by Lexi Cross
“That’s great, Brooke. So I guess you haven’t heard the news,” she said.
“The news?” What kind of news could have put a damper on my victory over the board? There were only two things I could have imagined. It involved either my father or Jake. One of them was hurt, or worse. Was she about to tell me why I hadn’t heard from Jake?
“There was an accident,” she said.
I was immediately seized by a sense of dread. I sat down in my father’s seat at the table. The lingering smell of men’s cologne and tobacco made me think of my father. It reminded me of the way his office smelled in his house.
“Jake is in the hospital. Oh God, Brooke, the pictures they showed of the car on the news made it look horrible,” she said.
I didn’t say anything. I wanted to leave right then. I wanted to turn on the news. I wanted to run away from all of it and forget things had even happened between us.
“Have they said anything about his condition?” I asked, my mind switching to autopilot.
“They said he’s in stable condition, whatever that really means,” Hollie said.
“I should go see him,” I told her.
“They also said he’s not accepting visitors,” she cautioned me.
“I’m also still his fiancée. He’ll see me,” I told her, confident that I wouldn’t have any trouble getting in to see Jake if I went down to the hospital.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I lied. Even I could hear the flat tone in my voice.
“If you decide to go down there to see him, good luck getting in, and don’t freak out when you see him,” Hollie added.
“I’ll be okay,” I assured her.
“Okay, but call me if you need anything.”
“Will do. Wait, where is he?”
“ICU, from what they said on the news. Are you sure you don’t want me to at least drive you over there?” she asked.
I thought about her offer for a moment before politely declining yet again. I felt like Jake’s accident was one of those things I just wanted to take time to process alone instead of having someone there with me.
“Okay, just keep in touch,” she said before disconnecting the call.
I hurried back to my office, where I had a small flat-screen TV in the wall. I turned it on to see what was on the news about him. Sure enough, like she said, there was a horrifying picture of a Ferrari completely destroyed by whatever had happened to it. They were saying he rolled the car on the interstate after having too much to drink the other night and that he’d been in hospital since the day before.
That explained why he hadn’t been back home in two nights. I had been sleeping in his bed, hoping that he would come home and find me there. I had been afraid he had just left me. I had actually started to wonder if his house staff had been tipping him off to my presence so that he didn’t come home to find me there.
I felt horrible for assuming he had just been avoiding me. That hadn’t been it at all. He’d been in the hospital, and I hadn’t even known. We were supposed to be letting each other know where we were, and the one time he ran off without letting me know, he wound up in trouble. Watching the images of the car on the news, I felt so helpless. I felt like there wasn’t anything I could do for him.
“Well, you’re not going to do anything standing in here,” I told myself. I turned off the TV and hurried down to the parking deck. I rushed over to the hospital. I wasn’t sure where to enter, so I took the closest door to the parking garage there.
“Can I help you?” the nurse behind the counter asked as I walked in.
Inside, the hospital was immaculate. It always surprised me how clean they kept the hospital. The floors always looked like they’d just been freshly waxed. The air even felt clean, but it was that creepy, recently-cleaned restroom kind of freshness. It seemed like there was something just underneath the clean smell, like the smell of babies. Everyone knew that the baby smell was just barely covering up spit-up and dirty diapers. The hospital was the same way. The spotless cleanliness of the hospital felt the exact same way.
“Can I help you?” the nurse repeated, bringing me back out of my head.
“I’m here to see Jake Hall. He’s in ICU. I’m his fiancée, Brooke Scott,” I told her, dumping everything I thought she needed in order to let me in.
She looked down at a computer screen behind the counter and tapped on a couple of keys on the keyboard. “Okay, if you will, have a seat please. The doctor will be out to see you momentarily.”
She walked away from the counter, leaving me to find a seat in the waiting room. Everyone in hospital waiting rooms always looked so sad to me. They were either sick or injured themselves, or waiting for news of a loved one who was sick or injured in the back. I took a seat to wait for the doctor to call me back to see Jake.
I didn’t have to wait long. A wide, wooden door opened a few minutes later, and a doctor appeared through it in blue scrubs.
“Ms. Scott,” he called, looking around the room, unsure of which person I was.
I stood up and walked towards him.
“Right this way, please,” he said, leading me through the door and into a small consultation room aside from the waiting room.
“What’s going on?” I asked as he closed the door behind us.
“Mr. Hall isn’t receiving visitors right now. That’s his request, but he did tell me to update you on his condition,” the doctor said in his reassuring tone
“No, that’s not going to do. I demand to see him. It’s imperative that I see him,” I said, raising my voice.
“I can talk to him for you, Ms. Scott, but there’s not much I can do to make him want to see you right now. If he requests no visitors, I’m going to honor that request, since visitation is a courtesy anyway. Only immediate family would be able to exercise any rights over that, and you two are not married currently, correct?” I could see the pleasure in his eyes that he took from putting me in my place.
“Fine. Talk to him for me. Tell him it’s about our marriage and my father,” I said. “That will probably make him want to see me.”
“Well, I will caution you against anything that may bring undue stress upon him right now. His condition is stable at the moment, but he’s been through hell to get there,” the doctor told me.
“I want to see for myself. I need to see him,” I insisted.
“Okay. Wait right here. I’ll be back.” He got up to leave the room, leaving the door cracked behind him. He said something to a nurse in the hallway in a hushed voice before heading down to hopefully talk to Jake for me.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Jake
“She’s not leaving,” the doctor told me.
“Then I guess she doesn’t mind waiting,” I said with gravel in my throat.
“She says it’s about her father and the wedding,” he added.
My curiosity was piqued. I wondered what kind of news she could have had on her father or the wedding to make her bold enough to continue to wait even though she’d been told I didn’t want to see her. I wanted to tell the doctor to send her away, but I also wanted to know what it was she had to say.
My curiosity got the best of me and won out.
“Send her back,” I said with a sigh. It was something I probably needed to know, so I wasn’t going to deny her the opportunity to share her news with me.
When Brooke came back a few minutes later, she looked stunning. She wore a business suit, like she usually did, but it fit her body just right, showing off all her subtle, teasing curves. Her blonde hair spilled over her shoulders, and her blue, watery eyes stared at me, filled with concern. I wanted to come out of the bed and take her right there in the hospital room, but there was no way I could manage that.
Instead, I smiled, which I felt was the absolute least I could do. It also felt like the most she really deserved after talking about cancelling the wedding and letting her father run her life.
“I hear you
have some news,” I said.
“I do, and it’s good news.” Her eyes sparkled, and her smile lit up the room as she spoke. The room was already pretty bright, with its immaculate white walls and floor, and the blue-white fluorescent lighting, but she lit it up in a different way, warming it.
“Well, are you going to tell me?” I wasn’t feeling as impatient as I sounded, but I didn’t want her to know how happy I was to see her. She didn’t deserve that. I was still upset with her.
“The board has agreed to go ahead and make me the majority shareholder without having to follow any of my father’s conditions for taking the company,” she said softly.
“That’s great. That’s what you wanted, right? Not to have to get married.” A weight lifted off of my shoulders. I was free of prenuptial agreements and permanent solutions to temporary problems. I could finally get back to the guys and the lifestyle I knew. Since I wasn’t going to be on the field anymore, I didn’t see any reason to continue keeping up the role model charade.
“Right. I get the company on my own, and we can ditch all the talk about fake marriages and staged relationships,” she said.
“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” I told her. “I’m actually relieved not to have to go through with all of that now.”
“If you need me to stay your girlfriend for the team, I can still do that,” she added quickly as an afterthought, realizing what her news meant for us.
She stepped up to the side of the bed and took my hand in hers. Her touch was gentle, but her grip on my hand was firm and passionate.
“I don’t think that will be necessary at this point,” I said, trying not to tell her too much. I wanted it to sound like I was letting her go because of her news, not because I wasn’t going to be playing anymore.
“Are you sure?” She gave me a look with her eyes that suggested she didn’t want to walk away completely from our arrangement just yet.
“You’re going to be busy,” I told her. “You’ve got a company to take over.”
“I do, don’t I?” She looked proud of herself. She had every right to be.
Hell, I was proud of her. It was good to see her taking charge and doing things herself, her way, instead of letting her father call all the shots.
“So how is it going to work? Are they just going to transfer the shares over, or do you have to buy them?” I asked.
“They’re going to transfer enough shares to make me the majority shareholder, but my father is going to keep some of them. I’m considering buying the rest from him through the company,” she explained.
“Well, if you need any money to purchase shares, I’ll be happy to help you out and front you the cash,” I offered.
“Thanks, but that may not be necessary.”
“Well, if it is, I’ll help,” I reiterated, my discomfort and impatience becoming obvious.
“Jake, are you okay?” she asked in a low tone.
“Other than lying in a hospital bed waiting on the team physicians to come up and let me know if I can play again, I’m doing just fine, Brooke.”
“I’m really sorry about the other night,” she said, turning her eyes down toward the floor. “I said some pretty awful things.”
“You thought your father was going to take all of this away from you, and that’s understandable. But it sounds like you’ve found a way around him, so that’s good. You don’t need to blow a bunch of money on a fake wedding, and you’re going to be too busy to keep up a front for me,” I explained to her. I wanted to go ahead and break it off with her, but I didn’t know how to say it. I was trying to let her down easily.
“What are you saying, Jake? Are you calling it all off? What are you going to do when the team wants to see you with someone steady on your arm?” she asked, rattling her questions off in rapid succession.
“I’ll figure something out.”
“Jake,” she said, demanding answers with her tone and the expression on her face. I could see in her blue eyes that she didn’t like what I was saying to her.
“Look, Brooke, I’m going to be very busy with my recovery once I get out of here. I’m sure you can tell by looking at me that I roughed myself up pretty badly with this accident,” I started.
“I saw the pictures of the car,” she said. “You’re lucky to be alive.”
“Tell me about it. I’m going to need to focus on my recovery. They’re saying I might not be able to play again. When I got hurt on the field, they were already concerned about that injury, but the injuries I’ve put on top of it from the accident may have pushed me across that line. If there is any chance I can get back on the field, it’s going to take a lot of work on my part. If not, I’m going to have to focus on changing the direction of my career,” I explained to her, hoping she would get the point that I was trying to get her to back off.
“I can help you with all of that,” she insisted. A few days ago, that would have been a very welcome response, but now, not so much. I didn’t want anything to do with her after our last conversation.
She was ignoring the fact that she needed to put all of her energy into her father’s company, and I needed to put all of mine into getting back on my feet and back on the field. I needed to make her see that, and in a way that she wouldn’t be able to ignore any longer.
“I appreciate your offer, Brooke, but I really think this is the end of the road for us,” I said finally, just putting it out there plain as day for her.
“Even though it doesn’t have to be.”
I admired the fight in her. I knew it was that kind of fight, that determination and perseverance that had eventually won over her father’s board.
I sighed. I didn’t want to continue arguing with her about it. I had made up my mind. It was time to call it quits. She didn’t need to get married, and I probably wasn’t going to need to impress anyone with a steady girlfriend anytime in the near future.
“I think it has to be,” I told her, infusing my words with a sense of finality. There was no point in continuing to try to fight me on this. I wasn’t going to budge.
“I think you’re wrong, Jake,” Brooke continued.
If she had fought this much when we were in high school, we probably would have already been married, I thought, but I kept it to myself. I didn’t want to offer her any false encouragement.
“Thank you for coming by to check on me today. It means a lot,” I said in response.
“Are you dismissing me?” she snapped.
“Remember, if you need anything, just give me a call,” I added, ignoring her protests.
“I can’t believe this. No, I don’t think I’ll need anything from you. Even if I did, I’d find someone else to help me. You’re obviously through with me. Again. That’s fine.” She sighed and took her hand back from mine.
She struggled to maintain her composure. Her blue eyes looked like they were about to spill over onto her cheeks. She scowled, trying to keep a straight face and fight back the tears. I didn’t say anything while I watched her emotions play with her expression and posture.
She exhaled and pushed her hand down on the side of the hospital bed. She shook her head, looking down at the floor. I knew I was going to regret my decision once she left the room, but I also knew she’d forget about it as soon as she returned to work and started working on the transitional period with her father’s company.
“Good luck with your recovery,” she said finally, still looking away from me. Her voice trembled as she barely held it together long enough to speak.
I felt a pain in my chest as I watched her wait for a response that I never gave her. She cleared her throat once she realized I wasn’t going to say anything. Then she straightened her back and turned to leave without another word.
I had to convince myself not to call out for her, that it was best to just let her go. I had nothing to offer to make her stay anyway. My future in the game was up in the air. I didn’t know where I really stood with the guys in the network, which really put a k
ink in the money I had been making over the years. Back before all of this with Brooke and trying to create Mr. Clark’s positive image for the team, the guys never would have left me to my own devices after getting as drunk as I had the other night. I felt like I was on the way out with them as well. If Brooke hung around, she’d have to watch me fall in disgrace.
I took a deep, steadying breath and pushed back all of my emotions for her. I did need to focus on moving forward with recovery and trying to find any possible way I could manage to get back on the field. I needed to forget about Brooke Scott. We had walked away from each other once before and it hadn’t caused any disastrous consequences in our lives. I couldn’t see why this time would be any different.