Page 1 of Daddy's Little Patient

Chapter One

Cole made the forty-five-minute drive to the hospital in thirty-three. He might have double-parked, he wasn’t sure, but as he ran across the parking lot and through the double sliding glass doors, he wasn’t thinking about whether he’d pulled a major dick-move by letting his truck straddle the line. The only thing on his mind now was his girlfriend Kelly and the accident she said she’d been in when she’d left a message on his cellphone just over an hour ago.

Just a fender-bender, really.

Nothing to get too fired up about.

They only kept me in the hospital four days.

Can you come get me when your plane lands? They won’t let me take a cab home.

Four days? Those were the two words that kept bouncing through his head. That and her opening line. Instead of, ‘Hey, honey, how was your trip,’ he’d gotten a nerve-shattering,I’m okay, nobody got badly hurt.

Doing his best to walk instead of running to the front desk, he took his place at the back of the intake line. It seemed likea slow night to his inexpert eyes. One young mother convinced that her infant’s face was “too red and that’s not normal, he’s got a fever and I don’t care what your thermometer says,” an older woman grimly refusing to let her grumbling male companion leave before a doctor had seen him, a nervous young man who was redirected to Labor and Delivery, and an elderly gentleman with a broad, blissful smile who didn’t even need to speak. The intake nurse took one look, sighed, picked up the phone and told someone to “get OR ready. Two-Apples Tanner is back.”

“Three apples,” the man corrected, holding up three fingers with pride. To the nurse’s raised eyebrow, he added, “They’re Pinkabelles. Smaller than the McIntosh, quite firm, but not as sweet.”

“Not anymore, anyway,” the nurse muttered as the patient was led away. She made a few more notes and then turned her thousand-yard-stare on Cole. “Okay. And what brought you here today?”

“My girlfriend,” Cole began and stopped there as he realized he was in the wrong place. Kelly wouldn’t still be in the emergency room if they’d had her for four days.

Calm down, calm down. Think before you talk. ‘I need help.’ No, I don’t. What do I need? Her room number! Deep breath. Start over.

Nodding once in agreement with himself, Cole took a breath, leaned closer to the glass separating them and calmly, but urgently said, “I need your number.”

“What?” said the nurse.

“What?” Cole echoed stupidly. “No! I’m not a creep! It’s for my girlfriend!”

That eyebrow slid slowly up again until it reached an angle of maximum skepticism. “Tell your girlfriend I’m flattered, but I am not giving out my phone number.”

“No, I… I meant room number.”

Right, well, his work here was done. His face burning, Cole turned in a hasty circle until he found the wall signs, directing him to the other side of the hospital. He found the non-emergency front desk with a security guard stationed there, dividing his attention between the monitor in front of him and the phone in his hand.

“Help you?” he grunted amiably.

Perhaps the brisk jog across the hospital had pushed a little more oxygen to his brain because Cole managed with only a little stammering to explain himself and ask for Kelly’s room number, which the guard was able to provide after a quick look-up on the computer, and soon Cole was in the elevator on his way to the fourth floor. St. Francis was a huge hospital, as old as the city, added onto multiple times over the years. He passed through the oldest parts with its white-painted brick walls through to the newer construction with big bay windows, overlooking the rooftop of the cancer building next door, then three nurses’ stations, a food cart pushed against the wall, and a room where someone might have been coding, considering all the alarms and commotion occurring behind the privacy curtain. Finally, he found Kelly’s room.

The door was slightly ajar already. He gave it a nudge and was greeted with the sight of his precious little goof sitting on a lime green leather chair—the one he would have taken a red-eye back and planted himself in if only he had known, just to be by her side. Sitcoms played softly on the television where her bored gaze rested, but she lit up like Christmas lights when she saw him come through the door.

“Hey,” she said brightly through a split and slightly swollen bottom lip.

“Oh, my God, baby.” His stomach crashed through the floor of his gut as his eyes moved over her. Her face was bruised and cut, and her hair had been shaved on the left side of her head, allthe way back to the ear, showing a black line of stitches about an inch long. Both arms were wrapped in weird, plasticky netting—one pink, one blue—looking more like loli-punk gloves than the bulky bone casts he had grown up with on medical shows. She was all packed and ready to go, with some clothes, plenty of paperwork and a few bottles of medication stuffed in one bag, while a second held other medical stuff--a transparent breathing canister with a little yellow ball in it, bandage packs and tape, and a plastic water tumbler identical to the one in her other hand which she was sipping from. Her pants were blue paper scrubs, her shirt two white-and-blue patient gowns—one turned around backward—and her shoes were hospital slippers.

“My God,” he said again, and before he could stop it, the Daddy Dom in him came to the forefront, and it didn’t matter that they were in public. “Babygirl, what happened?”

Kelly blinked twice, her gaze sliding past him to the open door, but she didn’t hush him.

“A guy merged into me on the freeway,” she said brightly, as if it was no big deal. Like it happened to everybody and last Tuesday just happened to be her turn. “It kind of sucks,” she was saying, her nose scrunched up in a pout as she held up her bruised and stitch-tracked arms. “I always wanted to break a bone when I was a kid so all my friends could sign my cast, and then modern medicine goes and gives me these. I guess you could still sign them,” she offered, peeping up at him with her head tilted so her eyes shone, bird-bright, behind that forever-falling hank of hair that was too short to tie back. He loved that look on her and she knew it, but it wasn’t going to distract him today.

He waited until she lowered her arms and her eyes. Coming into the room, he sat down on the window seat/sofa bed beside her chair. She let him take first her left, then her right arm,turning it over to get a better look at the stitches from where the edge of the cast swallowed it up to the tip of her middle finger.

“What happened?” he asked quietly.

“The airbag deployed. The car rolled. Glass went everywhere. I don’t really remember what happened, except I was driving one minute, and the paramedics were pulling me out the next. Anyway, I got cut a little, my left wrist is broken, and three of my fingers on the other got jammed into my hand, so they had to do surgery. No big deal now. I’ll heal.”

No big deal? He stared at the party-colored casts on her small, thin arms, privately telling himself he’d be devastated, no matter who this had happened to, but deeper inside, he knew that wasn’t entirely true. Girlfriends took precedence over friends, even though they’d only been dating steadily for about six months. Besides, most of his other friends were guys. Had any one of them traded places with Kelly, the first words out of his mouth were far more likely to be, “What boneheaded thing did you do to make this happen?”

---