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“How long was I out?” My voice was a weak rattle but I stared at him stubbornly.
He sighed and gave in. “A day.”
My stomach flipped. While I’d been lying here in bed, the company had gotten a day closer to collapse. And…I fell back against the pillows as something else sank in. We’d been wrong about Van der Meer. He was an evil bastard, but clearly he wasn’t the one trying to kill me. He’d said he’d bought the cognac especially for when I came to him offering a deal: the killer must have bugged him or something, found out about the cognac and intercepted the bottle in transit. That meant the killer was more resourceful, more dangerous, than we ever thought. And we still had no idea who he was.
43
LORNA
I persuaded JD to let me have a laptop and a phone so I could work from bed. He didn’t like it and neither did the doctors but I refused to just lie there when thousands of people were about to lose their jobs. For two days, I desperately called banks, trying to scrape together enough money to keep the company afloat another week, another day. But no one would give us a dime.
JD brought me food, made me take breaks, and kept Cody occupied. Watching them together made me melt: JD was gentle, patient, and he so obviously loved spending time with Cody, even though it must have brought back memories. They planned a camping trip for when I was better, together with a road trip to Texas to do some horse riding.
The team took turns guarding my hospital room. At one point, while Colton was on watch, he asked if he could use my laptop on the hospital WiFi to call home. “I want to check on my bear,” he told me.
Bear? I let him login and make the video call. An image of a beautiful, pale-skinned woman with black hair a little like mine filled the screen. She seemed to be in the kitchen. “Hey, Colton!” She had a wonderfully gentle, relaxing voice…but there was a faint edge to it. I thought of a kindergarten teacher trying to maintain her composure with an unruly class. “Atlas is doing fine.”
There was a crash from off-screen and Bethany’s head whipped around. “No! You’ve already had enough of that.” She looked back to the camera. “It’s all good,” she told us, not very convincingly. “All under control.”
We heard a snort and something that sounded almost like a growl. Then a rounded, hairy back shot past the bottom of the frame. “No. No, Atlas, no refrigerator!” There was the creak of a refrigerator door opening, then the clink of glass. “No! Stop that!”
The camera suddenly rocked. “No!” Bethany bent and huffed and seemed to be wrestling with something. “No, we don’t go up there!”
I watched, transfixed, as a paw came into shot. Then another paw. Something furry was trying to haul itself up onto the table where Bethany’s phone was perched. “No!” Bethany told it, panicked. “No, Atlas, you’re too heavy—”
There was a crash as the table collapsed and the camera suddenly dropped. It bounced and we saw the ceiling for a second. When it landed, it was tilted at an angle and we were looking at a young bear, the size of a large dog. It sat back on its ass, blinking at the camera, then lifted a carton of milk in its paws and glugged from it, milk gushing over its snout, its chest, and the floor. My mouth dropped open, silently ahh-ing. Colton grinned sheepishly.
A hand retrieved the phone and we saw Bethany again. “Let me call you back,” she panted.
On the third day, the doctors said I was well enough to be discharged. “But no work. You need to rest and eat, rebuild your strength,” they told me.
I nodded obediently, already thinking about which meetings I needed to hold first. But JD must have seen the look in my eyes because he leaned close and growled in my ear. “You are gonna take it easy. Don’t make me make you.”
I sighed, frustrated…but feeling warmly protected.
There were a million forms I had to sign, then I collected up my stuff and started to climb out of bed. “Wait,” said a nurse. “We can’t let you walk to the parking lot. You’ll have to wait until we can get you a wheelchair.”
“Thank you, but I’m fine,” I told her. “I can walk.”
The nurse shook her head. “It’s the rules.”
I sat back down on the bed and we waited. Ten minutes. Then thirty. “Goddamn it,” muttered JD. “It’s okay as long as she doesn’t walk, right?”
“Yes,” said the nurse cautiously.
JD marched over to the bed, slipped his arms under me…and then I was lifted into the air and cradled against his chest. I snuggled in there, looking up at him, my chest bursting, and he stomped off towards the parking lot with the team falling in behind.
