Need You Now (Love in Unknown)

by Lunsford, Taylor M.

  Caine moved between Mel and the gun. He kept his voice level. “We both know that’s not what happened, Portia. Mel doesn’t even own a gun. She hates them.”

  “That’s not what the registration will say. It’s amazing how easy it is to get a fake ID these days.” His ex-fiancée looked like an escapee from a bad action flick with her slicked hair and bodysuit. Her hand on the gun didn’t waver. Her dad had taught her to shoot at a young age. “Poor little genius girl couldn’t handle her boyfriend leaving her for a better woman. She went to her beloved clinic and shot herself. How tragic.”

  He took a deep breath, searching for control. He had to get that gun away from her. If she still had it when Gage showed up, someone was going to get hurt. “No one is going to believe you, Portia. And I’m not going to let you shoot her. Not ever. So why don’t you hand over the gun and we can forget this whole thing ever happened?”

  “Why are you defending her? She doesn’t deserve you.” Portia’s body began to shake a little as she grew more agitated. Images of Mel’s lifeless body sent bolts of icy fear through him. “You belong with me, not her.”

  “Isn’t that my decision to make?” He took a small step toward Portia. A few more steps and he’d be close enough to get the gun away from her. Break her arm, if he had to.

  Portia laughed, the sound maniacal as it echoed out into the quiet house. “Men aren’t capable of making decisions when it comes to getting married. Everyone knows that. It’s up to women to steer them in the right direction. It would have worked before, but you were weak. Now you’ve had the chance to get her out of your system and we can be together.”

  “Okay.” Talking sense into her wasn’t going to work. He felt like he might choke on his heart. Every muscle screamed to reach behind him, to take Mel and shield her until he had her out of this room and away from Portia. “Just give me the gun and we can go back to my place to talk about our future together. Can you do that?”

  She hesitated for a second. “You have to promise that you won’t leave me again. Keep her on the side if you have to. I don’t care if you have a whole harem on the side. You just have to marry me. I was born to marry a man like you.”

  Over her hysterical orders, he heard a car pull up outside. Gage. Thank God. “Okay. I got it. Now, give me the gun and we’ll get out of here. Mel won’t say anything to anyone, will you, sunshine?”

  “No. Of course I won’t. Ms. Brewer’s just having a bad day.” The steel in Mel’s words reassured him. She knew what he was doing.

  “Give me the gun, Portia.” Caine moved forward, fingers wrapping around the cool metal and her boney hand. He thought his heart might burst when her grip loosened enough for him to take the gun. Flipping on the safety, he sat it on the counter. “Let’s go.”

  With a hand on the small of her back, he turned Portia around and guided her out of the open door. He made a motion to tell Mel to stay behind. The last thing he needed was for Portia to have a change of heart and attack Mel as they went downstairs. He remained alert, hoping Portia hadn’t heard Gage entering the house the same way Caine had. All he had to do was get her to the ground floor, away from Mel, and they’d be all clear.

  Halfway down the stairs, Portia stopped. “What was that? Somebody else is here.”

  “Probably just the wind. This old place is really creaky at night.” Get downstairs. Get downstairs.

  Portia shook her head. “No. Someone’s here. You called somebody, didn’t you? That policeman brother of yours, right? You bastard.”

  Before he could stop her, Portia reached down into the knee-high boots she wore. In the pale light from the open exam room door, he saw the glint. A knife. He reached up to try and catch hold of her wrist and get it away from her, but she was too fast. Twisting, he felt the blade slice through his shoulder, a blinding pain ripping through the left side of his torso.

  “Police! Drop the knife!” Gage barked the order from the foot of the stairs. Through his haze of pain, Caine saw his brother shine a flashlight at Portia with one hand and use the other hand to keep his gun trained on her.

  Portia didn’t drop the knife. Instead, blinking from the glare of the flashlight, she stomped her feet like a two-year-old in a tantrum. “You bastards! You idiotic, stupid small town hicks! You’ve ruined everything! Everything!”

  She tried to stab at Caine again, but a gunshot rang out through the house. A screech of pain followed and he saw her cradling her shoulder. Gage didn’t waste any time, climbing the stairs two at a time. “Mel! Get your ass down here. Caine’s hurt!”

  #

  The next few hours were a blur for Mel. A really painful, awful, nightmarish blur. She’d known she wanted to be a doctor at age nine. Never in the twenty years since then had she imagined she would have to use her medical training on the man she loved. Blind panic threatened to take over the second Caine left the exam room with Portia. All she’d wanted to do was curl up in the corner and sob through the fear. Then she heard Portia losing it with Caine. Every cell in her body screamed for her to run to him, but she knew it would make things worse.

  If she lived two lifetimes, she’d never forget the utter terror she felt when she heard that gunshot. All she could see in her head was Gage or Caine with a gaping wound, dying on the stairs. Gage’s shout pulled her back to reality.

  Blood stained Caine’s crisp blue shirt. Kicking into doctor mode, she went to him, examining his shoulder and side. The slash was deep and about five inches long, but Portia had missed any major organs. As she worked, she was vaguely aware of Gage checking on Portia. She learned later that Gage shot the bitch right through the hand.

  Mel rode with Caine to the hospital in the ambulance, not letting the EMTs touch him. When they got into the emergency room, the doctor on duty, Dr. Jameson, refused to let her work on him anymore. “You know the rules, Dr. Carr,” he admonished. “No treating loved ones. Go sit in the waiting room and I’ll come to get you once he’s settled.”

  Hands red with Caine’s blood, she tried to find the energy to argue with the other doctor, but she couldn’t. Shock settling in, she knew. One of the nurses led her to the waiting room and forced her to sit down. A little while later, a cup of coffee was pressed into her hands. At some point, Micah showed up, leaving their mother to take care of Jax. That’s when she really broke down.

  “It’s okay, squirt. It’s okay.” With her big brother’s arms around her, Mel almost believed that. Intellectually, she knew that Caine’s injury wasn’t fatal, that he would recover. But here in this waiting room, she didn’t get to be the calm, rational doctor. She had to be the scared, worried girlfriend.

  “I could have lost him tonight,” she sobbed. “I could have lost him and I never even told him I loved him.”

  Another hand joined MIcah’s rubbing soothing circles on her back. Gage. “He knows you love him. Don’t worry about that. Get it all out now so he can see that beautiful smile of yours.”

  Mel honestly didn’t know what she would have done without them. The brother of her blood and the brother of her heart. They’d supported her through every major change in her life. Having them with her now made it almost impossible for her not to feel better. All of the worry and pain and uncertainty of the past few months crashed into her. Her chest tightened and loosed with waves of relief. No more crazy phone calls. No more vandalized cars or trashed offices. The only things between her and the man she loved right now were an elevator, a few doctors, and a really big apology. At this point, she’d grovel if she had to, as long as she saw him breathing.

  By the time Dr. Jameson came down to the waiting room, she’d stopped the tears, but still hadn’t let go of Gage’s or Micah’s hands. They were keeping her sane. “You can go up and see him. We’ll keep him overnight for observation, but the wound was mostly superficial. Lots of stitches, but he’ll be good as new in a couple weeks.”

  She barely registered Gage and Micah thanking Dr. Jameson. All she cared about was seeing Caine. Feeling his pulse b
eating healthy and strong under her fingers. Some remnants of her doctor self kept her from sprinting through the halls and up the stairs. One of the nurses on the second floor saw her coming and directed her toward the right room. Mel stopped just outside the door and took a breath.

  Caine’s big body look so out of place in the narrow hospital bed. An IV drip was attached to the bed of his right arm. A bandage covered his left shoulder and sent a wave of nausea through her. Just a few inches lower and Portia could have got his lungs, his heart, an artery. Mel looked down at her hands, expecting to still see blood. Vaguely, she recalled Micah or Gage wiping them with a wet cloth at some point. Didn’t matter. She still felt the warm stickiness of the blood that had pumped out of Caine from that shoulder. The tang of iron still filled her nose, the familiar scent that she’d thought herself immune to after all these years.

  “Stop standing there worrying, sunshine. Trying to rest over here and your brain’s being too damn noisy.” Caine didn’t open his eyes and his voice sounded like it’d been run over gravel, but a smile tugged at his lips.

  She walked over to sit on the chair beside his bed. The second she sat down, he took her hand in his right one. The fingers of her free hand rubbed light circles on the pale skin on the inside of his wrist, taking solace in counting the steady beats there. Eventually, his eyes opened, warm and blue and alive. “You okay, sunshine?”

  “You were stabbed by your crazy ex-fiancée and you ask if I’m okay?” Mel sniffed, tears stinging the back of her throat again. “I really must look like hell. Probably all red and splotchy.”

  Caine shook his head, wincing a little at the movement. A lock of shaggy hair fell in his eyes. “You’re always gorgeous. I’ve just never seen you cry before.”

  “Well, being held at gunpoint and seeing the man I love gushing blood is a bit much for even me to handle.” She looked down at their entwined fingers, his big hand so warm around hers. She never wanted to let go, but he did. He reached up to cup her chin, tilting her head to look at him.

  “Love, huh?” His expression went all soft. It might be the pain meds dripping into his veins, but she didn’t think so. “So I have to get stabbed and be in a hospital bed for you to finally ‘fess up?”

  Mel laughed, the sound a little watery. God, she loved this man. Everything about him, even his overprotective alpha male tendencies. “Well, if a certain someone's ex-fiancée hadn't broken into my clinic, I would have come by your office to tell you that tonight."

  “Yeah?” Blue eyes turned almost electric with happiness as they eagerly moved over every part of her.

  She nodded, turning her face to kiss his palm and cup it in her own. “Yeah. It really sucked to be away from you. I know it wasn’t fair of me to keep so much from you. I just…I was scared, Caine. Scared to feel so much for someone, then and now. Getting hurt by you would be a thousand times more painful than anything I felt before.”

  Losing him forever, she now knew, would have been almost unbearable. She finally understood how her mother could spend a year trying to block out the world and the pain. To love someone meant risking the pain of losing them; it meant giving them the power to hurt you irreparably when you lost them. It also meant not wanting to miss out on a single one of the memories that could happen between this day and that.

  “I will never, ever hurt you, Mel.” Caine patted the bed, urging her to sit beside him. Throwing protocol to the wind, she did. Even pale from blood loss, the man radiated heat and vitality, and all she wanted to do was curl up and stay by his side forever. “I know I haven't said it yet, but I love you, sunshine. So much. You're everything to me. Everything.”

  Suddenly shy, Mel laced her fingers with Caine’s. “I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you about the pregnancy scare. It’s something I’ve worked really hard to forget. I knew telling you was the only way I could think of to end things and keep you safe. After what Portia did to your golf cart, I was terrified of what she might do next and I didn’t want to see you hurt because of me.”

  “Would you have ever told me about it if this thing with Portia hadn’t been going on?” Caine squeezed her hand reassuringly.

  Mel buried her face in his good shoulder for a minute, taking strength from the clean, masculine smell of him. “I…I think I would have. I’ve never felt so alone as I did during those weeks you were gone. It was hard. Being with you, even as casually as we were, had been a fairy tale for me. Reality hit me really hard and I just couldn’t stand to be let down again. Given time….given time I know I would have trusted you enough to tell you. You have this way of breaking through my defenses and sneaking into my heart.”

  “I understand.” Two simple words that meant the world to Mel. Unable to speak, she leaned forward and kissed him. When his tongue darted out to tangle with hers, she pulled back, resting her forehead against his. “Easy there, Mr. Mayor. You’re not quite in shape for that just yet. There’s plenty of time for making up when you’re out of here.”

  “Will you come home with me and play doctor?” A teasing light danced in his eyes.

  A life of love with her best friend? A life of possibility and laughter? She could do this. There was no way she wasn’t going to do this.

  Mel laughed, kissing him again. “That’s the best offer I’ve had in a long time.”

  Epilogue

  Mel stopped to check for the third time to see if she had something stuck to her back. The occupants of the car that had just passed her had swiveled around to watch her. Again. In the month and a half since the incident at the clinic, the gossips had finally lost interest in her. By now they were used to her dating Caine, seeing them kissing around town. Then suddenly, early this week, the gossipy looks had started again. Micah and Gage told her she was imagining things, but she knew something was up.

  She tried to shrug it off as she walked back to the clinic. She'd met her mother for lunch at the bakery, a ritual they'd started up after she moved in with Caine. It'd never been a formal move. The day Caine was released from the hospital, she’d gone home with him and hadn't ever left. One day all of her things had magically appeared in the big house, an obviously high-handed and thoroughly sweet move on the part of the men in her life. Smart bastards knew she was too happy to argue.

  The streets were remarkably empty for a mid-summer afternoon in Unknown. There should have been kids playing in the yards, riding bikes. Adults bustling in and out of the businesses, but there wasn’t. What the heck was going on?

  She went into the clinic, expecting to see a few patients in the waiting room and Sandra behind the desk, but there was no one. Going behind the desk, she opened up the appointment screen to see that the afternoon was completely blank. Huh. A little unusual. She started to head upstairs to work in her office when she got a text. COME OUTSIDE. It was from Caine.

  The door opened before she had a chance to touch it and Caine stood on the other side, grinning at her. God, he looked handsome in his bright white shirt, those dark jeans of his that fit him perfectly. The wind tousled his hair, which had been cut since she’d seen him this morning when he'd left her in bed. Blue eyes gleamed with laughter and that warm, gooey, tender look that he reserved just for her. "Hey, sunshine. I've got something to show you."

  Stepping aside, he took her out onto the old wooden porch. A sea of sunflowers covered the yard and spilled out into the streets. Sunflowers held by people. From the looks of it, nearly the entire town had to be there. A few of the sunflower holders stood on the steps of the porch. They peeked out from behind the bright yellow petals enough for her to tell that her mom, Micah, Gage, Doc Booth, and Jax were there.

  She didn’t know what to say. This was a pretty giant grand gesture, even for Caine. Trust him not to do things in half measures. A bit sooner than she expected, but everything with them seemed to move at its own pace.

  “Oh. Wow. Caine, what is this?”

  He took her hands in his. "Well, I couldn't bottle up sunshine to match what you've brought into my li
fe, so I had to settle for sunflowers. Melody Carr, I adore you. You're my best friend. Since we were kids you've been one of the truly bright spots in my life. We've put each other through hell over the years. We've shared the good times and the bad. You’re my sunshine, you bring so much light into my life and I love you so much."

  “I love you too." She bit her lip, trying not to beam at him. If this wasn't want she thought it was, she might have to murder him.

  “I've wanted to do this since you were eighteen, but I'm glad I waited." He got on one knee, sending her already racing heart into overdrive. Releasing one hand, he reached into his shirt pocket and pulled something out. "Please, sunshine. Marry me. Make me the happiest man in town and be my wife."

  He opened his hand and held it out to her. In the center of that strong, comforting hand of his lay a beautiful ring. It wasn't platinum and diamond encrusted. Nothing that anyone would expect a Maddox to purchase for his future bride. A pearl sat on the silver band, flanked by two small sapphires. Simple and perfect.

  They hadn't talked about marriage or the future, but Mel didn't need to talk. She didn't need to gather her facts or look at the pros and cons. She knew her answer.

  “Yes.”

  The roar of approval from the crowd as he slipped the ring on her hand was deafening. Unable to contain himself, Caine whooped and lifted her off her feet for a kiss. Laughing, the man she loved whirled Mel around for the whole town to see. She had everything she could ever need right here with her. Her town. Her family. But most of all, Caine.

  Free Preview of Ready to Love Again

  Book Two of the Love in Unknown Series

  Coming July 2013

  Chapter One

  Brides usually went into bakeries long before they put on their wedding dresses. That wasn't the only strange thing about the bride standing in Micah Carr's bakery on a late Saturday afternoon in May. Most brides would be carrying a bouquet, not a tote bag overflowing with clothes. Come to think of it, most brides didn't look windblown with dark mascara smears under their eyes.