Page 291 of Cross Checked
She felt like a mother whose son was in surgery and fighting for his life.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
That broke something in me all over again.
I clutched her harder. “He saved me.”
Her arms tightened around me.
“He saved me,” I said again, because I needed her to know. Because if he didn’t wake up, if the worst thing in the world happened and I had to stand in front of this woman with her son’s life having been cut short for me, she needed to know he had not been alone in this story. He had not been reckless for nothing. “Luke came for him because of me.”
“No,” Harrison said.
His voice was quiet, but it cut through the room with enough force that both of us looked at him.
His jaw was tight. His eyes were red. Not crying, not yet. But close enough that I suddenly understood Cade better in a way that hurt.
“No,” Harrison repeated. “That man came because of himself. Whatever happened tonight, Miss Bennett, it is not because of you.”
Miss Bennett.
The formality almost made me cry harder.
Elenore pulled back enough to touch my face with a shaking hand. “Cade told us about you.”
My heart stuttered. “He did?”
I knew he had spoken with his father for the lawyer and the security, but knowing Cade had mentioned me and knowing Cade had told them about me felt like different doors opening into the same room.
A broken laugh left her. “Not directly enough. He’s very much his father’s son that way.” She glanced back at Harrison, and the grief between them softened into something old and complicated before she looked at me again. “But he said enough.”
I swallowed.
Harrison stepped closer, his expression controlled but not unkind. “We had hoped to meet you under better circumstances.”
A laugh cracked out of me, awful and wet. “Yeah. Me too.”
His mouth moved like he wanted to say something else and didn’t know how. For a man who probably controlled boardrooms and money and entire skylines, he looked completely lost in a hospital chapel under fluorescent lights while his son fought for his life down the hall.
Knox cleared his throat gently. “We need to get back to the waiting room.”
Elenore kept one arm around me as we walked. When we stepped back into the ICU family room, everyone rose. Dad first, then Ryker, then the rest of my brothers because Bennett men could be furious, feral, and emotionally constipated in their own special ways, but they had manners beaten into their bones by a mother who believed there was nothing that excused rudeness.
My dad stepped forward. “Daniel Bennett.”
Harrison shook his hand. “Harrison Mercer.”
For one second, the two fathers looked at each other, and an entire conversation passed without words.
Your daughter.
My son.
This nightmare.
Please let them survive it.
“This is my wife, Elenore,” Harrison said.
