She drifted. It was cold, but it wasn’t that bad. Better than the pain. Much better.
“WE’RE losing her!”
Cullen heard the paramedic’s grim voice, and he fought his way through the medics and the federal agents. When Jones’s team had shown up, the agents had been forced to tear Cullen away so the medics could get to her.
But now, nothing in hell was going to keep him away. He fought free, and when one of the men tried to grab him, he struck out. Pain flared up his arm, but he never noticed as he ran to Taige. Falling to his knees by her head, he cupped her face, bent down, and kissed her.
They tried to pull him again, but he wouldn’t leave. “Come on, baby. Don’t do this to me,” he pleaded, pressing a desperate kiss to her cold lips.
“Sir, you have to get away. Let us . . .”
“No.” The woman’s voice was strong and certain. “Damn it, give him a minute. I can feel her.”
Cullen didn’t even have the time to be grateful. The medics argued, but when the woman refused to back down, the rest of the agents gathered around, keeping them from Cullen.
“Taige, you’re stronger than this,” he whispered, cradling her face. Dipping his head, he buried his face in her hair. Through the stink of blood and sweat, he could still smell her, soft and sweet. Her skin was cold, frighteningly so. She was . . . No. Don’t think it. He couldn’t think it.
“Don’t leave me, Taige. God, I love you so much.”
CULLEN had gotten used to the incessant noise of the hospital equipment. He even took comfort in the high-pitched little beep. It was strong, it was regular. Taige’s heart continued to beat. The trip to the hospital was one that was going to live on in his nightmares. Twice, they’d lost her.
Twice, they had been forced to shock her heart back into beating, and each time it had happened when one of the medics tried to force Cullen to give them a little room. The second time they’d been forced to revive her, Cullen had looked at one of the medics and said, “You want me to move again, you’re going to have to kill me to do it.”
That had been three days ago. Although the medical staff hadn’t been forced to revive her since arriving at the hospital, she continued to linger in a coma.
Cullen and four of the agents on the scene had donated blood. She hovered between life and death, and Cullen was right there with her.
“Daddy?”
He heard that soft, hesitant little voice, and he looked up, felt his heart squeeze in his chest as Jillian peered into the room. Cullen’s dad stood behind her. They both heard the nurse’s quiet voice, and Robert went to intercept the nurse as the woman said, “Sir, there are no children allowed in here.”
Cullen tuned out the sound of his father’s cajoling voice and reached out a hand to Jillian. “Hey, baby.”
She glanced at Taige, her eyes huge and round in her face. “She looks different.”
Yeah, she did. Taige’s skin had a strange grayish cast, but she looked better today than she had yesterday. At least that was what he told himself. “She’s just sick, darlin’. She’s going to be just fine.” Silently, he added, She has to be.
Jillian nodded. She glanced back at her grandfather and then at Cullen. “Granpa didn’t want to bring me up here. But I had to see you.”
“I’m glad you came, Jilly.” He forced himself to smile. “You want to say something to her?”
“Will she hear me?”
Blowing out a sigh, he murmured, “I think she does. I hope she does.” Managing a faint grin, he murmured, “I sure do hope she hears me, because I’ve been talking to her a lot.”
Jillian eye’s widened. “You never talk a lot.” Nervous, she edged a little closer to the bed and then reached up, brushed her fingers over Taige’s arm. It was the only part of her visible that wasn’t covered with tubes, bandages, or wires. “She helped you find the bad man, didn’t she?”
“Yeah.” His throat went tight, and his voice was barely more than a whisper. “Yeah, she did.”
With a solemn nod, Jillian said, “Now he can’t hurt anybody again, right?” Without waiting for an answer, she shimmied a little closer to Taige’s head. Cullen reached out for her to pull her away from the machines, but she didn’t bump into either of them, and she carefully sidestepped all the tubes and wires. “Thank you, Taige.”
TAIGE heard that soft little whisper. It brushed across her subconscious like a soft breeze, warm and comforting.
She thought she recognized the voice, but it was so damn hard to think. So hard to feel, so hard to even force herself into some state of semiawareness. She’d been fighting to wake for what seemed like ages, and she just couldn’t do it.
Taige couldn’t open her eyes, couldn’t even move. She wanted to, but any time she gained the strength to reach out, exhaustion rose up and pulled her away before she could make contact. The weight of that exhaustion killed her purpose, and she’d have to rest before she had the energy to try again.
There were people all around her, but the only one she was really aware of was Cullen. He’d been there since the beginning. When she’d felt herself fading away, it had been Cullen who pulled her back. A few times, something or somebody had tried to take him away, and she’d felt her hold on reality slip again, felt herself falling away.
He’d forced himself back to her side each time, and she knew if it wasn’t for him, she would have drifted away altogether, off into the gray, until she grew smaller and smaller and then just faded entirely. Cullen wouldn’t let her, though. All around her, she could feel his strength, smell his skin, hear his voice.
She needed to touch him, though. Needed to . . .
EVER since Taige had been brought to the hospital, bleeding and hovering near death, he had lived on catnaps, vending machine coffee, and stale sandwiches. It had been exactly seven days since he had stood by, helpless, as her uncle shot her. Seven days since Cullen had killed a man with his bare hands.
His eyes were gritty with exhaustion, his entire body clumsy with fatigue, and his stomach was so knotted up that he doubted he could keep a meal down should he try something beyond the stale sandwiches the hospital cafeteria specialized in.
Tired as he was, he wouldn’t let himself sleep. He couldn’t really sleep. Not until Taige woke up. He was terrified to leave her side for more than a couple of minutes. Couldn’t do it. Although logically he knew that the danger was mostly over, he still couldn’t tear himself away for longer than it took to go to the bathroom or take a quick shower.
He ate by her bed, he slept next to her, and when the nurses came in to care for her, he stood at her side and watched them like a hawk to make sure they didn’t hurt her. After the first day, they’d given up trying to get him to give them some privacy. They’d argued and threatened to call security, but in the end, none of them pushed it beyond a lost argument.
One or two of the smarter nurses had started waiting until they knew he was either grabbing a sandwich or using the phone in the family lounge to call home so he could check on Jilly. While he was gone, they’d slip in, do their work in speed and silence, and when Cullen returned, Taige would be sleeping in fresh sheets with her bandages changed.
“You really should lie down.”
Cullen, foggy and half out of it, didn’t process what the nurse said until nearly a minute after she had said his name. She was young, pretty, and he suspected she was fresh out of college. Muffling a yawn, he just shrugged.
“What if I had a cot brought in?” she offered.
It wasn’t the first time he’d been offered a cot. He started to make his normal refusal, but then he realized he was drifting off, even in the middle of trying to form some sort of coherent response. Shit, he did need a nap. A nap of the horizontal variety and not in that torture device of a chair. “Yeah.” Before he could change his mind, he nodded again, “Yeah, I’ll take a cot so long as they can put it in here. I’m not leaving her.”
The nurse smiled. Her teeth flashed white against the darkness of
her skin, and her eyes were bright with amusement. “You haven’t left her side since they brought her up here. I didn’t figure you were going to leave now.”
A nap.
A real nap.
He leaned forward and closed his hand around Taige’s. “You need to come on back now, Taige.” It was early in the afternoon yet, but he figured he had less than an hour before Jones or one of the other jerk offs in the Bureau showed up. Jones was persistent. He showed up like clockwork every day at four, only moments after Jilly and Robert came by to bring him clothes. Cullen half suspected that Jones was following Jilly and her grandfather. Cullen knew damn well how persistent Jones had been getting with Jilly, and when he saw the bastard today, he was going to make sure Jones understood that it had to stop.
Just a quick nap, and he’d be ready to face all of it: the well-meaning, intrusive nurses, the impersonal doctors, the agents who came by singly or in small groups of two or three, not to mention Jilly and her grandfather. Ready to face another day that didn’t really include Taige. The only contact he’d had with her was holding her hand or brushing her hair back from her face.
The nurses wouldn’t let him help with anything. If he tried to so much as change her blanket, they showed up. He was starting to think the linen closet was bugged, and that’s how they always knew when he was trying to either change a blanket or give her a pillow. Hell, even move the bed around a little. Granted, he didn’t really need to do any damn thing, because the nurses were taking good care of her. Even Cullen couldn’t fault their care. But just sitting there was driving him nuts.
The lack of sleep wasn’t helping. The worry and lingering fear over seeing her go down, blood blossoming on the front of her shirt like a vicious rose—that was really driving him nuts. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw it again, but it was getting harder . . . and harder . . .
It dropped down on him like a meteor crashing to earth, fast and unstoppable. One minute he was thinking about that quick nap and how much good it might do him, and the next, he was under. Arms folded across his chest, legs stretched out and crossed at his ankles, his chin tucked against his chest, Cullen slept.
Out in the hallway, the nurse paused at the door, the supplies she needed for rebandaging her patient’s various injuries already out and ready on the treatment cart she pushed in front of her. The sight of the man, though, sound asleep in that damned uncomfortable chair had her stopping in her tracks. She heard the squeak of wheels behind her and looked up to see one of the housekeeping staff pushing a folded-up cot down the hallway. She held up a hand, and he stopped. “Just leave it there,” she said, keeping her voice low.
The guy finally crashes, there was no way she was going to wake him up just yet. Wasn’t like the cot would be much more comfortable than the chair, anyway. She glanced at her chart, gauged the time. Ms. Branch’s wounds were healing well enough, and she could hold off an hour before she changed the bandages.
That hour wasn’t much. This man looked like he needed a week horizontal. During shift changes, the nurses had talked about their unusual ICU patient. They didn’t get too many patients come in with a collapsed lung, an injury from a whip, and an escort that consisted of federal agents and a best-selling fantasy author.
A bestselling author who hadn’t left the patient’s side for more than ten minutes at a stretch, and then only to get food or call and check on his daughter. A bestselling author who was currently sleeping by the patient’s bed and, to her knowledge, this was the first time he’d done more than catnap for five or ten minutes.
This was no catnap. Already his chest was moving in the slow, steady rhythm of deep sleep. Since he hadn’t woken up at the sound of the cot’s squeaky arrival, she figured he wasn’t going to wake up for a little while, not until he rested some or she woke him up.
No, an hour wasn’t much, but it was the best she could do right now. Too bad he hadn’t waited until after she’d changed the dressings on Ms. Branch’s wounds. He could have managed two or three hours before shift change.
EVEN before Cullen opened his eyes, he knew he was dreaming.
Instead of the steady beep of hospital machinery, he heard the crash of waves into the sand. Instead of the cool air that smelled faintly of antiseptic, he could smell the ocean and the scents of summer: hot sand and sunscreen.
Yeah, he knew he was dreaming, but still he panicked. The sound of the heart monitors was the only thing that kept him sane right then, and not hearing them was enough to have his own heart speeding up in panic.
Body braced, he opened his eyes.
And then he sagged.
Taige.
She stood staring out over the blue green waters of the Gulf, her arms crossed over her chest, her hair blowing back from her face. Incongruously, she still wore one of those ugly, utilitarian hospital gowns. It flapped around her body, a body that was too thin and battered.
The sight of her was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, and once more, the panic inside him welled up.
Shit—she wasn’t . . .
Stop it! She hadn’t survived those first hours only to die now. Still, when he finally opened his mouth to speak, he had to clear his throat twice, and his voice cracked on him. “Taige?”
For a second, she didn’t respond, and then she turned her head and looked at him over her shoulder. “Hey.” A faint grin curled her lips. “You look like hell.”
“You look beautiful.” And he meant it. It didn’t matter that her hair was tangled, that she still had that dull, grayish cast to her skin, or that she looked like she needed a month’s worth of decent, home-cooked meals. She looked absolutely beautiful to him.
Her grin spread into a full-out smirk, and she laughed. Plucking her hospital gown away from her chest, she gave it a disgusted look. “Yeah, I bet. I look ready to walk down a runway, don’t I?”
That wry, self-deprecating humor finally managed to break through the ice surrounding him. He crossed the sand in four long strides and grabbed her, not thinking about the injuries that had put her in the hospital bed. These were dreams—sort of. Whatever was physically hurting her didn’t really exist here.
Pain of the nonphysical variety was different, though. Cullen knew it for a fact, because he had a very real, very huge ache centered square in his chest, taking up the void that had been his heart ever since she’d gotten shot. “My God,” he muttered, burying his face in her hair. “I’ve been so damn scared . . .”
He wouldn’t say it, though. Saying it made it real. Until she actually woke up and talked to him, that was more reality than he could handle. Even after she woke up, he suspected that would be too much.
She cuddled into him, her hands curling into his T-shirt. “I’m okay.”
“You’re in a damn coma. That’s pretty damn far from okay,” Cullen gritted out. Finally able to touch her, even in a dream, he hadn’t thought he’d pull away from her so quick, but he did, leaning back just enough so he could see her face. “You died on us three damn times.”
“I know.” That plain, simple statement froze him clear to down to his feet. “Close to four, I think.” She reached up, touched her fingers to his mouth. “But I heard you. You kept calling me, and you just wouldn’t let go.”
Wrapping his arms around her, he said, “I’m not going to, either. Ever. So you might as well wake up.”
He pressed his forehead against hers and whispered, “Come on, Taige. You need to wake up, baby.”
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