She blinked, looking as if she’d been caught off guard.
He didn’t know why.
Everybody knew he had a temper.
Granted, he rarely let it out around her.
She inclined her head and gestured to the seat. “You shouldn’t be on your feet. You still look wobbly.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass if I end up passing out, so long as you tell me.”
“How about you sit down,” she suggested. “Then I’ll tell you. It seems like it would make more sense that way.”
Slowly, he lowered himself into the chair, but he was ready to get up and grab her, shake her silly this time, if she didn’t start talking.
To his relief, he didn’t have to put himself to the test and see if he could even walk over there just yet. Charli started to talk.
“As you likely know, no birth control is one-hundred-percent foolproof,” she said, lifting one shoulder in a shrug. “The condom must have leaked, or something. I have no idea. But the week before I left for Mexico, I had...spontaneously aborted. The baby was yours.”
“I’m not questioning that,” he said in a low voice. He remembered how tight she’d been. How hot. How sweet. He remembered everything—how she’d begged, how she’d pleaded for him not to stop even though everything in him told him that was what he needed to do. “What happened? You’re holding back.”
Her lashes drifted down. After a moment, she hitched a shoulder in a shrug. “It’s not anything you need to worry about. I was having cramps—had been having them for several days, but that day they were getting worse. We had a...difficult patient come into the ER. Psych admit. He was violent. I was trying to give him some medication to help with the hallucinations he was having and he managed to get an arm free. He punched me.” She swallowed, looking away. “I had to go get checked out. Halfway through the exam, the cramping got worse. I...I lost the baby.”
“What else?” He tightened the hand that lay in his lap into a fist as he watched her. He’d always watched Charli and he knew when she was keeping secrets. There were secrets in her eyes now.
Those steely blue eyes flashed at him. “You know enough.”
“I don’t know it all, Charli,” he said implacably. “I want it all.”
“You always have,” she whispered, looking away.
He frowned, not sure what she meant by that, but before he could ask, she started to talk again. “I had to have surgery, okay?” She got up and pulled her sweatshirt up, tugging down the waistband of her jeans at the same time. There it was, a bright pink, slightly puckered scar on the lower left side of her abdomen. “It was an ectopic pregnancy and the ovary had ruptured. They don’t know if it was the trouble from the fall or what.”
“What fall?” Shame demanded.
“I...” She huffed out a breath. “When that bastard hit me, it was hard enough to knock me down. I tripped over a table and fell down, banged myself up, okay? He was a big guy.” She let go of her shirt and pants, letting her clothes settle back into place as she slid into her seat. With a deprecating sweep of her hand, she added, “As you already know, I am not particularly big. He might as well have been throwing punches at a rag doll. I went down pretty hard.”
His mind was spinning. How much of it had to do with his ever-present headache and how much had to do with what Charli was telling him, Shame didn’t know, but it was like somebody had put his brain on the Tilt-A-Whirl. He’d very much like to get off, but that wasn’t happening.
Slowly, he got to his feet and paced away, over to the kitchen counter where he could brace himself if he had to. “What’s an ectopic pregnancy... Is that one of those tubal pregnancies?” he asked, voice gritty.
She’d been pregnant.
He hadn’t known.
“Yes,” she said, her voice soft. “I didn’t even know until it happened.”
“Guess that’s why you didn’t tell me,” he said, keeping the bitterness out of his tone by sheer will alone.
“I tried.” She threw her hair back over one shoulder, her blue eyes cutting into his. “There was a day when I called you three times in under an hour. You never called me back. I called you because I wanted you there—I needed you. But you didn’t answer, and they couldn’t wait on the surgery.”
He half stumbled. Forced to grip the counter to stay upright, he gaped at her, searching for words. He remembered, of course, the day she was talking about. He’d been hung over, shit-faced to be exact, and when the phone had rung, he’d thrown it away from him as if it had been a snake about to attack.
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re always sorry, Max, you know that?” She sighed, and when he turned to look at her, she was staring out one of the windows into the backyard. “It wasn’t a real pregnancy. Part of me knows that in here...” She touched her head. Then she moved her hand to her heart. “Here’s a different story. Tubal pregnancies never survive. They can’t. But that doesn’t change what could have been.”
“You wouldn’t want my baby, Charli,” he said gruffly.
Oh, was that the wrong thing to say.
She erupted out of the chair—a supernova ready to explode.
Storming toward him, hair streaming back from her face, she glared at him with snapping eyes. “You don’t get to tell me what I’d want, Max.” She jabbed him in the chest, leaning up so she could all but sneer the words into his face. “You hear me? You don’t know shit about what I want. What I’ve always wanted. And you don’t know shit about what I lost that day, so just shut the fuck up already.”
She turned away and moved off before he could reach out for her. He damned the clumsiness of his mouth, the slowness of his hands. It was obvious the loss of the pregnancy had hurt her. He could see that. But...
Who would want his baby?
His DNA was beyond fucked up.
“You can get pregnant again, Charli.”
She laughed, the sound high and wild. “You think it’s that easy?” She turned to glare at him, her eyes full of tears and misery. “No, Shame. It’s not that fucking easy. My right ovary is messed up, thank you. It’s covered in cysts and it might have to be removed. I lost the left one the day I had surgery—they had to take it out. So...no, getting pregnant isn’t just that easy. And contrary to what you think, it’s not like I’m just going to go out and shack up with anybody. You don’t get it. I love you. I’ve always loved you.”
“Charli...” He lifted a hand, floundering now as he so often did with her.
You’re wrong, he wanted to say.
Tell me again.
You can’t love me.
Please don’t stop.
But he didn’t say any of those things and Charli didn’t wait for him to decide on what to say.
“Now...you are going to get your sorry ass dressed, Max.” She smoothed her hands over her hair, then down her sides. “You and I are going to the hospital. I think it’s safe to say you owe me after all of this, don’t you agree?”
“You always did know how to twist the knife, didn’t you, Char?”
She said nothing, just sat down at the table and looked at her watch. “You’ve got twenty minutes. If you fall on your face, I’m calling Con.”
Chapter Nineteen
Charli
“DID YOU HEAR WHAT I said?”
Max sat on the bed, staring outside.
To her unending surprise, he’d agreed to stay in the hospital until they finished the tests. Thanks to the IV antibiotics, his fever had gone down and the wound from the knife was looking better.
He, too, looked surprisingly...fine.
He shouldn’t look fine, not after what she’d just told him.
It had taken several days’ worth of tests and consultations—not to mention her avoiding all phone calls from her brothers and camping out here at the hospital, because if she talked to them, they’d know something was wrong.
But they did have an answer. Finally.
It was a scary-ass answer, but a treatabl
e one. She’d started out with that, so he’d know and understand what they were dealing with, but the calm expression on his face was unnerving.
He shouldn’t look calm after being told something like that.
Nobody should be calm after being told something like that.
And yet Max sat there with a blank face and impassive eyes.
It wasn’t his normal mask, either.
She knew when he was wearing a mask.
That wasn’t what this was.
It was almost as if what she’d said didn’t affect him.
That scared the hell out of her, because it had to affect him.
“Max?”
He met her eyes and shrugged lopsidedly. “I heard you, Charli. I’ll think about it and figure out what I want to do, okay?”
“What do you mean, you’ll figure out what you want to do?” she demanded. “We need to start treatment. Like immediately.”
She’d already spoken to the right doctors and they were in the process of ordering the treatments, although they had yet to speak with Max themselves. She rather thought he unnerved them, which was a typical response for him to evoke. They needed to get their asses together, though, and do their jobs.
He skimmed a hand over his hair before focusing on her face. “It’s kind of up to me to decide if I want to start treatment, isn’t it?”
Charli opened, then closed, her mouth. That was one thing that hadn’t occurred to her.
“You do realize we’re talking cancer, right? You have Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Max. It’s progressing. It wants to kill you. I’d rather it not do that,” she said, her voice rising with every passing word.
Max’s frown as he glanced at her pissed her off. “You certain that if I don’t treat it, I’ll end up dead?”
“Yes!” Frustrated, she shoved a hand back through her hair and spun away to pace. “It’s treatable...right now. And if you get treatment, you’ve got a good shot at living a nice healthy life. But if you don’t fight it? This cancer wants to kill you.”
“And you’re certain,” he said, seemingly disconnected.
“Didn’t I just say that?” She practically shouted the words at him and had to make a concerted effort to calm herself down. “Like ninety-nine-point-nine-percent certain! Cancer doesn’t much care if you’re young or old, if you’ve got money or not, if you’ve had a shitty life or not. It just sort of likes fucking with people and you’re next up to play. So we have to fuck with it before it takes you out of the game,” Charli snapped.
Max sighed and the gray T-shirt he wore stretched across his wide shoulders with the movement.
She wanted to grab him and shake him.
“I told you I’d think about it,” he said, still sounding so...distant.
“Will you explain to me what there is to think about?”
His blue gaze came to hers and for a moment, she didn’t think he’d answer. He did, though, surprisingly. When he was done, she almost wished he hadn’t said anything.
Shaken to the core of her soul, she shook her head and backed toward the door. “I...” But she couldn’t finish her sentence. The words were stuck in her throat, trapped there. Turning on her heel, she stormed out. She was halfway down the hall when she crashed into a hard, heavy chest.
Dazed, she looked up and found herself staring into familiar hazel-brown eyes.
“Ry,” she said.
“Where the fuck have you been?” he demanded.
Unable to keep it inside anymore, Charli burst into tears.
It took almost twenty minutes for her to stop crying, another ten for her to speak coherently, and even then, she couldn’t talk to them. Connor had been a few feet behind his big brother and he’d looked just as pissed off as Riley had sounded, but now his anger was somewhat shrouded by confusion and fear.
He was still pissed, though.
Both of them were.
And it didn’t help that when they kept pressing her to tell them what was wrong, all she could offer was, “I’m not allowed to discuss it right now.”
Sometimes the patient-confidentiality thing sucked big, hairy donkey balls.
She needed to confide in somebody, but the ability to do that was hampered by the laws protecting said patient confidentiality, and she’d be damned if she screwed with it.
As Con quietly slid from the private family lounge, she slumped deeper into the seat and buried her face against her knees. “How did you all know where I was?” she asked weakly.
“You intern here,” her brother reminded her. “I’ve been in and out of this place two or three times looking for you, but one of the customers who came by the bar mentioned she’d seen you on this floor last night so Con and I left the place in Shawntelle’s hands to see if we could track you down.”
Riley leaned forward and took her hands. “This is about Shame, isn’t it?”
“I’m not allowed to discuss it,” she said weakly. And the knot in her chest swelled to massive proportions.
“Then don’t discuss it. Just...let me speculate,” he said, cocking his head. “Shame’s not answering his phone, either. Con told me about how he got hurt. I know he guilted you into helping him. Is your license going to be okay?”
“My license isn’t my concern right now,” Charli said, more tired than she’d been in a long, long time.
“Okay.” Riley nodded, and she knew he was still turning things over in that canny brain of his. If he hadn’t dropped out of college to take care of them, he would have done something amazing with his life—she knew it. Now he was using that sharp mind to piece through what he saw as a puzzle. “I’m going to venture out on a limb and assume that Shame is in the hospital. Nobody is at the house, but I saw all sorts of shit for treating somebody who was sick.”
She grimaced and looked away. She hadn’t had time to deal with the IV pole or the bags hanging on it when she’d talked Max into coming to the hospital with her. She hadn’t thought about it, to be honest.
“Was the injury worse than you thought? Is that why he’s here?”
“No, I...” She started to speak only to snap her mouth shut. “Stop it, Ry. I can’t discuss this.”
He rubbed her hand between his. “Sooner or later, we’ll find out.”
“Then do it.” She pulled back and curled into a small ball at the end of the couch. Then knock some sense into that hardheaded bastard.
She glanced around, looking for Con, because if anybody had a chance of getting Max to listen to reason, it had to be his best friend.
But Con wasn’t even in the room.
“Oh, fuck,” she whispered.
Surging to her feet, she rushed past Riley, heading for the hall and the room just a few doors down.
Chapter Twenty
Shame
“YOU WANT TO RUN THAT by me again?” Con asked, his voice surprisingly level.
Maybe he got it. It would be nice if somebody did. Shame was seriously tired of hurting, tired of hurting people, tired of a lot of shit. He’d thought about killing himself a hundred times, probably more, but that was the coward’s way out.
If he died...well, it wasn’t his fault he had cancer, right?
This way, maybe Charli would move on.
She still had feelings for him. That was why she was moving. She’d all but told him. He’d seen it in her eyes, too. Now that he wasn’t hurting—painkillers weren’t all that bad if they didn’t knock you out—and now that he wasn’t sick out of his head with fever, he could think, and he was actually thinking better than he had in a good long while.
It made sense to him.
Maybe it made sense to Con, too.
But then, just as he started to explain again, he caught sight of the glitter in Con’s eyes.
“I think I explained it well enough,” he said, deciding to let it go at that.
Connor moved so quickly, Shame barely had time to process it, spinning away and slamming his fist into the door of the bathroom. Blood splattered. Con didn’t ev
en flinch as he turned furious eyes on Shame. “You selfish son of a bitch. I know you’ve thought about taking an out, but you always said you’d never do it. You always said you knew it was a coward’s way. What in the hell are you doing now if not taking an out?”
“Hey, you can’t blame me for getting cancer,” he said caustically.
Con closed the distance between them and bent down over the bed, shoving his face into Shame’s. “I can sure as hell blame you for not trying, you chickenshit bastard.”
He backed away then, shaking his head. “I can’t believe you’d do this, Shame.”
“I’m not doing anything!”
“That’s the whole fucking point!” Con shouted.
“You’re going to get your ass thrown out of here,” Shame pointed out, jerking his head toward the open door.
Con turned around and slammed it. “I don’t give a rat’s ass.” He stormed back over to the bed. “Don’t do this, Shame. You can’t do this.”
Now, as tears burned in Con’s gaze, something hot and tight gripped Shame’s gut, but he looked away. “You don’t get it, Con. Things just... I hate... I...”
“You hurt. You think I don’t know that?”
“How can you know?” Shame returned, slanting his best friend a look. “You weren’t there. You don’t know...”
“I know you survived. And if you give in now, it means he broke you. You were always stronger than that son of a bitch. Be strong now.”
“I’m tired of being strong,” Shame said, and it was nothing but the truth. He’d never even felt all that strong to begin with. He just...went on. He hurt, and he went on. He had nightmares, and he went on. He was tired of just going on.
“You’re tired because you shoulder it all alone. You never went to counseling. You never talk to anybody. You never—”
“Don’t start that shit,” Shame warned him. “You think I want people to know what he did to me?”
“You think you’re the only one who was ever hurt like that? You think you should hide away because some predator hurt you? It’s his fucking fault, not yours!”
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