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“Never could. So he’s had a night to stew on all of it, and now he wants his new CEO at his bedside. Bring a helmet. Gird your loins, bro, because he had a particular look in his eye when he said that he wanted to see you.”

Joel Winslow wasn’t happy. That really wasn’t exciting or new news. He was never happy unless he’d just made another million.

The old man had survived, then. Sam had never really doubted it. Heaven wasn’t ready for Joel Winslow, and hell wasn’t stupid enough to take him.

He drove to the hospital, not allowing himself to think about the upcoming meeting. He wouldn’t lie to his father, but the old man didn’t need to know every fucking detail about what was happening at the office. Those days were gone. How Joel felt about that didn’t matter anymore. He’d be too busy just surviving.

Sam heard the room before he reached it. Not Joel. Kim, her voice pitched high and fluttering, was probably trying to convince his father of something. Maybe even talking about a vacation and taking it easy.

Joel was going to hate that.

Sam stopped in the doorway, surveying the sterile hospital room. It was private, of course, because Joel wouldn’t share a room with anyone, let alone a stranger. He wouldn’t want anyone to see him in anything less than fighting strength either.

Because it was a regular ward, not an ICU, there were now dozens of flower arrangements and a few balloons with get-well wishes. On the rolling tray table, there was a gold box of chocolates and a teddy bear.

Someone had sent a fucking teddy bear to Joel Winslow? Clearly, that person had never met him. Perhaps it was the assistant of one of his father’s business acquaintances?

Joel was propped against a bank of pillows, smaller than Sam had ever seen him. The heart attack had carved something out of his face, hollowed the cheeks, grayed the skin. A monitor ticked his pulse in green above the bed. He looked, for the first time in Sam’s memory, like a man who could actually die.

But his eyes? When they landed on Sam, they were exactly as cold and sharp as they had ever been.

“There he is,” Joel said, his eyes narrowing. “The boy king.”

Asshole, even at a moment like this.

“Dad.”

Kim fussed with the blanket, tucking it tight across Joel’s legs, reaching to plump a pillow he plainly did not want plumped.

“Joel, sit forward and let me fix this for you.”

“Leave it.” He knocked her hand away with the back of his own, no strength in it but plenty of meaning. “God’s sake, Kimberly, I’m not a throw cushion. Go find coffee. Go find anything.”

Kim’s face crumpled and smoothed, the practiced recovery of a woman used to being swatted. She gathered her handbag with a small sigh. Sam had noticed that she sighed a lot around Joel.

“I’ll be just down the hall, sweetheart. If you need anything. I won’t be long.”

She touched Sam’s arm on her way out, quick and apologetic, and was gone.

Joel watched her go with something close to contempt, then turned the same look, dialed down, on his son.

“Sit. You’re making the room crowded.”

Sam took the chair. He’d promised himself two things in the car. He would not upset a man who had somehow survived a widowmaker, and he would not lie to him. He suspected he would not get to keep both.

“You look better than I expected,” Sam said, which was true.

“I look like death warmed over and served on a tray. Don’t manage me; I get enough of that.” Joel’s hand lifted an inch off the blanket and dropped. “Tell me what’s happening to my company.”

So Sam told him. Not everything, but no lies in it. The vote. The interim title. The audits he’d started, which he kept deliberately vague. Joel listened with his eyes half shut, and the questions came like jabs, quick and testing, hunting for the soft place where Sam didn’t know his own answer. It was the closest thing to approval the man had ever offered, this interrogation, and Sam had learned long ago to take it for what it was.

He’d learned long ago who and what his father was. That wouldn’t change either. There wouldn’t be some miraculous shift in his lone parent after an almost fatal heart attack.

Joel’s mouth thinned, his fingers clutching the bedsheet tightly.

“Leigh,” he said, no emotion in his voice.

For the woman who had given pretty much her entire adult life to him. Nothing. Nada.