lover for more than three decades, her best friend.
“I’ll go in with you, and I’ll be able to answer any questions you have,” Luc told her as they approached the room. At the doorway, Luc pulled her to a stop and waited until she looked at him. The terror in his eyes almost dropped her to her knees.
“Mom,” Luc said, holding both her hands in his, “he has a TBI, a traumatic brain injury.”
Mariella tried to contain her frustration. She wanted to get inside, see her husband, feel his warm skin under her fingertips. “I know that, Luc.”
“I don’t think you do,” Luc replied. He lifted a hand, and Mariella knew that it was a silent request asking her to slow down, to listen to him. She didn’t want to—she just wanted to yank the door open and walk inside. “You need to hear this.”
The quicker he said what he had to say, the sooner she could see Harrison. “Get on with it,” Mariella stated, her patience running thin.
“Dad won’t look like himself. He might be cut up and bruised, bloated. There will be a ridiculous amount of tubes and pipes connected to him.”
God, did Luc think she was a fool? He’d been in a car accident, for God’s sake—she didn’t expect him to look like he’d just walked off a tennis court or golf course. Mariella placed her hand on the handle to pull open the door to Harrison’s room, but Luc spoke again. “All the machines have alarms on them. It’s important that you
know that an alarm sounding does not automatically mean that there’s a problem or an emergency. The alarms are there to alert the staff to an upcoming task, like a drip change. The nurses are highly trained—”
“Can I see him now?” Mariella demanded, not wanting to hear any more of his lecture.
Luc looked frustrated. “Yeah, we can go in.”
Mariella shook her head and looked Luc in the eye. “I want to go in by myself this first time. I need to be alone with him.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Luc protested, shock crossing his face and skittering through his eyes.
“I don’t care whether you think it’s a good idea or not, that’s what’s going to happen,” Mariella replied, her voice cool. She was a Santiago, for God’s sake—she could do this. She had to do this, because she was a hairbreadth from showing Luc that she’d rather walk through the last level of hell than confront the reality of a brutally injured Harrison.
Pulling the last threads of her courage together, Mariella turned her back to Luc and stepped into Harrison’s room. Impressions bombarded her: two generic chairs next to his bed, puke-gray walls. The harsh smell of disinfectant in her nostrils, her shaking hands. She had to look at him. Mariella slowly, so slowly, lifted her eyes to the bed. His left leg was covered in a cast from ankle to thigh, and his right hand lay on the blindingly white sheet next to his cast. Two of his nails were torn, and there was blood under the rest. Ignoring her tightening throat, Mariella walked her eyes up his chest to the snaking coils of tubes and pipes. God, there were so many, the biggest of which were the two thick, bright blue tubes of the ventilator. A brace encased the strong neck she’d like to bite when they were feeling frisky, and his face, Dios mío, his face...
Beneath the tubes and equipment, Harrison didn’t look anything like the man she lived her life with. He was beyond battered, beyond swollen. He looked like a horror-house version of himself.
Mariella crossed herself and fought the urge to run from the room, screaming that this wasn’t her husband, her life, that this didn’t happen to people like them! She flicked an eye to the door and back to Harrison’s face. They’d taped his eyes closed, and Mariella wished she could see them. Harrison had the prettiest, prettiest eyes. They jumped from cornflower blue when he was amused to Carolina blue when he was focused to a Prussian blue when he was aroused. Mariella knew his eyes, could read his eyes, and she knew that if she could look into them, she’d be able to see if Harrison, in a coma or not, would make his way back to her.
Mariella pulled a chair closer to the bed and gripped Harrison’s cool fingers with her own. Feeling her head spin, she gulped for air and abruptly sat down, instinctively dropping her head to her knees. She could not faint, she would not faint! Yes, she felt heart-stopping fear and bone-crushing anxiety, but she wouldn’t be helping anyone if she collapsed. She needed to be strong, dammit. Mariella heard soft footsteps and looked up to see a nurse approaching the bed.
Her experienced, knowing eyes raked over Mariella’s face. “Are you okay, Mrs. Santiago-Marshall?”
“I’m fine,” Mariella stated, her tone suggesting that the nurse not argue with her. “Is there anything you can tell me?”
The nurse shook her head. “Time will tell. But talking to him couldn’t hurt. Tell him you’re here, let him know that he’s not alone.”
Mariella nodded, and when she heard the snick of the door closing, she looked at her husband—who looked nothing like her husband—and sighed. “I told you not to buy that stupid car, Harrison. I said that it was too powerful, that any car designed for a track shouldn’t be on public roads.”
Jeez, not even a coma gets me a break from your nagging.
Mariella almost smiled as Harrison’s sarcastic reply popped into her head.
“I’ll nag you until you come out of this coma, Harrison.”
God help me.
Mariella placed her elbow on the bed next to his chest and touched his bare chest, his chest hair flecked with gray. He looked old, Mariella thought. When did that happen? “We’ve spent a lifetime together, Harrison, and it can’t end like this. I won’t let it end like this.”
Not up to you, sweetheart.
His voice in her head was so loud that Mariella thought that Harrison had spoken aloud. But imaginary voice or not, the words were a powerful—and annoying—reminder that there were some situations, and people, she could not control. That had been the case with Harrison and, she admitted, had been, and still was, so damn attractive. When you were Mariella Santiago, a direct descendant of Don Juan Santiago, men tended to bow and scrape.
Harrison, big and brash, did the exact opposite, and his indifference to her history and status had intrigued her. It was only after they’d married that she’d realized how much influence her family’s social connections and her lineage played in his success. Harrison wanted to prove to her, to her family and to himself that he was worthy of her, and he’d done that. He’d worked his ass off, and he was seen as a rags-to-riches success. They’d met when he was a hotshot chef, poor but talented, and through grit, determination and sheer bullheadedness, he made the transition from innovative chef to restaurant owner to billionaire entrepreneur. His drive and relentless effort resulted in a company that began with his restaurants and expanded into specialty gourmet products, a television network, vineyards and a chain of hotels, cocktail bars and nightclubs.
Mariella filled her lungs with air, exhaled and did it again. Feeling calmer, she spoke again. “I refuse to accept that you might die, that you’ll leave me here alone. We have our children’s weddings to attend, grandchildren to spoil. Yeah, we scream and fight and bitch and growl, and there have been times that I’ve wanted to smother you in your sleep, but we’re a team. I need you. I can’t be Mariella Santiago-Marshall without you.”
An alarm beeped, and Mariella jumped, her head whipping around to look at the bank of machines keeping her husband alive. God, he would hate this; he would loathe the idea of being connected to this technology, to being kept alive by ventilators and brain shunts. Harrison was an I’ll-do-it-myself-or-move-on type of guy. If Harrison could talk, he’d be telling her to get him the hell off this crap and let him take his chances; it wouldn’t matter that his chance at survival without the machines was less than zero. It wouldn’t be the first roll of the dice he’d made against the odds. But that was business and this was his life...
A life that he’d come so very close to losing.
Chapter Three
They allowed Mariella to stay with Harrison for a scant fifteen minutes, the nursing staff telling her they’d given her five minutes more than they usually did. Mariella would never admit it, but she was grateful—she didn’t know if she could sit next to Harrison’s unresponsive body for much longer, the noise of the machines her only company.
God, how long would he remain like that? Mariella pushed her fingers into her long, lustrous hair and pulled it off her face. Her phone was still buzzing, and habit had her looking down at her screen. Jonas Halstead was both a friend and a client, but she wasn’t up to talking to him in either capacity right now. Friends and business could wait. For now.
Mariella, seeing that the waiting room was empty, frowned. She knew that Luc wasn’t particularly happy with her—nothing new—but she’d expected him to wait for her, along with Rafe and Joe. Where were they? Mariella looked around and saw a group of nurses standing at the window, their faces alight with curiosity. Instantly suspicious, she walked over to them, and her imperial command to move out of her way had an instant effect. The nurses moved aside, and Mariella looked down into the large parking lot, the one directly outside the main entrance to the hospital. The area was full of news vans and reporters waving microphones in front of her two sons.
Mariella muttered a curse under her breath and spun around, knocking the patient file from a young nurse’s
hand. Too angry to apologize, she stormed toward the bank of elevators, silently cursing the inquisitive press. She could’ve anticipated this, she thought as she stepped inside the empty stainless steel cube. The Santiago and Marshall families, on an individual basis, were two of the wealthiest and most recognized clans in the world, and as a couple, every move she and Harrison made, their children made, garnered attention. They didn’t live in a fishbowl—they lived in the biggest tank in the busiest, most visited aquarium in the world. And what did Luc and Rafe think they were doing, dealing with the press on their own? They’d grown up in the eye of the cameras; they knew that you never held impromptu press conferences, that you didn’t step into the school of piranhas when they smelled blood in the water.
Dios mío!
Mariella slammed her hand against the emergency button of the elevator, and when it stopped, she pulled her bag off her shoulder. It was a long-ingrained habit to run a brush through her hair, to inspect her face. She wiped away a minuscule fleck of mascara from her underneath her left eye and slicked another layer of her trademark deep-red lipstick across her full lips. There, her armor was on. The cameras would flash when she left the elevator, and then the pack would converge on her. She wouldn’t flinch. She would take control of the situation, since her sons obviously couldn’t.
And where the hell was Joe and why hadn’t he stopped them? Mariella slammed the side of her fist against the emergency-stop button to set the elevator in motion again. Two seconds later it stopped again, and Mariella stared straight ahead as the doors opened. They mob was still outside, and no one had noticed her yet. Good.
“Mariella!”
Busted! Mariella did an internal eye roll as faces and cameras turned to look at her through the glass door. The men and women pushed their way through the automated doorway and formed a tight group around her, blocking the elevators in the process.
Mariella narrowed her eyes against the insistent, constant flashes of high-tech cameras. Needing to get to Rafe and Luc, she walked across the lobby, her expression daring any reporter to get in her way.