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She shook her head. “I want to go home.”
“I know, sweetie. We’ll go home soon.”
The doctor had already looked Olivia over and prescribed Tylenol for the fever. Ruby had tried giving it to Olivia before they left the house, but her daughter had been too delirious to take it.
Olivia’s eyes already looked less shiny and the sweat had dried on her hairline, all indicators that the fever was coming down.
“Hello,” a deep voice said from the door. “All right if I come in?”
She turned to find Roman standing in the doorway, his massive body filling the space, a hesitant expression on his face. She’d almost forgotten how beautiful he was, how enigmatic, something that was only highlighted by the fact that he had a butterfly bandage over a cut above his left eye and held a giant stuffed bear in one hand.
She’d been wrong to compare them to Beauty and the Beast: he was both in one package, and her breath caught in her throat as she realized how much she liked him.
How much she wanted him.
“Of course,” she said.
“Hi, Roman,” Olivia said from the hospital bed.
“Hello, Olivia.” He started for Olivia’s hospital bed and gave Ruby’s arm a reassuring squeeze on his way past. The gesture was so warm, so natural, that she almost wept. It had been a long time since she’d gotten any reassurance from a man who wasn’t her father. “Your mom told me you weren’t feeling well, and hospitals are kind of boring, so I thought you could use a friend.”
“That’s for me?” Olivia asked, her eyes bright.
“Well, I was planning to take him home myself, because my house is kind of boring too, but he told me he’d rather stay with you, so…” He shrugged his muscular shoulders and handed the bear to Olivia.
She squeezed it tight. “Thank you! I love him!” She looked up at Roman. “You can visit him if you get too bored at your house.”
The smile that cracked Roman’s face was like the first rays of sun peeking over the horizon in the morning. He was transformed by it, and Ruby felt the ground shift under her feet.
“Thank you,” Roman said. “I might just take you up on that, assuming it’s okay with your mom of course.”
“It will be,” Olivia said with confidence. “She doesn’t have any other friends.”
Roman laughed.
Ruby’s cheeks burned but the laughter that bubbled up out of her throat was genuine. “Really, Olivia? Wow, thanks for that.”
Olivia started talking to the bear and Roman turned to Ruby. He touched her face. “You okay?”
She nodded. “I am now. Thanks so much for sending the car. I shouldn’t have panicked. Kids get fevers sometimes. It was just the vaccination and — ”
“I’m happy you called,” he said.
She was aware of Olivia in the hospital bed just a few feet away, distracted by the bear, but still. This wasn’t how she’d planned to reenter the dating pool.
Not that she’d had a plan for reentering the dating pool.
She hadn’t gotten that far, but on the rare occasions when she’d imagined herself dating, she’d imagined something slow and steady. She would get to know someone as friends first. She would be deliberate with the man she chose to date seriously after Adam.
Careful.
She wouldn’t introduce him to Olivia for months, because she’d want to make sure it was real before she brought a man around her daughter.
But she hadn’t seen this man coming and her feelings for him felt anything but careful.
She didn’t know someone could reawaken her body so powerfully, that she could feel such a strange affinity for someone who was still, in so many ways, a mystery.
“Well, everything looks fine,” Doctor Singh said, entering the room, her eyes on Olivia’s chart. She looked up and noticed Roman in the room, blinked in surprise, then turned her attention to Ruby. “Olivia clearly had some kind of reaction to the vaccination, but her vitals are fine and the fever seems to be coming down.”
