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She was being taken away from him.
He blinked a rush of emotion back from his eyes and bit his fist as he continued blinking fast.
Luke Preston once said billionaires didn’t cry.
But for the second time in his life, this one did.
* * *
Ivy drifted back to consciousness with his face branded in her mind as he’d been when he’d seen her earlier. Her eyes stung remembering, and she wanted to cry all over again, afraid to look down at her chest, afraid to see if they had to take only the lump out, or one breast with it, or both.
She loathed that Cade knew, right now, this second, what they’d been doing to her.
I couldn’t even make love to my own wife.
Oh, God. Her throat shut all over itself. If Cade had loved his wife and hadn’t been able to touch her, how could Ivy ever dream of feeling him wanting to be with her now?
She didn’t know how long she lay there, waiting to know what her future held. If it held chemo, radiation … Cade …
“Miss Summers.” Dr. Sabella came in, his graying hair slicked back, his kind face somehow comforting even though he hadn’t looked at her and was glancing down at his clipboard notes. “You’re likely to experience some pain and tenderness in the areas of incision for a couple of days, for which I will prescribe some painkillers.”
She licked her dry lips and nodded, having trouble forcing words past her throat. “Did you … get it all out?”
“Miss Summers…” He put the clipboard notes aside and lifted his warm brown eyes to her, his expression alarming her. “We couldn’t find it.”
Her heart skipped a beat, then resumed at a frantic pace. “What? Well, where is it?” She mentally panicked. Not even a second had passed, but already her mind had told her a dozen bad things that might have happened. It morphed and went to her lymph nodes. Her blood. It was already in her head. All over her organs.
He squeezed her shoulder, and for the first time, she realized the expression on his face was wonder. “It was gone. The tumor. There’s no trace.”
She blinked, feeling surreal, for in the dozens of scenarios she had gone through in her head before the operation, she had never expected this in any of the outcomes she’d dreamed for herself. She’d stopped believing in miracles when her mother died. And yet, how would you explain her tumor shrinking so totally? Without chemo?
“What have you been doing lately, Miss Summers? Tell me? I’m in awe of this. In my twenty years as a doctor, I’ve seen some marvelous recoveries, but this…?”
“I … well, I’ve taken green shakes every day and read that … graviola drops help reduce cancer naturally … and … I…”
Fell helplessly in love.
Her heart squeezed as she recognized that last.
Yes. She could say it was the graviola drops, and the cruciferous vegetables. She could say it was that her own body’s immune system, which supposedly should have taken care of the cancer in the first place, had finally kicked into overdrive. But then she thought of Cade, who made her feel one with her body again, who made her cherish the responses he could coax from her, who made her happy in her body and no longer betrayed by it … he’d been like a drug. And he’d been better than freaking chemo.
The idea of having a clean slate blossomed in her chest like a lotus flower, but the thought of having lost her chance to make Cade ever care for her quickly weighed her back down. She swallowed hard. “When … can I go home?”
“You’ll be able to go home in a couple of hours, as soon as the anesthesia wears off. I’ll need to see you in two weeks to check your incisions. The stitches are both internal and external and they should fall off once the medical glue does … and I’d like to prescribe an antibiotic to prevent infection just for a couple of days.”
She nodded. “Can I call someone to come get me?”
The nurse—for there was always a nurse hovering behind a doctor—spoke up. “The man is still outside. The one who was here earlier in the morning, Miss Summers.”
Something kicked in her stomach and it wasn’t a baby. Her heart began to drum. “Cade’s here?”
The nurse nodded, but didn’t return Ivy’s smile. “I don’t know his name. But he doesn’t look too good. He’s sitting all by himself at the far end of the waiting room.”
If she could’ve moved, Ivy would’ve jumped off the bed and run to him, that was what hearing that he’d waited outside did to her. She remembered all those times she’d seen him, his big shoulders hunched, his face in his hands, while his wife was dying, and Ivy wanted to weep in both gratitude and apology that he was going through it with her. “Dr. Sabella, can you please tell him I’ll be all right?”
The doctor cocked his head with a happy sparkle in his eye. “I’m glad you realized you shouldn’t go through this alone, Miss Summers. People need support during something like this.”
“I planned to be alone.” Ivy closed her eyes, again, feeling tears. “Apparently he didn’t agree with me.”
