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Fourteen
It was refreshing, this panic.
It meant Arlie didn’t need to think about herself.
If she had to identify the chief emotion governing her consciousness at that precise moment, she would have named it guilt. Her charade with Mason had worked just a little too well. They’d poured it on pretty thick. This she couldn’t deny.
Mason handing her slim flutes of champagne.
Mason helpfully affixing the name tag just a smidge too close to her breast.
Mason pushing a stray hair away from her face.
Truth be told, she’d already known that Samuel had opted out of the dune buggy event. A couple friendly emails between her and Charlotte had given her pretty much all the information she had needed.
So when he’d volunteered to take the unoccupied dune buggy, Arlie had been equal parts elated and disturbed.
Had she wanted him to be jealous? Definitely. Had she wanted him to risk life and limb? Not so much.
She’d made her apologies to Mason and Charlotte, who had looked at her with confusion when she’d insisted on riding in the ambulance with Samuel. In the back of the rocking vehicle, against the beeping of machines and wailing of sirens, she’d listened closely to the EMTs as they systematically checked each part of his body, hoping for any helpful scrap of information about his condition.
They’d managed to get an IV into his arm, and, after determining the source and severity of Samuel’s pain, poked a small syringe of Dilaudid into the port.
Seeing Samuel’s creased forehead go peaceful and slack with the intervention of the drug drained a measure of tension from her heart.
Arlie leaned over him, gently sweeping sand away from his cheekbone. With the hand not bound by the IV, Samuel reached up, capturing her fingers in his. Looking her in the eye, he squeezed them once.
Once they’d reached the hospital and waited two hours to be seen, the final verdict was completely underwhelming. Samuel had fractured his left collarbone. Luckily for him, it wasn’t a compound break, which might have required surgery. Unluckily, he’d need to be trussed up like a roasting hen in a sling for the next six weeks.
“I’ll send you home with some pain medication for the next few days, but I’d recommend that you follow up with your regular physician as soon as possible.” The very young, visibly exhausted doctor looked to Arlie. “Did you have any other questions?”
“I don’t,” she said. “Samuel?”
Samuel, propped in the narrow hospital bed, wearing slacks and a hospital gown to replace the shirt they’d cut away in the ambulance, shook his head no.
Arlie thanked the doctor and turned to Samuel when he’d left.
“I’m just going to step out and make a couple calls, okay?”
He gave her an endearingly wobbly thumbs-up.
In the hallway smelling of antiseptic and floor wax, she first called Mason to update him on Samuel’s condition and then called Charlotte, who insisted on sending a car service to collect them.
A mere fifteen minutes later, Arlie received a text informing her their car had arrived and was waiting at the emergency room exit.
Samuel insisted on walking, declining the offered wheelchair.
Together, they shuffled out to the curb where a bear of a man with a short, gray ponytail and a dark suit opened the passenger door of a long, black limousine.
Samuel stood next to Arlie, arm in a sling, his affable aspect and dilated pupils springing from the same source.
“Okay,” Arlie said. “Let’s get you settled.”
She looped one hand through his good arm, putting her other on his scalp to make sure he didn’t hit his head on the door. Samuel collapsed onto the soft leather seats, his long legs unfolding in front of him as he slid down.
Arlie scooted in after him, giving their driver a nod as he closed the door behind them. On either side of the backbench seat, blue LED-lit ice buckets held an assortment of beers. Behind them, a racked display of mini bottles gleamed beneath a similar glow.
“I’ll have one of those,” Samuel said, blinking at the gleaming bottles.
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Arlie said.
“Mason would do it.”
The edges of his words had been filed away, leaving Samuel with the soft, damp speech of your average, moderately lubed barfly.
“I don’t know that I would trust Mason’s instincts in this particular situation,” Arlie said.
Squinting at the mini bottle of vodka, Samuel poked at it. “Why is this so small?”
Arlie bit her lip, trying not to laugh. “Factory mistake?”
