Flawed Beauty (19 page)

Blearily, Tate closed the apartment
door behind her and went immediately to the counter where she’d set the
painkillers
Jace
had prescribed for her. She grabbed
a glass of water and downed two of the tablets. She tried to roll the latex
glove she’d worn off her hand, but the severe swelling required her to cut it
off. The skin surrounding the cut was oozing some kind of yellow fluid and
there appeared to be red lines beginning to run up her arm. If it wasn’t better
by tomorrow, she’d have to go the emergency room. She vaguely remembered
Jace
telling her she needed to eat with the pain pills, but
she just wasn’t hungry.

More tired than she could ever
remember, and with her head throbbing, she took a quick shower, and didn’t even
bother with pajamas before slipping in between the cool sheets of her bed.
Burying her face into her pillow, she struggled not to envision
Jace
with a pair of red cowboys boots wrapped around his
waist as he made love to the dark-haired beauty.
Just a few
days before… it’d been her.

Round and round, spinning faster and
faster.

The glowing, blonde angel twirling
her smiled and said, “You are such a beautiful angel.”

She giggled, “No, you’re the angel.”

The beautiful angel with the ring of
flowers in her hair, smiled again. “Promise you’ll stay right with me.”

“I promise.”

It felt as if she’d just closed her
eyes when she became aware of a pounding at her apartment door and someone
shouting her name.

Struggling to open her eyes, made
heavy by the painkillers, she whispered, “
Jace
?”

She eased up and the room swayed
crazily, causing her stomach to roil. Sweat popped out on her face and she was
suddenly freezing. She jumped when she heard the pounding again. Struggling to
a sitting position, from the foot of the bed, she grabbed the blue throw with
the familiar orange gator on it – school colors – and slowly wrapped it around
her shoulders. She heard him shout her name again.

Under her breath, she murmured, “I’m
coming, I’m coming.”

She swayed when she rose to her feet
and shuffled out into the hall. The movement made her lightheaded, and she was
forced to lean her shoulder against the wall to help her remain upright.

“Damn it, Tate, I want to see you
right now!”
Jace
shouted from the door.

Easing forward once again, she took
a deep breath to settle her stomach. She’d made it to the entrance of the
kitchen when
Jace
slammed open the door and walked
in. Somewhere in the deep recesses of her mind, Tate took in his face,
beautiful still, even though it was flushed with anger.

He shoved the envelope she’d had
Thor give him in her face.

“What is this? I don’t need your
damn money. It was a gift, Tate. Get over it!” he shouted.

Tate slowly licked her lips,
struggling to focus on him and his words, but the effort was becoming too hard.
She was just so tired.
          

“
Jace
…
I..
I..”

He cut her off. “What? Did the guy
you’re screwing give you the money? I don’t want his money,” he spat.

“No, I… I…” she swayed once more,
and afraid she’d fall, she leaned heavily against the doorjamb, mashing her
swollen, injured hand between her body and the wooden frame. She gasped at the
pain and jumped back, causing her to stumble uncertainly on her feet.

“What the hell is wrong with you?”
he demanded.

Her head, fuzzy from the pain
medication, Tate just couldn’t cope with
Jace
right
now. Her hand throbbed and she was freezing. She’d have to deal with him later.
Without another word, she slowly turned back towards the hall leading to her
bedroom.

“Where the hell are you going? We’re
not done here,” he slung at her.

When she kept going, he grabbed her
shoulders, and spun her around with such force, she stumbled into his body. His
arms went around her automatically to steady her. She melted into him, happy to
be able to feel him… smell his familiar scent once more.

He tensed against her body. “God,
Tate, you’re burning up.”

She closed her eyes when she felt
his cool lips against her scorching forehead. He reached down and picked up her
badly swollen hand and turned it palm side up. With her eyes closed, she heard
his sharp intake of air.

“Tate, I need you to get dressed,
okay?”

She blinked up uncomprehendingly.
“What?” she asked.

“You’re burning up. I need you to
get dressed.”

He shuffled her back into her
bedroom and began to paw through her drawers before pulling out sweats and a
T-shirt. He helped her dress quickly. Once her T-shirt went over her head, he
wrapped her back in the blanket, picked her up, and hurried her out to his car.
With her eyes opened in tiny little slits, she watched him as he drove quickly
through the streets of Gainesville.

“Are we going home?” she whispered
hopefully.

He turned grim eyes to hers. “Not
yet. We need to make a quick stop at the hospital first.”

“Okay. Can I have ice cream?” she
murmured irrationally before closing her eyes.

Sean Devlin was on duty when they
arrived. “What’s going on?” he asked when he saw
Jace
carrying Tate into an exam room.

“I think she might be septic. Look
at the lines running up her right forearm,”
Jace
explained.

Sean lifted her arm and whistled.
“I’ll order some antibiotics right away and a blood test.”

§§§

“I want my mommy. I want my daddy,”
she wailed.

“They’ll be here soon, now eat the
nice ice cream I bought you,” the dark-haired stranger said.

“Then you’ll take me to my mommy and
daddy?” she asked hopefully.

The stranger gave her a smile. “I
have an idea. What do you think about going on an adventure with me?”

“What kind of adventure?”

“I hear in the next town lives a
real, live princess. Would you like to see her?”

“Can my mommy and daddy come?”

“They look a little busy to me. How
about we go first, then they can meet us there?”

Slowly the little girl dressed like
a pixie nodded her head. “Okay, deal.”

The stranger put his hand out, and
excited, the pixie placed hers in it.

“We wouldn’t want you getting lost,
would we?” he grinned.

Tate
squinted
her eyes against the brightness of the really white room. Was this where the
princess lived? No
wait, that
was her dream. She’d
been dreaming that same dream for as long as she could remember. Sometimes in
her dream, she ran away from the stranger, but usually she put her hand in his.
How strange. She used to ask her numerous therapists what it meant and they
usually said it was because she didn’t feel safe. Well, no duh.

She tilted her aching head and
looked around. She didn’t recognize the room, but when she looked
down,
she saw she was lying in a hospital bed. Then images
of the night before began to flit across her memory.
Jace’s
cold stare;
Jace
dancing with the girl in the red
boots;
Jace
leaned into the girl;
Jace
at her house;
Jace
taking her home? No, he’d said
we’d needed to stop by the hospital first. She wondered what happened. She
looked down at the tubes running up into the veins in her arms.

Pain lanced her heart when she
thought about
Jace
. She wondered briefly if she tore
the tubes out if she would die. What did it matter, really? She’d been trying
to battle her way through life for so long, and she was really tired. It seemed
she took one step forward and two steps back into her squalid existence every
day. She’d heard that expression from one of her shrinks, ‘squalid existence.’
Not understanding the word, she’d looked it up when she got home:
squalid –
marked by filthiness and degradation from neglect or poverty; morally debased.
Yep, that was her – marked by filth and morally debased. Who was she to try and
smear that filth into
Jace’s
life? He didn’t deserve
it any more than she had.

She lifted her eyes when her door
was pushed open. Sean Devlin walked in, writing something on a clipboard. He
glanced up and smiled.

“Well, look who’s finally awake,” he
said cheerfully.

“What’s wrong with me? Why am I
here?”

“
Septicemia,
or sepsis.”

At her blank stare, he smiled and
said, “Blood poisoning from the cut on your hand. It got infected, and left
untreated, it causes blood poisoning. You were lucky
Jace
caught it. You could have died.”

“Yeah, lucky.
That’s me,” she muttered.

“I don’t know how
Jace
let it get so bad before he brought you in,” Sean said
disapprovingly.

It was obvious Sean didn’t know she
and
Jace
were no longer.

Quietly, she said, “He’s been at the
hospital a lot and I haven’t seen him. I didn’t realize it was that bad. How
long do I have to stay here?”

Dr. Sean Devlin checked his watch.
“As soon as you have your next round of antibiotics, I think you’ll be good to
go. You will need bed-rest for a couple days. But you should make a full
recovery.”

“Thanks, Sean.”

“Glad I could help. I was actually
surprised
Jace
let me anywhere near you. He gets a
little bit crazy regarding you. Well, feel better. If you need anything just
give me a call, okay?”

Struggling to rein in her emotions
at his words, she only nodded. After making a note on her chart, Sean gave her
a smile and a small salute, and left the room.

He gets a little bit crazy regarding
you.
Oh, she’d made
him crazy, all right. A picture of his tortured face when he’d first walked
into her apartment and found her being kissed by a naked Nick was seared in her
brain. It was better this way, she kept reminding herself.

Glancing around the room, practical
matters began to consume her. First, how was she going to pay her bills if she
couldn’t work? Would
Zek
replace her because she
couldn’t work? Secondly, how was she going to get home? She didn’t have her
purse, her phone, any money. She tried to remember how far it was from the
hospital to her apartment. She guessed it didn’t matter. She’d just have to
make it the best she could.

Tears of loneliness and despair
began to fall down her cheeks. She turned away from the door onto her side and
cried for her loses. She was twenty-two and had not one person who cared
whether she lived or died. How pathetic. What kind of a person did that make
her? She deserved her squalid existence.

Shaking off her self-pity, she
forced herself to pull it together, and eventually, the tears ceased. She lay
on her side, looking out through her window at the side of the building across
the street from her hospital room. Not that she really looked at the
building,
she just concentrated on it in order to calm down.
She blanked her mind and focused solely on the building. So absorbed, she
jumped when she heard someone clear their throat behind her. She turned slowly
so as not to disturb the tubes in her arms.

She swallowed when she saw
Jace
standing just inside her door, holding her purse. Pain
washed over his features before he once more put on his mask of impassivity.

“How are you feeling?” he asked in a
detached tone.

“Better, thanks,” she murmured, as
memories of him and the girl with the red cowboy boots flooded her mind.

He cleared his throat once more
before saying, “I went by your place and picked up your purse.”

“You shouldn’t have, but thanks.”

He gave a shrug of indifference.
“Sean said you can go home soon.”

She nodded her head.

“Do you have a way?”

Again she nodded her head.

“How?” he asked.

She blinked rapidly trying to think
of an answer.

“Is your new boyfriend coming to
pick you up?” he asked harshly.

She winced. “No!”

“Then who?”

“Does it matter?” she asked softly.

He sighed deeply. “Tate, I’ll take
you home. Okay?”

“Thanks, but no. You’ve done enough
already.”

“You can’t walk from here, it’s too
far,” he said as if he could read her mind.

“I’ll take a taxi or the bus. It
doesn’t matter.”