Chapter Three
Madden
The bed was so uncomfortable Madden thought rolling off it and hitting the floor would be a more pleasant experience.
Opening his eyes, the bright lights and privacy curtains didn’t clue him in as to where he was.
His head was pounding too, but he didn’t remember drinking that much.
His father’s funeral had ended exactly like he thought it would, with him rushing away before things got out of hand.
He shouldn’t have been speeding, he told himself. It could have ended badly.
And then he remembered and all the pieces fell into place. That asshole had come around the curve driving between lanes and had forced him off the road. The light, the curtains. This was a hospital, and he wasn’t on a bed, he was on a gurney. A loud grunt of annoyance spilled from his lips.
Struggling to see around him, he tried to straighten up but pain shot through him like lightning. His left arm pulled him back. A white cast wrapped around his arm and shoulder like a piece of armor.
Fuck.
‘Nurse!’ he called. ‘Hey!’
‘I’ll be right there, Mr. Price,’ called a woman’s voice from the other side of the curtain.
Madden winced. Mr. Price was his father. Even at work, no one called him Mr. Price. He was Madden, Sir or Boss, and that was it.
The curtain opened harshly, and a woman in blue scrubs, stethoscope around her neck, walked in.
Her black hair was tightly held in a ponytail at the base of her skull, and she wore thick black framed glasses.
She didn’t even look up at him as she picked up the clipboard and checked the details on it.
‘Where is my phone?’ he asked, his voice hoarse.
‘Good afternoon to you too, Mr. Price,’ the woman said. ‘My name is Mariska. I’ll be looking after you for another…’ She looked at her watch. ‘Two hours, so let’s try to be cordial in this very short relationship we’re engaging into.’
Of all the nurses in the world, he had to get the cheerful smart-ass one, he thought.
‘Call me Madden if you expect me to answer,’ he snapped.
The woman looked at him for the first time. Maybe in her early forties, she had a nice fake smile.
‘How are you feeling today, Madden?’ Mariska said, pulling a blood pressure machine closer, her eyes no longer on him.
‘Anxious.’
That seemed to surprise her for a moment.
‘It is normal to feel unsettled after an accident like that.’
‘Anxious to retrieve my phone so I can call my assistant,’ he corrected her, even more annoyed.
‘I see. I’ll check with the fire department that recovered your car and we’ll see about getting your belongings back. If they survived the crash, of course. How’s that?’
‘Can I not make a phone call from elsewhere in the meantime?’
‘Hmmm, I’m going to need a larger cuff,’ she said to herself, looking at his arm. ‘Give me a minute.’
‘Wait!’
But she left without answering. It was then that he heard a familiar voice and more of the events after the accident came back to him.
Adryan Hayes had been in the ambulance. He had almost forgotten. The memories came back as momentary flashes of fair hair and blue eyes, gloved hands flying over him. He had wanted nothing more than to shove him off him and get out of there. That hadn’t changed.
Madden tensed as the curtain began to open. Adryan stepped around it, framed by the bright lights outside his cubicle, the light reflecting in his blond hair.
‘It’s you,’ Madden heard himself say before Adryan had a chance to say a word.
Adryan froze, raising an eyebrow. Without a word, he reached for the clipboard and checked the notes.
‘That’s confidential,’ he snapped at him.
‘It is, but I had to make sure they had confirmed my concussion diagnosis. Otherwise I might think your hostility is part of your real personality,’ he smirked. ‘How are you feeling?’
Adryan casually put the clipboard back in its slot and got closer to the head of the bed. He looked him up and down with his big blue eyes.
He remembered those blue eyes, that smirk, staring as Michael beat the shit out of him while screaming every slur he could think of.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, not in any mood to indulge in pleasantries.
‘I’m on a mission.’
Adryan pulled forward the backpack he was carrying and started searching its interior, coming out shortly after with a ziplock bag.
‘I’ve been tasked to deliver this to you,’ he said, offering the bag.
Inside, his phone lay dark and inert.
‘What the hell?’
‘It was a pretty bad car crash,’ Adryan said. ‘Be glad only the screen is broken.’
Madden snatched the bag out of his hands. He had intended to open it but realized only now he couldn’t quite move his right arm to reach it, so he was left staring at the bag in his hand like an idiot.
‘Does it switch on?’ he asked, not looking at Adryan.
‘As you can imagine, I didn’t check,’ the other man answered. ‘But I can, if you want to.’
He could feel Adryan’s eyes on him, but refused to look up.
His entire insides grumbled in annoyance.
The last thing he wanted to do was ask this guy for help.
On the other hand, he absolutely needed to call Vicky.
She was probably going mad by now. It was a miracle she hadn’t rang the hospital yet.
‘Fine,’ he grunted.
Adryan lifted the bag, but somehow Madden didn’t feel like letting it go and it didn’t slide out of his fingers quite as easily as he might have expected.
He made a point of staring at Adryan’s hands while he manipulated the phone.
Fingers on large hands. Adryan had always had large hands.
It had made him a better football player, back in high school.
‘Ah, it’s turning on,’ Adryan said.
Madden looked up for the first time since he had seen his phone, relieved to hear the news. Adryan was now turning his phone to his face. He watched the lock icon open, but Adryan didn’t give him the phone immediately.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he grunted, trying to reach for his phone.
Adryan took a step back, out of reach, and Madden saw red. So many memories of his things being passed around, out of his reach, before he had grown taller. So many memories of trying to recover his school bag from the trash, or the fountain in the main square, or the toilet.
‘Adryan, give me that back right now,’ he said, his voice lowering dangerously.
‘Relax,’ Adryan said, handing him the phone. ‘That’s who you wanted to call, right?’
Madden blinked, Vicky’s name was written across his screen.
‘How did you know I was going to call her?’
‘You called out her name, when you were in and out, yesterday. Your assistant?’
Madden considered him carefully.
‘You stalking me?’
Adryan laughed out loud. It made him glow, Madden thought. Or maybe it was the concussion that made him see things.
‘Well, she’s not your girlfriend, is she?’ he said, the smile still on his lips.
Madden was taken aback. He was about to reply when a woman popped her head around the curtain, curly hair tightly pulled on top of her head in a ponytail.
‘There you are. Come on, they’re waiting for us in pediatrics,’ the woman said. Her eyes moved from Adryan to him. ‘Hi,’ she said, stepping in, with a huge grin on her face.
‘Okay, let’s go, Abs,’ Adryan said, rolling his eyes. ‘I’ll see you later,’ he turned to say over his shoulder, as he dragged her out into the light.
Madden was left behind, momentarily dumbfounded and unsure as to what had just happened. He was mostly surprised he had been able to share oxygen with that guy and hadn’t felt like punching him at all.
His phone rang, and he picked it up without checking the ID. After all, it could only be one person.
‘Where have you been?’ she yelled from the other side of the phone. ‘Do you know how worried we have been? You were meant to be home last night, in the office at eight, and nothing! Not a call, not a message. No fucking clue where you were at?’
‘Vicky—’
‘You better be dead—’ She snapped. ‘—because I’m going to kill you otherwise.’
‘Vicky. I’m in the hospital.’
‘What?’ Her voice softened immediately and he smirked to himself. ‘Are you okay? What’s happened? Do you need me to bribe someone to push you up the transplant list?’
Madden chuckled, amused, then regretted it, as his head started pounding with each spasm.
‘Don’t make me laugh, it hurts.’
‘What happened?’ she asked, her voice cracking.
To be honest, he wasn’t so sure. All his memories were flashes of light and color. He told her what he knew, trying to piece it all together the best he could.
‘Adryan? Who’s Adryan?’
Madden stopped talking.
‘Just the paramedic,’ he said, his voice weaker than he’d like it.
Vicky didn’t reply. He could feel her laser-like senses working overtime.
‘It’s odd to call just-paramedics by their first name.’
Madden wanted to rub his eyes but he couldn’t since he was holding his phone with the only hand he could use.
‘Move on, Vicky,’ he said, not amused.
‘Sure thing, Boss. I’ll reschedule your meetings and call your family.’
‘Don’t,’ he said, his chest rising with anger at the thought of it.
‘But you’ll need to stay there a few days,’ she said, her voice heavy with concern.
‘No,’ was all he said.
The doctors didn’t care for his adamant refusal to follow their advice. They would have rather he stayed in the hospital, but that was simply not acceptable to him. He needed to go home. There were better hospitals and he had all his things.
‘Unless they are teleporting you there, Mr. Price,’ the old doctor said, ‘I will not allow you to leave in your condition.’
‘And how do you suppose you will stop me?’ he had said, trying to get up.
The doctor had then laid out several possible scenarios, making it very clear that this was, indeed, a small town and that the police would not hesitate to act on his advice, if said advice was in the patient’s best interest. Madden wanted to call his bluff, but he had been in business long enough to know there was no bluff to call.
That man would absolutely call the cops and have him handcuffed to the hospital bed.
They had managed a compromise, then. He could sign himself out of hospital, but he would need to stay in town and come for daily checkups to the hospital until the doctors were confident he was well enough to travel, both because of his concussion and his broken upper arm.
It had taken hours to arrange everything, but Vicky had found him a hotel room. She had also arranged for the local electronics store to get him a new phone and a laptop and, via speakerphone and one handed, he had managed to connect to his work computer remotely.
As he now sat on the king-size bed in the Troham’s Royal Hotel’s presidential suite—a term they used very, very loosely—Madden was shocked at the sheer amount of emails he had received over such a short period of time.
He rang Vicky again.
‘Do you have any idea what time it is?’ she asked, clearly angry, her voice thick.
Madden looked at the time on the corner of his laptop. Almost one in the morning.
‘Damn,’ was all he said.
‘What is it now?’ She was pissed. That was never good.
‘Never mind,’ he tried to end the call as fast as he could.
‘No no. You woke me up, now you tell me what you want.’
‘The…’ He cleared his throat, partially embarrassed. ‘The internet is slow.’
There was an ominous silence on the other side of the line.
‘I’m going to say this with all the love, affection, and homicidal instinct I can muster, Boss, but you need to find someone local to help you.’
‘I know no one here.’
Another silence.
‘I’d rather shove a drill in my left eye than call my brother.’
‘It’s the town you grew up in! Were you such a jerk already then that no one would come to help you?’
And then she hung up. In normal circumstances, he would call her back and apologize, but this time, it was clearly best not to try.
She was right, though. He had grown up there, so there should be someone willing to help him. The problem was that he had not kept in touch with anyone, so he had no way to reach out to anyone, other than, maybe, social media. But that was way too awkward. He’d rather hire a nurse.
Then again, a healthcare professional might take offense at being sent to the shop or the post office or wherever it is he might need to send someone.
Those thoughts brought back the image of Adryan bringing him his phone.
If he hadn’t minded running that errand for the fire department, maybe he wouldn’t mind helping him out while he was available.
And at least he knew how to easily get his number without having to bother Vicky again.
He’d send Susan a message. She’d reply when she saw it in the morning. She was sure to have his number.
As he opened his contact list to look for her number, a name caught his attention. Third from the top, Adryan Hayes.
So that’s what he was doing.
What a jerk, Madden thought with a smirk.