MARCUS (Dragon Security Book 4) Read online

  I could have called Dante. Hayden. Even Cole. He would have come despite being off on his honeymoon. But I kept telling myself that if I had to call someone, then that meant it was serious. I desperately didn’t want it to be serious.

  I’d already lost my fiancé and my brother. I wasn’t ready to lose my best friend.

  “You can see her now,” a different nurse said, touching my arm to get my attention. “Your friend? She’s conscious and asking for you.”

  I followed her through the maze of rooms, so relieved when I saw Sam’s smiling face that I know I made a strange sort of sound as I rushed to her. She hugged me; her breath was warm and reassuring against my throat.

  “Don’t ever do that again!” I cried, slapping her shoulder lightly. “You scared the fucking hell out of me!”

  “Sorry.” She smiled sort of sheepishly. “I guess I overdid it yesterday at the wedding.”

  “I saw you dancing with Hayden. That’s enough to make anyone faint.”

  Sam laughed, color flooding her cheeks. “Yeah. He’s a pretty good dancer.”

  “I don’t know about dancing. But the way he was looking at you? Ooh la la!”

  A dark cloud moved over her eyes. “We’re slowly becoming friends. Nothing more.”

  “All the secret conversations. The dancing. The looks. I think you underestimate him, babe.”

  She shook her head.

  A nurse chose that moment to come in, just as I was about to ask her what was going on. Sam was always a little low on the whole self-esteem scale. Her mother was an ultra-conservative Christian who berated Sam over every little issue. But she’d been better about that sort of thing these last few years. I was a little surprised to see some of it still lingered.

  The nurse checked the bag of fluid flowing into Sam’s veins.

  “They should be down soon to take you upstairs.”

  “Upstairs?”

  “She’s being admitted,” the nurse said as she left the room.

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  “They called my regular doctor and he wants to do some tests. It’s really no big deal.”

  “Yeah? What kind of tests?”

  She shook her head. “Blood tests. X-rays. Nothing new, just the same battery of tests they do whenever I have a lupus flare up.”

  “So this is related to your lupus?”

  “I think so. So do they.”

  That offered me a little relief. If it was lupus, that was okay. It was a common illness, something she’d been dealing with since she was fifteen or sixteen. That they could fix.

  I followed as the orderly wheeled her up to her new room. They got her in the bed and came by to ask a million questions, making sure everyone knew what she was there for and what she might be allergic to. I pulled one of the nurses aside and did something I rarely did.

  “Make sure she has everything she wants. Whatever her insurance won’t pay for, I will. Okay?”

  The nurse’s eyebrows rose, but she nodded.

  It was arrogant and a little unethical, considering HIPPA laws and all that. But I felt compelled to do it anyway.

  I sat in a chair at her bedside as they came and took blood, and then came and took her off for this test or that test. Two days. They did every test known to man, I think.

  “I’m turning into a pincushion,” Sam joked.

  She looked much better the second day. The medications that they were putting in her IV several times a day were making a difference, whatever they were. I hadn’t realized how shallow her breathing had been until it was normal again. And I really hadn’t appreciated how pale she was until color came back into her cheeks.

  “I should call Hayden to come see you now. He might appreciate you in that hospital gown.”

  Sam shook her head. “He’d still think it was too conservative. It doesn’t show any cleavage.”

  I laughed. “True.”

  We did crossword puzzles together. She was always better at the technical stuff—ironic since my family made their fortune on technology—and I was always better with words. She only passed English because I helped with her homework. I only passed BASIC because of her. My daddy still thought I was a genius programmer. He had no idea.

  “Do you remember our junior prom?” I asked late in the night on the second night, as we lay side by side in the narrow hospital bed.

  “Of course. I felt like a third wheel going with you and Luke.”

  “I still have those pictures. The ones we took when we left the prom and went to my parents’ place on Galveston. Remember? I found them the other day.”

  “I remember. You and Luke sat in the sand and you got the bottom of your dress all wet.”

  “And you and…Tyler Owens, right?”

  She giggled.

  “You were up on the deck, making out like a couple of horny teens.”

  “We were a couple of horny teens.”

  “I was a little afraid you’d lose your virginity that night. Before me.”

  Sam glanced at me. “Were you really? Do you really think I could have gone home and faced my mom if I’d lost my virginity on the back deck of your summer house?”

  I shrugged. “We don’t always tell our parents everything.”

  She smiled. “True, true. I never told my mom half of what we did.”

  “I remember Luke threatened to go over and knock Tyler’s teeth out. He didn’t like that he was taking advantage of you.”

  “He wasn’t. I’d wanted to.”

  “I know. I tried to tell him that without making it sound bad.”

  “Luke was…he was a gentleman in a time when those didn’t—don’t—exist.”

  “He was. Even then.”

  She took my hand, her fingers ice cold even though the room was warm. I sighed, rubbing her hand between both mine.

  “Luke wanted to wait. He said it was cliché to lose your virginity on prom night.”

  “So, you did it the night before he boarded a bus for basic training. Isn’t that cliché, too?”

  “Yeah, but we couldn’t wait any more. And we didn’t know when we would see each other again.”

  “And it was good. So that’s okay.”

  I smiled. “It was better than good. He was a gentleman outside the bedroom, but he was every bit a man in it.”

  Sam groaned, turning from me a little. “Don’t give me details. I’ve told you over and over, I don’t want that image of my best friend and my best male friend doing things like that.”

  I laughed. But then this profound sadness came over me.

  “How much more loss do you think we’ll have to face before it’s all said and done?”

  Sam didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.

  I was packing Sam’s things the next morning. They’d finally decided to release her, so it was time to pack up the things I’d just managed to retrieve for her the day before. Not that I minded. I wanted her out of this place; I wanted her home and safe.

  There was just something unnerving about a hospital. Even when the patient wasn’t really sick, like a woman who’d just given birth, it was still an uneasy place. It made me think of the night Peter died. The night Amber gave birth and Cole was here, in this same place, covered almost head to toe in her blood.

  Enough. It was time to focus on good things.

  The doctor came in just as Sam emerged from the bathroom, her hair wet from the shower.

  “Hey, Dr. Reynolds,” she said with a perky smile.

  My Sam was back.

  He studied her with that serious look doctors seem to learn in medical school.

  “Could you have a seat, Samantha? I’d like to talk to you about your test results.”

  “I thought we were going to do that in your office on Monday.”

  He glanced at me. “Could we have a minute?”

  “No,” Sam said, the color she’d gained slowly leaving her cheeks again. “She can stay.”

  The doctor sighed, gesturing for Sam to take a seat.
She did, though there was defiance in the way she did it. I moved up behind her, taking her hand. She held mine between both of hers, holding so tight I knew that she was frightened. I was too. There was something about the doctor’s demeanor that was just…well, he sucked at the whole bedside manner thing.

  He talked about lupus’ effect on the body, the way it often attacked the internal organs. He talked about infections and irritation and things that simply made no sense as my mind struggled to grasp the message that was hidden in all that jargon.

  I was stunned when he walked out the door. So was Sam. We just sat there for a long time, clinging to each other. And then the shock dissipated. And the pain hit.

  And it was a hell of a lot of pain.

  ~~~