“Mom, come here.” Bax’s gentle voice was barely audible, and the pain in it made Meredith’s skin prickle with cold.
I shouldn’t be listening to this.
Weeping followed, and Meredith turned to leave the house, but as she pulled the door open, she heard Vulcan and Juno scramble into a run, heading straight for her.
“Meredith?” Gray’s call followed them, and she froze.
She turned to find the dogs bounding toward her, and Gray right behind them. One glance at him, and her knees almost gave. He looked like hell. The redness around his eyes contrasted sharply with his blanched skin. His complexion was usually honeyed and warm. Why did he look so pale?
“What’s wrong?” The words left her in a rush, almost hollowing out her body.
Wearing a look of agony, he came at her without slowing, without stopping. When his body met hers, her back knocked against the front door. Gray’s lips crushed hers with such need all she could do was tilt her face up to his.
His arms came around her, and she pulled him closer. She made no decision. There was nothing to decide. Her resolve moments before to keep a professional distance from him seemed irrelevant, completely disconnected from the moment that now held her firmly in its grip.
She felt the tension and distress that thrummed through his body and held his muscles tight, almost at war. And she felt too, when she opened her mouth to his, how those same muscles went slack, softening so that every place their bodies touched, she sunk into him a little more.
A part of her was afraid. Not because they were kissing again. But because of what she felt. The powerlessness of how she felt. But another part was completely at peace. The contentment that came with knowing she wasn’t alone. Gray, clearly, was just as powerless. They were partners in this.
They were partners.
And whatever he needed, he could take.
“What the hell is he doing?” The older man’s voice reached them from the end of the hall. Meredith gave a startled breath, but Gray held her tighter, so she didn’t pull away. Instead she gripped his shirt at his shoulders, and his fingers pressed into her back.
“Jesus, Gray. Have you lost your mind?” This was Bax, disbelief stretching each syllable.
Against her mouth, Gray laughed bitterly. “Not yet.” The whisper of each word brushed over her lips. “Meredith… you feel so good. When nothing else does, you do.”
Despite their audience, the words swept down her body, but she needed to get ahold of herself. Something was wrong. Something that had absolutely nothing to do with her.
Ignoring everyone else in the house — everyone else in the world — she drew back just enough to look into his eyes. They were tortured. And sad. And the sadness in them burned her like a brand.
“What is it?” she whispered back. Here against the door, only a few feet from what she now guessed was the whole of his family, she and Gray existed in a kind of bubble, alone and together. She felt no need to pull away and face the others. She just needed to know what hurt him.
Gray frowned, the sadness turning to regret. “I shouldn’t have done that.” He kept his voice low, trapping the words in their bubble, acknowledging that this moment belonged to no one else.
Meredith squeezed his shoulders. “You don’t hear me complaining.” She wanted him to smile, and when he didn’t, the volume of her fear grew, but instead of pushing away from him, she held tighter.
“I’ve kept something from you.” Gray’s eyes were anguished. “And I kissed you just now because I probably won’t get the chance again. You won’t want me to.”
It was her turn to frown. While she knew it was a terrible idea to kiss her boss — especially in front of his whole family — she couldn’t imagine not wanting to.
“You’re wrong,” she swore. “And you’re scaring me.”
Gray squeezed his eyes shut and seemed to curse himself before opening them again. “I don’t mean to scare you. This is just hard. I thought I could count on having the right words, but I don’t.” He took a deep breath, never letting his eyes leave hers. “I told you last night I could wait. But I can’t.”
Meredith willed herself not to cry. She expected this, and she didn’t blame him. She’d just have to—
“I can’t wait, Meredith, because I have a brain tumor, and it’s trying to kill me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“WHAT?” SHE STAGGERED in his arms, and Gray gripped her tighter. “What did you say?”
Her voice was paper thin, and the color his kiss had brought to her cheeks drained away before his eyes.
Gray hated himself. This hours-old intimacy they shared, this hopeful, thrilling attraction was as doomed as he was. And he hated himself for how narrow and greedy he’d been with her.
Stealing the kiss at his front door was the most selfish thing he’d ever done, but he would carry the beauty of it to his grave. Meredith would likely walk away from him today, so, it might be his last memory of her.
And certainly his last happy memory.
“I have a brain tumor. And it’s bad.”
He watched her wide brown eyes as understanding sunk in, the recollection of their weeks together, of his headaches, his exhaustion, and the seizure now making perfect sense in her mind. And to his surprise, that understanding rounded her eyes with terror.
He’d expected anger at his deception. He’d expected shock and self-preservation — the instinct everyone has to pull back from disease and death, even someone else’s. But Meredith defied expectation.
He should have known that.
Before him, she mastered her terror, shaking her head.
“No,” she said simply, surprising him again.
She’d said “no,” as if the tumor in his head could be refused as easily as a waiter’s offer of dessert. As if the existence of his lethal overgrowth of cells could vanish with a word.
“No?”
“No,” she repeated. “I don’t accept that. You’re the first good thing to happen to me in two years. You cannot die.”
“I knew I liked her,” Bax interjected behind him.
Gray had almost forgotten his family looking on. He’d resented their intrusion in the moments before she arrived. Now it was an offense. Gray turned to shoot his brother a scowl.
“Bax, Mom, Dad, please give me a minute with Meredith.”
His mother took two steps forward, blinking away her tears, the look of hope in her eyes making him ill. “Gray, is this young lady your girlfriend?”
What could he say to that? She wasn’t, of course. Not nearly. But he wanted her to be. At his hesitation, Meredith tried to step around him then, but he held her steady. Keeping her by his side, he turned to face his family.
“Mom, Dad, this is Meredith Ryan.”
Bax piped in. “She’s the one I told you about. The one who’s been helping Gray.”
A look of shock overtook his father’s face. “And you mauled her at the front door?”
Gray felt more than saw Meredith cringe beside him. He would not allow her to be embarrassed. Not when the stolen kiss had been entirely his fault.
“Meredith is… special. Please. Let me talk to her in private.”
Dahlia Blakewood had always been a beautiful woman, and she’d aged gracefully. Losing Cecilia had deepened the lines on her lovely face and hollowed her cheeks, and she’d stopped coloring her hair afterward. Not because she’d given up on life, she’d told her sons, but because it felt foolish to pretend. And now her dark hair was going silver around her face.
But instead of muting her beauty, the effect was magisterial. She looked more aristocratic, more high-born than ever, and Gray’s mother had always been able to pull off high-born with grace and exceeding kindness. Though her look of hope slipped, she smiled bravely at the girl he clung to.
“Very nice to meet you, Meredith.”
Meredith nodded beside him, blushing. She was trembling. Gray could feel it as he gently held her elbow. “Same to you, Mrs
. Blakewood.”
His mother smiled, genuinely. “Please, call me Dahlia. And this is my husband, Lowell.”
Gray watched his father smile at her, but the man couldn’t hide the naked curiosity in his gaze. “Hello, Meredith.”
“Hello, sir.”
“Okay. You’ve met her. Now let us talk,” Gray leveled, growing impatient. Meredith was a mess beside him. He figured she’d bolt at the first opportunity, but he wanted to salvage whatever he could.
Bax raised a brow at him. “Good. Talk. But you have to tell her everything.”
Gray narrowed his eyes at his brother. “You stay out of this. You’ve interfered enough.”
“Everything, Gray,” Bax repeated, unfazed. “The odds with surgery and the odds without.”
Gray clenched his jaw and moved his grip to Meredith’s hand. “C’mon. Let’s go outside.” He walked her past them, and the dogs followed, eager to head to the back yard.
The sky was just a smear of low winter clouds as he led Meredith to the bench where he’d watched her play with Vulcan and Juno. Had that only been three weeks before? Impossible. Maybe time slows the closer you get to death, he pondered. Or maybe the tumor is distorting my concept of it.
Either way, the hours he’d spent with Meredith seemed to claim much more of his life than a mere handful of weeks. When compared to the last few months, even the last few years, they weighed so much more. Like gold over silver.
When they sat, Meredith’s strength seemed to leave her, and her shoulders bowed. She still shook, and he knew it had nothing to do with the cold. Gray held her hand in both of his. She looked at the ground and then up at the tree branches that canopied his back yard. He let his eyes follow hers, and he searched the one pecan tree for any sign of green. They wouldn’t leaf out until after every chance of frost had passed, and he could spot no such promise. Spring was still a long way off.
Gray wondered if he’d be around to see it sprout again.
“I know I should have told you,” he said finally.
“Why didn’t you?” she asked without looking at him. Her voice was soft, absent of the accusation he deserved, and he was grateful.
Gray sighed. He wanted to be honest with her now. Honesty felt like a gift. And maybe giving it to her would make him feel better.
“I saw you. The day you came to interview.” She raised her eyes to his then, looking just as innocent, just as radiant as she had that day. “I’d opened the door to come out and confront Bax, but as soon as I laid eyes on you, I knew I couldn’t.”
Meredith frowned her pretty frown. “Why not?”
Gray had no control over his face. He felt his smile wobble with the intensity of the memory. “Because you were so beautiful I didn’t want to look at you and see pity in your eyes.”
“Pity?” Her brows drew up, and she looked at him in disbelief.
“Yes. Pity. I can’t drive myself. I’m twenty-eight years old, and I need someone to check on me — or else I might have a seizure, hit my head, and never wake up,” he explained. “It’s pretty pathetic.”
“I’ve never thought that,” she said, a little flint coming out in her eyes, in her voice. “I would have never pitied someone like you. You’re amazing.”
“Someone like me?” he asked, trying to ignore the way her words brushed over him like a pair of hands.
“Successful. Self-made. Intelligent. Talented,” she listed. “You’re intimidating. Not pitiful.”
He huffed. “I’m not intimidating.” Gray shook the notion from his shoulders. No way she found him intimidating.
Her dainty left brow arched severely. “You’re a bestselling author, and you’re not even thirty. You’ve been to Paris three times. You eat things I can’t even pronounce, and you own a breed of wolf dogs from Czechoslovakia,” she listed in a rush. “You have two fireplaces. You’re the most intimidating person I’ve ever met. Add all that to the fact that you look like something out of Greek mythology, and it’s a wonder someone like me can even form sentences around you.”
Her words were meant to distance them, so Gray wrapped his arm around her and pulled her against him. “Something out of Greek mythology? Like the Cyclops?” he teased.
She glared up at him. “You’re not funny.”
“The Minotaur?” He gave her a concerned frown, and her mouth twitched. Just a little. And then her eyes grew sad.
“No. The Trojan Horse. Because you hide a devastating truth.”
Gray shut his eyes to absorb the blow.
“Ouch… You’re right,” he whispered, opening them again. Meredith looked pained, and his guilt doubled. “I’m sorry.”
“So tell me the truth now.” Her voice was just a husk, empty of its usual strength.
“I could die any minute.”
Meredith shut her eyes, and her body recoiled as if he’d shoved her. He remembered collapsing on top of her with the seizure and how her small frame put up no resistance. It was just like that.
This is what I am. A lumbering oaf who takes out innocent bystanders as I go down.
But he didn’t let her go down this time. He held onto her. He held onto what he had left.
“Is it cancer?” she said, blinking her eyes open. Her color was gone again, but her voice sounded steadier.
Gray shook his head. “No, it’s not. But that doesn’t matter. It’s pressing against the left carotid artery in my brain. That’s what’s causing the seizures,” he explained. “And it’s growing. If it blocks the artery completely, I’ll stroke out… My doctor says it would be fast.”
As he spoke, her eyes grew wider until she gaped at him in horror. “How can you say it like that? So calmly? Like…like…”
“Like I’m not afraid?” he asked. “I am afraid. But not of dropping dead.”
She shook her head, growing more panicked. “Why the hell not? I am. Your family sure seems to be. What did Bax mean? About odds?”
Gray silently cursed his brother. Bax didn’t understand. Neither did his parents. It would be such a relief if Meredith could.
“I don’t want options. I want time,” he said. His left arm was wrapped around her, and he still held her right hand. He squeezed it, hoping she’d listen. “Surgery is an option, but—”
“Then do it,” she said flatly.
He took a deep breath. “Meredith, I will, but I need time. I’m still me. A lot of things have happened to me since this tumor showed up, but I’m still Gray Blakewood,” he tried to explain. “Most days, I can still write — if I skip that stupid seizure medicine.”
He watched her wince, but he kept going.
“Yeah, I’m forgetting things. Like did I feed the dogs? Did I unload the dishwasher? And my head hurts all the time, but I’m still who I am. My behavior hasn’t changed, and I can still do the things that are most important to me.”
“But for how long?” she breathed, the sentence making her lower lip tremble. She pulled it between her teeth, and Gray fought the urge to run his thumb across her lips.
“I don’t know,” he told her honestly. “But the surgery is tricky. Assuming I survive it, I could lose some memories. And some — maybe all — of my ability to speak. Words might not make sense, and I wouldn’t be able to write. It will be a long, slow recovery, and even then I may not recover everything.”
“But if you don’t have surgery now, you’ll lose your life?” Her voice rose with the question, and anger etched her features. He’d frustrated her before, but he’d never seen her angry. Not really. Gray didn’t relish the fact that she was angry with him, but he was grateful that she wasn’t afraid to let it show. It meant that she would claim the life she wanted. She wouldn’t let someone else cheat her of what she deserved. And she wouldn’t cheat herself. She wouldn’t be a victim.
Without warning, Gray thought of Cecilia. If she’d had some of Meredith’s anger, some of her strength, maybe she would have fought harder for herself.
He reached up and ran his fingers down Meredith�
��s face. He’d kissed her. Twice now. And those memories burned bright in his mind. Maybe they were stored in a place far, far from the tumor. Maybe — if he played chicken and lost — they’d be the last thing to go before his breath stopped.
Gray hoped as much. That wouldn’t be so bad.
“Meredith, how can I make you understand?” he asked, tracing a finger around her ear and wanting to commit this, too, to the deepest recesses of his mind. “The thought of losing who I am — of living a life of someone who can no longer think the way I think and write the way I write — is far more terrifying than the thought of dying. I know waiting is a gamble, but I’d be able to face whatever comes with peace.”
She stared at him for a moment, and her face softened, the anger still there but less sharp. Drawing in a deep inhale, she sat up straight beside him.
“Why?” She eyed him with unflinching focus.
“My books.”
Meredith blinked, but to his relief, she didn’t roll her eyes. “How long?”
Gray shrugged. He needed another week to tie up the novel and give it two solid rounds of editing before he sent it to his publisher. He’d get it back a week after that to go through content edits, and then line edits would occur later. In the meantime, he could be sketching out an outline for the fifth installment. If he left himself a solid outline and good notes — and he survived the surgery, and he still had it in him to write — it would be best to have something to work with.
“Another month, I guess.”
“Why a month?”
“To finish this book and get enough of a start on the next one that it’ll be obvious to me where I need to go with it — even if my head’s messed up.”
Meredith watched him for a moment. “Does your doctor think you have another month?”
She pinned him with her gaze, and Gray found himself answering honestly.
“No.”
He watched her try to hide the shock that washed over her face. And he admired like hell the way she rallied and asked the next question without a trace of hesitation.
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