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“You know something,” she whispered. “That wolven is right. I am in love with you.”
Her eyes shot up to Gus’s battered face, but he remained unconscious, and she wondered where he was, where that beautiful mind of his had gone to. Was it still in the husk that had been so sorely abused? Or was the damage so great that he was gone, even as his body lived on?
Tears came to her eyes, making the vision of him in the hospital bed go wavy.
“Do you remember where we first met?” She wiped her cheeks and sniffled. “I do. I can recall exactly where we were.”
As she spoke softly, she wanted to reach up and caress his face, but that seemed like an invasion of his privacy since she’d never touched him like that when he’d been awake. The closest they’d ever gotten to that kind of line-crossing had been that one time they’d been about to kiss, when she’d finally finished fighting her attraction and he’d looked at her as a woman.
He’d stepped back, though. Stepped away. Stopped… everything.
“You were speaking at that symposium on immunology at Stanford.” She smiled at the memory, and it felt good to go to a lighter place, back when they’d both been stronger. “All those clinicians andresearchers in their ties and jackets, with their somber PowerPoints. And then you took the podium.”
She had to wipe her eyes again, and as she drew in a shuddering breath, she smiled through the sadness. “God, I can just picture you taking that stage. You were wearing blue jeans and Converse high-tops. You had on a Led Zeppelin t-shirt, with that blimp on it. Those tight-ass bastards were twitching in their seats, whispering under their breath—and you just stood there in those lights, with a half smile on your face because you knew you were smarter than all of them. You didn’t care what they thought of you or how much they disapproved of you for all the wrong reasons. You had the mic—and you blew them away. Right out of the water. Your ideas were groundbreaking, your research in its infancy, your career about to begin. I knew then and there… Ihadto work with you. I knew you were the one.”
Lowering her eyes, she shook her head. “And then you came here. I never expected to be afraid of a living soul, but you rattled me. You, with your concert t-shirts of bands I’d never heard of and your cans of Coke. Everyone looked up to you in the lab. Worshipped you, really. I worshipped you—and I tried distracting myself. I did.”
Glancing down at her stomach, she thought of the blond guard she’d slept with for a couple ofmonths. Who’d then been killed. The pregnancy had been an impossibility, something that never should have happened after chemo had cooked her ovaries.
Something she had never been able to tell the man about before he’d been murdered on her lawn.
Gus had told her about the baby. The screening tests for her trial of Vita-12b had revealed everything, and almost instantly, she’d been determined to keep it—even though that meant she couldn’t be patient one for their drug. She’d told herself that a child would be her legacy, and she’d decided to leave the baby to Lydia to raise as soon as the cancer got too far advanced.
Lydia was going to be a great mother someday. And her broken heart was going to need something to live for.
Deep down, though, she’d known the pregnancy couldn’t last. She wasn’t a genetics expert, but the chromosomes she’d put into the mix had to be deficient. They just had to be. And… they had been. The miscarriage was all very logical from a medical point of view. The human side of things? That was proving difficult. For someone who had never wanted to be pregnant, who wouldn’t know what to do with an infant if she were handed one for just a hi-hello, she was shocked by the sadness.
She glanced back at Gus’s bruised face. “The baby’s gone. If I lose you, too, I’m done… I’mnot going out fighting, there’s going to be no great show of courage. I’m just going to head up to that bed and lie down and let my cancer take me.”
Beep-beep-beep…
The heart monitor kept a steady metronome that, instead of reassuring her, just made her anxious for the moment it missed a beat. Like her losing her baby, surely that was going to be the outcome.
“Just so you know,” she murmured, “my lawyer insisted I put a reversion clause in that contract giving you Vita. So if you die, she comes back to me. And when I die… she’s going to disappear with me.”
Like the baby. A spark of life, and then gone.
It was a crazy idea anyway. Curing cancer.
What the hell had they been thinking.
“Anyway, I just wanted to say it all out loud once.” She laughed in a short burst. “Deathbed confession, really. I love you, Gus. You’re the best man I ever met. And in another life, in another time… I really think we would have been great together.”
Up in the first-floor guest suite, Lydia stood in the shower, her head back, the hot jets of water spearing through her hair, the suds of her shampoo running down her spine and puddling on the tile under her feet. On a lot of levels, it seemed inconceivablethat she was doing something as normal as having a wash.
She also felt like it was an impermissible self-indulgence.
There was this need to be clean, however… as if soaping herself up and having a good rinse could somehow wipe away the images she saw on the backs of her eyelids every time she blinked. Or at least maybe the cleansing would dim the memory of what Gus had looked like, bloodied, bleeding, going into cardiac arrest, on the black-and-white marble floor of the foyer.
The amnesia strategy wasn’t working, unfortunately. But her aching body was loosening up so she lingered in the neither-here-nor-there of the warmth and the steam and the scents of sweet-smelling products that were familiar to her.
Which were nice things to focus on. As opposed to whether Gus would live, and how Daniel was doing… and the light she had seen around Blade—
Cranking the faucet off with a jerk, she stepped out.
“Towel?” Daniel said as he held one out.
“Thank you.”
