REGENCY: Loved by the Duke (Historical Billionaire Military Romance) (19th Century Victorian Short Stories) (50 page)

Chapter 5

An empty bottle later – and only an hour deeper into the morning – Evie watched her patient.  Erik had drifted off to sleep and despite the amount of alcohol in her system Evie knew that she was nowhere near being able to relax enough to get any kind of rest.  There was so much adrenaline pumping through her that it all but offset the effect that the booze should have had on her.  Even so she felt she could have leapt straight to the moon, the urge to move was so overpowering.  That would have been preferable just now, seeing as how she suddenly felt that there was nowhere on Earth that she could have hidden successfully. 

A crime family… a goddamned crime family will be after me!
  She said the words over and over again and still they stung at her as if she were hearing them for the first time.  The words didn’t even sit together in the context in which she used them.  Evie had always tried to live her life as straightforward as possible.  There had been times when she had sweated like a prisoner on death row when she’d received parking tickets.  But this… this was something new… something terrible… and her mind could only conjure up terrible conclusions for it.

So much had happened in the last couple of hours that it felt like her world had been built on the surface of a Rubik’s Cube and someone had just twisted her world in every direction conceivable until all she was left with was a puzzle that she could not see any easy way to solve.  With that in mind, now she felt like she really was well and truly in over her head. 

She sat staring at the man on her counter top, holding the empty bottle of scotch in her folded arms as if it were a teddy bear.  She almost begrudged him the sleep he’d gone into.  Medically she knew that he needed the sleep as badly as she needed the time to think.  But all she could do, really, was imagine the horrible ways in which this could end for her.  And none of them were pleasant.

She had always been prepared to deal with difficult patients; her line of work demanded that.  She had come to accept that there would be times where she might have to get physical to restrain a patient or even have to break bad to news to family members who might react violently and at worst she would get written up or receive a reprimand on her record for any actions taken or words spoken.  But she had never imagined it becoming any worse than that.  Not ever had it occurred to her that something of this nature would happen.

This
thing
brought everything to a whole new level.  Never in her wildest dreams had she ever thought that she would have been a mob doctor.  She had done so involuntarily, sure, but nonetheless, here she was.  And whether she liked it or not she couldn’t escape the idea that Erik Kyrov would keep her in the back of his mind as a person that he could go to in a time of need. 

How do I even know he’s going to?  He could just decide to leave and forget that he ever saw me.
  The thought was legit and it brought with it a ray of hope.  Whatever was happening in Erik’s life it was obviously bad enough for him to need to disappear and fast.  Maybe he would.  Maybe he would just up and leave when he was well enough to do so and forget that he was ever here.  With luck on her side, maybe she would be able to forget that this thing ever happened at all and she could go on with her life.  It was a modest hope but at least it was one that she could use to keep her eye on the horizon.

I could always call his fiancé and tell her where he is
.  The thought was so dark that she surprised even herself.  She didn’t know anything about crime families, apart from what she’d seen in the movies.  And in the movies they were generally painted as a violent lot who punished allies the same way they punished enemies.  She had no desire to be on the receiving end of a baseball bat or slowly slashed into thin strips of human flesh.  Maybe she
could
turn Erik in?  Maybe his formerly-soon-to-be-other-half would accept it as a peace offering if all she asked in return was to be left alone and that she was ever involved could be forgotten?

Even as she reached the conclusion, a river of guilt began to flow through her. 
Oh yeah… do no harm… you got that part of your Hippocratic Oath down real well, didn’t you?

She cringed inwardly and shut her eyes so tightly that it hurt.  Shame cut through her the same way a chain saw cut through aged and spoiled wood.  It clawed at her very soul as if it had talons, threatening to rip her to pieces.

No… she wouldn’t turn Erik over to the woman who wanted him dead.  Hell, she wouldn’t even know where to begin.  It wasn’t like she could look her up in the phone book just as Erik had found her.  And she’d studied enough history to know that what was happening in Erik’s life now was a coup for power.  And in such instances, anyone that posed a threat to the new regime was swiftly eliminated.  And that would include her, now that she had seen to Erik’s wounds and assured that there might be a fighting chance for him to take back what was being stolen. 

No, she was positive that in the eyes of Erik’s’ enemies she would be seen as an enemy.  And enemies didn’t live long if they had no way to protect themselves. 

“Thinking of how best to advise my formerly beloved of where I am?” Erik’s voice asked.

Her eyes shot open and she saw him staring at her, the piercing green orbs of his eyes caused her to fumble the empty bottle onto the floor, though it did not break.  The look in his eyes added new shame to her and she regretted having even entertained the idea of executing her private thoughts. 

“No,” she said, quickly.  “No… I was… just…”

“I couldn’t blame you if you did,” Erik said, his voice sounded distant… detached… just as he had seemed last night.  “This is a terrible situation that I’ve put you in, Evie.  No one deserves it.”  He paused and the look in his eyes changed, becoming soft.  “I am sorry for it… really, I am.  But… you see…”

“You wanted to live,” she supplied, cutting him off. 

He nodded.  “I did.”  He looked away from her, rotating his head so that he looked up straight at her kitchen ceiling.  “But surely you must know that if you turned me over… they would kill you too.  Just for having seen me, to say nothing of helping me.”

She looked away shamefully. 

“If I were in your position, I would have wondered the same thing.  How could I manipulate the situation to my advantage?  What course of action could I take so that I come away unscathed and get back to life?” He was silent for a few minutes.  “I find that I can arrive at no solution that benefits me at all.”

She folded her hands guiltily in her lap.  “Neither could I.”

He rolled his head.  “However… there is one solution that comes to mind.”

She looked up, curious if not hopeful.  “There is?”

“Yes… one that doesn’t benefit either of us individually… but one that benefits
us
.  Our chances of survival are better if we should work together, I think.” 

There was a ring of optimism in his voice and it caught her attention like a car horn on the street.  “I’m listening.”

“You say that it would be unwise for me to move from this place… and that I am already showing signs of infection.  You are the doctor and I trust you at your word on that.  Then it would seem that we are stuck together at least for the duration.”  He took a short breath.  “Believe me, Evie, I would spare you entirely from this nightmare were it within my power.  I swear I would.  But I can see no way out where neither you will be free to return to the life you lived before this morning and I would be free to reclaim that which was stolen from me last night.

“All that I can see is a bleak future for us both should we attempt to go our separate ways.  My former fiancé has considerable resources, even from her place of power now.  Those resources are not infinite, mind you, but considerable.  Sooner or later she will discover you.  There are those who witnessed the two of us speaking at the party last night when we retrieved our drinks, I’m sure.  And someone was sure to notice that we had disappeared from the general frivolity of the party for those hours that we spoke.  She’ll put it all together eventually and then she will come for you.”

The words carried a heavy meaning in them that made Evie feel like sinking to the floor and crying.  Of all of the things that she could have imagined going wrong in her life, being on the angry side of a crime princess hadn’t been on the list.  Dolefully she looked down at her empty hands as if contemplating them and could not see a way out of her predicament without Erik’s help.

“What do you suggest?”

“That we simply choose to disappear… together.”

She sat and stared at him incredulously for a moment.  Then she rose up from her chair.

“Where are you going?”

“To take a shower,” she replied over her shoulder coldly.

“A shower?”

“Yes… I’ve got your blood all over me… I need to wash up.”  She disappeared into the bathroom.

The kiss of the thin jets of water was warm as it washed over her naked form.  The water dripped from off of her forehead in thin strings as she leaned her weight against the wall of the shower. 

She had abandoned any thought of using the soap to cleanse herself ten seconds after she had stepped under the jets.  Though the blood that had caked on her fingers had been washed away, she still felt dirty.  Not that it mattered.  There were some things that no amount of soap could simply cleanse.  It felt like even her shadow had been compromised in filth and like her shadow, this new trouble would follow her around for the remainder of her life.

Her eyes were locked on the drain and she watched the gentle swirls of water as they formed miniature cyclones and disappeared down the drain.  The gurgling sound of the liquid as it vanished from sight was the perfect metaphor for her life.  It was cliché, she knew, but accurate: her whole life was down the drain now.

A lifetime of desire… years of study… of killing herself so that she could get ahead in life… a good job… helping people… doing what she felt like she was meant to be doing… it was all gone now.  Her desire – her
ambition
– to help people had landed her in this predicament and all because she simply hadn’t obeyed her finer instincts and called an ambulance… or the cops… or anyone.  And now, it felt like she was paying the price for it.  And not even in the worst of ways.

She formed a fist and lightly punched at the tile walls of her shower, the sound reverberating in the room and in the walls of her mind.  The obviousness of the solution to her problems was simple, but no less frightening. 

What if I
had
called for an ambulance?

The question was simple, but not so in its answer.  If Erik was telling the truth – and she had no reason to doubt him – then the life she had been living up until now would have been down the drain anyway.  For all she knew Erik’s newly estranged fiancé had men in black SUV’s or something with police scanners listening to the calls and they would know right away where Erik was… where
she
was.  And then perhaps they might show up guns blazing… or pretending to be EMT’s and silently stuck her with a needle to make it look like she had a heart attack or something…

She shuddered.

Given her options her choices were simple.  It was better to be ruined than to be dead.  It was a grim choice, but somewhere in the back of her mind she knew that it was the right one.  She couldn’t help the predicament that she was in any more than Erik could have stopped his own bleeding with the power of positive thought.

She wiped water that ran under her eyes, wondering if there were any tears in that mix.  She doubted that there were.  She was too stunned to do anything other than dwell on her life as she now knew it.  She felt hollow inside… empty… like a piggy bank without a single coin inside to rattle around.

Her mind inevitably went back to Erik and what he had suggested.

Run away?
  The words rang with a note of defeat in them.  There had been times in life where she’d felt the thing to do was to find a deep, dark hole and crawl into it, sure.  But this didn’t feel like one of those times.  And Erik had said it so simply it was as if he’d been planning it the whole time.  That she could just up and leave… give up everything that she had spent her life building… the idea left a terrible emptiness inside of her.  Despite that, running away seemed like the thing to do given the alternative.  Nothing that she had heard and everything that she imagined supported that notion. 

It wouldn’t be the life she imagined living… but at least it would be
life
.  What good was her career or her desires if she was dead?  How could she help anyone then?  Alternately if she did run away, she would at least be helping one person: herself.  And perhaps she would even be helping Erik as well, but only to a point. 

The thought stirred something odd inside of her.

What was he to her?  He was no one really.  He was just some stranger that she had met and talked to only last night.  She didn’t have to do anything he said.  She could just choose to stay and let him leave, taking her chances that she wouldn’t be found out.  Part of her was convinced that she could spin a believable lie to tell if anyone did come looking for him.  Perhaps she could bluff her way out of this mess after all.

Yeah… and maybe I’ll find out that they’re serving ice water in hell.