I’m startled awake, knowing that it isn’t anywhere near morning, but hearing a lot of activity in the room. I quickly get my bearings and see that several nurses are working over Baylor. My heart stops. Did she code while I was asleep?
I throw the sheet off me and run over to her bed, not caring that I’m clad only in my boxer briefs. “What is it? Is she okay? What’s happening?”
The nurses turn to acknowledge me and I’m more than a little surprised by the smiles and laughter that ensue. It takes me a few seconds to realize that their smiles mean nobody’s dying. I look at Baylor, who stares up at me through those uniquely amazing eyes. She clears her throat while looking at me appraisingly. She says in a raspy, sarcastic voice, “Really?”
Relief flows through me as one of the nurses tries to explain through her adolescent giggles, “Her feed at the nurses’ station showed elevated vitals a little while ago, indicating she may have been waking up. We rushed in and here she is, all bright-eyed and looking back to normal. Well, except for some bumps and bruises. The doctor will be in . . .”
She keeps talking but her voice, along with all the other activity in the room, fades away as I walk to the head of the bed. I nudge one of the nurses aside and lean over to gather Baylor in my arms. I try not to squeeze too hard for fear of hurting her bruised ribs. But, damn, Baylor alive and talking is a miracle and I plan on holding her until they kick my ass plain out.
“Darlin’,” my husky voice breaks, “thank God you’re awake.” I kiss her face, her hair, her hands. I touch every part of her that I can without being inappropriate in front of an audience. “You were in an accident,” I tell her.
She nods her head gingerly, an indication to me that it still hurts. “I know,” she says in nothing more than a whisper.
I reach for the cup of water the nurses are offering and help put it to her lips.
“Bay, we missed you so much. Most everyone is here. Your parents. Skylar. My mom. Well, not here at the hospital,” I say. “My mom and Skylar are with Maddox, and your folks are at a hotel. Piper is in Australia trying to get a flight out. I should call them.”
I follow her gaze as she looks from me to the clock on the wall. 3:00 a.m. “No,” she whispers. “I just want you right now.”
“Okay, darlin’. Okay.” I lean down to kiss her again when a young doctor walks in.
“I’m Dr. Johansen, the on-call neurologist. Your regular doctor will be here in a few hours.” He takes a minute to read Baylor’s chart and ask her a few questions. Then he proceeds to do an exam, after which he says, “Everything looks very good. You’ll be taken for a few scans later this morning to make sure the swelling in your brain is improving. I’m told you have other minor injuries as well, but I don’t see any reason to believe you won’t make a full recovery.”
I release my breath along with the death-grip I have on Baylor’s hand. I replay his words in my head. Full recovery.
The nurses tinker around a while longer and then they leave the room, turning off all the lights except one in the corner that is just bright enough to illuminate Baylor’s tears.
“You’re going to be fine, Bay” I tell her, carefully crawling into the bed next to her.
“It’s not me,” she says. Her eyes close, squeezing out more tears. “Callie . . . Callie’s gone, isn’t she?”
My heart sinks. I nod. “Did the nurses tell you that before I woke up?”
She shakes her head gingerly. “No. I already knew. I’m not really sure how,” she says through her muffled sobs on my chest. “I remember hearing something about visiting her grave. I must have picked up bits of conversations you had. I feel like I’ve known for a while. I knew your mom was here, too. I heard her voice, I think.” She looks around the room. “How long have I been here?”
“Two weeks,” I tell her. “You had a pretty severe head injury and there was some swelling. You didn’t wake up after they brought you here in the ambulance and then they gave you drugs to keep you in a coma-like state so that your brain could heal. You also have some bruised ribs, a gash on your leg, scrapes along your left arm and side, and some cuts on your face that have already started to heal.”
“Cuts on my face?” She feels the tiny new scar right under her chin where they had already removed a few stitches. “That must be why I saw red in the car, right? Because I was cut and I was hanging upside down. The blood must have run into my eyes.”
I let my gorgeous girl fall apart in my arms as she relives the accident and comes to terms with the death of her friend. She cries herself to sleep and I simply hold her until the nurses pry me off her in the light of the morning.
I call everyone as the nurses tend to her. Skylar shrieks into the phone. Baylor’s mom sobs uncontrollably and tells me she’ll phone Piper so that she doesn’t get on a plane after all. Chris thanks me for calling with a husky voice that tells me tears aren’t far behind.
When I’m once again allowed back in her room, after they’ve removed her catheter and cleaned her up, she says, “I have something to tell you.”
I sit on the edge of her bed and rub her uninjured leg through the blanket. “I have something to tell you, too,” I say.
“Me first, okay?” she asks.
I nod at her.
“I was on my way to tell you that I can’t stay here in L.A.” She looks guiltily at the floor. “I love you, Gavin, but Maddox and I don’t belong here.”
I put my finger to her lips to stop any more words from escaping. “I know, darlin’.”
Her eyes go wide and then fill with tears. “Did Callie tell you before she died?”
“No,” I say, sadly. “I didn’t get to see her after they brought her in.”
“Then how?”
“Baylor, when are you going to get it through your thick and damaged skull that I know you? Sometimes I think I know you better than you know yourself.”
She quietly stares at me with glistening eyes.
“You don’t think I’ve been watching you over the past month? Watching Maddox? At first you were both so happy,” I say. “You were writing a lot and Maddox was excited about being in a new place. After those first few days, though, you changed. Maddox changed. I thought maybe you both needed time to adjust. But as the weeks went by, you stopped telling me how many words you’d written each day, and Maddox didn’t talk about school because he couldn’t find a single good thing to say about it. I know you’ve both made an effort to fit in, but it’s been written all over your faces. You hate it here.”
I see a mixture of guilt and relief wash over her. “Yes,” she admits. ‘I hate L.A., but I love you.” She takes a hold of my hand and grips it hard. “We can make it work, Gavin. You don’t have to do all the traveling this time. Maddox and I will visit. A lot. We’ll come so much you’ll get sick of us. And we can talk and text every day. And there’ll be summers and vacations and holidays—”
“Can you shut up for two seconds, Bay?”
She cocks her beautiful head to the side and a disobedient wave of tangled hair falls into her eyes as she silently questions me.
I reach out and tuck her hair behind her ear. “While you’ve been out of it for two weeks, I’ve done a bit of . . . reorganizing,” I tell her.
“Reorganizing?” she asks.
“My life is with you and Maddox,” I say. “I won’t be away from you like that again. I want to come home to your bed every night. I want to have breakfast with Maddox every morning.”
“What are you saying, Gavin?”
“I’m saying, fuck L.A., we’re moving to Connecticut. We’re moving you back home, darlin’.”
I’m not quite sure she heard me. She does have a head injury, after all. She blankly stares at me with an adorable wrinkle in her brow. “Uh . . . what?” she asks, incredulously.
I lean down close to her lips, making each word a staccato between my gentle kisses. “We. Are. Moving. Back. Home.”
“I can hear, you stupid cowboy,” she says, playfully slapping my arm. “But how can you run your business from back east without traveling so much?”
“I won’t be running my current business from back east,” I say, leaning over to pick up a folder off the table next to the bed. “I’ll be running a new one.”
“What?”
“Scott will run Bay Watch Productions from here. I’m going to run our new sister company from New York City.”
She gasps. “You started a new company. While I was sleeping?”
I place the folder on her lap for her to peruse. “It will take a while to get it up and running, but yes. It’s an idea I tossed around before you decided to move here. I just didn’t run with it until now. Until I realized something.”
“Realized what?”
“That you are definitely not a California girl.”
Her jaw hangs open as she picks up the thick file folder. She pages through piles of contracts and legal papers. “What’s the name of the new company, Bay Watch Two?” she teases.
“No. I thought I’d go with something different this time.” I point to the name on the articles of incorporation.
“You called it ‘Mad Max Productions’?”
I nod. “And our first acquisition will be getting the film rights to your books.”
She smiles shyly. “I may have the perfect one for you,” she says.
“Which one is that?” I ask.
“The one I’m writing now. It’s about us. It’s our story,” she says. “Well, I changed the names, but as it turns out, our tumultuous lives make for a pretty interesting romance novel.”
I lean down to kiss her. “It better have a damn good happy ending, that’s all I can say.”
She smiles. But then she sighs, closing the folder. “What if I had died? You started this weeks ago. It would have all been for nothing.”
“Not for nothing, Bay. Maddox doesn’t belong here, either. I would have moved back there anyway. Maple Creek is where he needs to grow up.”
“But what if the same thing happens to you that happened to me? What if you hate it there?” she asks.
“Are you kidding?” I say. “Not only do I have you and Maddox, but your dad and I have become pretty good friends. And Chris, he’s not the asswipe I always took him to be. In fact, he’s actually pretty great. So, you see, I already have friends there. I have a business there. I have you there. What more could I need?”
“Asswipe?” she says, raising her eyebrows.
I shrug my shoulders. “It was my nickname for him in college.”
She laughs but then winces in pain.
“Careful, darlin’,” I remind her. I help arrange her so that she’s more comfortable.
She frowns. “Callie was going to move back there with me. Can you believe that?”
“Yes, I can,” I tell her. “You completely underestimate the pull you have on people. Most of us would follow you anywhere.”
She pales and her whole body stiffens. “Oh, my God, I totally forgot,” she says. “We were being followed, Gavin. At the restaurant there was a black-haired lady. And then she was behind us in a blue car. Oh, God, did she hit us with her car?”
“No,” I say, “But she did cause the accident.”
“How?”
“She punctured one of your tires when you were at lunch.”
“Oh, my God, really?” she asks in horror.
I nod. “Her plan was for you to get a flat tire and then she would stop to help you. But when you were on the freeway, your tire blew out, causing the car to flip.”
A tear rolls down her cheek as I imagine she’s reliving it once again. “So they caught her?” she asks.
“No. She turned up dead at a motel the next day,” I tell her. “She had pulled over to help after seeing the accident. You had stopped breathing for a short time and apparently she witnessed that, thinking you died, because she explained in her suicide note that she was sorry, that she never intended to kill you.”
Before we can talk about it further, the door flies open and an excited Maddox runs across the room followed by the rest of Baylor’s family.
“Watch her head and her ribs, partner,” I say quickly before he jumps up on her bed.
“Mommy!” he cries, embracing her in an emotional hug that can only be shared by mother and child as the rest of us silently watch with elated smiles.
Baylor spent the rest of yesterday sleeping and recovering while the rest of us attempted to return to our normal lives. Her parents decided they would head back east today as they’d left the restaurant unattended for far too long. Skylar is going to stay here while Baylor recovers. She will fly back with us as soon as Baylor feels up to it. Maddox even went back to school this morning, after our visit to the cemetery of course. He was ecstatic when we told him that we were all moving back to Maple Creek. However, he said that he would really miss his ‘kid cave.’ Little does he know I’ve already got people at the house working on it.
Baylor’s morning scans today continue to show improvement, and they tell us she will be released tomorrow, barring any unforeseen setbacks. I’m sitting on the couch in her room, catching up on e-mails, when she emerges from the bathroom. I stand up and quickly go over to help her.
“I’m not helpless, you know,” she says. “I can walk from the bathroom to my bed. I even managed a quick shower.”
I take in the fruity smell of her damp, freshly-shampooed hair as I escort her back to her bed. “I know you’re not helpless, Bay, but cut me some slack. I had to sit here for two weeks wondering if I’d ever be able to do anything for you again.”
She smiles at me as I get her into bed and pull the sheet up over her, tucking it gently around her. “I know. I’m sorry,” she says. “It must have been hell for you. Your mom told me you barely even left the hospital.”
I settle on the bed next to her and take her hand. “Listen, I need to talk to you about something.”
She sighs. “I don’t know if I like the sound of that.”
“I think Karen had something to do with your stalker showing up,” I say. “I can’t exactly prove it yet, and I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to, but I do have a private investigator looking into it. So far all he’s been able to find out is that a woman called the police station a week before your accident, trying to get information about your stalker. But nobody can figure out how Karen even knew you had a stalker.”
Baylor pales. “Oh, my God. This is all my fault.”
“How can this possibly be your fault?” I ask.
She shakes her head as tears well up in her eyes. “I’m the one that told Karen I had a stalker,” she says. “The day she came to the condo, I yelled something at her about how I would rather see my stalker than her.”
“Well, that’s explains it, then. And that only strengthens my suspicion that she’s behind it,” I say. “Think about it, Bay. No way was it a coincidence that your stalker showed up the same week Karen’s accusations about me being her baby’s father were disproved. She was trying to break us up again. Maybe scare you away or something. She’s a woman with means and we’ve both seen all too well how far she can go.”
“Can that woman rip apart our lives any more? How can she get away with all this, Gavin?”
“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” I explain. “We could take her to court. I doubt we could press criminal charges, but we might be able to build a civil case against her.”
“Take her to court?” she asks.
“If you want to, darlin’, yes. I will spend every last cent I have making her pay, if that’s what you want. But it might mean staying here, or at the very least, coming back for long periods of time. And even then, we may not be able to build a strong enough case, not unless my guys can come up with something.” I put down her hand and tip her chin up so her eyes meet mine. “It’s up to you, Baylor. I will do whatever you want. It’s your best friend who was killed. It’s your body that was damaged. Take some time to think about it.”
She nods silently as she cries herself to sleep in my arms once again.