Can't Take the Heat (2 page)

Mostly.

His phone vibrated again. God damn it, now his father couldn’t even go ten minutes between messages.

Standing up, he dug his cell out of his jeans’ pocket and clicked the icon to see his messages. He’d been right about the most of the messages—all from Sam, all bitching about Wes not being in the office—but the last one was from his sister, Chelsea, asking after Delaney. Chelsea had been seventeen when he and Delaney first hooked up, and the two of them had hit it off right away. He suspected his sister had been almost as upset by the abrupt dissolution of their relationship as he had.

He turned away from the bed to shield the phone screen from the light so he could see to type out a response to Chelsea. His dad he was ignoring.

No change yet. Nurse said it might take a few more hours for drugs to wear off. I’ll let you know if—

He hit the backspace key twice, changed the “if” to “when”.

—when she wakes u—

“Hey, Crush. Nice ass you got there.”

Wes nearly dropped the phone, not just because hearing Delaney’s voice—raspy but recognizably hers—surprised the hell out of him, but because she’d used her old pet name for him. When he first told her his name, she’d said, “Westley, like the Dread Pirate Roberts from
Princess Bride
, or Wesley, like the
Star Trek
character, Wesley Crusher?” After he’d confirmed the latter rather than the former, she nearly always called him Crush. Or she had until their breakup. The few times they’d spoken since then, she had never once called him Crush.

He spun around to look at her. She was awake, but clearly still drowsy; her eyelids drooped at the corners and her brown eyes were hazy. Maybe that explained her use of the nickname—she wasn’t quite fully alert yet.

But she was conscious. And able to speak. And she recognized him.

It was more than he’d been willing to hope for.

Overcome with relief, his text message to Chelsea forgotten, he rushed to the head of the bed. “How do you feel?”

Delaney’s beautiful features twisted with puzzlement. “My head hurts.” She struggled to sit up then, realizing she was tethered to something, lifted her arm and stared at the IV line. “What happened to me?”

The neurologist had warned Wes that there was a good possibility Delaney wouldn’t remember the accident when she first woke up. The human brain had a way of protecting itself from traumatic events, particularly in the immediate aftermath of an injury. In some cases, people never regained their memory of the incident.

“You had an accident,” he said. The doctor had told him to be truthful, but not specific, about what had happened. Too much information too early could freak out some patients. “On the job.”

Her eyebrows bunched together. “In the ambulance?”

Why would she ask him that? She’d been a firefighter for more than two years and rarely rode in ambulances anymore.

Wes was trying to decide how to respond when the nurse entered the room. “Told you to give it a bit more time,” he said with a wink before turning his attention to his patient. “Welcome back, sleepy beauty.” He began turning knobs and pushing buttons on the equipment. The blood pressure monitor stirred to life.

Delany looked at Wes, the expression on her face unfamiliar but instantly recognizable.

Helplessness.

That look shredded his heart, because if there was one thing Delaney Monroe had never been, it was helpless. He’d never known anyone more capable of taking care of herself. Being strapped to all these machines, unsure of how she’d come to be here or what was happening, had to be the worst kind of hell imaginable for someone so determinedly self-sufficient.

Wes reached for her hand to offer some comfort as the nurse nodded, apparently satisfied with the readings. She squeezed his fingers so hard, it hurt.

“So, can you tell me your name?” the nurse asked.

She answered without missing a beat. “Delaney Monroe.”

“Good. Very good. And I assume you know this young man?” He nodded in Wes’s direction.

“Of course, I do.” She looked up at him, her features relaxing with obvious affection. “He’s Wesley Barrows. My fiancé.”

From the concern-laden glances Wes exchanges with the nurse, I know I’ve just said something wrong, but I can’t imagine what. Confusion makes my already aching head throb. I’m familiar enough with brain injury to know that my answers to these questions are an important indicator of how serious the damage is. But apart from a crashing headache and a fogginess that must be the result of the drugs they’ve been pumping into my veins for however long I’ve been unconscious, I
feel
fine.

And I know I’m not wrong about my name or his. So why does he look so pale, so uneasy?

Unless...

“Wes, are we still engaged?” I’m trying to keep my rising panic from creeping into my voice, but I’m doing a crappy job.

Memory loss is completely normal after an accident or other traumatic event. It’s the brain’s way of protecting you from reliving the terror of the incident over and over. Most people lose anywhere from a few hours to a few days. I’ve even heard of people who couldn’t remember the past few weeks when they first regained consciousness, although they usually got most of those memories back fairly quickly.

But if I’ve forgotten my wedding, then I’m not just short a few days or weeks. I’m short months. Maybe even years.

And that’s terrifying.

He shakes his head. “No, we’re not.”

Then we’re married. “How long?” I ask.

“A little less than three years.”

Trembling, I close my eyes. My pulse is racing. An alarm sounds on one of the machines, probably the one that reads my blood pressure. I’ll bet it’s going through the roof.

Three years is bad. Three years means I haven’t just forgotten getting married, but a whole host of other things.

“Do we have any kids?” The question rips from my throat in a whisper. It’s horrifying enough that I can’t remember the day Wes and I committed to spend the rest of our lives together. If I can’t recall giving birth to our child…

“Kids?” Wes sounds puzzled. “No, of course not.”

Of course not?
Okay, it’s true we planned on waiting a while before having kids, mostly so we could figure out how to handle the day-to-day of raising a child between my weird hours and Sam’s incessant demands on Wes’s time. I guess we haven’t done that yet. Not that there’s any big rush—I’m only twenty-five.

Shit, no. I must be twenty-eight by now. That would make Wes thirty-two or very close to it.

“What month is it?” I ask.

The machine beeps louder, more insistently.

“You really need to calm down, Ms. Monroe,” the nurse says, an edge of despair in his voice.

Wes brushes a tangled lock of hair away from my face. “Shh. It’s not that important.”

“It
is
important.” I say it even more fiercely than I planned. My eyes sting, and my throat thickens. “I need to know if I missed your birthday.”

“You shouldn’t be worrying about that right now.”

I struggle to sit up, but all the tubes and wires make it impossible, which only frustrates me more. “Well, what should I worry about, then? I can’t remember how I got hurt, I don’t know how long I’ve been here, I can’t remember the day we got married. Hell, I don’t even know who’s the President of the United States.”

“Much to my dad’s distress, that hasn’t changed,” Wes interrupts, the corner of his mouth ticking up.

Despite my misery and irritation, I let out a gust of laughter. Yeah, that would drive old “get the government regulators off my back” Sam Barrows crazy, all right.

Another nurse and a doctor—I can tell by the white coat—burst into the room.

“She’s 162 over 98,” the first nurse says in low, urgent tones.

Verging on stroke territory. I should get a grip, stop freaking out, but I can’t. It’s too much to process. Or maybe it’s too little. Either way, I’m out of control and I’m not getting it back.

I reach up to touch Wes’s cheek. He hasn’t shaved in a couple of days, and the dark stubble along his jawline scrapes my palm. This has to be as hard for him as it is for me. Hell, maybe it’s worse, since I have no idea how long he’s been sitting here, waiting for me to wake up.

“Please, just tell me if I missed your birthday this year.”

His lips soften into something approaching a smile. “It’s August 23
^rd
.”

Three weeks. His birthday is in three weeks.

“Thank you.”

Someone says, “Two milligrams of lorazepam, stat!”

They’re going to put me back under. They don’t want me stroking out. I guess I can appreciate the desired result, even if I don’t care much for the methodology.

“I’m going to give you the best birthday of your life,” I promise as the nurse pushes the needle into the IV bag’s injection port. I’ve got a matter of seconds before I conk out. “I love you so much, you know.”

Wes puts his hand over mine. He blinks rapidly, as though he’s holding back tears. “I know, baby. I know.”

Wes pressed his fingers to his eyes until he saw stars. Of all the nightmare scenarios he’d imagined in the past week, this was one he’d never considered. Perhaps because, on some level, it was a dream come true. From the moment she left him, he had wished for a way to go back and change things. And now, in the most perverse way possible, his wish had come true. For Delaney, at least.

He still bore the burden of remembering every rotten second.

“What the hell am I supposed to tell her when she wakes up again?”

He posed the question to Dr. Jessica Fernandez, Delaney’s neurologist. A dark-haired, dark-eyed woman in her mid- to late-forties, the doctor reminded him a lot of Delaney’s mom, Vivian, who had died of metastatic breast cancer shortly after her daughter graduated from college. The resemblance was both vaguely disturbing and oddly comforting.

The doctor shifted in the square, vinyl-upholstered waiting room chair. “In most cases like this, I’d recommend telling the patient the truth,” she said slowly.

“But not in this one.”

She took a deep breath then leaned forward. “May I ask you a rather personal question, Mr. Barrows?”

“Wes.” The correction was a reflex.
Mr. Barrows
was definitely not him. “And yeah, go ahead.”

“Why did you and Ms. Monroe end your relationship? Was it her idea, yours, or a mutual decision?”

Oh yeah, that was personal, all right. “What difference does that make?”

“Well, it’s just that I’ve looked at her brain scans, and I can’t see anything to suggest her memory loss is organic. She doesn’t have any damage to the regions of the brain associated with long-term memory, and while I’d expect her to have trouble recalling the accident itself, that’s more a psychological mechanism than a physical one. We generally don’t like to relive a trauma, so our brains protect us by making it possible for us to forget what happened.”