Hot Island Nights (19 page)

Then it all came rushing back—the trip to Melbourne, Jarvie and Nate’s confrontation, the shower door, trying to get to the phone.

Nate driving her to the hospital.

She frowned. Was she remembering correctly? But the picture in her head was indelible—Nate behind the wheel, telling her not to move, telling her everything was going to be all right.

She lifted her head, but the chair by her bed was empty.

Where was he? She was so proud of him. He’d driven her to safety. He’d saved her life. She wanted to see him and talk to him and thank him and tell him all the things she’d kept inside.

She reached for the buzzer pinned to her pillowcase, automatically using her right hand. Pain washed up her arm and she subsided with a groan.

She was so incredibly tired. Utterly washed out. She let her head drop on the pillow and realized there was an IV drip beside the bed, the tube attached to her other arm.

Weariness made her eyelids heavy. She let them fall closed. She’d rest for a minute, then she’d call someone and ask all the questions teeming in her mind….

When she woke again the hospital was quieter, the lights dimmer. Nighttime, then. But which nighttime? How many days had passed? She twisted her head to see if Nate was there but again the chair beside her bed was empty. She subsided onto her pillow. Where was he? She wanted to see him. She
needed
to see him.

She sniffed, aware that she was feeling very sorry for herself and not a little weepy. Then movement at the door caught her eye and she turned her head in time to catch a figure retreating away from the doorway.

“Nate?” she called.

No one answered.

“Nate? Is that you?”

Still no response. She shifted higher on her pillows, which was when it occurred to her that the figure had been too short to be Nate. He was much bigger and broader.

So where was he?

A young dark-haired nurse entered the room, a tray in hand. “You’re awake. Excellent. I’m Jodie, I’ll be looking after you tonight. How are you feeling? How’s your pain level?”

She slid the tray onto the table at the foot of Elizabeth’s bed.

“Um. I’m fine. A little uncomfortable but not overly so. Can you tell me, there was a man in the doorway just now…?”

Jodie shook her head. “Sorry. I didn’t see anyone. Might have been one of the other patients’ visitors. Although it’s well past visiting hours. Do you feel up to eating?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe some soup and some juice? You’ve lost a lot of blood and even though you’ve had a transfusion food will definitely help to get you back on track.”

“All right. I’ll try some soup,” Elizabeth said.

Jodie helped her sit up, propping an extra pillow behind her.

“Can I ask—has anyone been in to see me? A tall, dark man? Blue eyes?”
Really sexy, utterly gorgeous? Love of my life?

“I’m sorry, no. Not that I know of. I can check at the nurses’ station to see if there are any messages for you, though?”

“Thanks.”

Jodie moved the table closer and removed the plastic cover from the bowl of soup on the tray.

“Chicken vegetable, and for a change it’s actually quite edible,” she said with a wry wink.

Elizabeth tried to smile but all she could manage was a weak twist of her lips. She didn’t understand. Nathan had driven her to the hospital. Why wasn’t he here?

She ate the soup and half a bowl of yogurt, then she had a visit from her doctor who explained that she’d cut her radial artery and that despite having received a blood transfusion she’d need to take it very easy while her body recovered.

“The stitches can come out in seven to ten days, and the nutritionist will be around to talk to you about your diet. You’ll need to take in a lot of protein for the next six to eight weeks.”

“When can I go home?” she asked.

“We need to do a few tests tomorrow, but there’s no reason why you can’t leave afterward as long as you’re prepared to take it very easy. Lots of bed rest, no standing quickly, no heavy lifting.”

She nodded dutifully and waited patiently while the doctor conferred with her nurse at the foot of her bed. Then they left and she was alone again. She sighed and rolled onto her left side, facing the window. She felt incredibly alone and the sudden, childish urge to call her grandparents overtook her. Just to hear the sound of their voices. She couldn’t, of course. Not from hospital. No way would her grandmother’s health cope with learning Elizabeth had had an accident on the other side of the world. And her grandfather would insist on flying out to see her, and he’d want her to come straight home the moment she was good to fly….

She could call Violet, however. She was reaching for the phone when she glanced up and saw a reflection in the window—a man hovering in her doorway, a pair of crutches propped beneath his armpits.

She shuffled around in bed but by the time she’d gotten herself turned around Sam Blackwell was gone.

“I know you’re there, Sam,” she called.

There was a brief silence, then Sam returned to the doorway. There was no mistaking the chagrin on his face—he looked like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

Despite everything—his dismissive attitude, his abrupt departure—her heart squeezed at the sight of him.

Stupid heart. She reminded herself that this man had already disappointed her more than once.

“Why are you here?” she asked coolly.

“Nate called me.” He remained in the doorway, unprepared to make even the small commitment of entering her room.

“I see. And you rushed straight to my bedside, I take it?”

She was being sarcastic, but the fiery blush that swept up his neck and into his cheeks gave her pause.

Had he really come rushing to her side, then? Was that what that fierce blush was about?

“Why? Why bother when you didn’t even want to give me the time of day back on the island?”

His gaze slid over her shoulder to focus on the water jug on her bedside table. “Wanted to make sure you were all right.”

She pushed herself higher in the bed and eyed him across several feet of scuffed linoleum.

“If we’re going to have this conversation, could you at least come into the room so I don’t have to shout? I assume there might be some patients next door who’d like to get some sleep.”

He entered the room with visible reluctance. If it wasn’t so heartbreaking, it might almost be funny.

“I thought you weren’t interested in me?” she asked.

“I never said that. Don’t put words in my mouth.”

“Well, someone has to, since you never say anything for yourself.”

Bugger being polite. She’d tiptoed around him enough.

“I was doing what I thought was best. That’s all you need to know.”

Elizabeth slapped her good hand palm-down onto the bed. “No, damn you, that’s not all I need to know! I’m your daughter, Sam. The very least you can do is look me in the eye and tell me why you don’t want anything to do with me. I’ve had a bloody gutful of people deciding what’s best for me—my grandparents, my fiancé. I’m the one who gets to decide what’s best for me, not you.”

Sam frowned. “Fiancé? I thought you and Nate were on with each other? Don’t tell me he’s proposed?”

Elizabeth shook her head. “No. I’m not telling you a thing until you explain why you left and why you’re here now and why it’s
for the best
that you ignore me.”

She eyed him belligerently. She wasn’t going to give an inch until he offered her something. Some sign that he cared.

He stared at the ground, his hands opening and closing on the hand rests of his crutches. The fierce frown on his forehead told her he was debating something internally. She held her breath, waiting. If he turned away now, she knew in her heart that she would never see him again. It would be over, for good.

His chin came up and at last he met her eyes.

“All right. You want to know, I’ll tell you. Then you can tell me to go to hell and we’ll be right back where we started from.”

She didn’t say anything, simply waited.

“I met your mother in Greece. She’d just finished school and was traveling with friends. She was good fun, beautiful, loved a party. We, um, hit it off right away. Then her friends went home and Elle decided to stay on, and even though I had a charter I was supposed to crew on, I stayed on, too, and we got a little place on one of the islands, down near the water.”

Elizabeth frowned. It was strange to hear her mother’s name shortened and to hear that the cool, slightly sad woman she’d known as her mother had once been a party girl, someone a young man could “hit it off” with.

“Did you love her?”

Her father shrugged, not meeting her eyes. “We were both nineteen years old. What did we know?”

Elizabeth decided to count that as a yes.

“She told me she was pregnant after the first month. I—” Sam brushed a hand over his face, momentarily hiding his expression from her. After a minute he started talking again. “I didn’t take it well. I was angry. She was supposed to be on the pill. I thought she was trying to trap me. I took off. Took a charter to Turkey. Left her all on her own, with nothing.”

Elizabeth frowned. “What does that mean, with nothing?”

“What does it sound like?” Sam said, his tone sharp. “No money, no food, no way of getting home or getting help. She was in trouble with her parents for staying on, so she couldn’t turn to them. Her friends had gone. But I didn’t think about any of that. I wanted to take off, so I did.”

Elizabeth could hear the self-condemnation in his tone. She spared a thought for her nineteen-year-old mother, pregnant and abandoned by her lover in a foreign country.

“What happened then? I take it she went home to England?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t around, was I? I always assumed she called your grandparents.”

Elizabeth looked at her hands. It wasn’t exactly a beautiful romance, but there was nothing particularly surprising in it, either. Her father had behaved like a selfish, immature young man, and her mother had paid the price for her youthful impulsiveness. It was a story as old as time.

“After a while, I got to thinking. I’d had a few good charters, I was offered a steward’s job, regular work. I started thinking that maybe having a kid wouldn’t be so bad, that I’d be able to look after the two of you without things changing that much. So I hitched a ride to England with a mate and went to find Elle.

“She’d had you by then. I tracked her down, went around to see her at your grandparents’ place. They didn’t want me to talk to her, but she said she wanted to see me. She brought you downstairs with her. You were—”

Sam cleared his throat.

“You were really small. Lots of blond hair. Big blue eyes, like my mom’s. Elle told me that she’d met a new bloke, that they were getting married. That the new guy wanted to adopt you. Then he came in and I realized I’d left my run too late. I’d stuffed up and I’d missed out.”

Sam lowered his head and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

She waited for him to say more, but he didn’t.

She frowned. She didn’t understand. If that was the extent of the story, what possible reason could he have had to keep her at arm’s length? From what he was saying, he’d come looking for her. A little late in the day, perhaps, but he had still wanted to claim her. And yet he was standing here, unable to look her in the eye.

“There’s something else, isn’t there?” she guessed.

He glanced toward the door, his reluctance palpable. Then he sighed and lifted his head.

“I could dress it up, tell you how your new dad sweet-talked me and your grandfather leaned on me. But it doesn’t change what happened. After Elle took you upstairs to put you down for your afternoon nap, your grandfather came in with his checkbook.”

Elizabeth stared at him. “They offered you money to stay away from me?”

“And I took it.” He held her eye as he said it, and she could see how deeply the shame ran in him. “How much?”

“Ten thousand.”

“What did you do with it?” Her throat was tight.

“Drank it, mostly. I kept telling myself I was going to put it toward a boat, or put it in a trust and send it to you when you were eighteen or something noble like that. But I drank it, bit by bit. Pissed it up against the wall.”

There was a profound silence in the room. Elizabeth could hear the squeak of rubber soles in the corridor outside and the rattle of a curtain being pulled around a bed in the room across the way.

She didn’t know what to think. What to say. At the ripe old age of twenty her father had taken ten thousand pounds to disappear from her life and pretend he’d never existed. He’d sold off his claim to her.

“So now you know.” Sam’s voice was gravelly with suppressed emotion. “You know what kind of man I am, and you know why I figured it was best to make myself scarce.”

He turned toward the door. White-hot anger burned inside her as she watched her father prepare to walk away from her for the third time in her life.