Hawke

  "Okay," I say softly.

  "He'll be fine," Hawke says reassuringly as I hear his car roar to life. I then hear the creaking of a garage door and I envision Hawke backing out.

  "Okay," I say, distrusting the confident statement. Because really, wasn't this potential miracle cure just too good to be true?

  "Vale?" Hawke says, and I blink my eyes to dispel the tears starting to form. "He'll be fine."

  "I'm scared," I say, my voice cracking under the weight of my fear.

  "I know, baby," he says gently. "But I'll meet you at the hospital and you won't be alone. Okay?"

  The EMTs have Dad fully strapped in and he gives me a weak smile. They start to maneuver the stretcher to the front door. "I've got to go. They're loading him up. I'll see you at the hospital."

  I don't wait for his response, but disconnect him immediately, afraid that any more soft words from him will be my complete undoing. While Dad is watching me, I need to remain strong for him.

  I can always fall apart later.

  Chapter 13

  Hawke

  I've only seen Vale look this way one other time in her life. The normally assured, confident, and self-aware woman is barely holding it together tonight. She looks lost.

  Defeated.

  And my heart aches for her.

  The other time I saw her this way was on the morning she broke up with me. Lying in her bed, covers up to her chin. So vulnerably small and delicate.

  Dave was admitted to Duke a little over seven hours ago. I arrived about five minutes after the ambulance to find a shaken Vale sitting alone in the waiting room of the emergency department.

  Her head was bowed, her eyes closed, lips moving in what I believe was a silent prayer. As I approached, her face tilted upward and I know I shouldn't have derived pleasure from it, but fuck...I did. She was relieved to see me.

  She stepped into my arms as if she had never left them seven years ago. She laid her head on my chest, wrapped her arms around my waist, and I couldn't help myself. I embraced her back, relishing in every inch of her touching me. I found solace in the familiarity that still existed between us. I kissed the top of her head and murmured words of assurance to soothe her. She shuddered once, and then went still except for her fingers, which clutched at me harder.

  Ordinarily, waiting in an emergency room can take hours. Hell, sometimes it feels like days. But when you are a patient in an exciting and almost miraculous clinical trial that could eradicate cancer from the face of the earth, you tend to get treated like a rock star. Vale and I were still in midhug when a nurse collected us, gently ushering us down halls until we reached the emergency-room bay that held all the beds. She put us in a room separated by curtains with an empty bed, telling us that Dave was receiving an MRI and that Dr. Furhman was on his way in. She offered us something to drink, which both of us politely declined.

  Vale and I sat beside each other on plastic chairs, clasping hands and silently ruminating. Dr. Furhman found us there twenty minutes later, looking serious as only a doctor can, but without that grave look that spells death.

  "Your dad's MRI looks good," he said first, and Vale let out a shuddering breath of relief. "He was due to have one this week anyway, and as we had hoped, the prior inflammation caused by the virus has reduced significantly. The tumor itself hasn't, but we don't expect to see that start to shrink for another month at least."

  "Then what happened to him?" Vale asked as her fingers still clutched mine tightly.

  "A secondary infection," Dr. Furhman said calmly. "That's what caused the fever, and probably the seizure, although that could have been from the inflammation caused by the virus. But your dad is stable and I've got him on a high dose of antibiotics and some steroids. We'll monitor the fever, but I expect it will start to drop pretty quickly. This has happened in our protocol before, so it's not a surprise."

  Dr. Furhman spent another fifteen minutes with us, answering a multitude of Vale's questions. The woman knew her shit when it came to her father's medical condition. The good doctor spent every minute patiently answering her questions and giving reassurances where he could without simultaneously giving false hope. Bottom line, he said, was that Dave's prognosis was good and that he should be able to go home in a day or two.

  Now it's closing in on midnight and Vale is stubbornly refusing to leave her dad's side. This I get. If it was my mom or dad, you'd have to pry my ass out of the chair. But Dave is starting to get a little cranky with his obstinate daughter, and I sense a fight brewing.

  A nurse is in, checking his vitals. After she disposes of the thermometer sheath, she smiles and says, "Temperature's at 99.1. It's come down significantly, so all hail the antibiotics."

  "Still higher than normal," Vale points out, and her dad rolls his eyes. For a split second, I almost think it's the start of seizure, but then he shoots her a glare.

  "My temp always runs a little high," he tells the nurse with a wink. "And I'm actually feeling pretty good. Any chance I could get something to eat?"

  "Sure," the nurse says with a return wink. "Dr. Furhman put in some orders for a low-sodium diet. I'm sure they can send something up."

  "Excellent," Dave says, and then turns his gaze to Vale. "Now I want you to get your butt home and get some sleep."

  "I'll sleep here," Vale says primly, and drops her gaze fast. I merely lean back against the wall, shove my hands in my pockets, and get ready to watch the fireworks.

  "You most certainly will not," Dave says firmly. "I'm going to eat me a roast beef sandwich, or something probably with less salt, and then I'm going to sleep. I don't need you here."

  Vale isn't swayed. "You may not need me here, but on the off chance something were to happen, I'd just as soon stay here so I can be close by."

  "Nothing's going to happen--" Dave says calmly, but he's cut off by the cutest snarl.

  "You don't know that. I just watched you have a seizure in front of me, which took ten years off my life."

  "But I'm fine now," Dave placates.

  "But you may not--"

  "Enough," Dave growls as he levels the sternest look I've ever seen him give his daughter. Normally he indulges her every whim, but even I'm feeling the sting of those words.

  Vale's eyes go wide and then she blinks at him in disbelief.

  With a gentler voice, Dave tells her, "Honey, I get you're worried, but you are doing me no good here. You're only going to make me worry about you. So if you really want to help me, you'll go home, get some food in you, and get a good night's sleep. You can come back at the crack of dawn if you want, okay?"

  It's like a balloon deflating. Vale's shoulders sag in resignation and she gives him a wan smile as she nods her head. Standing up from the bedside chair, she gives a suffering sigh and says, "Fine. I'll go."

  Vale leans over the bedrail and kisses her father on the cheek. I push up off the wall, walk to the bed, and pat him on his lower leg covered in crisp, white sheets. "Take care, Dave. We'll be back tomorrow."

  "Don't you have practice tomorrow?" Dave, the athletic trainer and competitor at heart, asks me with a grunt.

  "Yes," I say with a cheeky grin. "But it doesn't last all day."

  Vale gives no less than three backward glances over her shoulder to her dad as I gently push her from the room with my hand on her lower back. It's a given I'll give her a ride home, so no words are necessary as she follows me to the parking garage located outside the hospital.

  Once we hit I-40 east, Vale leans back in the passenger seat and says, "You remember that time we were at Lollerman Creek...swinging from a tree rope into that swimming hole?"

  I give a grunt of a laugh. "Yeah, it took forever for you to get psyched up to make the jump, but once you did, you couldn't stop. What were we...like seventeen or so?"

  "Yeah, seventeen," she agrees softly. She's quiet a moment, and because I suspect this particular memory is plaguing her mind, I hold my tongue. I can see from the corner of my eye her hands nervously tw
isting and rubbing in her lap. "Before I made that first jump, I was so scared."

  I nod in understanding. I was scared too, as that tree sat on a small cliff a good twenty feet up from the water. There was always a rumor floating around that some unnamed kid had drowned there after breaking his neck in the jump, but that was never confirmed to my knowledge. Probably just a rumor started by parents to discourage their adrenaline-seeking children.

  "I prayed right before I jumped," Vale says in an almost silent whisper, as if she's embarrassed to admit that. She's never been an overly religious person, and as far as I know, didn't pray routinely. We most certainly didn't go to church. "I told God that if he let me make the jump and not break my neck, I'd never ask him for another thing as long as I lived."

  Understanding washes through me like a tidal wave. "You were praying in the waiting room."

  A laugh pops out of Vale's mouth, not born of amusement but of bitter self-castigation. "I've been praying to God since my dad was first diagnosed. I'm afraid I used up my allotted prayers on that stupid fucking jump into Lollerman's Creek."

  There's no thought to my actions, just instinct. My hand reaches over, pries into her clenched hands, and pulls one of them over onto my lap. I lace my fingers through hers, give a reassuring squeeze. "I don't think that's how it works, Vale. Besides, who's to say that one of your prayers didn't land on the Big Guy's desk and that's what led him to the clinical trial at Duke? Huh?"

  Vale reactively squeezes my hand, and while I don't hear it, I feel an amused chuckle in that action. "You always have an answer for everything."

  "It got us out of a lot of trouble with your dad and Oliver's parents when we were younger, that's for sure."

  Another small laugh from Vale, and she makes no effort to move her hand from mine. Her head tilts to look out the passenger window, and we sit in comfortable silence until we get to her apartment, where our hands finally part.

  I put the car in park and switch off the ignition. Vale exits the car and doesn't say a word as I get out too. It's dark outside, the light on her stairwell is burned out, and I'm going to walk her up. In fact, I'm going to make sure she gets something to eat, then I can leave knowing she's been taken care of.

  And it feels good...not going to lie.

  To take care of her, have her dependent on me. The man that she cut out of her life so long ago.

  I'm not sure if this is validation, or maybe it's retribution on my part that she has to depend on me in this moment, but it's driving me to walk up those apartment stairs with her.

  Vale unlocks the door, pushes it open with a soft creak, and I walk in right behind her. She doesn't even blink twice but drops her purse to the floor as her shoulders seem to be pulled way down by fatigue and gravity.

  "You need to eat something," I say as I step past her and into the tiny kitchen with stained-by-time, cream-colored linoleum that is curled slightly at the edges.

  She doesn't argue and follows me. I open the refrigerator and hear the scrape of a kitchen chair as she pulls it out, then her sigh as she sits. "I've got to get up in almost five hours," Vale says tiredly. "I figure I can hit the gym, train my two morning clients, and then head back to Duke. I'll need to talk with Bruce and let him know I won't be in today at the arena."

  "Bruce will be fine with that," I say as I pull out some turkey from the fridge, along with a jar of mayo. "Where's your bread?"

  "Cupboard to your left," she says automatically.

  I lay my materials down on the chipped Formica counter mottled blue and gray and reach for the cabinet. After grabbing the bread, I turn to look at her pointedly. "You need to text your clients right now and tell them you've had a family emergency and you won't make it in tomorrow."

  "I can't just bail on them," Vale argues, but I hold up a hand, point my finger at her.

  "Text them now, Vale. This is a legitimate excuse to cancel, and you need the rest. Especially if you plan to park your ass at the hospital all day tomorrow, which I expect you will."

  She stares at me.

  I stare back at her and then growl, "Text. Now."

  It's a definite surprise that she immediately capitulates, pulling her phone out of her pocket. I turn around so she doesn't see the triumph lighting up my eyes and I make both of us sandwiches. Pulling two bottles of water out of the fridge, I lay the simple meal on the table and take a seat.

  We eat in silence, not because there isn't anything to say but because we're both starving and exhausted. I inhale my sandwich and Vale isn't far behind me, chugging half her water bottle after she swallows the last bite.

  She gives me an almost shy smile as she wipes her mouth and lays the napkin on the plate. "Thank you."

  "Just a sandwich," I say as I rise from the table and grab the plates, turning to take them to the sink.

  The scrape of her chair against the floor indicates she's risen. I hear her soft footsteps come up behind me, and just as I'm setting the plates in the sink, her arms come around my waist from behind. She presses her cheek to my back and my breath freezes in my lungs.

  "No," she says softly. "Thank you for everything. Being there when I called, coming to the hospital. Staying all night...holding my hand. For the ride home, and yes, for fixing me dinner. I'm not sure why you did it or why you think I deserve it, but just...thank you."

  A stab of something close to painful longing pierces the center of my chest and I have no will over my body. It turns in her embrace so we come face to face. My arms go around her, folding over her lower back, and I pull her in to me. Her cheek goes to my chest, just below my collarbone, and her hair feels soft against my throat, which seems to be clogged with weird and poignant emotion brought on by her vulnerability and my need to save the day for her.

  For a blessed moment, I don't question all the hurt between us.

  I simply hold her.

  After several long moments, Vale stirs in my arms and I loosen my hold. She pulls her head back, followed by her chest, and leans back to look at me. Her eyes are tired, but it doesn't diminish the beauty of the fern-colored irises boring into me. I think she may say something, maybe another expression of thanks, but then she lifts up on tiptoes and presses a kiss to my lips.

  It's soft and over all too quickly, and I sense a world of gratitude within it. I expect her to drop down to her heels, but she continues to stare at me.

  Then she kisses me again.

  I hold absolutely still, shocked by this move, because as she presses her mouth to mine, I think that this is something definitely more than just gratitude.

  I'm sure of it when her tongue tentatively pushes past my lips and brushes against the tip of mine.

  My body reacts swiftly, completely independent of my brain. My arms tighten around her and I angle my face, pushing back against her...pushing my tongue against hers.

  She purrs deep in her throat and the rumble slips into me, rolling down my body, which starts to tighten with need.

  For a brief moment, I consider all the ways in which this is wrong.

  She's vulnerable.

  Lost.

  Not thinking straight.

  I would be taking advantage of her if I let this go on.

  But then I think of other things.

  Like her breasts pressed into my lower chest, and how soft her lips feel against mine. The warmth of her body, the swell of her ass just three inches below my hands that are clasped at her lower back. The little moaning sound she makes as our kiss enters erotic territory. The utter and irrefutable knowledge of just how fucking good it feels to be buried deep inside of her. I've never had better, and now that I've gotten a reminding taste of her, I want to feel it again. It's at this point that my cock starts to outwit my brain.

  I spin both of us around until her back is resting against the refrigerator. She gasps but never moves her mouth from mine. I nip at her lower lip and then pull back slightly to look down at her.

  She's glorious. Chest rising and falling with faltering breath, e
yes at half-mast but heated through with need, lips wet and puffy from our kiss.

  "Vale," I say warningly. "We're getting past the point of no return."

  She shivers over the tone of my voice, presses into me. Her voice quakes when she asks, "Is it wrong of us to want this?"

  My heart thuds loudly, maybe even stutters, and I grit my teeth over the way in which my body and mind are warring. So fucking dangerous to go where I want to go, but ultimately, it's a prize I want too much, damn the consequences.

  "It's totally wrong," I tell her as my hand comes up to her face. I rub my thumb over her lower lip, letting my gaze drop briefly to watch. When I look back up at her, it's with naked honesty that I tell her, "So goddamn wrong, but I don't give a fuck."

  And I kiss her again.

  Chapter 14

  Vale

  So goddamn wrong, but I don't give a fuck.

  That's what he said, and I'm rolling with it.

  I'm stretched beyond capacity for reason, completely exhausted in my mind and spirit, and Hawke stands before me like an anchor in the storm. I clutch on to him hard, accepting his continued offer of comfort, and if he's the same old Hawke that possessed me all those years ago, I know he'll make me forget all of the bad in my life right now. I'm actually counting on him to do just that.

  Am I using him?

  Even as his mouth descends back onto mine and my hands inch their way up into his long hair, I know the answer to this is yes. Guilt and remorse flood through me, but I push in closer to him rather than pull away.

  He told me he didn't give a fuck, and so neither do I. He had the chance to bolt and he didn't, so that has to say something, right?

  "Where'd your head go, Vale?" Hawke mumbles before moving his lips from mine, down and over to my jaw. My head drops back and my head goes fuzzy. "You tensed up. Want me to stop?"

  My head snaps back up and my fingers grip his hair tight. I go to my tiptoes again, push my nose almost against his. "Please don't stop, okay?"

  His eyes flare with relief, a tiny smile forming on his lips, but his voice is gruff...strained. "I don't think I can."

  "Good," I say with equal relief.

  "Great."

  "Bedroom. Now," I prod him along.