Chapter 12
TWELVE
OUCH
Ally
Fucking ouch. A hand prodded me, hitting a tender spot on my leg that hadn’t been there before… Before when? I had no idea what the time was. Or the day. But I was certain I’d been out of it for a while.
“He’s waking up. His fingers moved. Doctor!” Callum boomed.
What the hell was my brother doing in my hotel?
“Cal,” I croaked, my throat aching like a mother, the word barely audible.
A hand took mine in a tight grip. “Ally? Can ye hear me?”
“Cal?” I blinked, but my eyes were covered with something. “What’s on my face?”
“Hush now. Stay calm. Dinna try to move, lad.” He started to say something else, but I zoned out and missed it, returning to the hazy black.
“What do you mean ‘permanently scarred?’ You said you could fix him. What about plastic surgery?”
This time, it was Ma’s voice, and I knew I must be severely fucked. My and Wasp’s mother had a new family and had long ago moved south. We loved her, and she loved us, but the woman had suffered badly at our father’s hands, and she rarely came to the castle.
Wait. The scratchy sheets under me didn’t feel like home. And the disinfectant and dried blood smell didn’t fit either. But if I wasn’t in the castle…
Ah, Callum had yelled for a doctor. Christ on a flaming bike. I was in hospital? Why?
Panic struck me. The bairn. I was meant to see her.
Scarlet… Where was Scarlet?
Hadn’t we been talking?
An image flashed into my mind—her alarmed gaze, then her white-faced fear. Every freckle on her face stark. Oh Christ.
“Ma?” My voice cracked from lack of use. I swallowed hard, but my dry throat grated. Why the hell couldn’t I see?
“Alasdair, my poor boy.” Ma’s fingers clutched my arm. “You’re in hospital. Do you remember what happened?”
I concentrated. A flash of memory burst through, metal chewing into my skin. “Accident?”
“That’s right. Your car was hit.” Ma sobbed.
“Scar—” I tried to say Scarlet’s name. I couldn’t remember if she’d been with me. Was she in a hospital bed nearby?
Or worse.
Nausea rocketed through me. “Scar!” I tried to yell, the name distorting.
My mother spoke through her tears, her tone distraught.
“You know, then. I’m so sorry. I didn’t realise you’d heard.
The doctor might be able to do more about the scar across your forehead, but the one over your cheek is too prominent.
There’s no way to conceal it. Your face… Oh, Alasdair. I’m so sorry!”
Her cries shook the bed, and I passed out again into my drug-induced cloud, fighting against it to piece together what the hell had happened because none of this made sense.
Wasp was my next visitor, and a fresh determination rose in me to get up and stay up this time. At my bedside, he talked on the phone, promising someone an update soon. At the end of his call, I reached for his hand, waving blindly.
“Ow, why does everything hurt?” I complained. Pain zapped down my right leg and banded across my chest. My head pounded.
Then I blinked, light trickling into my vision.
I blinked again. Wasp’s concerned face came into focus. I could see!
A hospital room. Pale-blue blankets. My leg in a cast, held in some sort of hoist. My brother’s strung out, red-eyed expression.
“Why are ye looking at me like that?” I demanded.
“You’re awake!”
“Bro, help me out here. I need to know what’s going on.” I struggled, dragging my heavy body an inch up the pillows.
Everything ached. A tube pierced the back of my hand, stinging where I pulled it.
I stopped moving.
“Do ye know you were in an accident?”
“Aye. Ma said my face was ruined.” I wanted to smile, but my skin stretched tight, hurting. Thick pads covered one eye and half my face.
“I gave blood. You owe me big time,” my twin tried to joke, but it fell flat, and anguish ghosted over his features.
My spine tingled. This was bad, it had to be, but I needed to know. “How long have I been out of it? Tell me everything.”
He did.
For four whole days, I’d been unconscious.
My aching leg was broken in two places, the second break splintering and requiring surgery with a metal plate to fix.
Then there were cracked ribs and a dislocated shoulder, though the latter had been popped back into place.
Wasp described the scars I’d be left with.
A deep gouge out of my cheek. A dent in my chest. Lines elsewhere on my upper right half.
My Land Rover had been totalled, hit by a drunk driver.
“Was I alone in the car?” I burst out.
“You were.”
“I remember Scarlet being with me.”
Wasp cocked his head. “She wasn’t. But she came to the hospital. I didn’t speak to her, but Callum did. So she can’t have been far away.”
Relief floored me. In a rush, half a dozen new emotions roared.
“I need to get out of here. I missed seeing the bairn. Have ye got my phone?”
“It was trashed in the wreck, and you aren’t going anywhere. They’ve only just taken you off the heaviest dope. Stop wrestling with your sheets or you’ll do yourself another injury.”
I couldn’t do much worse than had already happened. Luckily for me, my frustration lost out to exhaustion, and my eyes slid closed again of their own accord. Fuck this. I needed to get better, and fast.
It took another long-arsed week before the doctors cleared me to go home. I couldn’t walk so had to suffer being lifted by Callum into his car then carried into the castle at the other end of the journey.
Get-well-soon cards littered my bedside table. Someone had sent flowers.
When I’d been sixteen, I’d got myself into trouble after a midnight raft race with another lad on the estate.
I’d been thrown into the water and washed downstream, forced to cling to rocks until rescue came.
The whole of the Cairngorms, it seemed, had turned out to find me, with my brothers in boats and helicopters, hunting me down.
Like then, people had wished me well, but I wasn’t a teenager anymore.
The accident might not have been my fault but, stuck in my bed and unable to move, I wasn’t a man in control of his life, either.
Mathilda, my sister-in-law, was sitting at my bedside when I woke after the long journey home. With one hand, she absently caressed her very pregnant belly.
“Hey.” I lifted on my elbows, ignoring the shrieking from my ribs and shoulder. “What time is it?”
“You got home at four. It’s now eight. Here, I’ve got a present for you.” She collected a box from the bedside table and handed it over.
“A phone?” I’d been using an old one of my brother’s, but it only worked for calls and texts. Mathilda held out a latest model.
“I’ve put your SIM in already.”
I gave her a hug that twisted my hip and had pain shooting along my leg, then dropped back into my pillows and switched on the device.
“I should have pictures from the foster carer. She promised one every morning.” I’d rung Vicki the moment I could make a sensible sentence. She already knew about my accident from the social workers, though not immediately, and said she’d send pictures as often as possible.
We both waited while the phone did its thing, then multiple picture messages loaded. Mathilda leaned in, her mouth agape, taking in the shots.
The bairn had her eyes open in one, a curl to her wee lips like she was smiling in another.
My heart ached.
“Her eyes are turning green, like yours.” Mathilda placed her hand on my forearm.
Emotion rippled in me. I hadn’t noticed that the one time I’d seen her. Or maybe all eyes started blue and changed colour later. What did I know?
“Vicki said that because I can’t visit, I should record a video so she could show it to her every day, but she won’t want to see this.” I pointed at my bandaged face. “I’ll scare the poor thing.”
From what little I could tell about the accident, I must’ve turned in my seat to avoid the impact when the other car hit mine, so half my face had been destroyed while the other was untouched.
I looked like a cartoon villain.
“Don’t be silly. You’re still you, and she’ll love you just the same with a scar or two.”
Tears welled in Mathilda’s eyes.
“Don’t you start crying, too.” I gently shook her hand. “All everyone does is cry at me. I’m not that hideous, am I?”
“No!” Mathilda dried her tears with my quilt. “It’s the pregnancy hormones. You’re fine.”
But I wasn’t. Two days ago, in the hospital, when a nurse changed my bandages, I’d examined the angry, puckered scars in a mirror.
The shock had eaten me up.
I’d never thought myself vain, but I’d taken my looks for granted.
A different person had stared back at me, one with a fucked-up, swollen, lacerated cheek, and a gash over my forehead. My ear had been sliced by whatever had caught me.
My face had made my career. Even if I hadn’t planned to turn my back on modelling, it would certainly give up on me now.
“I’ll record another voice message for her. At least she can hear me speak to her.”
“When will you see her next? Can they bring her to you?”
I hadn’t asked. I didn’t want her to see me all bound up in white. Or be unable to hold her right because of a pinched muscle still killing my shoulder.
“I’ll work something out.” My gaze found the flowers next to my bed, and I reached for the card propped alongside the vase, needing a distraction.
Mathilda tracked my movements. “They’re from Scarlet. She’s been asking after you.”
I knew she had. I hadn’t replied to her messages.
I’d remembered everything about our night.
Her body. The lust. The overwhelming passion and everything I’d felt when I’d woken wrapped up in her.
And I clearly recalled the message I’d been given in the solicitor’s office.
I needed to present a picture of stability to the court to prove I could be a good father.
They didn’t say that I shouldn’t date, but any new relationships should be carefully thought through.
I needed to be a different person, one in control, making good decisions and knowing myself.
From a starting place of nought, that had seemed a challenge. Now, I was below zero and drowning.
I’d told Scarlet we needed to cool things.
No doubt now she’d be relieved.