The limo tore down La Cienega Boulevard, barely stopping for red lights.
“What happened?” Sebastian asked as we sat in the back facing each other.
I told him about the elevator ride down and Johnny greeting us. How, as Connor stood with his back to the hallway, I had seen the gun and screamed –
“It’s my fault,” I said, breaking down into tears again.
“How can it possibly be your fault?” Sebastian asked.
“I-if we h-hadn’t been on the elevator… if I h-hadn’t made him take me up to the p-penthouse – ”
“Then he’d probably be dead,” Sebastian said matter-of-factly.
I looked up at him in horror.
“I saw the shooter’s body,” Sebastian said, now calm and in control of himself. “And I saw the gun. There was a silencer on it. He was in a Dubai uniform. Somehow he managed to get past security, which means he had everything planned out ahead of time, or there’s someone on the inside who got him in. Not only that, he knew exactly when to target Connor. He wasn’t in that hallway by accident, not at that precise moment. Lily, this was a professional hit. He was there to kill Connor, and he would have taken the best opportunity that presented itself. If it hadn’t been in the hallway, it would have been somewhere else, sometime this evening. You might have saved Connor’s life just by being there tonight. You never know.”
I just shook my head miserably. I appreciated him saying it, but I felt such overwhelming guilt. If I hadn’t lured him away from the crowd… if I hadn’t put him in such a vulnerable position…
“How did the ambulance guys get to him so fast?”
“We always have an ambulance stand by at events like this. Just in case.”
Just in case somebody gets shot? I almost asked, but I didn’t want to speak the words aloud.
Then I remembered that it hadn’t looked like Connor had been shot at all. “Why wasn’t there any blood on him?”
Sebastian leaned back and rubbed his face with one hand. “Thank God for that, at least. Two months ago, after you… um, left, Johnny kept after him over and over to wear a bulletproof jacket out in public. He’d always resisted it up until then, but he was so morose and out of it that he agreed to whatever just to get Johnny off his back. Johnny called around and got some sort of new prototype that could be sewn into other clothes. We got Armani to outfit a new batch of suits with the prototype incorporated into the jackets and vests… and they did the tux, too, thank God.”
Suddenly I remembered when I had handled Connor’s jacket – both when I had pulled it off him, and later picked it up off the floor. How strangely heavy it had seemed. Now it made sense.
“So he’s okay?!” I asked, joy and dread wrestling inside me – because I had seen him unconscious. He obviously hadn’t been okay.
“I don’t know,” Sebastian said, struggling to remain calm. “It was a prototype… and Johnny told me it’s not like in the movies, that people don’t just take a bullet and walk away. The jacket probably stopped it from entering his body, but he might have had internal damage… I just don’t know. We have to wait and see at the hospital. But if he hadn’t had that jacket on…”
I trembled in my limo seat.
If he hadn’t put it on…
If he had instead walked out of the penthouse with it casually slung over his arm…
Things were bad enough now; the possibility of what might have happened was too terrible to contemplate.
“Why did he do it?”
“Who, Connor?”
“No, the guy with the gun. …why?”
Sebastian’s eyes narrowed grimly. “He was paid, that’s why.”
“What, for a suicide mission?!”
“No. He made a mistake in shooting Connor first. You saw the gun, that’s what screwed him. My guess is, once you yelled, he was just a little bit slower on the draw than Johnny. If he’d gone for Johnny first, though – ”
Sebastian didn’t finish.
My stomach turned at the thought of how things might have gone differently.
“But who hired him? Do you think it was that guy who came up to me at the pool, that first weekend at the Dubai?”
“I doubt it.”
“So who?”
“I’ll give you one guess.”
“…his parents?!”
“No, although that’s a good second choice.”
“Miranda?! You think Miranda did this?”
“That’s where I’m putting my bet.”
“That’s insane!”
“To think she would do it, or for her to actually do it?”
I struggled with that. Miranda Lockwood had tried to ruin my life. She’d publicly humiliated me on national television. She’d blackmailed Connor, using me as a bargaining chip. She’d also lied about it all to the press. And indirectly, she’d almost destroyed my relationship with him.
But murder?
No matter how much of a sociopathic bitch I thought she was, I found it hard to believe a woman worth hundreds of millions of dollars, who had everything that Miranda did, would even consider something so… evil as a murder-for-hire of her ex-fiancé.
Then I remembered the look she had given me in the lobby of the Dubai, and I shivered.
“Although you can be sure of one thing,” Sebastian continued. “If Miranda is behind it, we’ll never find one shred of evidence implicating her.”
4
Todd the limo driver was pretty damn good. Even without a siren and flashing lights, he got to the hospital just as the EMTs were unloading Connor’s stretcher outside the Emergency Room.
The limo screeched to a halt and Sebastian and I jumped out. Johnny was already on the sidewalk as the EMTs released the legs and turned the stretcher into an instant gurney.
“Johnny, is he okay?!” I cried out as Sebastian and I ran across the sidewalk.
And then I heard the most beautiful sound ever:
Connor’s voice, even though it was more like a croak.
“…Lily…?”
I rushed up beside him and burst into tears. He looked blearily up at me and grasped for my hand. I grabbed it and ran beside him as the EMTs rushed him inside.
“…are you okay?...”
“Yes, yes,” I sobbed.
“…are you sure?...”
“You’re the one who got shot!”
“…I got shot?”
“Just a little bit,” Sebastian said drily.
Connor looked up at Johnny. “…don’t I pay you so that doesn’t happen?...”
I glanced over at Johnny and saw the guilt on his face.
Connor saw it, too. “…kidding, kidding… Jesus, lighten up…”
“Not funny,” I scolded him.
“…I thought it was,” he said, then turned back to Johnny. “…you got him, though, right?”
“Yes,” Johnny said grimly.
“…dead?”
“Yes.”
Connor pointed at him playfully. “…see, that’s what I pay you for…”
“How can you joke?! You almost got killed!” I sobbed.
“…naaah, I just got my girlfriend back… it’d take a whole lot more than one asshole with a popgun to take me out of the game now…”
I stared down at him, my lower lip trembling.
I just got my girlfriend back.
I clasped his hand tightly in mine.
He just smiled at me and winked.
Then one of the wheels hit some sort of a bump in the floor, jarring the gurney.
Connor immediately winced hard, like somebody had punched him. “OW… guys, careful…”
“Sorry,” one of the EMTs said, then looked at me. “Ma’am, you need to step back, we’re going to hand him over to the doctors now.”
I looked up. Sure enough, two men and a woman in scrubs were racing out of a pair of sliding glass doors. Immediately they started yelling, and the EMTs began reciting jargon right out of the TV show E.R.
“Male,
29, gunshot, lumbar region, bulletproof vest non-penetrating, non-critical, probable concussion, possible internal bleeding – ”
“Trauma two – stand back, ma’am, you can’t come back in here – ”
“BP’s 95 over 60 – ”
“Pulse ox 99, stable – ”
“I need to go in,” Johnny protested.
“Absolutely not.”
“There was an assassination attempt on his life,” Johnny snapped. “They could come back for a second try. And I think you want me to be there if they do.”
The doctor paused and seemed to think that over. “Alright, but you stay out of the way. And the rest of you, stay out here,” the doctor ordered.
Then he, Johnny, the nurses, and the EMTs wheeled the gurney beyond the sliding doors.
The last thing I saw was Connor’s hand held up in the air, weakly waving goodbye.
Sebastian and I stood there and watched him disappear, afraid it might be the last time we ever saw him alive.
5
It was the longest two hours of my life.
Sebastian talked to somebody. Once it was clear who their mystery patient was, they had us wait in a private lounge on the second floor. We drank bad coffee out of a vending machine, ate candy bars, and listened to police sirens go by in the night.
We didn’t talk continuously – we were too worried for that – but occasionally Sebastian or I would start a little fragment of a conversation.
“Did the plan work?” he asked at one point.
I looked over at him, jarred out of an anxiety-ridden daydream. “What?”
“Did the plan work?” he repeated. He looked at me, then made a rolling motion with his hand like Keep up, Lily. “The makeup, the hair, the seduction – ”
“Oh. Yeah… he… he was going to…”
I tried to keep it together, but as I remembered our last moment together at the elevator, I broke down into tears.
Sebastian let me cry for a minute and get myself back together before spoke again.
“I heard what he said before they took him into the ER.”
I looked at him blankly.
“The part about him getting his girlfriend back,” he said in a tone of voice that let me know he was annoyed with my being so slow.
“Oh. Yeah.” For the first time in an hour, a smile bloomed on my face.
Sebastian stretched out his 6-foot-5 frame in his hospital lounge chair, put his hands behind his head, and beamed a self-satisfied smile. “I’m so very, very good.”
I stared at him in disbelief. “Connor just got shot… he’s possibly being operated on… and you’re congratulating yourself on the execution of your plan?”
Sebastian waved me off with one hand and a Pfft expression. “He’ll be fine. Besides, you could say that I gave him something to live for.”
“You gave him something to live for?!”
“Well, you played a small part, but…” He looked over at me, then rolled his eyes. “It’s called comic relief, Lily. Laugh so you don’t cry.”
“Oh…” I said, somewhat mollified.
He paused for effect.
“Although, you have to admit… I’m good.”
“I’ll admit that you’re an ass sometimes.”
“Well… that, too. Part of the job description.”
We exchanged a brief smile, then went back to sitting in silence, drinking the vending machine coffee, and waiting our way through the never-ending seconds as they clicked by, one by one.
6
At last a doctor walked through the lounge door. He was a Middle-Eastern-looking man dressed in pale blue doctor’s scrubs and glasses.
“Hello, my name is Dr. Sarpara,” he said with an incongruously flat, Midwestern accent. “Are you the people who came in with Mr. Connor Templeton?”
Sebastian and I both leapt up from our seats at the same time.
“Yes – is he okay?” I asked tearfully.
“How is he?” Sebastian asked at the same time.
“He’s fine,” Dr. Sarpara said. “He was shot twice in the lower left region of his back, but the bulletproof vest stopped the projectiles. However, it’s not like in the movies where the hero just rips off the vest and walks away. Even though the vest blunted the impact and helped distribute the force, it was basically like he got hit with a sledgehammer. We did x-rays, and he has fractures in the left floating ribs – those are the lowest two ribs, the ones that are only attached to the spinal column – plus a fracture in the left 10th rib, which is the bottommost rib in the ribcage. We were initially worried about internal bleeding or a ruptured spleen, but so far there’s no indication of that. We did a CAT scan, but we didn’t find anything alarming. There doesn’t seem to be anything other than a large hematoma – basically, a bruise – in the underlying tissues. He apparently struck his head in the fall, which caused him to lose unconsciousnees and gave him a mild concussion. We’re going to be monitoring him the next couple of days for possible damage to the kidney, and we’ll continue to watch for internal bleeding, but so far he looks good.”
“Thank God,” I whispered and started crying out of relief.
Sebastian put an arm around me, and I hugged him back.
“Is he going to be alright?” Sebastian asked. “Any long-term problems?”
“He’s in a great deal of pain – after all, the fractured ribs move any time he breathes – but we’ve got him on heavy pain medication. It’ll take about six to eight weeks for him to heal fully. Barring any complications with the kidney and nerve tissues, he should be back to normal after two months.”
“Can we see him?” I asked.
“Are you family?”
Sebastian spoke first. “I’m Mr. Templeton’s personal assistant. I help run his business empire.”
“I’m sorry, but he’s still in the trauma ward. No one but family is allowed while he’s in there.”
When the doctor said that, my stomach dropped. There was no way I could see him.
“But I’m one of his closest friends,” Sebastian protested.
“I’m sorry, it’s California law.”
“John Inaba got to go with your colleagues – ”
“If you’re referring to the gentleman with the gun, he insisted there was an assassination attempt and that he was guarding against a second attempt on Mr. Templeton’s life, is that correct?”
“Yes,” Sebastian said grudgingly.
“He had proper identification as a licensed bodyguard, and that’s why the doctor on duty allowed him to accompany them, but even then, he’s stationed outside the trauma room.” Dr. Sarpara turned to me. “What is your relation to the patient?”
As he asked, I could see him peering closely at my face. He’d probably seen my pictures on television.
Great.
I opened my mouth, but before I could say anything –
“His wife,” Sebastian interrupted.
I stared up at him in shock.
The doctor frowned and consulted his clipboard. “We were told he was single.”
“It was a secret ceremony, which is why neither she nor Connor are wearing rings. In light of the sex scandal – I’m sure you heard about that – no one’s supposed to know about the wedding, so I hope we can count on your discretion,” Sebastian said with a great deal of solemnity.
The doctor’s eyes widened. “Of course, of course. Well, um… Mrs. Templeton, if you’ll follow me, I’ll take you to him. He’s unconscious right now because of the pain medication, but you can sit with him for a short while.”
“Can you give us a minute?” I asked, gesturing to Sebastian.
“Just a minute. I need to get back.”
“It’ll just take a second, thanks,” I smiled.
As soon as the doctor was outside the lounge doors, I turned on Sebastian.
“His wife?! Really?!” I hissed.
“They won’t let you in otherwise,” Sebastian whispered back.
“What happens when
they find out we’re not married?!”
“By then he’ll be in a regular room. Go – I want somebody with him, now go.”
“You get to explain this to Connor when he wakes up,” I whispered harshly.
“Fine!” Sebastian hissed as I walked out the door and found the doctor.
7
When we got to the trauma room, Johnny was standing outside, his face pale. As soon as he saw me, he beamed – and then, just as quickly, his expression grew bewildered.
“Lily, what are you doing here? They told me nobody but family could in.”
I went over and hugged him – mostly so the doctor couldn’t see my face, only a couple of inches away from Johnny’s. I widened my eyes and grimaced like Dude, play along!
“It’s okay, the doctor knows about the secret wedding,” I said calmly. “He promised not to tell anybody that Connor and I got married in secret.”
Johnny looked at me, blank-faced… and then the light went off in his eyes. He looked over at the doctor. “You can’t tell anybody, sir,” he said sternly.
Attaboy, Johnny!
“Don’t worry, I won’t,” Dr. Sarpara assured him.
“Okay,” Johnny said, then gave me a brief smile.
“Just a couple of minutes,” Dr. Sarpara said as he held the door open and I slipped inside.
8
I almost started crying again as soon as I entered the dimly lit room.
Connor was lying in a hospital bed, dressed in a flimsy hospital gown and his eyes closed. He was hooked up to a ton of machines, and the gentle beep… beep of an EKG machine filled the silence. There was an IV with clear fluid taped to his arm.
He looked peaceful. For that, I was grateful.
I sat down next to him in a chair and held his hand with both of mine.
“Connor, can you hear me?” I whispered.
There was no sound but the beeping of the heart monitor.
There were so many things I wanted to say to him… and now that he couldn’t hear me, couldn’t talk back… now was the only time I had the courage to say them.
All That He Loves (Volume 2 The Billionaires Seduction) Page 29