Chapter Six

She stood outside Angel’s door so long, it became noticeable. Finally footsteps came up behind her, a warm, bony hand pressed against her shoulder.

“You okay, Madelaine?”

She stiffened, forced her chin up, and drew her gaze away from the name on the door. “I’m fine, Hilda,” she said, turning slowly to face the small, no-nonsense nurse who ran the transplant team like a drill sergeant.

Hilda beamed up at her, her birdlike head tilting suddenly to the right. “I was going to see our Mr. Jones. Shall I wait until you’re done?”

“Yes. I’d like some time alone with him.”

Hilda gave her a quick wink. “If the staff knew who he was, you’d be stampeded. Only Sarah, Karen, and I will be allowed in here. We’ll handle the security.”

Madelaine tried to dredge up a smile, she really tried. “Good.”

“Hollywood types,” Hilda said disapprovingly. “According to the Enquirer—and God knows they’re reputable on such things—he drinks like a fish and screws anything with tits bigger’n his.” With another pat on the shoulder, Hilda turned and scurried down the hallway, vanishing into her office.

Madelaine took a deep, steadying breath and marched into the lion’s den.

He was sleeping. Thank God.

Quietly she closed the door shut behind her. Weak autumn sunlight shone through the small window, giving the room a respite from the cold impersonality of fluorescent lighting. The narrow, metal-framed bed cut the room in half.

He lay as motionless as death, the washed-out gray sheeting tucked haphazardly across his chest. Dark brown hair lay in a tangled heap against the white cotton of the pillow. His chiseled face looked sunken and too thin; his lips were pale. A stubbly growth of black beard shadowed his triangular jaw and darkened his upper lip.

Even so, he was so handsome he took her breath away.

She sank unsteadily to the chair. For a second she couldn’t think about his illness or what was at stake here. All she could think about was the past and how much she’d loved this man.

He had swept her, laughing, into a whole new world. A world of lights and possibility and hope, a place where rules and responsibility didn’t exist. She’d clung to him, giggling, believing, following wherever he led, so proud that hers was the hand he wanted to hold. She’d fallen in love with him in the wild, abandoned way that only teenagers could. Making excuses during the day to be together, sneaking from her father’s austere house in the middle of the night. It was the first time she’d ever disobeyed her father, and it had made her feel recklessly confident.

With the distance of so many years, she knew that she’d never really fallen in love with him, not in the way that lasts. She’d been consumed by his brushfire passion, transformed by him.

There had been that night, under the old oak tree at Carrington Park.…

They’d been lying in the grass, staring up at the night sky, wishing on stars, sharing their dreams, holding each other. But she’d known it was time to go home. Her father would be getting back from his business trip.

She pulled away from him, staring down the long, darkened street. The thought of leaving him, returning to that cold house and her even colder father, made her feel almost sick with desperation. “I don’t want to go back.…” She realized instantly that she’d said too much. She held her breath, waiting for Angel to call her silly or stupid or childish—all the words her father hurled at her with such regularity.

But he didn’t. He touched her cheek, gently turned her face to his. “Don’t. Stay with me. We could run away … raise a family … be a family.…”

Madelaine had never known what it could feel like to love someone until that moment. The emotion swept through her, filling her soul with heat until, suddenly, she was laughing, and then she was crying. “I love you, Angel.”

Ah … it had been so painfully sweet.…

He pulled her into his arms, held her so tightly, she couldn’t breathe. Together they dropped to their knees in the spongy grass. She felt his hands on her, stroking her hair, her back, her hips. And then he was kissing her, tasting her tears, claiming her so completely with his mouth that she felt dizzy.

At last he drew back and stared down at her. There was an intensity in his eyes that stole her breath, made her heart beat wildly. “I love you, Madelaine. I don’t … I mean, I’ve never …” Tears squeezed past his eyelashes and he started to wipe them away.

She stopped his hand. “Don’t be afraid,” she whispered.

He gave her a trembling smile. In that instant she understood so much about him, about the way he was. He went about swaggering and blustering and acting like the rebel, but on the inside he was just like her. Scared and confused and lonely. He didn’t believe in himself, didn’t think he was good, but he was—she believed in him enough for both of them. And he loved her like no one had ever loved her before.…

Such powerful, powerful words: I love you.…

After that, she’d told him everything, opened her heart and soul to him and let him become a part of her. Without him, she hadn’t thought she could live.

What if he could do that to her again?

She forced herself to remember the other things, the other moments, letting the pain wash through her in a cold, cleansing sweep.

She’d thought she’d forgiven him for what he’d done to her—for leaving her without so much as a good-bye. Honestly, truly, she thought she had. Time and again she’d replayed the sequence of events in her head. She told herself she didn’t blame Angel for running out on her. She told herself that seventeen was young, so young, and with each advancing year of her life, it felt younger still. She told herself it had been for the best, that they never would have made it, that they would have ruined each other’s lives.

Yes, she’d told herself a lot of things, but now, in this second, staring down at him, she recognized the truth at last. They were lies, all of them lies. Pretty foil paper on a dark, ugly gift.

She hadn’t forgiven him. How could she?

He’d killed a part of her that summer, a part he’d created and nurtured and claimed to love. A part she’d never gotten back.

*  *  *

Angel came awake slowly. For a single blissful second he didn’t know where he was or what had happened to him. Then the muted sucking sound of machines drifted to his ears, the murmur of the heart monitor.

After his futile jailbreak attempt, Hilda the bird-woman and a marine-sized nurse had hooked his useless heart back up. The machine kept its clicking record, spitting out reams of paper.

He felt like hell. His chest ached, his head pounded, and the needles in his arms burned like spots of fire. He couldn’t move without hurting somewhere. He could feel the telltale whirring of drugs in his bloodstream; he’d used narcotics too often in his life to be fooled.

He groaned, letting his head loll to the side. The smell of old cotton, green Jell-O, and boiled turkey filled his nostrils.

Lunchtime in cardiac hell.

He winced as the sunlight stabbed deep in his head. Blinking, he tried to wet his parched lips, and reached shakily for the Wedgewood-blue plastic pitcher labeled 264-W.

“I’ll get that for you.”

The voice washed over him. At first all he noticed was the soothing huskiness of it, the Debra Winger throatiness. It reminded him of something, some distant night in his past when he’d picked up a waitress in Tulsa, taken her home, and fu—

Oh, Jesus. That wasn’t the right memory at all.

His idiotic heart lurched, rammed into his rib cage, and started to knock like an old engine on bad gas. The monitor beside him spat a sudden Gatling-gun clatter into the room. He couldn’t breathe.

Breathe deeply, you asshole. Calm down. Slowly he tilted his chin. And saw her beside him.

God, after all these years …

She sat perfectly erect, her upper body camouflaged by a lab coat, with only the barest hint of a forest-green sweater visible beneath the wide white lapels. Her face was magnificently emotionless, her wide, silver-green eyes utterly blank. No smile lurked at the edges of her full, unpainted lips.

For a second, an image flashed through his mind of a heartbroken sixteen-year-old girl standing at a barred window, her pale, slim hand pressed to the glass, her cheeks streaked with tears, mouthing his name.

He’d fallen in love with a candy striper with long brown hair and laughing, mist-green eyes, but there was no remnant of that girl in the woman sitting beside him. She was regal in her bearing, in the well-styled precision of her short, honey-brown hair, in the classical perfection of her face. The perfect physician in complete control.

Strangely, it pissed him off that she’d done so well for herself. He ought to have been happy—hell, he ought to have been proud of her—but all he felt was cheated and angry. As if all his memories of her were an invention. This woman couldn’t have been broken by his betrayal, couldn’t have cared for long. And obviously Daddy’s money had financed the best possible education.

“Angel,” she said in that barmaid’s voice he’d never quite been able to forget. “How … interesting to see you again.”

“You’ve done all right for yourself, Mad,” he said bitterly. More bitterly than he intended.

“Don’t call me Mad.” She gave him a completely professional smile and flipped open his charts. “They tell me you need a new heart.”

“It shouldn’t surprise you.”

“It doesn’t.”

He could feel the judgment radiating from her. That was all he needed—another pair of accusing eyes, another person judging him by some invisible standard and finding him lacking. “Look, Mad, I think we’d both agree, I should have another doc.”

“Yes, I do. Unfortunately, Allenford wants you to have the best.”

“So do I, but—”

“I’m the best there is, Angel. You’re lucky to have me.” She brightened. “But if you don’t want me, I’ll have you transferred to someone else.”

He felt a twinge of irritation. “You don’t want me as your patient?”

“Not particularly.”

“Then I want you,” he said sharply, regretting it the minute he said it. But he’d wanted to rattle her cage, shake up this woman he ought to know intimately and yet didn’t know at all.

She studied his chart. “Lucky me.”

The harsh tone of her voice seemed absurdly out of character for the polished, picture-perfect woman beside him. He couldn’t help himself, he laughed. “I guess little Mad has grown up.”

She looked at him, hard. “Med school will do that to a girl.” She turned her gaze from his face and studied the pile of charts on her lap. “You appear not to have changed at all, Angel.”

“That’s not true. I have to shave every day now.”

She didn’t crack a smile. “Your blood work looks good. Despite obvious alcohol abuse, all of your organs are functioning well. Now it’s a waiting game. Hopefully we’ll find a suitable donor in time. As you have probably been told, fewer than one percent of all accidental deaths make suitable donors. Brain death is extremely rare.”

“So it’s a waiting game,” he said, feeling the anger rising. He told himself that she was his cardiologist—the person who held his life in her hands. But he couldn’t seem to stop the anger. She was the last person on earth who would give him a fair shake.

“If you improve substantially, you may be able to live outside the hospital—of course, you’re too sick to do that now.”

He couldn’t believe it. She sat there, talking to him as if he were a child, looking at him as if he were an insect. So damned doctorlike. As if she’d never known him before, never cared about him. He knew it was irrational to suddenly be furious, but he’d never been a real rational guy and he saw no reason to start. “No.”

That surprised her. She actually looked up from the paperwork and turned to him. “No? No, what?”

“No, Doctor Hillyard, I’m not going to lie here like a pincushion and wait for what you euphemistically call a ‘donor.’ ”

Slowly she set the charts down again. “Angel—”

“And call me Mr. DeMarco. You don’t know shit about me, lady. I’m not about to sit around hoping some perfectly nice guy gets broadsided by an eighteen-wheeler. That is what we’re talking about here, isn’t it? Somebody dies and I get a chance to live?”

She was slow to answer. “Yes. That’s what we’re talking about, Angel. Donor organs come from a body that has been declared brain-dead.”

He shivered at the thought. Some guy lying on a slab of metal, doctors greedily harvesting his organs. “Well, no, thanks.”

She stared at him for another full half minute, saying nothing. Then, finally, she shrugged. “Die, then.”

It shocked him, that response. At first it made him angry, then fear crept in, leaving a sour taste in his mouth. “So compassionate, Dr. Hillyard.”

“Look, Angel, I can’t waste time feeling compassion for a person with a death wish. You smoke, you drink, and there were traces of marijuana in your urine. All of this after two heart attacks.” She leaned toward him, drilled him with a steely look. “You’re going to die—and pretty soon if you don’t make some very hard choices.”

“You think I deserve it.”

She drew back. For a heartbeat, she looked at him through the eyes he remembered. “I’d say you think you deserve it, and I think …”

“What?”

“I have no right to say anything. I don’t know you at all, do I?”

“You did once.”

“No.” She said the word softly, but it seemed to echo in the stillness of the room. “I only thought I did once … but the boy I fell in love with promised to be with me forever.” She laughed—a hard, brittle sound that was nothing like the laughter he remembered. “Forever turned out to be about ten seconds.”

“I guess that’s my cue to apologize.”

She frowned. “I don’t want your apology, Angel. I stopped wanting anything from you a long time ago. Now I’m just your doctor, and as such, I want you to live, but make no mistake about it, I’m not going to waste something as valuable as a heart on a bad-boy loser who isn’t going to change his life.”

“You’ve learned to play hardball, Mad.”

“This is a hardball game, Angel. No cut corners, no fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants. You’re going to have to decide how badly you want to live. Only you can answer that.”

He was angry that she could talk about this so matter-of-factly, angry that she didn’t seem to care what he did, and angriest of all that he felt so goddamn alone. He wished for a crazy, desperate minute that he’d never abandoned or betrayed her. She was the only person he ever had really been able to talk to, the one person he could cry in front of. And he needed that intimacy right now, needed a friend.

Angel swallowed the thick lump in his throat. It was too late to be friends with Madelaine, too late for a lot of things.

He needed strength and faith and hope. None of which he’d ever had. He looked at her, saw the momentary flash of pity in her eyes, and he lost it. “You’ll make me into a freak.”

“It may feel that way, Angel, but it’s not true. With a few adjustments, you can live a full, rich life. I have a patient down the hall who fathered two children and ran in the Seattle marathon after a heart transplant.”

“I don’t want to run a goddamned marathon.” Horrifyingly, his voice broke. “I want my life back.”

“I don’t know what to tell you. Living with a transplant isn’t easy. It requires a real commitment, some follow-through.”

She stared at him, and he knew what she was thinking—that he was a flaky asshole who’d never committed to anything or anyone in his life. “You have no right to judge me.”

“You’re right; unfortunately, I have to.” She leaned toward him, and for a second, just a second, he thought she was going to touch him. “A new heart is a gift, Angel. Please, please don’t get in line for one if you don’t really want to change your life. Out there, somewhere, is a father who is dying from heart failure—a man to whom a new heart would mean another chance to hold his daughter, or spend another night with the wife he’s loved for years.”

The truth of her words made him feel sick. He was a selfish prick who didn’t deserve this kind of chance. “Another party at the Viper’s Nest doesn’t cut it?”

“Not in my book.”

He gave her a weak smile. “We never did have the same book, did we, Mad?”

“No.”

He thought for a second about how different their backgrounds were—her, growing up in that mansion behind the iron gates; him, living in a shitty little trailer park on the wrong side of the tracks. No, they’d never had the same book at all. “So how is the great Alexander Hillyard these days?”

She stiffened. “He died a long time ago.”

He immediately felt like an idiot. “Oh. Sorry.”

“I’m going to look over your paperwork and initiate some more testing.” She got to her feet suddenly. “Please don’t humiliate me by killing yourself before we can save your life.”

And then she was gone.