Page 19 of The Devil's Spawn

He whirled, grabbed my arm, and pulled me a couple of feet down the hall. “Of course I did. You said she had a fever. She was puking…” Pacing a few steps, he pushed his hands into his hair.

“It’s just a stomach bug. There’s a lot of nasty stuff going around right now.” I lowered my voice. “Really, Gage. I talked to her doctor. She doesn’t think there’s any reason to worry.”

He turned to face me again, and something dark haunted his eyes. “How can you be so calm? So fucking sure? What if she’s…?”

Sick again.

I swallowed hard to keep hysteria from choking me. The fear that she would get sick again bordered on paranoia, and it would pull me into weeks, or even months of despair if I let it. I crossed the few feet separating us and wound my arms around him.

“I spent a whole year in Texas, in and out of the hospital. Every cough, every fever…I was a basket case convinced she was going to come out of remission.”

“I hate that you had to go through that alone.” Gage practically crushed me in his arms. “You’re not alone now. Never again, baby.”

Blinking back tears, I held on a little tighter. Eve coming down with any illness, no matter how common or normal, would always send me spiraling, and that was why I’d slowly learned to cope instead of freak out.

“She’ll be fine,” I said. “Remember the last time she got a cold? You went all protective daddy on her then too.”

Which made me love him a million times more.

Exhaling on a sigh, he let me go. “Okay, I’ll try to scale down the overprotective parent role. But Kayla…I can’t help it. She’s our girl.”

I wanted to launch myself at him again, only this time with no clothing barring us from becoming a tangle of two bodies made for each other. I reached for his face, figuring I could settle for a kiss, but the hallway seemed to tilt. I shuffled backward until my spine hit the wall.

Gage frowned. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. I’m a little dizzy.”

“Did you eat lunch?”

“Umm…not that I can remember.” I’d been too worried about Eve to eat, and too busy taking care of her to find time to have lunch anyway. At the thought of food, my stomach revolted. What little I had eaten earlier that day rose so unexpectedly that making it to the bathroom wasn’t a possibility. I tipped forward and vomited in the hallway, narrowly missing Gage’s shiny black dress shoes.

He helped me to the bathroom and held back my hair as I lost more of my stomach’s meager contents. “I’m sorry,” I gasped during a spell. “Guess Eve’s not the only one—”

My whole body seized, muscles tensing as vomiting turned to dry-heaving. “Oh God,” I moaned. The dry-heaves lasted for maybe a minute, but it felt like forever. I fell back into Gage’s arms, utterly spent.

“I happen to know a bed with your name on it,” he said, carrying me as if I weighed nothing. Though his tone was light, he couldn’t hide the worry in his eyes as he tucked me between our silky sheets.

“Thank you, Master.”

Brushing the damp hair back from my head, he frowned. “Don’t ‘Master’ me now, Kayla. Just rest. I’ll keep an eye on Eve.”

My eyelids suddenly felt as if they weighed a ton, but the fact that I was sick too was a huge relief. “See,” I mumbled, halfway to a much-needed slumber. “She’s fine. It’s just a bug.”

“Hopefully a short-lived one.”

“Tonight’s Friday, after all,” I said. Now would be the time to tell him about my accidental meeting with Ian. Then I could wash away my guilt over doubting Gage with the force of his punishing arm. But I didn’t have any strength left, and I’d already spilled my guts enough for one day. I tried to muster a small smile, uneasy with the dark cloud hanging over my head. “Wouldn’t want a pesky illness to get between your belt and my ass.”

“You mean bullwhip,” he said.

“It’s been a month already?”

The sculpted shape of his jaw hardened. Hell, he was so damn beautiful. “It’s been a month,” he confirmed. “But I’m not about to use the bullwhip on you while you’re sick, so we’ll put an extension on it.”

“An extension with interest?”

“We’re discussing an ass-whipping, Kayla.” He rolled his eyes. “Not negotiating a complex contract.”

He was the king of complexity. Everything he did was calculated to break down another layer of my protective armor. A few hours later, after Eve and I sipped chicken broth and managed to keep it down, I sat in bed flipping through a fashion magazine.

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