Chapter 32
THIRTY-TWO
WINNIE
Dusty Drips and Lucid Dreaming
My watcher snores.
I roll onto my side. I was dreaming of running along a hall toward Sally sleeping on a sofa past lots of closed doors but never reaching her, but the vision dissipates as I stretch toward West. His eyes are closed, and the hard lines that define his face soften in the morning light.
At least, I think it’s morning. Neither of us catch a lot of sleep, as the nurses wake us regularly for observations.
The advantages of being a Rand, and the disadvantages. Because when my brother is paying, absolutely no one has the balls to say no.
I mewl as I turn too far, stretching my stitches. It took me three days to wake out of my drug-induced haze, and I’ve been here for that long again already. My hand rises to my side as West cracks his eyes open.
“Damn it, Winnie. Stay on your back.” He looms over me, hands pressed to my shoulders as he returns me to my regular place with infinite care, flicking my IV out of the way.
“I mean, if you ask nicely…” I bat my eyelashes suggestively. The action fails as sleep crusts in the corner and I squint unsexily at him.
He snorts. “Nice, Rand.”
I no longer object to his usage because the day I woke, I filled out the paperwork to change Sally’s and my surname back to my maiden name.
The doctors objected I was making decisions too fast, but West forestalled everything, creating a buffer between me and the world.
I spent time with Sally while he stood in the doorway, blocking everyone else out, including my brother, for a full two hours.
And I could breathe.
“I aim to please.” My voice comes out thin as I deplete the little energy I have, and I scrounge internally for more. “Can I go home today?” I ask hopefully.
West’s eyes narrow. “Winnie—”
“Tomorrow.” My doctor, a dark-haired man with thick glasses who stands about half West’s height, steps quickly into my room like he’s afraid my resident cowboy might block him. “Tomorrow?” he repeats, looking up at West for approval.
West’s mouth sets in a tight line, but I’m ready to bounce off the bed. “Terrific. And the stitches?”
“You may have those removed in ten days, should the wound not present any further… complications.” Another glance at West.
I smother a smile behind my hand and use the wrong one. “Ow.”
Two sets of eyes laser-focus on me.
“Not ow ow, just… ow,” I explain hurriedly. “I should have used this hand… Never mind,” I sigh as they both descend on me, working in tandem to check my side.
Once I’m pronounced safe, my space is returned and I can breathe again. The doc says a few extra things that West listens to but I don’t and scurries out. I fix my cowboy with a stern eye, which he avoids.
“Wilder West. Do you have to scare everyone in sight?” I admonish him in my best paramedic’s voice.
He lifts an eyebrow, leaning his butt against my window. “Would you prefer to be inundated with visitors?”
“Well, no,” I admit. “Except for Sally. And you.”
“Mmm.” He rubs a hand over his mouth.
I frown. “What?”
West clears his throat. “Then you’re going to hate this.”
I glance at the doorway, expecting to see a team of nurses bustling in, but instead a head of flaming hair that I last saw the night I nearly lost my daughter fills the doorway. “Lanie?”
My crazy-ass wolf-biologist best friend, still pregnant, waddles toward me, tears streaming down her face. Apologies tumble from her lips as she stares at me in horror.
I open my arms, shaking my head to forbid her words, but her hands trace over my injured side without touching me.
“I left her. I’m a monster. I left her,” Lanie whispers.
“You are not a monster,” Cord and I say together. My hospital bed groans under their combined weight and mine.
West disappears out the door and returns a moment later, his oversized biceps straining his shirt sleeves as he hoists a pair of matching chairs that look much sturdier than the ones I slept in last time I stayed at the hospital, waiting on my brother to wake.
“Off,” he says shortly. “She can’t breathe. She just won’t tell you.”
Cord lifts Lanie off my bed and I manage a brief inhale. Big ones hurt and I cough. That hurts too so I just don’t.
“Thanks,” I manage on an exhale. It’s the best I can do.
“Sorry,” Lanie mumbles between a mouthful of wild red hair and my brother’s shirt.
“Stop it,” we both say at the same time.
I hold out a fist—the right hand this time—and Cord bumps it. “Don’t apologize anymore. Anyone,” I direct the room. “Got it?”
West leans back against the window frame, reducing the glaring light that filters into the sterile room. “Sally’s with Billy.” He forestalls my next argument.
I frown at him. “Why is she there and not here?” I assume that means she’s up at Coyote. I can’t imagine Billy coming off the land for anything. There’s a donkey hidden in that sentence, but I’m on too many good drugs to puzzle it out.
“Because we need to talk.” Lanie flicks her waist-length hair back and nearly strangles my brother.
I watch on with interest as he ducks to avoid being slapped in the face with the ends, fails, and chokes a little. Apparently this is the Lanie Show today. “Does he do that a lot?”
“More than you know.” She grimaces.
“So what’s on the menu?” I keep my eyes on my best friend, though West’s stare hits me hard.
I can’t avoid him forever, and I figure there’s a second talk coming after this one. I’m not sure which I don’t want to deal with just yet, but Lanie pulled dibs fist. With a man as stubborn as West, that’s impressive.
“You.” Lanie waves a finger at me. “Him.” The finger redirects to my stoic cowboy man. “Booty calls.” She curtails the rest of that sentence, which could have involved my parental absence but doesn’t.
I’ve paid that penance. Sally is okay, and I’m lucky.
We know that. Brad’s locked away. With the help of Cordell’s tame lawyer, Richard McCullins, who usually deals with business and estates but has stretched his muscles for me, my ex-husband won’t see the outside of a jail cell for a long time, regardless of how much money he thinks he has.
“Booty calls are fun.” I want to perk up brightly to the task, but I’m far too tired and my side wound where Brad stabbed me—the fucker—won’t allow it.
“They are.” Lanie’s lip twitches.
“Told you she’d brat out.” West tosses his two cents’ worth into the ring.
“I’ll get to you in a moment,” Lanie says mildly, and not without an undercurrent of threat.
“Yes, ma’am.” West closes his mouth and waits his turn patiently.
I squeeze my lips together to suppress a giggle. Because, hot damn, that man is cute when he’s sassy. I am far from the only brat in the room. I really hope Lanie didn’t come in with the intention of a serious conversation.
“I know you’ve known West for a long time,” Lanie starts.
“Is it a booty call or a sleepover if it’s a regular occurrence?” I interrupt her. I meet Cord’s icy eyes over her shoulder and grin. “Where is that line? I don’t think I’ve ever found it.”
“I don’t doubt that,” my brother says over Lanie’s shoulder.
West wisely keeps his mouth shut.
Lanie glares at me. “Am I going to be allowed to finish?”
“Sure.” I fold my hands in my lap like a chastised church mouse and fall silent.
She huffs. “When West called me after you left to head to him”—we all turn and look at West, who has never seemed so damn innocent in all his life—“I knew you were in trouble.”
“But I wasn’t,” I protest.
That earns me another glare. “As in, I knew you were in trouble because you hadn’t made any real plans to organize care for Sally, and you didn’t know when your next shift was. But you did need to go to him.” Lanie stares me down, unflinching.
Okay, so I see why my brother thinks she’s all that. Fighting Lanie is sexy Lanie.
I also get the message. Breath leaves my throat in a quick exhale. “I’m sorry I asked so much of you. I shouldn’t have.”
Lanie shakes her head. “That’s not what I mean.
” She twists to face West, her hands and Cord’s supporting her belly.
“You, both of you, need to be there for each other. Cord and I did this the opposite way around. We were… right there for each other from the start. Almost too much, at times.” She casts a bemused smile over her shoulder, and Cord presses a kiss to her temple.
“But we were there, even when things went wrong. And eventually, we even talked about it.”
I blink at her. “Is this an intervention?”
A throat clears. After a moment, Cord tucks around Lanie like she’s the most precious creature in his world. “And we’re out. Good luck.” He pauses, then reaches across my bed, his hand extended.
Lanie and I both hold our breaths. For a moment, I wonder if West will hold to his stubborn streak and deny my brother. Then he detaches his behind from the windowsill and leans forward to grip Cordell’s hand.
“I’m gonna need it.” West nods as the pair leave with me staring after them.
“Did they just tell us to talk to each other?” I ask in a hushed voice, maybe even a little awed.
West laughs softly. “Something like that, yeah.” He scrubs a hand across the back of his neck. “You want me to get you a crappy hospital coffee, Winnie?”
I turn to stare up at him. “Oh, no you don’t.”
“I don’t what?” He gazes down at me, his slate-gray eyes opaque like the overcast day he took me out for our ghost-town picnic.
“You don’t get to run away from me. Drag that chair over here and sit with me, you great big cowboy lump.”
“There’s a pretty picture.” He does what I ask anyway, grabbing the chair Cord took before and hoisting it up the bed to sit closer to my pillow. “Satisfied?” His eyes glint darker in challenge.
“Hardly.” I tip my chin up, the best gesture of defiance I can manage. I think I’m onto what Lanie wanted, but it’s going to take a whole lot more than I want to give right now. Plus, something else is percolating in my mind. I start with that. “I quit.”
“You what?” His hand hovers just above my hairline like he wants to tuck my curls behind my ear but gets stuck halfway. “Just how much are they giving you, Winnie?” He leans back to check my dosage, as though he knows what he’s doing.
This is Wilder West. For all I know, he does.
“I quit,” I repeat quietly. “I’m going to stay home and look after Sally. But not that home and not anywhere to do with Brad.” I force my ex’s name out between my lips without making it sound like a curse.
West watches me. “That career was your choice, Winnie. Is this something you’ll regret in the next weeks, months?”
I’ve thought it over, and it’s not the drugs talking. I know because I had these thoughts in the last weeks before all the shit went down. Afterward the medication wore off and everything freaking hurt again.
“I’m sure.” My sober face seems to convince him this time.
“All right. And the second half?”
“I didn’t say anything about—”
“Winnie,” he warns me.
I nibble my lip and his gaze zeroes in. “I want to move up to Valiant Peak like we talked about.”
“We?” West wasn’t there for that conversation.
I nod, a small concession. “Cord and I talked about it. I never said if I’d stay at the homestead, and, I don’t know, I kind of thought I could get a small rental in town, or maybe just outside it? Something with a few bedrooms. Just big enough for me, and Sally, and—” I licked my lips. “And you?”
That speech is enough to leave me breathless. Silence falls in the hospital room. I peer up at him through my lashes.
“Fucking flirt,” he growls, catching my chin in a firm grip before his mouth finds mine in the sort of slow, mind-searing kiss that helps me forget every word I’ve just uttered. “Got anywhere picked out?”
“What’s picked out?” I mutter when he releases me to catch my breath.
“Good.” West leans back, a satisfied smirk decorating his handsome face. “I might know a place.”
“Of course you do.” I snuggle down into my pillows, the taste of cowboy and overcast date days on my lips to remind me I’m not alone as sleep drifts at the edges of my reality.
The scarred hand that wraps around mine promises I’m not alone and don’t have to be scared of the dark anymore. Not that I told him, but I think he guessed, anyway.