SweetHarts (5 Book Box Set)

by Kira Graham

  “Fact. I totally crush you ugly hags,” I tease, though a cough interrupts my taunting.

  Oh, Jesus! That hurts, I scream silently as I start to cough and almost fall off the bed trying to escape my own body. Paris grabs me, holding me still, and just croons a bunch of bullshit to me while I feel as if my ribcage is about to explode. Please explode, I tell it soundlessly. Just put me out of my misery.

  “Just breathe. That’s it, Sinai. Let it pass and don’t fight it.”

  Don’t fight it? I feel as if my lungs are chopped liver, asshole.

  Of course, I don’t say that to him, because I don’t have the strength to do anything but slump against him, my needy, completely clingy inner sap searching for comfort in the one place I shouldn’t be sniffing. It’s no secret to me that Paris hates my guts, and that, as a woman with pride, I should steer clear of him and stand on my own two feet.

  I really should. Instead, though, I press in closer to him and almost purr when he hugs me gently and strokes a cool hand over my burning brow.

  People are shifting around uncomfortably now, and I almost smile, because if I were one of them, I would’ve split this joint hours ago. I suck at sympathy and kind words—honesty and hard facts being more my style.

  “You guys should go home. You look like hell. Stop trying to argue, Jack. I’m fine. I will be fine,” I tell him when he starts to sniffle, only to stop, clear his throat, and nod slowly.

  “I know that, honey. I knew you were a scrapper from the moment you opened those eyes of yours. You done good today, fought like a champion,” he croaks, coming over to kiss my forehead, about the only place on my body that isn’t screaming at me.

  They don’t all clear out immediately, but I’m not surprised. This is the Sweets we’re talking about, and they’ll leave when they’re good and goddamn ready—and not a moment before. So over the next half hour or so, I get to hear Tee’s recounting of what she saw when the SUV flipped, Cleo makes an off-color joke about my vagina being the only thing to escape unscathed, and everyone I know comes over to kiss me—or, in Grange’s case, pat me on the head while glaring into space, before clearing his throat and storming out.

  Eventually, though, I can breathe once the room is finally emptied out, only to grimace again when Paris walks back in, closes the door, and just stands there, regarding me with a scowl on his face and his hands on his hips.

  “If this is you about to lecture me, then forget it,” I warn him.

  I can’t handle his form of lecturing right now, and all I really want to do is press the morphine pump, float away, and try to figure out why three little words keep repeating themselves in my head on a loop.

  Jesus loves you.

  “What the hell were you doing flitting around in the wee hours of the morning after all the shit we’ve been through?” he seethes, ignoring both my words and my glare.

  I can’t keep it up for long, though; my head just hurts too much. Besides, he’s right, in a way. What the hell was I thinking, taking not only myself and Tee, but also Mindy and all the security out, when I should have been at home, sleeping?

  Oh, yeah—I was going to egg Cole’s house and leave a death threat on his front door, letting him know exactly what I think of him and his…I can’t remember…dammit. My mind is a jumble right now, and thinking isn’t as easy as it usually is. All I remember is that we were headed to the twenty-four-hour supermarket, and then to Cole’s…

  “Please don’t yell at me. My head is killing me,” I sigh tiredly, closing my good eye with a groan when I press the morphine pump and nothing happens.

  “You already did that twenty minutes ago. It won’t release another dose until this one’s starting to wear off. Would you stop that? I’m trying to talk to you,” Paris growls, stalking over to push me back gently when I try to lean over and grab the machines beside me.

  “Well, I don’t want to talk to you. All you’re going to do is yell at me, and I don’t need that right now. I’m in pain,” I whine, a sob getting stuck in my throat when I jostle my leg and feel agony tearing into the thing.

  I have something like eight pins holding the bone together, and from what Adonis told me, because he seems to be the only person around here who understands how to talk to people, I bruised, sprained, or banged up the other ninety percent of my body by bouncing against the asphalt.

  ‘I know that,” he sighs, deflating as if I just shoved a pin into him.

  When Paris drops his head and tightens his white-knuckled grip on the bed railing beside me, I stop trying to shove him and fall silent, taking in his pinched lips and the tenseness around his mouth. He looks like he’s holding back more than a few yells, and, judging from the one time that I was with Paris when I saw him lose his temper, I’d say that he’s holding on to his control by a thread.

  The man is usually a jokester who doesn’t take anything seriously, but sometimes, when he’s pushed, he can get violent to the point of instilling fear. Right now, I am scared, but not for myself. I’m scared for anyone who was involved in this.

  I don’t know why that is, but I know that he’s upset…because I got hurt.

  “Why do you even care?” I ask, shifting around gingerly until I find a spot that makes me feel as comfortable as I’m likely to get. “You should be laughing in my face and telling me how I was reckless and put everyone in danger.”

  It’s true. If I hadn’t gone home, gotten everyone drunk, and then come up with the hare-brained idea to go out and do something that is technically a crime, we’d all be just fine. I didn’t miss the black eyes that both Ares and Nate were sporting, and even poor Mindy looked roughed up when she hugged me goodbye.

  She was miraculously quiet, though, thank God, because while I am not ungrateful to the Lord for my survival and everyone else’s, I didn’t need her breaking into prayer as she is wont to do.

  Basically, I endangered everyone, and for what? Because I have memories eating at me constantly, and when that happens, I feel the need to escape them? What kind of pathetic loser am I that I can’t even deal with something that millions of women deal with every day? I’m not the only person who’s been through what I went through, and it’s about time that I stopped feeling so goddamned sorry for myself and got over it!

  “I’m not laughing, Sinai. There’s absolutely nothing funny about anything that happened tonight. And yes, while I want to yell at you and demand to know what the hell you thought you were doing, I also have to remember that just a few hours ago, I was sitting beside you on the side of the road, watching the EMTs trying to perform CPR while being unable to touch your chest because you had so many broken or cracked ribs that it was impossible for them not to harm you further by trying to save your life,” he says softly, soberly, as if the memory alone is too dark to revisit.

  The normal me, the bitch who hates getting sappy and always runs from this kind of thing, wants to quip that he should be gloating. Paris and I had an unlikely and very awkward friendship, seeing as how he was always trying to get in my pants and propose marriage, but we were friends. And, as friends, we came to care for each other in our own way. So now, I can’t just forget that he cares about me and that I care about him, which is why I shut my mouth instead of laughing off his feelings and telling him to go to hell.

  Jesus loves you.

  Goddammit! I know, I yell at my mind, shaking off the annoying words and turning my head to meet Paris’s eyes.

  “I’m doing just fine, as you can see. The question I’m asking myself now is how I lived, and, more importantly, what the hell?” I admit, frowning when confusion fills me.

  That attack tonight—or last night, or whenever it happened—was so out of left field that I find it as confusing as heck to think about the whys of it. We haven’t had a minute of worry for weeks, not since the stalker delivered his message to Alex and then melted back into the woodwork again. To be honest, I don’t get it. I don’t understand why this man is doing the things he’s doing, and I don’t get w
hy he’d target us.

  This all started when Adonis and Cleo got together, so for a while there, I was convinced that the rest of us would be fine, since it seemed to me that Cleo or Adonis was his target. Now, months later, I’m starting to ask myself just what the hell is really going on.

  Jesus loves you.

  Shoving impatiently at the repeated phrase in my mind, I shake my head slightly, careful not to jostle myself too much, and meet Paris’s dark stare.

  “Is this because Rosetta and Zeus are still investigating?”

  “They aren’t—or, at least, they aren’t doing any hands-on digging themselves. According to Z, they’ve stepped back and given the case up to Rose’s contacts and Z’s investigative team. So no, I don’t think that this is another warning. I think that this was a planned strike meant to cause as much damage as possible,” he mutters, blowing out a breath when I swallow and look away.

  “You wanna know what’s really weird? I can’t really remember much of anything, but I keep thinking this one phrase over and over, and it’s starting to drive me crazy. The nurses all snorted and told me that my being alive is a miracle, but I don’t really know that that’s true. From what Adonis said, Nate did his job admirably by flipping the car before we hit the median.”

  “Nate did the only thing he could and threw a Hail Mary,” Paris snorts, shaking his head again when I open my mouth. “What’s the phrase?”

  “Jesus loves you,” I tell him, groaning when my leg starts to ache more intensely where I suspect they’ve pinned it.

  God, this isn’t fun, and it’s even less fun that the man I’ve been secretly head over heels in love with is looking at me with an angry expression and what I can only describe as pity. Which I hate. Pity is not something that I have ever enjoyed experiencing, and it’s even worse because I know that I could have had so much more from him. He could have been the husband or boyfriend standing beside my bed, emotional and pissed off because I got hurt—and because he loves me.

  That’s not what this is. This is Paris being my friend and a member of my family, showing the same concern that Zeus would show if he were the one standing here instead. That sucks. A lot. And while I won’t cry about it now, I can honestly say that I want to.

  “You said those same words to me when you woke up for a brief moment at the accident scene,” he says softly.

  “Huh. I guess Mindy is really rubbing off on me,” I sigh, shaking off the foreboding feeling and the sense of urgency that grips me.

  “Nate seemed to be sticking to her like glue,” Paris comments, stepping back to lower himself into the chair beside the bed with a tired sigh.

  “They seemed to be…getting it together before everything went bad,” I admit, my eyes closing against my will.

  “It won’t last. Nate doesn’t love her, and from what I saw when they were together, she doesn’t love him, either. Not enough to make it work.”

  I hum sadly at that, my heart hurting for them both, because, in an ideal world, they’d be perfect for each other. With Mindy loosening up a little, and with Nate looking at her the way he was, I was kinda hoping that they’d end up being a love story, too. I guess that life doesn’t always give you happy endings, though. Case in point: me.

  If I’d been smarter and…healthier, I think that I would have eventually thrown myself at Paris and admitted that I liked him, too. More than is normal for me, at least. Things would have evolved naturally from there, and, if life were fair, I’d probably have ended up marrying the guy, like he always said I would.

  But life isn’t fair, and my lemon-infested life isn’t about to become some fairy tale, like the way Rose’s and Cleo’s turned out. I’d include Alex in that equation, too, but from the looks of her tonight, motherhood is kicking her ass, so “happy ending” may not quite be the correct term. Maybe “bumpy start” would be more apt.

  “Sometimes, love isn’t enough. Sometimes, you do things that you regret,” I murmur groggily, a sad smile pulling at my lips before I frown and curse silently.

  I can feel the soft slide of another morphine dose making its way through my veins now, and for some reason, I feel safer than I have in months. Maybe that’s why I’m unable to keep my damn mouth shut.

  Chapter Eight

  Paris

  My head whips up at the sound of her sad words, and I look over at Sin, who now looks as calm as I have seen her since she woke up. The lines of strain around her mouth are lessening, and that deep groove of pain from her constant frown is gone. Her expression is sad, though, and I sit up suddenly, my gut tingling with suspicion.

  “Regrets?”

  “Regrets are a terrible thing. Guilt. So much guilt that I feel like…” she begins, then trails off and sighs, her battered face twisting as a tear slips down her cheek.

  “What, baby?” I ask softly, leaning in closer while I take her hand and try to hold on to her.

  “Drowning. Need to get out and breathe. Forget.”

  She sounds so sad and lonely that my heart aches for her and demands that I fix this. Based on experience, I naturally shy away from getting too close, not wanting to get in too deep with Sin—not again. But we were friends once, kind of, and as her friend, I owe it to her to help, don’t I? Of course I do, I tell myself, in order to justify my curiosity and the sick feeling that fills me. Questioning her while she’s defenseless and high on morphine isn’t cool, but I need some damn answers!

  “What’s pulling you under, honey?”

  Please don’t say me, my heart pleads, almost beating out of my chest when she sniffles and seems to try to fight against answering. The morphine wins out, though, and when she starts talking, I wish to God that I had something of my own to dull the pain that blooms in my chest.

  “So scared. I was so scared when I didn’t get my period.”

  Jesus.

  “I thought…this is bad,” she mumbles, another tear leaking free.

  “Of course that was scary. It’s a huge commitment,” I say, reading between the lines and hoping that I’m getting this right.

  “I went to the clinic. Sat there for three hours, telling myself that I was…okay. That I could do it. But I couldn’t.”

  “Of course not. Of course not,” I choke out, not sure if I’m heartbroken for her, or pissed off.

  “I was like Alex. I thought that I could ignore it till I was ready. Then I accepted it, even though…you know, I fucking hate Cole.”

  “Me, too. I shoulda beat his ass,” I growl, smiling mirthlessly when her mouth tilts into a grimace.

  “Shoulda let you. I should have done so many things differently, but in the end…it wasn’t meant to be,” she sighs, her head lolling to the side.

  “What wasn’t meant to be? What happened? Sin? Baby, wake up and tell me what wasn’t meant to be,” I say, when a small shake doesn’t rouse her.

  “Sin?” I ask again, needing to hear more of it, wanting to hear her tell me the rest.

  She doesn’t move, though, and I give up after a few minutes, letting her escape into sleep while I am left with my mind racing, demanding answers that I don’t think she’ll give me as easily once she’s in her right mind.

  She was pregnant. That’s all I can gather from what little she’s told me—that, and the fact that she somehow lost the baby. I don’t believe that she went through with an abortion, because that’s not Sin. She supports the pro-choice movement, and she’ll debate to the death on behalf of women who aren’t ready for parenthood, but she’s also pro-life when it comes to herself.

  That means that something must have happened, and for whatever reason, she’s kept it a secret from everyone she loves. Including me. Because I know that she loves me, even if it’s just as friends.

  Sighing and frustrated that I’m stuck in this room with her with nothing but questions, I lean my head back against the chair and prepare myself for a long day ahead.

  The restaurant can run itself—or burn down, for all I care. Sin is my main priority now.
And once she’s better, I will find the motherfucker who hurt her. I will. And when I do, I don’t care what morality or right and wrong dictates. He will die.

  ********************************************************************

  “Get the hell away from me, you fat asshole.”

  I grunt and try not to laugh when the physical therapist snarls and throws his hands into the air. The man is far from fat, and he’s been more than accommodating when it comes to the ray of sunshine that is Sinai Sweet.

  It’s been two weeks of pure hell ever since she woke up and dropped that morphine-induced bomb on me. I’ve tried asking her questions, but the more time that passes, the more stubborn she gets about using pain relief. And that leads us to her very pleasant mood for the last week. Because she’s in pain and refusing to use drugs, it isn’t easy for her to get along when the therapists come around.

  At least she’s looking a little better, I think, taking in the yellow bruising that’s fading on her face, and the way that her eyes have gone back to normal now that the swelling has dissipated.

  “Miz Sweet, you know that Doc Flannery told you that I have to do this with you every day. It’s important that you strengthen up those muscles and get to healing. Come on, now—let’s do a few easy exercises instead of quitting before we even done started,” the man coaxes, earning himself a sneer and a glare that sends him stalking from the room.

  “You know, they’re just going to replace him with someone else,” I point out from my position against the wall, where I’ve been leaning and watching her fight with James for over an hour.

  “Then I guess I’ll get to meet some other exercise Nazi who doesn’t understand the meaning of the word pain,” she sniffs back, settling back onto the bed with a grimace that makes me want to yell at her.

  “They don’t get it because they don’t know that you’re not using the meds, and if they did, I bet they wouldn’t be too happy. You need to stop being so stubborn and use what they give you.”