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He went back under.
The next time he woke the sounds were slightly different, there was a silence in the room that encouraged him to risk a peek through heavy-lidded eyes. The bright white disorientated him for a moment and he closed them before the agony pressing into his brain became too much. But the quiet gave him enough space to think. He had been out—In Venum. The launch. He’d been there and...
I want your hands on me...
An unpleasant shiver ran through him at the memory. He’d got to the car with Esteban and...the roadworks. Javier braced, remembering the moment of impact, the way the world had swung and swayed. Blood in his eye...
‘Who is Emily?’ an unfamiliar female voice asked.
The monitor trilled again as his heart jumped awkwardly at the question.
‘He’s been saying her name over and over.’
Had he?
‘No one,’ his mother replied, sharp as steel and just as cutting.
For a moment his brain went blank and he thought he might have blacked out again, but his senses were still full of the room.
‘Mother!’ his sister said, outraged. ‘Emily is his wife,’ his sister explained to the stranger.
Anger filled him, tension cording his neck and fists. His wife was a lot of things, but most definitely neverno one. No, he hadn’t been surprised that Renata had been unhappy with his choice of wife—an English girl, barely twenty, who couldn’t speak a word of Spanish. But his wife wasfamily.
‘That girl was nothing more than a—’
He forced his eyes open and whatever his mother had been about to say was cut off by the sudden flurry of activity around his bed. Fingers prodded and poked and someone shook his shoulders, not gently enough for him to ignore but not rough enough to hurt, tying him to the room when all he wanted to do was go back to the black.
‘Mr Casas? Can you hear me?’
The woman was insistent and he raised his hand to ward her off, but his arm didn’t move more than an inch. His throat thickened with frustration and he wanted to howl. Goddammit! Why wasn’t his body doing what it was supposed to?
‘Mr Casas, do you know where you are?’
He tried to speak but nothing came out, so nodded, which hurt enough to make him stop.
‘We’re going to get you some water, okay? I want you to try and take a sip for me.’
A straw appeared in his vision and, after a few attempts, he managed to get enough down him to soothe his throat a little.
‘Okay,’ the man said—Javier recognised the voice from before. ‘Let’s try that again. Do you know where you are?’
‘Yes,’ Javier managed.
‘Do you know what brought you here?’
He narrowed his eyes, trying to make his mouth say the words in his mind. He was on the brink of forcing the answer from his lips when the man fired another question at him.
‘Can you tell me the last thing you remember?’
Javier frowned, the weight of expectation in the air different to the previous questions. His gaze flickered around the room—his mother, sister, the doctor and the nurse—but snagged on the doorway.
‘Emily.’
Standing in the doorway to his hospital room, Emily was stunned by what she saw. In a pale blue medical gown, attached to monitors, Javier lay propped up, a vicious bruise slashed across his cheek, a cut marring the planes of his proud forehead, but it was the paleness of his skin that really shocked her. Javier wasneverpale.
Through a crazy dash to the airport and a nerve-racking flight, Emily had told herself that Javier was fine. Because there wasn’t a reality in which Javier was anything other than a truly powerful force of nature. She could only believe that there had been some kind of misunderstanding. But the two and a half hour flight had given her too much time to think.
She’d tried not to read too much into the fact that she was still his next of kin, hating the way it made her heart leap. Because it was too familiar. Too similar to the hope she’d nursed in the first months after she’d returned from Spain. And then, in the blink of an eye, the time she’d been back had eclipsed the entire time she’d known him, and he’d not come for her.
