Sitting next to Maya and playing some Candy shit on my phone that Layla had introduced me to on Facebook, I heard the door open behind me, making me sigh and stand up. Ren never wanted Maya alone, but then, he never wanted anyone too close to her, either. Difficult bastard. I walked over to the window and rested against it as I continued to play my game.
“How are we today, honey?” asked a voice I hadn’t expected, and I looked up and saw a nurse standing beside Maya, smiling. She was gorgeous with her dark hair tied back and boring blue scrubs on. How the hell did she make those look sexy? It was impossible! “My name’s Ebru, by the way, and I’m the nurse that’s been taking care of you during the day while you’ve been with us,” she continued, putting her fingers on Maya’s wrist. Had she? I hadn’t seen her, but then, Ren was normally here.
Dammit. Now, see, I’d missed out on…“Oh, fucking no.” I had a feeling that my life was going to change and that Ebru was the reason for it. Grandad, Dad and Ren had told me that when they met Gram, Mom and Maya something had clicked and settled inside them. I couldn't be sure, but I wasn't ready...at all.
Looking up, I saw both of them looking at me, frowning like there was something wrong with me. Why was this my fault?
“You alright, Cole?” Maya croaked.
Backing away from them in the direction of the door, I held my hands out in front of me in case the little witch in the blue scrubs came after me.
“No no no.” I knew I must’ve looked like an idiot, but come on, this wasn’t meant to happen now. “No way, this is Free Willy! No, it’s not happening. Free fucking Willy!” I made my point by jabbing my finger in their direction.
Did they not know about the United States? It was a free country, the land of the free, and my dick was a free man. I may not have actively acted out my reputation, but I was too young to settle down. I mean, what about Dash? Fucking dog…what did that say about my life?
As I shot out the door, I saw the nurse turn red, and Maya looked at me with that look that she got that I knew was going to end up with me in pain. Fuck my life.
Isla
Sitting beside Luke’s bed, hearing the machinery beeping and the ventilator whirring beside me, I tried not to cry. His eyes had been taped shut, as they’d struggled to get them to stay closed due to the pressure inside his skull, and he just looked so broken lying there.
Laying my head down on his hand, I gave in to the tears that I’d been trying to hold back. He had to be okay.
I was about to start talking when the curtain around us was pushed back with a mighty force. Kendal stormed up to the bed with mascara down her face.
“Oh my God,” she wailed loudly in the middle of ICU, no doubt disturbing everyone else. Before I could say anything, she literally pushed me away from him as she fell onto his chest, causing alarms to go off as she sobbed. A team of nurses and doctors came running in to help Luke, and they pulled her off him as they assessed what was wrong.
“The pressure caused the bleed to start again; we need to take him back to the theater,” the doctor in charge said. They lowered the top of the bed and started wheeling him out in a hurry.
“What’s happening?” It felt like I wasn’t really there and that I was watching this from a distance.
“Miss? Miss!” A petite nurse shook the hysterical Kendal. “Who are you?”
“I’m his girlfriend,” she snapped back, with the mascara now dripping off her face. She looked a bit like Alice Cooper mixed with a psycho out of a movie. Then her words hit me.
“That’s impossible!”
“Why are you here?” she sneered at me. “Look, little girl, Luke and I have been together for months now, and we’re getting married. You hanging around him and harassing him all the time isn’t going to work for me.” She’d walked up to me during this time and was now pointing at me with a sharp-tipped red nail. It actually completed the psycho look.
“That’s impossible,” I repeated. Only two weeks ago, we’d been lying in bed, and he’d told me he loved me for the first time.
Yanking her purse off her shoulder, the harpy dug through it, pulling out a phone in a not surprisingly bedazzled case. As she pressed the screen, I thought back to all of the things that this bitch had put me through with Calista. How Luke could ever have dated her, I’d never know. He’d said that things had ended ages ago and that they hadn’t even been a proper couple, so why was she here?
“Here you go. See?” She smiled triumphantly at me as she thrust her phone under my nose. Looking at the screen, I saw photo after photo of them standing at different events and articles about the events with the dates on them. The one with his arm around her and his nose on her temple was dated two weeks ago, the day before Luke had told me he loved me. He’d had a meeting in California on a site, he’d said. Looking at the other dates, it all added up; yet again I was the idiot. He’d fooled me again.
I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of knowing she’d broken me, so I shrugged and looked up at her. “Have at it,” I said, and I walked out of ICU. I needed to get home; I couldn’t cry in public.
Ren
She was awake and remembered that the photos weren’t real. What she didn’t know was that someone had tried to kill her and Luke, and they had come close to succeeding. I’d gone with George to look at the crime scene this morning, and just seeing what they’d been pulled out of almost brought me to my knees. When the investigators pulled out that scrap of cloth with “SURPRISE” written across it, it had taken everything in me not to go out and hunt the fucker down.
“Who the fuck is this bastard?” George muttered. “Why is he attacking my sites, and why Luke and Maya?”
“I dunno, George, but I think it’s time to get someone onto it.” I was interrupted by my phone ringing with Brett’s ringtone. Answering, I walked slightly away from George. “Not now, man, I’m a bit busy.” Brett would understand; he knew what had happened.
“Ren, fucker ran me off the road,” Brett wheezed down the phone.
“What?”
“I was driving out of Houston to y’all when an SUV pushed me off the road,” he rasped. “If I hadn’t hit a tree stump, I would have gone over the edge. Fuck, I need to sit down.”
“Brett, are you okay?” I shouted. He’d become faint, and I was fucking terrified that he was badly injured or that they’d come back.
“Yeah, there’s blood on my head, and my side hurts,” he coughed. “Mitchell’s four minutes out. He was following behind and got stuck at lights.”
“Why were you bringing security with you?”
Sure, he had security available, but a majority of the time they were only with Brett or my cousins when they had meetings or were in high-risk situations. You never knew who you were meeting with in that industry, and most of them were sharks; they’d shoot you in the head and walk to freaking Shangri-La for a steak afterward, calm as shit. I’d never once known them to do something like this to Brett, though, since he worked well with all of them.
“Shit has been happening, and after the last time, they decided it was safer to have them there.” He stopped, and I heard the sound of a door slamming and voices shouting his name before he continued. “I should never have left without them, but I got back from Dubai this morning and got the voicemails. I got back in the car and left. What the fuck is going on, Ren?”
His security detail was urging him to get in their SUV so they could take him to the Texas Medical Center, so I told him to go and keep me updated. I turned my head back to where Luke and Maya had almost been killed and struggled not to roar. Someone was attacking my family; they’d almost killed them. I was done!
“George, get your man to find the best PI possible. I’ll pay, I don’t care, but someone just went after Brett and almost succeeded. This ends now!”
Not being able to stomach seeing where I’d almost lost my baby, I left and drove back to her, my heart racing the whole time. I’d already decided that she was moving in with me when we left, an
d Tony had surprisingly been all over the idea. He’d already helped moved a lot of the shit that she needed to my home, our home. I’d also asked the guys who had worked at my place to help me out, making a couple of temporary adjustments to make it easier for her to get around until she healed, which wouldn’t be for some time. I was going to make sure that she was never left alone and vulnerable; someone would be with her all the time. I wasn’t taking any chances. I needed to speak to my dad and call Tom, Layla, and Grandpa to make sure they stayed vigilant and kept their eyes open. I didn’t know who was doing this, but I wasn’t taking any more risks.
Pulling back into the hospital parking lot, I parked up and rang Dad as I walked towards the entrance. Quickly explaining things to him, I went up to where Maya’s room was and walked in on her shouting at Cole.
“What the hell is wrong with you, you asshole? You called her fucking Shamu! Do you know what that does to a woman? And she’s not even big!”
Groaning, I felt like whacking my head off of a wall. What had Captain Skinny Dick done this time?
“I didn’t—”
“You know, somewhere out there, Cole,” Maya snapped, looking seriously hot with some color back in her cheeks, “there’s a tree tirelessly producing oxygen so that you can breathe. You owe that poor tree a goddamned apology!” Her eyes were spitting fire at him, and in his defense, I could see that he felt shit about whatever he’d done, because he was looking at the floor and chewing his lip.
As I walked into the room, both of their heads swung in my direction, and I saw the relief in Cole’s eyes when he saw me.
“What did I miss?” I bent down to give her a kiss, relaxing as soon as I inhaled the smell that was uniquely hers.
“Your asshole brother called poor Ebru a goddamn orca,” she growled, swinging her head back in his direction. Oh goody, Golden Balls was in the shit; sure, that was immature of me, but come the fuck on.
“I didn’t! I was talking about my dick!”
“You pointed at her, you shit-licking, tiny-dicked, monkey shit-stealing, window-munching dickhead!” she shouted, regretting it quickly and grabbing her head.
“Baby, lie back and relax. Close your eyes. You need to stay calm and not shout just now. I promise I’ll let you do whatever you want to him when you’re better.” I gently pushed her back onto her pillows and rubbed her forehead with my thumb.
It didn’t take long for her to fall asleep. I gestured Cole towards the door so that I could fill him in on what was going on.
“Dude, your chick’s so mean,” he grumbled, sulking over being told off. “I mean, tiny-dicked?”
“Did you seriously call the nurse Shamu?”
“Hell no! I got this weird feeling when she walked in and freaked out that I was gonna end up a sad sack like you. I just stressed that my dick was a free willy, ya know?”
I looked at him to see if he was yanking my crank, but no, of course he was serious. “You called your dick an orca? Yeah, I’m proud of the size of mine, but at least be realistic, man.”
“No, that wasn’t what I meant. I meant like it was a free country and my dick had freedom!” He was walking back and forth now with his hands on top of his head.
“So now your dick’s Braveheart?”
“What the fuck?”
“You know, that movie where they put blue shit on their faces and yell about freedom! It had that angry little dude in it who had an awful accent…” I dunno if I was tired, but in my defense, I’d only watched the movie once, so sue me if I didn’t remember the guy’s name. Then a horrible image of a dick with blue shit and a kilt on it entered my mind…“Fuck it, I need to get some sleep,” I muttered.
“Oh yeah! He got dirty with the French chick after his wife was—” Cole drew his finger in a line across his throat.
Walking a little further away from her door, but making sure I could see it all the time, I filled Cole in on what had happened. His somewhat relaxed expression turned furious. People very rarely saw the serious side of Cole, but it existed, and it was scary.
“Who have we got on it?”
“George is getting his man to get a PI. I’m gonna call Mace in a sec and ask him to do his shit too, without anyone knowing. Brett will also have his guys on it, so no matter what, they can run, but they won’t be able to fucking hide.”
Nodding his head, Cole continued to pace. We both had stuff to do, though, so he needed to sort himself out. “Now apologize to the nurse, shit kitten. She looks after Maya, and she better continue being the best nurse to ever exist in the ‘land of the free,’” I mocked, heading back to her room.
“Gooch grabber,” he muttered behind me, but I was too close to Maya to care.
Chapter Thirty
Maya
I ’d been going over the facts since I woke up from my nap since, for once, Ren wasn’t hovering over me. Someone had been sabotaging sites for months now. Could it be Francheska? She was unstable and insane, if her actions were anything to go by. But did she have it in her to sabotage sites so effectively and covertly that no one picked up on it? It just didn’t make sense.
“Hey, baby, you’re awake.” Ren walked into the room and bent down to kiss my forehead. “How are you feeling?”
He crawled into bed beside me and listened as I told him everything that had been going through my head. “I dunno if Francheska’s smart enough to pull this off, My, but I don’t think we can remove her from the equation.” He reached up and twirled a lock of my hair around his finger. “I’m so sorry for everything and for not speaking to you when I should have. I’m going to do better, baby, I promise.”
“We’ll get there.” I lifted up to give him a kiss and then put my head down on his chest, listening to his heartbeat. We needed to focus on who was doing this. “Ren, who do you think’s doing this?”
Feeling him stiffen under me, I raised my head to look at him again and saw that he was glaring at the ceiling. “I don’t know, Maya, but I swear they’re not going to get you again. We’ve been working on getting it solved. Security at the sites has been tightened, and once you get your casts off and your doctor clears you for work, George has arranged security for you. Tony has a security detail, and your home had a new system put in by Mace’s guys yesterday, so he’s safe. We can’t even establish a motive, Maya, and its driving me insane that someone might get to you again.”
“They won’t. And if they do, I’ll utilize Operation Human Shield and shove Cole ahead of me and run,” I said through giggles, relieved when Ren burst out laughing. Tightening his arms around me, he rolled us over.
“Fuck, I love you! Just when I didn’t think you could get more perfect, you naturally come up with the plan that Brett and I came up with during our zombie apocalypse debate.”
Laughing with him when life was scary made it all tolerable. Maybe I should thank Francheska for making us stronger? Nah, that bitch could rot in psycho hell.
Ren
Mace had contacted his buddies and asked them to help him out with looking into this shit storm. I felt better knowing that there was a team of guys who knew what they were doing looking into it, but at the same time it was disconcerting not finding anything major. The CCTV had shut off for thirty minutes at 5:15 a.m., but when it had come back on, nothing had looked different. There were no fingerprints on the cloth or the beam that it was attached to, and all of the fingerprints collected from the site belonged to people who worked on the site. Whoever had done it was a ghost right now. Mace had sent his brothers to the other sites and to where the tampered machinery was being stored to check those over too. Hopefully the asshole had slipped up.
My priority was Maya now, though. She had a long road to recovery ahead of her, and Luke still being in a coma was really holding her back.
“He jumped on top of me when it all fell,” she sobbed into Christie’s shoulder as her parents looked on from the FaceTime screen on her cell phone. I could hear her mom sniffing, and I couldn’t say I blamed her. Knowin
g that we could potentially have lost Maya if she’d been hit harder, but knowing that Luke was suffering, too, it was so hard to get my head around, and her mom must have felt the same way. Beside me, Tony burst out into loud, dramatic sobs, distracting everyone from their own tears.
“Don’t mind me,” he hiccoughed when he saw us all staring at him. “It’s just that it’s so like Armageddon when Bruce sacrifices himself for Ben,” he finished on a wail. I wasn’t seeing the similarity, and neither was anyone else, by the looks on their faces. At least Maya had stopped crying, though!
Shaking herself out of her perusal of the Oscar performance in the room, Christie took Maya’s hand and sat on the bed. “Sweetheart, Luke won’t want you crying, and you’re not going to help your head and side any by getting so upset. My boy is a fighter, you know this, and he’s fighting. When he wakes up, I’ll bet you anything his first question is if you’re okay. When he realizes how much he saved you from, he’ll accept his pain proudly,” Christie said in a low voice, but we all still heard her and nodded our heads as Tony wailed even louder.
Earlier that day, Amy and Lucy had FaceTimed because neither could get away from their work. Apparently almost losing a close family member didn’t count as a good enough reason to miss college and work. I was a bit disappointed for Maya by this; I figured having her girls around would cheer her up and give her a boost. Scarlett and Ava had been regular figures in Maya’s room, along with Tony and our families, so she’d never had a moment alone. I figured Isla was spending all her time in Luke’s room, because I’d only seen her a couple of times. On both occasions, she’d been really quiet and withdrawn when she came in to see Maya. Everyone understood, though, as Luke was still not out of the woods.
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