Page 8 of Untamed Heart

“Oh, right.” Red suffused his cheeks, finally giving him a hint of the color he needed. Even if it came from discomfort. It appeared the old man and I were in the same boat.

“Are you . . . are you okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m good. It’s not as big a deal as Nurse Ratched made it seem.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Oh, okay. So you didn’t just have your chest cracked open days ago so they could perform surgery on your heart?”

He hemmed and hawed for a few seconds. “Well, when you put it like that...”

“Uh-huh.”

I clutched my purse tightly, holding it in front of my chest like a protective shield as I moved to the chair beside the bed. My lungs pushed out a weary sigh as I sat, the material of the chair creaking beneath my weight. “Look, I don’t know what to say to you.” I dragged a hand through my hair as I searched for my calm. “I don’t know what I want to hear from you either. But I knew I couldn’t act like it was nothing when the hospital called me. So I came.”

“Baby girl?—”

God, that killed.

I squeezed my eyes closed and held my hand up to stop him. “I’m here. Okay? That’s all I have at the moment. Let’s just... let that be enough. For now, at least. Deal?”

Ezra’s mouth spread into a smile I remembered from childhood. One that’s beauty managed to slice off another piece of my heart just then. “Yeah. Deal.”

The silence that surrounded us was anything but comfortable, but at least it was no longer stifling.

Small victories I guess.

THREE

DAKOTA

I didn’t knowcomplete silence could be so exhausting.

Any kind of conversation would have been forced, and if he had asked me about my life, it would have come off fake and insincere, so Ezra and I spent the next half hour without saying a word. Eventually, he fell sleep, and I took another ten minutes to simply watch him, my eyes scanning over his features.

Of course he’d aged over the last sixteen years. My father had always lived large; it made his already rough-around-the-edges character downright jagged. His once salt-and-pepper hair had gone completely gray in the years I’d been gone. The wrinkles on his skin from years of being battered by the wind and sun as he rode his motorcycle were even more pronounced. But time alone couldn’t have aged him the way he was just then. The heart attack had managed to bring him down in a way I thought no one and nothing could.

For some reason I couldn’t begin to understand, seeing him like that scared me. It caught behind my ribs like a hook catching in a fish’s mouth. It tugged with each breath I took as I watched my sleeping father’s chest rise and fall, pulling painfully at theheart I thought had been deadened to him the moment I climbed into my car and walked away.

I hadn’t realized I’d been standing there, counting each of his breaths to make sure they were evenly spaced, until the door creaked open behind me, giving me a jolt. The nurse from earlier came in, pulling her med cart behind her. She shot me a kind smile before her eyes shifted to her patient. “Ah, I see he’s out.”

“Cold,” I verified. “He’s been sleeping for about thirty minutes.” My brows pulled together as I tugged my bottom lip between my teeth and bit down. “Is that normal? He’s okay, right?”

I didn’t want to care. In fact, part of me hated that I did. I couldn’t make myself stop, though.

She reached for my arm, her touch a comfort, her sympathetic smile full of warmth. Her fingers gave a reassuring squeeze. “I know it might not look it, but he’s getting better and better every day. Just give him some time.”

I forced my mouth into a smile, but it felt brittle and fake. My emotions were all over the place, swirling so fast I was weary in a way that I felt all the way down to my bones.

“Yeah, I’ll do that. Thanks.”

“You know, he’s probably out for the rest of the night if you want to go and get some rest. Come back tomorrow fresh and rested.”

That sounded perfect. I needed some air, and I needed some time to get my head together.

I left a few minutes later. The breath I’d been holding escaped my lungs in a whoosh when I stepped into the hall and found it empty. Not a single Wraith cut in sight.

The steel band that had wrapped around my chest, steadily squeezing since I pulled into the hospital parking lot, slowly loosened as I rode the elevator down to the ground floor and headed for the exit, past that hideous flower arrangement. As Istepped through the frosted glass doors, I saw that the sun had set, and after the whirlwind that had stirred up inside me, all I could think about was finding a place to crash for the night.

I filled my lungs with the fresh, pine-scented air to cleanse away the smells of the hospital and closed my eyes as a soft breeze skated across my skin.Just a few more yards, I thought as I glanced in the direction of my car. Just a few more yards and I was home free. At least for a little while.