Hideaway Cove (A Windfall Island Novel) (28 page)

She gave him three syllables back, and it took everything she had left to say them. Her last thought before darkness took her was that she wished she could stick around to see the look on his face when she told him she loved him.

Hold barely heard the crash, looking up just as Lance’s car smashed into the side of a semi. Jessi had gone limp in his arms, so he laid her down. And saw the blood—on her side, her arms. So much blood. He checked frantically, lost precious time determining that the wound on her side had already stopped bleeding, but then found the gash on her wrist.

He grabbed Lance’s knife and cut off the plastic tie, cursing when the blood ran faster, soaking through the strips he cut from her dress and wrapped around her wrist.

I love you
, she’d said.

All he could do was hold her in his arms while her life drained away. He fought to get his cell phone out of his breast pocket, even knowing there was no chance in hell an ambulance would get through, not with the highway turned into a parking lot thanks to Lance.

He dialed anyway, then picked Jessi up and started back to his car. “Just hold on,” he begged her, “stay with me, Jessica. I love you. Stay with me.”

“We’ve got her. Sir, we’ve got her.”

It was the operator, he thought, until he lifted his head from the sound of Jessi’s slowing heartbeat, and saw the wheels of a gurney.

“You have to let us help her,” a woman’s voice said.

Still, it took him a minute to understand she was a paramedic, that there were two police cars and an ambulance, hazard lights strobing through the darkness, parked on the opposite side of the highway.

Hands pried Jessi out of his arms, the words coming in snatches to him as they checked her vitals and rewrapped her wrist. Her clothes were cut away so they could do a quick assessment. “Lost a lot of blood,” he heard—“Touch and go,” and “Get her to the hospital stat.”

He tried to go with Jessi, demanded it, but a pair of Boston cops held him back. “How…”

“Sergeant Keegan called it in when you took off from his house,” one of the cops said. “I think he figured you were going to kill that guy. Looks like you won’t need to.”

Hold barely heard him, and he couldn’t have cared less what became of Lance. All he could do was watch the ambulance take Jessi away. He started to scrub his hands over his face, before he realized they were covered with blood. Jessi’s blood.

“Sir. Sir?”

He looked up into the face of a cop about ten years older than he was.

“I’m Officer Davidson. Can you give me a statement? Sergeant Keegan filled us in on the episode at the house, but we need to know what happened after you gave chase.”

“Which you shouldn’t have done,” a younger cop nearby, likely the older one’s partner, said.

“Shut up, Mulligan.”

Hold took a couple of deep breaths and reminded himself he couldn’t go to Jessi until he gave his statement. He ran it through as concisely as he could for Davidson, while the younger cop wandered off to study the scene, flashlight in hand.

“Now tell me again,” Davidson said.

“I need to get to the hospital.”

“And I’ll take you, just as soon as you run through it again. We have to get it down while it’s fresh.”

With no hope of ditching the police, Hold complied. “When I got here she was beating the shit out of him with those,” he said as Mulligan walked up with Jessi’s shoes—dirty and bloodstained—in his hand. “She was bleeding.” He had to stop and swallow, and still his voice was raw. “She was bleeding to death and she fought him because she knew if he got away he’d go after her son.”

“The crime techs are here,” Mulligan said.

Davidson took Hold by the arm. “Come on, we’ll take you to the hospital. It sounds like your Jessi was quite a woman.”

“Don’t talk about her in the past tense. She’s too tough to let that polecat win.”

The two cops exchanged a look; Hold refused to believe he could lose her now.

And yet, when they got to the hospital, he found he couldn’t bring himself to go inside.

“She’s tough, remember?” Mulligan said, as if to bolster him up.

Davidson just shook his head. “She’s in surgery. We’ll take you to the waiting room.”

Maggie, Dex, Dex’s parents, and remarkably, his own mother were already there. Benji threw himself into Hold’s arms. Hold closed his eyes, but when he tried, he couldn’t find any words of reassurance. So he just hugged Benji back—hard—and hoped he was giving as much comfort as he was getting.

J
essi swam back from what seemed a long distance, ran into a wall of pain, and retreated again into oblivion, came back again and retreated—how many times she’d never remember. But when she heard Benji’s voice, she fought to open her eyes and smile at him.

“Jessi.”

Hold’s voice brought a different pain, the kind no doctor could cure, and she let herself drift off because it was easier than facing that.

The next time she surfaced, it was to Maggie’s voice—angry, harsh, insulting. “Stop being a wimp,” she ordered. “You’re scaring Benji half to death.”

“Benji.” Jessi wouldn’t have recognized the thin rasp of sound as her own voice if it hadn’t burned its way out of her throat. She fought to open eyes that felt like they were filled with ground glass. And everything hurt. Mostly her heart.

“That’s it,” Maggie said encouragingly. “The doctors say you’re going to be fine, but you’ve been sleeping for two days.”

“Tired,” she whispered. “Sore.”

“I can only imagine. You have a stab wound in your side; it’s not serious but it must hurt like hell. Your wrists look like raw hamburger, and Lance gashed the left one pretty good. Nicked an artery, so you lost a lot of blood, and you’re bruised all over. You look like you were hit by a truck.”

“Lance,” she croaked as the memory came screaming back. She felt selfish, lamenting her broken heart when there was real suffering so close at hand. “Where is he?”

“Alive, but in a coma.” Maggie shook her head. “He’s not expected to come out of it, Jess.”

“Benji?”

“He knows, but he hasn’t said much about it.”

“He’ll need to talk,” she forced out, each word like knives on her sore throat, “when he’s ready.”

“We’ll all be there for him, including Hold.”

Now Jessi did close her eyes.

“You can’t ignore him, Jess.”

She only nodded.

“Is that agreement?”

She shook her head.

“Stubbornness, then. You should know Benji barely leaves his side, even for me.” Maggie sounded baffled, a little pissed off, and grateful for it. “If not for Hold…I don’t know if Benji would be as okay as he is right now.”

Jessi tried not to, but tears leaked out of her eyes. She let go again. She just wanted the pain to go away. Even Maggie swearing at her couldn’t make her stay.

As much as she wanted to hide from everything, Jessi surfaced for longer and longer periods. By the end of the week she was almost back to her old self, awake during the day, asleep at night, and restless to get out of the hospital. She was still sore in places, still heartbroken, but ready to get back to her life.

As usual in the afternoons, her room was full of visitors: Dex, Maggie, and Paige. Benji would be along later—with Hold, Maggie had told her. She hadn’t seen him since the ball, but she’d have to face him sooner or later. With everyone there as a buffer, it shouldn’t be too difficult.

“Jessi?”

She looked up, tuned back into the conversation, realized they were all waiting on her. She’d given a statement, carefully edited, to the Boston police, but that had so exhausted her that the others hadn’t pushed her to relive her ordeal with Lance. Until today.

And since it had to be told, no matter how much it troubled her, she repeated what Lance had told her, how he’d believed his connection to her meant he had guaranteed access to the genealogy. How Lance had hatched the scheme to blackmail Clayton instead, claiming she was a descendant, and through her, Benji.

The part about forcing her to conceive more children? That she kept to herself. As the days passed, the odds that Lance would recover grew less and less, so what point was there in making him look even more heinous than he already did?

“As far as I’m concerned, Lance belongs in the tenth circle of Hell,” Maggie said cheerfully when Jessi had finished. “And he can take Clayton Stanhope with him.”

“Wishing is the closest we’ll get to doing anything about him at the moment,” Dex said. With Mort gone, Lance incapable of talking, and no payment for the blanket, the little we have isn’t enough to take to the authorities. But at least we know who we’re up against now.”

“Clayton won’t bother us, and that’s all that matters at the moment,” Jessi said. The DNA test had come back negative; she and Benji were not related to the Stanhopes. Nobody would be coming after them.

She closed her eyes, just for a second, and let the relief wash through her like a cool breeze. She’d never realized just how heavy the weight of that fear had been until it was gone. Everything about her felt lighter.

Except her heart.

“The money might have been nice,” Maggie said.

“You didn’t want it, Mags, and neither do I. Not with that kind of price tag. No, I’m with you. We’ll get there on our own.” She smiled. “But I’m still playing the lottery.”

“Nice to know you’re open to taking risks,” Hold said from the doorway.

Suddenly everyone had someplace else to be.

“I understand why you’re deserting me.” Jessi shot Dex a sour look. “Men are cowards about this kind of thing.”

“Yes, we are,” Dex said.

Jessi appealed to Maggie. “Stay.”

Maggie only patted her hand. “It may not seem like it,” she murmured, “but I’m on your side.”

Jessi was stuck, especially when Benji peeked out from behind Hold. She greeted him with a smile and wide open arms, just holding him when he climbed into them, holding him and breathing him in. It would be a long time before either of them forgot what they’d gone through.

“Aren’t you going to say hi to Hold?” Benji asked her.

She was afraid to even look at him, afraid of the hope that rose within her, but she lifted her eyes to his and smiled. He’d given her the most precious gift in the world. She’d always be grateful.

Hold had stayed by the door, uncharacteristically hesitant, although his hands were buried in his pockets, like she’d seen him do a hundred times before when he was dealing with something emotional.

“Hello,” she said to him. “I’m glad to see you.”

His eyes shot to hers. “Are you?”

“Of course. You saved Benji. You saved me. We owe you everything.”

“I’d do anything for you.” He looked at Benji. “For both of you.” Hold took a step into the room. “Ask me why, Jessica.”

“We’re friends,” she said. “At least I hope we can be.”

“We’re more than friends.”

She smiled, though her throat ached and her eyes burned with tears she refused to shed. “So,” she said to Benji, “what have you been up to today?”

“We got you a present.” He held out a little blue bag. Tiffany blue. “Hold and me got it.”

Jessi locked eyes with Hold, shifted them back to the bag again. She didn’t take it.

“Hold wants us to marry him,” Benji said, sounding a little annoyed now. “He asked me if it was okay, and I said yes, and he said we have to get you a ring or it’s not official.”

“Hold, I…” She had to stop and swallow because her throat kept trying to close.

“It’s a present, Mom.”

She had no choice but to take it, pull out the box, open it. And suck in her breath. A band of white gold held a diamond in a delicate shade of yellow, not too big and not too small, surrounded by a circle of white diamonds. “It’s perfect,” Jessi said. “Beautiful.”

“It reminded me of you,” Hold finally said. “I always feel like the sun comes out when you enter a room.”

“I-I don’t know what to say.”

“Say yes.”

She didn’t hear him, couldn’t hear anything over the pounding of her heart, the voice in her head telling her to take the ring out and slip it on.

She opened her mouth, then closed it, afraid she’d beg him to say the three words that would erase all the awkwardness and hurt between them. There was no question Hold loved Benji, but it would be wrong for her to trade on that.

She closed the box, even though it killed her, put it back into the bag, and held it out. “I— We can’t accept this.”

“Why not?” Benji demanded. He climbed off the bed and stood between them. She would have done almost anything to wipe that lost, hurt, confused look off his face, but it wouldn’t be fair to any of them to live a lie.

“I was an ass, Jessica. Just tell me what you want and I’ll give it to you.”

Your heart.
But she couldn’t say that to him. If she had to ask, it meant nothing. The fact that he couldn’t say those three little words, well, said everything.

“I don’t know…So much has happened, and you’ve never…Why didn’t you ever share your life with me?”

Hold came over, sat on the side of the bed, and threw her senses into such turmoil it took all her strength to focus on what he was saying.

“What held me back was never about you. I think I convinced myself if I didn’t let you into my life, I could keep you out of my heart.”

“Well, that’s just stupid.”

“I didn’t say it made sense, or that I did it on purpose. It was done out of fear, Jessica, fear of giving my love to someone who only saw it as an avenue to the money. That’s not you, even if, in the beginning, I was right to take it slow.”

“Following me around like a puppy dog is your version of slow?”

He smiled, all the way to his melted-chocolate eyes, and it was all she could do not to throw herself into his arms.

“The longer I held back, the harder it was to tell you the truth. That was fear, too, Jessica, but then it was fear of losing you.”

And now everything inside her went still, quiet. “So what are you saying, Hold?”

“I love you, Jessica.”

Benji came over and leaned against Hold’s side, beaming.

Hold took out the ring, held it between his thumb and forefinger. He put his other arm around Benji’s shoulders. “Marry me, sugar. Make us a family. If you don’t I’ll just follow you around until you give in.”

Her head was spinning. She couldn’t seem to keep a thought in it suddenly, but there were words coming out of her mouth. And joy filling her heart. “Are you sure, Hold? We’re from such different worlds.”

“I love you,” he said again. “We’ll make our own world, you and me and Ben. But you’re the sunshine, sugar.”

“There’ll be plenty of clouds, Hold.” But she held out her hand. Hold slipped the ring on her finger and Benji let out a whoop, dancing around the room.

“He’s awfully happy,” Jessi said suspiciously.

Hold shrugged. “He mentioned something about summer vacation. I told him we’d go anywhere he wanted.”

“I hope you like cartoon mice and fairytale castles.”

“Actually, he wants to go to Budapest.”

Jessi laughed so hard it hurt.

Hold eased into the bed with her, pulled her close, kissed her softly. “One thing’s for certain, sugar. Our life isn’t going to be boring.”

“I love you, Hold.”

He sighed, rested his cheek on the top of her head. “I’ve been waiting to hear you say that while you weren’t losing consciousness from near-fatal blood loss.”

“Yeah?” She looked up at him. “I love you, Hold. Get used to hearing it.”

“I will,” Hold said, “but I’ll never take it for granted.”

She smiled. “Yes, you will, and I’ll take you for granted, and our kids will drive us crazy.”

“Our kids,” Hold murmured in his slow, smooth voice. “When are they letting you out of here?”

Jessi’s heart simply sang. She’d always wanted more children. “You have no idea what you’re in a hurry for, Hold—dirty diapers, three a.m. feedings, the terrible twos.”

Hold snuggled her closer. “It sounds like a pretty good deal to me.”

“No,” Jessi said as she rested her head on his shoulder, “it sounds like a life. Our life. I can’t wait to get started.”