Chapter 24
The hospital monitor beeped… beeped… beeped… from the machine beside me.
“Do I really need this?” I asked the nurse, holding up my hand with endless wires attached.
“Yes,” Presley answered for him, his tone leaving no room for discussion.
His fingers tightened over my other hand where he sat at the side of my bed.
They’d come for me. All three of them.
Presley on the ATV and Sinclair and Dacre via a damn rescue helicopter, just like Dacre had said.
A paramedic had come out perched on a bright orange stretcher that was attached to the side of the helicopter, and I’d been winched into the whirring bird in the sky, where Sinclair and Dacre had been waiting for me.
Now I was at the hospital, my shoulder popped back into place after an excruciating re-adjustment by the doctor and the large gash just above my left kidney had been stitched up. They were trying to keep me here overnight, but I didn’t want to stay.
“I don’t need to be here,” I reassured Presley for what had to be the thirty-eighth time.
Dacre made a noise of disagreement from where he leaned against the wall with his arms crossed. “You need to be where the doctor tells you to be.”
He hadn’t taken his eyes off me since the moment I entered that helicopter. He’d told me he wasn’t letting me out of his sight again.
Sinclair stood at the end of my bed, the same spot he’d been since they’d wheeled me in, refusing to move and making the medical staff work around him.
He was furiously typing on his phone, trying to figure out who had done this and why.
He’d sporadically look up to make sure I was still breathing, giving my foot a gentle squeeze, then going back to his work.
“The doctor will be back in to see you shortly,” the nurse said, giving my hand a gentle pat.
All three of the guys’ heads whipped up, their gazes locked on the nurse’s hand on me. Thankfully, he didn’t notice as he left the room.
“You don’t need to be jealous of my male nurse.” I shifted in the bed and winced, and Presley was instantly on his feet, trying to help me.
“It’s not jealousy. We just don’t like another man’s hands on you, Sass.”
Sounded like jealousy to me, but I heard myself asking, “Yet you don’t care about each other?”
Dacre shrugged. “It’s different.”
“How?”
Sinclair looked up at me, thinking about it. “I can’t explain it, but it is.”
“You’re all weird,” I said, my tone teasing.
Pres leaned in, pressing a quick kiss to my cheek. “And you’re hot in a hospital gown, Sass.”
I rolled my eyes, but he’d made me smile for the first time since I’d been pushed over a cliff. I sobered at the reminder of what I’d gone through.
“Any leads?” I asked Sinclair.
He shook his head, looking agitated. “Whoever keeps trying to get at you are hiding behind whoever they’ve hired to do it. I don’t know who’s controlling it all.”
“The guys they have working for them are loyal as hell and can’t be bought,” Dacre added.
Sinclair nodded his agreement. “I can’t confirm it’s Dempsey’s father, but I can’t rule it either.”
Our conversation was broken up by a heated conversation outside my room.
“I don’t give a shit about your hospital protocols, somebody needs to tell me where the hell my wife is or I’m going to burn this place and everyone in it to the fucking ground!” Boston’s deep, menacing voice cut through the wall.
Presley raised a brow at me. “Your husband is a psychopath, Sass.”
“I warned you, didn’t I?”
The sight of his smile at my joke cut through my panic at Boston being here. I loved Pres’s smile more than anything and it had been a little absent lately.
“She’s right in here, Mr. Ivers,” came a woman’s voice, the door opening.
Boston filled the room, his face tight with fury. His eyes swept the room, assessing it for danger, then they landed on me and the rage that filled him abated slightly.
Surely that wasn’t the reaction of someone working for my father. I wanted to believe that Boston was here on his own accord, not doing my father’s bidding.
I wanted to believe it so badly.
The nurse gawked at Boston’s back like he was a madman, shutting the door behind her as she left.
“Fuck, you’re alive,” he murmured, more to himself than anything.
Dacre gave an amused huff. “I think he’s happy to see you, Bambi.”
Boston’s eyes didn’t stray from me as he came around the bed to the side that wasn’t occupied by Pres. “Are you hurt?”
I shook my head.
“That’s a fucking lie,” Sinclair said.
“She had a dislocated shoulder,” Presley told him. “And a slice across her back that only just missed a crucial organ.”
Boston nodded once in acknowledgment of their words, taking in my injuries before sliding his fingers between mine.
He’d taken my hand the day we’d gone for the ride together, but nothing as intimate and familiar as this.
It was like I’d left the door ajar after that day with him at the beach, and his panic for my safety was pushing it wide open.
“You good now?”
He was a man of few words, at least around the others, but that just meant the words he did offer had more weight and meaning.
He’d told me at the beach that he’d do anything for the people he cared about.
Was this him showing me he cared about me?
His intensity was both comforting and overwhelming at the same time.
“I’m good.” I tried to sit up higher and groaned at the pain in my shoulder. Boston’s fingers tightened in mine, but he didn’t say anything.
“I just want to get out of here,” I complained.
I knew I sounded like a whiny brat, but right now I didn’t care.
After what I’d been through today, I just wanted a shower and my own bed.
Not to be stuck in a brightly lit hospital being poked and prodded by strangers every hour while forced to lie on this cold, metal bed.
“So, let’s go,” Boston said like it was the simplest thing in the world.
“She can’t just leave,” Pres said, brow pinched. “The doctor wants her here overnight to keep an eye on her.”
Boston stared at him, expression blank. He looked to Sinclair and Dacre, then back to Presley.
“I thought you Astons were super fucking loaded. You can’t afford a doctor and medical team at your giant compound?”
Dacre looked at Sinclair, then Presley, shrugging. “Yeah, of course we can.”
Boston stalked from the room, returning with a harassed looking male doctor.
“Take all that shit off her, including the thing in her arm.”
The young doctor’s eyes widened at the demand. “I-I’m just a student doctor. I’m not qualified yet. I’m not allowed to do that.”
Boston’s eyes narrowed. “You need a qualification to get all that stuff off her?”
“Well… no…” The young doctor swallowed.
“So, then do it.” Boston motioned towards my bed, his expression conveying just how impatient he was about to become.
The young doctor must have decided that he valued his life more than his position at the hospital, because he came around the side of the bed and started disconnecting wires from my hands and chest. “This may pinch for a second,” he said to me in a gentle voice.
I nodded and he pulled back the tape stuck to the crook of my arm, sliding some kind of very thin tube from my vein.
The doctor turned back to Boston.
“Done?” Boston asked, and the doctor nodded.
Boston ushered him towards the door. “Thank you for your service.”
Dacre snorted a laugh.
“He’s not in the military,” Pres muttered.
Boston ignored him, stalking from the room once more and returning this time with a large brown leather and metal wheelchair.
He came round the side of the bed and gripped my blankets in his large hand, tossing them off me, then he scooped me into his arms, placing me gently in the wheelchair. “Well then, let’s fucking go.”
The guys all got to their feet and Boston wheeled me to the door, just as a more senior-looking doctor stepped into the doorway. “Where are you going? Ms. Falconer needs to stay here.”
Boston’s expression darkened as he stared at her. “It’s Mrs. Ivers, actually.”
Presley stepped forward to protest, but Sinclair put a hand to his chest, stopping him. “Now isn’t the time for that argument.”
Boston stood tall at my back, letting go of the handles of the wheelchair to stand at his full, imposing height. “Mrs. Ivers wants to go home, where she’ll be monitored by a private care team. We’ll sign whatever you need to make it happen. Understood?”
The woman hesitated, glancing at each of us. Then she nodded, hustling back to the desk to get whatever forms needed to be signed.
Boston started down the hall with me in the chair.
“I can walk, you know.”
It might have been true; I hadn’t had the balls to test that theory before he’d come barrelling into my room.
His tone was clipped. “You just went over a cliff.”
“I’m well aware.”
“Then why would you be expecting to walk anywhere?”
I tipped my head up to look at him as much as I could without causing pain. “You’re going to carry me around for the next week?”
“If I have to.”
I frowned. “Why would you do that?”
“You know the answer to that.” He glanced down at me as he walked. “Because I’m your husband, Firecracker. It’s my damn job.”
I bit the inside of my cheek, my father’s letter weighing on me.
“Can I ask you something?” I said in a small voice.
“Go ahead.”
I stared down at my hands in my lap, before lifting my head to look at him. “Are you here because my father sent you?”
He stopped walking, staring down at me for a moment, then coming around the front of the wheelchair to crouch in front of me. The guys stopped behind us, clearly listening in.
“Coming to Cape Canyon had nothing to do with your father and everything to do with you.” His eyes shone with a sincerity I so desperately wanted to believe.
This was my father’s most successful game—undermining everything I trusted until I didn’t know what was true. It was only a matter of time before he tried to come for my connections with Dacre, Sin, and Pres.
“He told me he’d sent you. That you were his attack dog.”
Boston’s eyes narrowed. “He’s lying. He’s trying to keep you insecure so you bow to him. I’m here for you and only you.”
He took my hand, his thumb stroking over my skin. If he was here for me, did that mean he’d side with me if I said I didn’t want to produce an heir for our families? I didn’t have the strength to ask that question right now.
I studied him, searching for the lie in his expression and not finding it. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
I nodded, and he stood tall, accepting my response and returning to his place behind me to take me home.