Page 152 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

Chapter 27

WINSTON

The glass slipped right out of my fingers.

It didn’t shatter on the Persian rug, but the bourbon spilled dark and heavy across the wool, soaking into the intricate floral border I’d bought in Istanbul twenty years ago. The heavy crystal tumbler rolled until it hit the leg of my mahogany desk with a dull, mocking thud.

I stared down at my right hand. The fingers were twitching—small, erratic jerks like electric current jumping through the tendons.

“Goddamn useless quack,” I snarled, curling the fingers into a tight fist until my knuckles turned white. My grip had no bite to it. It felt like squeezing wet sand.

Across the study, Dr. Landreneau didn’t even flinch. He’d known me thirty years, which was probably the only reason he hadn’t packed his leather bag and run out into the driveway forty minutes ago. He was wiping down a stainless-steel blood pressure cuff, his movements slow, deliberate, and irritatingly methodical.

“Your blood pressure is one-ten over seventy,” Landreneau said, tucking the cuff into his bag. “Resting heart rate is ninety-six. You’re dehydrated, Winston. You’ve lost twenty-four pounds in the last couple of months, your liver enzymes are fluctuating without any clear pattern, and the neurological workup from Ochsner came back completely clean.”

“Clean?” I leaned forward in my leather wing chair, but a wave of nausea hit the back of my throat so fast I had to clamp my jaw shut. Cold sweat broke out along my hairline, prickling like needles against my scalp. “Clean means you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing. A man doesn’t lose twenty pounds and piss brown because he’s ‘dehydrated.’ I built an empire across three states, and you’re telling me some phantom stomach bug is keeping me from walking down my own goddamn stairs?”

“I’m telling you that clinically, there is no mass. There is no tumor. There is no stroke on the MRI, and your cardiac panel is unremarkable for a man in his sixties who smokes two cigars a day,” Landreneau said, fastening the brass buckles of his bag. “What you have are symptoms that don’t fit a standard diagnostic profile. We can run another toxic screening. We can check the autoimmune markers again⁠—”

“I’m done with your goddamn tests.” I pushed myself up from the chair. My knees trembled under the weight, a sickening tremor running from my calves straight up into my lower back. I grabbed the edge of the mahogany desk to keep my balance, hating the way the room tilted for three long, suffocating seconds before righting itself. “Every time you draw blood, you take six vials and tell me to wait five days for a bill. You think I’m stupid? You think because I’m sitting in this chair that I don’t see how this works?”

Landreneau looked up, his tired gray eyes meeting mine. “Winston, nobody is playing games with you.”

“Somebody’s always playing games,” I growled, my breath coming shorter than it should have. The air in my own library felt thin, like I was trying to breathe through wet linen. “You got nurses at that private lab taking checks from people who want to see the old man in the ground. You think I don’t know what half the families in this city would pay to know Winston Landry can’t hold a bourbon glass without spilling it on his shoes?”

“Your paranoia is getting worse,” Landreneau said quietly. “Cognitive fog and emotional volatility can accompany severe metabolic stress. I can prescribe a mild sedative to help with the tremors and the sleep disturbance⁠—”

“Get the fuck out of my house.”

I didn’t yell. I didn’t have the breath for yelling. But the weight behind the words was enough to make the doctor snap his mouth shut.

He picked up his coat from the leather sofa, gave me a curt nod that carried far too much pity for my liking, and let himself out through the heavy double doors.

When the lock clicked, I sank back into the armchair.

The silence of the estate settled over me like a suffocating blanket. I reached up and pulled at the collar of my Charvet shirt. It had been tailored to fit my neck thirty years ago, tight and crisp. Now, there was a two-finger gap between the cotton and my throat. The fabric hung loose over my collarbones, pooling around my shoulders like clothes borrowed from a larger man.

My stomach rolled again, sour and acidic, carrying that strange, metallic taste that had lived in the back of my mouth for the last few months. Like sucking on an old copper penny.

I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the leather.

Weakness.

I had spent my entire life rooting weakness out of other men like weeds in gravel. I had broken bones, taken territory, and buried rivals who let their bodies or their feelings get soft. And now, while my oldest boy was out tearing the Gulf Coast apart, looking for his woman, and my youngest had gone completely off his rocker, my own goddamn heart and guts were betraying me from the inside out.

“Not today,” I muttered into the empty room, dragging my shaking knuckles across the cold sweat on my forehead. “Not today, you son of a bitch.”

The study door pushed open twenty minutes later without a knock.

I didn’t reach for the revolver in the desk drawer. I knew the rhythm of those footsteps better than I knew my own heartbeat.

Odette stepped into the room, carrying a polished silver tray. On it sat a small porcelain bowl of clear chicken broth, two toasted slices of crustless sourdough, and a steaming cup of the chicory-root tea she had been brewing for me every morning and evening since my legs first started giving out after being shot.

She was wearing a pale lavender dressing gown, her graying hair pinned up neatly, her face smooth and unbothered. She looked twenty years younger than me in the dim lamplight.

“Landreneau’s car just pulled out of the gate,” she said, setting the tray on the corner of the desk with practiced ease. “I heard you barking at him from the hallway. You’re wasting what little breath you have left on a man who only knows how to read lab sheets.”

“The man is an idiot,” I muttered, but I didn’t pull away when she stepped behind my chair.