Page 51 of Savage Protector

That was when he did the worst thing imaginable. He winced.

I crossed my arms over my stomach because I would have sworn somebody kicked me in it. No, it wasn’t possible. I wouldn’t believe it. “What did he do? Where is he?” I whispered, shaking, ready to be sick.

Releasing a breath, he slid his hands into the pockets of his slacks. “He wouldn’t want me to tell you.”

“But—”

With a scowl, he snapped, “Let me finish. He wouldn’t want me to tell you, but he’s wrong. From what I understand, he got out of surgery a couple of hours ago. He was badly injured in a fight.”

I couldn’t stand around and wait to hear more. I had a direction now, a purpose. “Give me five minutes, then take me to him. Please. I have to see him.” Before Vaughn could say anything, I was out of the room and unzipping my dress, scrambling for something else to put on, my head spinning and my heart thumping, pumping determination through my veins.

Whatever happened, it happened because he loved me.

Did he honestly think I was going to stay away?

Within twenty minutes, we stood outside a glass-walled room in the ICU. Vaughn held a quiet conversation with a doctor before joining me, standing by my side as I stared tearfully into Grayson’s room. He looked so small in the bed, so helpless, tubes in his arms and sensors on his chest, sending a tangle of wires to a machine beeping rhythmically behind him.

He had to live. He just had to.

I refused to accept any other outcome. How could I live through it if he didn’t make it? Just seeing him like this left me swaying and biting my tongue to keep from screaming at him to please wake up.

“He came around briefly when surgery was over,” Vaughn told me in a quiet voice. “But since then, he’s been unconscious. The knife came close to his bowel and nicked his kidney. He lost a lot of blood. In the end, though, he was very lucky.”

“Who brought him in?” I asked, catching fresh tears with a trembling hand. I’d washed my face before leaving the suite, but I probably looked like hell just the same.

“A couple of his guys. One of them called me,” he explained. “Grayson did some work for me not long ago, and he must have told them to call me if things went wrong.”

“Did they tell you… anything else?”

I looked up in time to see him shake his head. “No. No details.”

I would have to wait for Grayson to wake up, and I would. They could drag me out of his room if they wanted me to leave. There was nowhere else I wanted to be.

As it turned out, I wasn’t alone with him the entire time. Around an hour after I camped out in an armchair next to the bed, an older man appeared on the other side of the glass wall between us and the hallway. Tall, handsome, if a bit weathered. Well-dressed, if a little disheveled, like he threw on the first things his hands landed on without bothering to check if it was ironed. He looked like an older version of the man in the bed.

Our eyes met. His head tipped to the side in a way that told me he knew who he was looking at.

I knew him too. There was only one person he could be. My blood ran cold even as my face went hot. So this was the man who changed my life by murdering my mother, whether he meant to do it or not. I had spent years paying for his sin.

I couldn’t keep him away from his son, though that didn’t mean I had to share the room with him. When he entered, I stood, ready to trade places, looking anywhere but at the man who symbolized everything that had gone wrong. “I’ll give you your time with him,” I mumbled, tucking my hair behind my ears with trembling hands.

“No, no,” he insisted. “Please. I wanted to see him for myself and make sure he’s hanging in. A phone call isn’t the same.”

Good for him. A real Father of the Year candidate. “I hope you understand why I wouldn’t want to be here with you, just the same.” My voice was cold, barely holding back the years of anger, questions, and pain I had stored up deep in my heart. Slowly, I lifted my gaze to find his features pinching together in pain, and somehow that pain gave me the strength to keep going. “You did a good thing by helping Grayson last night, and you helped me by doing it, but it doesn’t erase everything else. You took an innocent woman’s life, and you destroyed mine.”

“I’ve done a lot of things I’ve come to regret,” he mused. My muscles stiffened in apprehension when his dark eyes—just like his son’s—met mine. I was looking into the eyes of a cold-blooded murderer. “But nothing compares to the night I took so much from you.”

“I wish your words meant anything,” I whispered, fighting back tears. “I wish they could bring her back, but they can’t. Anybody can say they’re sorry fifteen years later. I wonder if you ever thought of her once after everything was cleaned up and brushed under the rug.”

“The truth?” His shoulders sagged. “All the time. It was because of her that my son cut me out of his life. There hasn’t been a minute I haven’t regretted making that stupid, careless mistake. I didn’t know there was anyone else in the house. I swear.”

“You also never bothered finding out who she was or trying to make things right for her daughter,” I reminded him. “But nothing we say now can change that. You’ll always have to live knowing what you did and everything you lost. I guess that’s punishment enough.”

Nodding slowly, he murmured, “You’re right. It has been. I’ll have to live with that. Thank you for putting it to me straight.” With a glance at Grayson, he asked, “Will you let him know I came to check on him? It doesn’t have to be right away, so long as he knows I came.”

That much I could do, so I nodded before turning away from him and looking at his son. The only man in the room with the guts to do the right thing when there was nothing in it for him. Soft footsteps faded as his father left the room until I finally dropped into the chair again, shaking and crying. I never figured I’d get the chance to face the man who made me an orphan, and of course, now there were a hundred things I wished I’d said, but maybe I’d get the chance to say them someday.

I mulled it over for a couple of hours, watching television without paying attention, listening to the incessant beeping from the numerous machines until the sound faded into the background of my troubled thoughts. It wasn’t until Grayson started to stir that I realized how long I’d been sitting and thinking.