“She’s not OK. Not even close. But you’re not responsible for her. She’s not your wife or girlfriend – she’s a woman you slept with off-and-on for three months.”
He flinched. Liv saw his confusion and she softened.
“I’m not trying to be cruel, I swear. I’m just trying to explain to you… you can go now. No guilt, no judgment, no bad feelings. Not from any of us, not even from Emma.” She smiled. “We love her and we can take it from here. We’ll be with her through it all – right to the end, if it comes to that. So relax, Dean…you’re off the hook. You don’t need to do anything you don’t want to, you have no ties to any of this. Go get on with your life.”
Liv turned and walked down the hall to Emma’s room.
Dean stood frozen, staring after her. He just couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on. He turned to his friends who were all standing there watching him closely.
“How the fuck could I not know? Why didn’t I –”
He fell silent, shaking his head.
Chris stepped forward. “Come on, man. Let’s go. Nothing more to do here.”
**
Without any discussion whatsoever, the guys went back to Dean’s place. While Dean was in the shower scrubbing off Emma’s blood, Jim called the parlour and said that he and Dean wouldn’t be in at all and then – despite the fact that it wasn’t even nine o’clock in the morning on a workday – he went to the convenience store on the corner and picked up three cases of cold beer. Dallas arranged for one of his team to replace him on duty; Chris called the garage and said he couldn’t make it to work that day.
They sat around Dean’s living room, drinking beer and not saying anything much. They just waited for Dean to talk, if he wanted to. If he didn’t talk, they were sure as hell going to get piss-drunk with him in almost complete silence and then carry him to bed to sleep it off, if that was what he preferred.
After his third beer, Dean started to lose that hit-over-the-head look and opened his mouth.
“I knew something was wrong,” he said. “She was so tired and she was losing weight and I just didn’t believe her when she said it was from work stress. She disappeared for days at a time and came back looking like she’d been through a fucking meat-grinder. She had all those bruises that couldn’t be explained… she was so clearly sick, and I knew it.” He hesitated. “I just – I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to know the truth.”
“We all knew she didn’t look good, man,” Jim said. “We all saw something was wrong.”
“Yeah, but not all of you were sleeping with her.”
“Stop beating yourself up,” Chris said. “Even if you knew something wasn’t right, it wasn’t your relationship with her to get involved in her life, or her in yours. It’s always just been casual and about sex. You can’t forget that now, just because you feel bad.”
Dean took a drink for courage. “It’s not just sex, though. Not anymore.”
They looked at him, disbelieving.
“Come on, man,” Dallas said. “Look, I’m sorry the girl is sick, OK? We all are. We all like Emma a lot, but there’s no sense rewriting history or pretending anything. It was damn obvious to everyone that you cared about her way more than you’d admit to, but what we’re talking about here is a whole different thing.”
“What thing are we talking about?” Dean said.
“She’s sick, man, really sick, and that means a whole different kind of relationship, a deeper and way more permanent one. You don’t have to say you have those kinds of feelings for her when you don’t just because you feel like you should. You’ve got nothing to feel guilty about. Like Olivia said, you’re off the hook.”
“What if I don’t want to be off the hook?”
“OK,” Chris sighed. “What are you saying here? What happened between you to make you talk like this?”
Dean stared in to his beer. “Last night… I told Emma about her. About Kimberley Valance.”
That was the first time Dean had said that name out loud in over three years. The men went very still.
“You what?” Chris said. “Why?”
“I – had a nightmare. Woke up shouting. Emma was here.”
“What did she do?” Dallas asked.
“She – she held me. Listened to me. I was – a mess. She was sweet and soft.” He shrugged, embarrassed. “She helped.”
“Yeah?” Jim said. “And after you finished talking, you had sex, right?”
Real anger flared in Dean’s eyes. “Don’t say it like that, man. It wasn’t like that. It was – different. I felt… I don’t know. I felt close to her. Like, emotionally.” He dared to look at them. “I haven’t had that in a long, long time. I liked it.”
“OK, Dean, OK.” Jim leaned back and sighed. You fucking suspicious bastard. Give it a goddamned rest, would you? “That was way out of line, I’m sorry. I get what you’re saying.”
“You want to hear something else?”
They nodded.
“This morning, I woke up and I was just lying in bed and watching her sleep. And I started to think, well, maybe I can make a go of it with her. Maybe I can try. And I got up and made coffee and she called me and when I got to the bedroom, she was covered in blood. I thought – I thought that someone had broken in while I was in the shower and knifed her, you know?” He shivered. “And she wouldn’t wake up and I couldn’t figure out where the blood was coming from, and then I couldn’t stop it. I was scared to death. I was so close to having her, and now she’s just gone. Taken away from me. Like Kimberley – just taken right out of my arms.”
“Not yet, she’s not,” Jim said. “She’s still here, just nobody can say for how much longer.”
“No. I’ve lost her,” Dean said. “She’s got something eating her alive from the inside out and there’s not one damn thing I can do about that.”
“So do we.” Chris spoke so quietly, they barely heard him. “We all have things eating us up, things we don’t talk about.”
“What?”
“We never talk about any of it,” Chris said. “About Afghanistan and what happened there, and that’s just fine. But the fact is that we’re dragging around our own invisible monsters eating us alive from the inside out.”
The others were watching him, their eyes steady. They wondered if he was actually going to say all those things out loud. If Chris was really going to call the dead out from where they had jammed them down in deep, dark places. If he was going to drag the demons kicking and screaming in to the light.
“Emma has leukemia.” Chris’ gray eyes were soft. “You’ve got Kimberley. I’ve got Tiegert, Jim has that five-year-old he couldn’t save. And Dallas – well, he’s got sixty-three heads exploding in his sights, all because he was told to take someone out. Don’t think none of that weighs on us, eats us up. You know it does. You’ve seen us all at our lowest and worst.”
They all sighed, knowing Chris was right.
“I know, man,” Dean said. “But it’s different with Emma…”
“Yeah, sure. Insofar as there’s a damn good chance that she’s physically going to die in a few months. The rest of us are just dying more slowly and we aren’t even being honest about that fact.”
Dean was silent.
Dallas studied him. “OK. Let’s hear it all. You care about her, Dean?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I do.”
“You care about her enough to want to be there for her through this?” His blue eyes were unwavering. “Can you handle watching another good woman die right in front of you? Maybe in your arms again?”
Dean thought about Emma. Her sweetness and kindness; those amazing eyes glowing up at him, warm and trusting. “Yes. I want to be there for whatever time she’s got left.”
Dallas looked at him, hard. “You sure?”
“Yeah. I’m sure.”
Dean glanced around the room at the guys. They were all nodding at him.
“Really?” he asked.
“Yeah, really,” Jim said. “We’ve always had your back in hard times, Dean. We ain’t leaving you on your own now.”
“OK.” Dean breathed out. “Then we need to get to work on her friends.”
“How come?” Jim said.
“Because,” Dallas answered for Dean. “Those women are not going to let Dean within ten feet of Emma unless they’re sure he’s serious about her. He has to convince them that he’ll stick around, even when things go to hell.”
“Oh, right.” Jim ran his hands through his cropped brown hair. “How are we going to do that?”
“Time,” Dean said. “The one fucking thing that Emma doesn’t have.”
“Yeah, time.” Dallas grinned. “And lots of runs to the coffee shop.”
The men stared at him, perplexed.
“What?” Chris said.
Chapter Ten
The next morning, the guys launched phase one of their plan.
They walked in to the hospital waiting room laden down with take-away coffees and baked goods. Liv, Jenny and Kat looked up in complete shock and got to their feet. They stood in a row and glared at the men.
“What are you doing here?” Liv said. “I thought I made myself pretty clear yesterday: you are not getting in to see her, Dean.”
“Yeah,” Dean said. “You did make yourself clear. But I’m fucking stubborn. Also, we thought maybe you’d want coffee and a doughnut.”
“You – what?” Kat said.
“Well, we figured y’all would have been here all night and would probably need a decent coffee by now. That stuff in the cafeteria is sludge.” Dallas set down the bag of croissants on a table. “I’m Dallas, by the way.” He nodded at the other guys. “That’s Chris, and that over there is Jim.”
The women blinked up at them.
“OK, here it is.” Dean’s voice was gentle as he took in their exhaustion. He was sure they had to be scared and worried to death, and were operating on nerves and very little sleep. “I know what Emma and I agreed to, but that was before I got to know her. Things are different now.”
“Different how?” Kat asked.
“I care about her. I want to be here for her, and for you too, if you’ll let me. If you’ll let us.”
They all stood there, silently regarding each other from opposite sides of a huge divide. The men’s eyes skimmed over the women, taking them in fully for the first time.
Olivia was stunning, of course. Much taller than the other two, and slim but still curvy. Her auburn hair was sleek and shiny even after a night of sleeping on three chairs all pulled together, and her brown eyes were gorgeous. They were narrowed in suspicion right now, but still – the woman was a knock-out. One of the other women looked tougher: short hair dyed a shocking blonde, she was staring at them with naked aggression in her moss-green eyes. Her hands were on her hips and even though she was about Emma’s height, her anger inflated her, somehow. The last woman – blonde, blue-eyes, heavier and curvier than the others – was now practically hidden behind the other two, and barely seemed able to make eye-contact. She looked genuinely unnerved and freaked out, and the guys wondered why she looked so frightened of them.
From their side, the women were observing the guys just as closely. The four of them were intimidating as hell, despite the nice words and the doughnuts, and the women had no idea where to look.
They felt like they knew Dean a bit, of course, and they knew that he’d been gentle and good to Emma. His green eyes were warm as he looked down at them, and Jenny for one saw that he was really trying here. Dallas too, was coming across as open and comforting. He was standing well back, his arms open and loose at his sides. He was huge and strong and those eyes were hard, but he was also making an effort to make himself smaller, keep his voice low.
The other two guys were just as big, just as muscular. The blond one – was it Chris? – was looking at them all with steady gray eyes. His gaze seemed to rest the most on Jenny, and he looked troubled. He didn’t say a word, though, and looked like he’d be willing to stand there all day, waiting for them to come around.
The last guy was the biggest question mark. He had brown hair, cropped close to his head and strange-colored eyes, like liquid gold. He stood the farthest back, so far that he was barely in the room at all. He had his hands in his jeans pockets and the women’s suspicion was mirrored in his handsome face. He met Kat’s eyes and they had a short stare-off.
Liv broke the silence. “What do you expect, Dean?”
He looked confused. “What do you mean?”
“With Emma.” Kat spoke up now. “What do you think her cancer looks like?”
He shook his head and blew out a hard breath. “I don’t know, really. I’m guessing she’s often weak and tired. I’m also guessing that all those supposed business trips were when she was having chemo and recovering. Am I right?’
“Yes,” Jenny said quietly.
“Well, if it took her a week to get back on her feet and she still showed up at my place looking the way she did, I’m going to say that the chemo is fucking brutal.”
The women were silent.
“Am I right so far?”
“Yeah,” Kat said. “So far, you’re bang on the money.”
“Then I’m also guessing that you three have been with her through it all these past four months, so you’ve seen it all up close and personal. You’re probably wiped out and stressed yourselves. What we’re offering here is some back-up – for all of you.”
The guys nodded.
“How?” Liv said.
“Let us stay here overnight tonight so you can go home and get some rest,” Chris said softly. “And when she leaves the hospital, let Emma stay with Dean at his place once in a while. Dallas lives right next door and we’re always over there, so we can switch off and make sure she’s never alone. We can take her to and from her doctor’s visits and chemo and tests. We’ll sit here with you, if you want, listen to you. We’re damn good listeners – better listeners than talkers, really.”
Jenny stared at him and was amazed when she felt herself warming to Chris. He was the first man in almost six years who didn’t paralyze her with terror. Despite his size and hardness, he struck her as a decent guy. She met those gray eyes and found herself smiling at him a bit. He smiled back.
“You’d really do that for her? For us?” she asked.
“We would,” Dallas said.
Liv considered this for a minute. “I’m sorry, guys, but what’s going on here is hard. Really, really hard, and I think you’re all going to duck out as soon as that fact hits you smack in the face.”
“I figured you’d need some convincing.” Dean sat down. “That’s why I’ll be here all day today, and tonight, and tomorrow, and the day after too. As long as it takes to show you I’m serious.”
“You – what?” Kat said again.
He picked up a coffee and sipped calmly. “Yeah. I’m not leaving this room.”
The other men sat down too and took their own coffees from the takeaway tray. Chris opened one of the bags, peeked in, grabbed a chocolate doughnut. He turned to Jenny. “You want anything?”
She hesitated.
Liv and Kat were looking at each other, having some kind of silent communication. The guys watched as a decision seemed to be reached between them. Liv walked across the room slowly, took a coffee for herself and Jenny. Kat followed and accepted the last one from Jim’s outstretched hand. Jenny took the doughnut Chris was offering her and Dallas handed Liv a plain croissant. She frowned at it and glanced up.
He caught her eye. “Sorry, darlin’. Did you want a jam-fi
lled doughnut? I just assumed that models eat plain croissants and drink black coffee.”
“Bah.” She huffed at him, charmed in spite of herself. “Gimme the damn jam-filled one and some of that milk and sugar.”
Grinning, Dallas handed everything over.
They all sat now, eyeing each other. Kat took a sip of coffee and sighed.
“I’m Kat,” she said. “And this is Jenny.”
The men nodded.
The seven of them settled down together. Dean was finally able to breathe: all he wanted was the chance to get past the visitor’s lounge and in to Emma’s room, and he’d sit there for as long as it took to convince Liv, Kat and Jenny to let him do exactly that.
However long it takes to get to you, baby, I’ll do it. I’m right here.
**
Emma opened her eyes when she heard the door to her room open and close. She blinked, not sure if she could trust what she saw.
“Dean?”
He was looking at her, his face soft. “Hey, Emma.”
“What – what are you doing here?”
“I came to see you.”
She was quiet for a few seconds. “You know everything, don’t you?”
He walked over to the bed, sat on the chair next to her. “Yeah.”
Emma bit her lip as the tears welled. “I’m so sorry, Dean… I lied to you about so many things. You must be furious.”
“No,” he said. “I understand why you didn’t tell me you were a shrink that first night we met, Doctor Cartwright. I also get why you needed a break from what was going on in your life.” He slowly reached out and touched her hand. “I’m happy that you found some… some peace with me. Even just for a little while. I’m glad that I was able to be a safe place for you, baby.”
“You were.” She smiled. “You really were.”
“Why didn’t you tell me, Emma?” His voice was quiet, pained. “I would have helped you through it, I promise you. I wouldn’t have ended anything, I wouldn’t have let you go through this alone.”
“I didn’t know that,” she said. “We agreed it was just sex between us, Dean. Asking for anything more would have been changing the deal and that would have been unfair.”
Enemy Within (Unseen Enemy Book 1) Page 11