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A nurse, alerted by Ace’s tone, interrupted her own search to join them near the counter, where Ace had set down the flowers. A fiftyish woman with a no-nonsense set to her jaw, she gave him a look that all but dared him to try to pin this mess on her. “Your Ms. Higgins planned her moment, clearly,” she said. “She waited until she heard the alarm. Another patient had coded just down the hall, so we all went running to help.”
“Did she take her belongings? Her clothes?” Her car keys, he thought, recalling the Chevy still parked in the lot. Though surely, Sierra wasn’t foolish enough to try to drive it very far, he could easily imagine her using it to make a getaway before ditching it elsewhere.
Sure enough, inside her windowless room, they found the plastic bag with her belongings missing from the storage locker. But when he went downstairs and looked outside, the Chevy remained where she had left it the previous evening.
Perhaps she’d feared another GPS tracker, or even a bomb, considering last night’s attempt on her life. Or maybe she was still somewhere inside the hospital.
But according to Callum, he and the hospital staff had been searching the floor for her, after positioning staff to watch both the elevator and the stairwell entry, for the past half hour.
“And before that?” Ace demanded. “How long would she have had to get dressed and get out of here?”
“Five or six minutes, tops,” Callum said decisively, with the nurse beside him nodding her agreement. “Things were hectic down the hall there, where that other patient coded.”
“Wait a minute,” Ace said, his heart skipping a beat as he remembered what he’d heard about his father being transferred to this floor earlier. “What patient?”
“I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to say,” the nurse told him. “We do have privacy laws here.”
“What room is our father in? You can tell us that much, can’t you?”
Chapter 13
When Ace entered the hospital room ahead of Callum, he cried out, shock colliding with relief at seeing his father again—seeing him sitting alone in his bed with the head elevated. A blanket had been pulled to his chest and his eyelids were at half-mast as he watched a wall-mounted television playing at low volume. As a hospital benefactor, he’d been placed in a private suite with a small divided seating area for waiting family, far larger than the cramped, windowless room where Sierra had been hidden away.
But the silver-haired family patriarch—the same Payne Colton whose tough and rugged good looks had been compared to a classic Western movie idol whose black-and-white image was now galloping across the screen on horseback—didn’t startle at Ace’s outburst. Nor did he turn his head, or even his gaze, to look in his direction.
“Dad?” Ace’s voice broke, his vision blurring as he blinked away a hot haze of tears. Because despite the absence of the guard he’d expected to find at the door, the catch in his throat told him this was truly his father, breathing and alive, though pale and frailer—and older-looking, too, with scarcely a hint of the powerful life force that had for sixty-eight years animated his expression.
Months after his father’s shooting, Ace spotted no obvious bandages or other evidence of the bullet wounds that had initially been the doctors’ greatest concern. But as Ace moved closer, he was able to make out a variety of tubes and an IV pole, plastic tendrils snaking around the once-formidable man.
“I’ll just give you two a few minutes.” Callum touched Ace’s shoulder before his tone turned more serious. “Right now, though, I’m going to track down that guard who’s supposed to be on duty watching Dad’s door and give him a piece of my mind for leaving his post.”
Ace nodded mutely, his gaze still glued to his father as he struggled to collect himself before speaking.
“Dad, it’s me, your son, Ace.” He was shaking head to toe now, aching to reach out, to gather his father in his arms yet terrified to touch him. “I—I’ve wanted for so long to come see you, to tell you how—how much I love you—and how I’ll always—how you’ll always be the only father I—”
At the sound of footsteps just behind him, he sharply turned his head, thinking Callum had returned already. Instead, it was the same nurse he’d just spoken to, the one with the severe, dark haircut. Only as she turned up the room’s lights, Ace noticed that her stern expression had melted into one of sympathy.
“Go on,” she urged gently as she reached for the remote and switched off the television. “There’s a good chance he can hear you, at least, though so far his responses have been minimal.”
“But minimal means that there’s been something, right? And he was watching TV, wasn’t he? I mean, he’s always liked old movies like that.” Ace knew that he was reaching, that Genevieve or anyone who really knew his father could’ve turned the channel on to soften the heartbreak of seeing his unfocused staring.
When the nurse only nodded, Ace turned a pleading look back to his father. “I’m here. Right here, if you could blink—or look at me or...” He glanced again at the nurse. “Is it all right if I take his hand?”
“You should do that,” she assured him. “Why don’t you stay with him a while? And I’ll come and notify you the moment that we’ve found Miss Higgins.”
Ace felt a twinge of guilt, since the shock of this reunion, a reunion he had dreamed of, prayed for, yet also somehow dreaded for so long had driven every other thought from his brain. Including the reality of how much trouble Sierra could get into on her own.
But if she spotted him looking for her, he knew damned well how she’d react, after the way he’d bound her to that bedrail. Whether she ran or hid or even tried to fight him, he’d end up no closer to gaining her cooperation...
He would also be leaving his father here, alone and totally unguarded, a thought that filled Ace with a tingling apprehension. After all, if word had somehow gotten back to the real shooter that there had been signs that Payne Colton might be emerging from his coma, that could make him a risk to the shooter. A risk to be taken out before he could name the person who had harmed him.
“I will stay here until my brother gets back, Nurse Martinez,” Ace agreed, finally looking at the nurse’s name tag. “But if you do find Sier—Ms. Higgins,” he corrected himself, “please, do everything you can to convince her to come back to the room for her own safety. No drugs or restraints, though. She needs to understand that we’re trying to help her.”
“I’ll do my best,” she assured him before hurrying out and closing the room’s door behind her.
Ace had more to say to his father—so much more—but the problems of Sierra’s disappearance and the missing guard had him worried and suspicious. What if both were somehow connected?
Before he could press the screen, the door of the suite’s attached bathroom swung open slightly. And he spotted a pair of legs and black shoes lying on the floor inside. A man, down!
