ANY SPECULATION AS to what was or was not going on between a certain CNA and me was made crystal clear when Jude’s dormant alpha tendencies came bubbling to the surface in a major way the second he felt my feverish skin. He’d flown out of my room and demanded the nurses call Dr. Marcus. I could hear him from my bed as he barked orders and expected immediate results.
The powerful surname he’d just revealed to me suddenly seemed fitting.
I should have been embarrassed. I should have been shrinking down in my hospital bed, rolling my eyes, and counting the minutes until the sound of his deep voice had quieted in the hall and I had the chance to chastise him for his overbearing behavior.
But I did none of that.
Instead, in my fever-induced fascination, I’d watched as he marched out of my room, his gait full of hurried purpose. I’d been listening as the deep timbre of his commands reminded me of the fight we’d had when I accused him of not caring. Then, I thought of the kiss that had followed.
He kissed me.
And now he’s taking care of me.
It turned out that over the next several hours, I’d need all the help I could get. The fever gave way to chills, which then transitioned into vomiting and cold sweats. I’d caught a virus that was aggressive and, of course, nonresponsive to antibiotics. The irony of living in a hospital was that it was actually one of the cleanest, germ-infested places to be. There were so many sick people all stuffed into one place. No matter how hard the staff tried to keep it clean, it was still a giant petri dish for bacteria and viruses.
Dr. Marcus told me this particular virus had to work its way through my system before I’d feel human again. Within a few hours of becoming feverish, I was convinced that it was trying to kill me.
The moment news of a fever spread, everyone entering my room slapped on a hospital mask, except for Jude.
For the remainder of his shift, he didn’t leave my side, and he stayed with me well past the time he’d clocked out. After his earlier heroic display, no one seemed willing to step up and argue with him about leaving, not even Dr. Marcus. Although, he didn’t look too pleased when he walked into my room to find Jude lying beside me on the bed.
I drifted off sometime around five in the morning after Jude had seen me at my absolute worst. He’d held my hair as I heaved and cried in the bathroom. Drying my tears, he had gotten me a glass of water and helped me back into bed, only to carry me back into the bathroom when the nausea and sickness started all over again. He never complained or seemed repulsed, but I guessed it was due to his job.
I just hadn’t wanted to be part of his job—or at least, not this part.
Vomiting mere hours after my first kiss wasn’t exactly how I’d pictured it.
Maybe an hour or two after falling asleep, I awoke, hearing the door snap shut. My eyes peeked open, and I peered over to find a sleeping Jude next to me. Sitting in the blue chair, his large frame was bent forward, and he was resting his head on his forearms.
Lifting my hand, I winced, remembering the IV that was now connected. Clear fluids were being pumped into my body to counteract the lack of food and water. I softly raked my hand through his hair, careful not to wake him. I heard a shuffle of feet, reminding me that the door had shut and awoken me moments earlier.
I turned to see my mother standing by the doorway, watching me. Her eyes were frozen on the man sleeping next to me while my fingers stood completely frozen in Jude’s unruly hair.
“Dr. Marcus didn’t call me until this morning,” she said softly, her gaze still fixed on Jude.
“It’s just a virus,” I said. “Rough night though.”
I watched as she took him in—his scrubs, the scrolling dark ink on his arms, and back to the place where my hand was resting in his hair. I started to pull my hand back, but I stopped myself.
You are an adult, Lailah, I chanted, as I willed my fingers to continue their previous path through Jude’s thick hair.
“And who is this?” she asked, her tone clipped and formal.
She wasn’t wearing a mask as well. Apparently, she wasn’t afraid of catching whatever I had either.
Jude stirred under my fingers, his hair falling into his eyes as sleep drained away. I turned away from my mother’s rigid stance by the entrance to see soft moss-colored eyes staring back at me.
“Good morning,” he whispered.
Even though I felt like I’d been run over by a Mack truck, then dropped off the side of a bridge, and stomped on, I couldn’t help the grin spread across my lips.
“Morning.”
My mom made a sound in her throat, and I snapped back, sitting up further in bed. I cleared my throat and took a deep breath.
“Mom, this is Jude…” I looked at him, asking for permission.
He gave me a single nod as a go-ahead.
“Cavanaugh. He’s a nurses’ assistant here in the hospital, and we’ve become quite close,” I said, trying to muster up as much maturity as possible.
Speaking up to my mother was something I’d never mastered. Having her in front of me always made me feel small and weak.
As I’d expected, Jude’s last name was lost on my mother. Her nose was usually buried in a textbook, or she was standing in front of a classroom. Either way, she really only paid attention to current events if they had to do with religious conflict or medical research. Everything else—politics, fashion, celebrity gossip, or business reports—was filtered out and forgotten.
Being the gentleman he was, Jude rose from the tattered old chair and went around to the other side of the bed to formally greet her. Standing over six feet tall, he dwarfed the petite frame of my mother.
“Very nice to meet you, Ms. Buchanan,” he said cordially, offering his hand to her.
She glanced down, and I bit my lip, waiting for her to take it.
“Likewise,” she finally said, taking his hand.
“Jude stayed with me and took care of me all night,” I said with as much enthusiasm as my frail state could manage.
By the way her lip tightened into displeasure, I would have thought I’d said, Hey, Mom! Jude and I had wild-monkey sex right here in this very bed! Want to see the video?
“Well, thank you very much, Mr. Cavanaugh. I’ll be able to take it from here.” Her voice was liquid ice. She’d lost control of things, and she didn’t like it. To her, life was always about control.
“With all due respect, Ms. Buchanan—” Jude started, that deep commanding Cavanaugh tone returning to his voice.
It sent shivers down my spine and made me wonder what he had been like in his alternate life.
“Jude…” I said softly, cutting him off, before he had the chance to give my mom the lashing she deserved.
As much as I wanted to see someone finally dish back what she’d been serving for as long as I could remember, I didn’t want my mother to hate him. The bad-boy thing wasn’t very appealing when I counted on my mother to manage most of my life. I needed her to like my boyfriend.
Boyfriend…mmm…
Warm fuzzies.
“You’re tired. You were up all night. Why don’t you run home and take a nap, shower, and then meet me back here for lunch?”
I could see the turmoil in his eyes. He didn’t want to leave. Last night, as Jude—the nurses’ assistant—had barked orders to those who earned double and triple his salary, I’d figured out fairly quickly that he had a driving instinct to protect others. Or maybe it was just me.
Yep, more warm fuzzies.
“Okay,” he relented.
He walked back over to my bedside, not caring that my mother’s eyes were shooting virtual laser beams of death at him, and he bent down.
“I’ll be back in a few hours,” he said.
When I nodded, he followed up with a list of instructions, “Try to drink some water. Have your mom use that cool washcloth on your forehead, and try to sleep.” He squeezed my hand and gave a quick kiss to my forehead. Then, he was gone.
I looked up at my mother looming in the empty space by my bed, glaring at me as if I were a deviant teenager, and I huffed out a frustrated breath.
Mother—One.
Adulthood—Zero.
“Are we going to talk about this?” my mother asked moments after Jude had left my room.
She paced several steps toward the bathroom and then pivoted back, retracing her steps, only to do the same thing all over again. She looked a bit agitated.
“Talk about what?” I asked, sinking further into my blankets. A chill traveled up my spine, and I buried my hands under the sheets, trying to cover as much skin as possible.
“Why haven’t you told me about your secret visitor?”
“Jude isn’t a secret. I wasn’t trying to hide anything from you. You were just never here when he visited.”
“And you never thought to tell me that you were…befriending a man who worked in the hospital?”
She’d said the word befriend as if it were dripping in gasoline and would likely light on fire at any given moment. It pissed me off, and it was a problem that needed to be taken care of quickly.
“Listen, Mom, I wasn’t trying to deceive you. Jude has been a friend to me. He’s kept me company on lonely nights.”
Her eyebrows rose.
I quickly pulled my hand out from under the blankets and lifted it to silence her rebuttal. “I know what you’re going to say. He was a friend. That’s it. I know you think because I’ve been in this bed and behind these walls for the majority of my life that I am innocent about the ways of the world, and to some extent, you’re probably right but not about this. Friends, I swear.”
She made a garbled humph sound in her throat and pulled her arms to her chest. “And now? That parting display of affection I saw on his way out? That wasn’t how you say good-bye to a friend, Lailah. I might be a little out of practice, but I do remember that.”
That stung a little. I knew she didn’t mean it to be harsh. My mother was direct, demanding, and straightforward, but she was never vicious or vindictive. Her personality came from necessity. I didn’t know much about her past, but I knew she’d been abandoned by the one person she thought she could trust—my father. I didn’t think she’d ever gotten over it. Since then, she’d fought for everything in life, and I knew my illness had only made that ten times harder. She’d spent her life caring for me, so she could never fit in a love life.
“And now, we’re more,” I simply answered, not knowing exactly what to call Jude and me.
The word boyfriend did sound nice, but he hadn’t said it, and I certainly wasn’t going to go around calling him that without audible proof from him. Friends with benefits just sounded dirty, and we definitely weren’t there yet. Flashes of his lips on mine while his hand had moved up the back of my shirt danced around in my head, and I felt my cheeks redden. While I was hoping for more than friends, I was looking forward to the benefits part.
My mother shook her head in frustration before leaving the room. I was sure she was going to find Dr. Marcus to have another one of her secret meetings that I wouldn’t be privy to. We wouldn’t want to talk about my own health in front of me.
I let the annoyance melt away, and I snuggled back down in my bed, allowing my thoughts to drift back to Jude. Whatever our label was—friends or something else—I wanted it to continue even though I knew that I shouldn’t. I was selfish for not pushing him away. My life was at a crossroads. Who knew which path I would end up traveling on? Was it fair to ask him to walk either of those roads with me? Even if I were lucky enough to get a transplant, there would be no guarantees it would be successful.
But were there ever any guarantees in life?
I’d told Jude that I believed a normal life was about the good and the bad. The ups and downs, not knowing where our lives would eventually end up—that’s what made us human.
Isn’t that what I want—a normal life with no guarantees?
If I’ve been living from one bad moment to the next with very little good in the middle, couldn’t I just take Jude as my wild card? Couldn’t he be my savior from all the bad I’ve had to endure?
But a normal relationship was about give and take.
If Jude were my replacement for all the bad in my life, could I be his?
But what if I were the opposite?
That one single question kept repeating through my thoughts as I tried to catch a few quiet moments of rest before my mom returned. I tossed all the blankets off of me and then promptly tugged them back around me several minutes later when I became ice cold. When I gave up on the notion of sleep, I instead pulled out my laptop and entered the one name doing laps in my head.
Thousands of search results popped up on Google. Many weren’t specifically related to Jude but rather the family as a whole. I found financial reports and glamorous photos of who I assumed were his parents at charity events and other elite social gatherings. I scrolled down further and found an old article entitled “The Cavanaughs Find Gold Mine in Youngest Son.”
Looking around the room, I felt like I was betraying some sort of secret trust between Jude and me. Why do I feel the need to do this? Shouldn’t I just ask him?
But my finger pushed down on the touchpad, and I pulled up the article.
I scanned the text, pulling out the bits of information I found relevant, and my mind skidded to a halt about a third of the way down after the introduction where the journalist had written about the vast accolades and accomplishments of the Cavanaugh family.
Jude was smart, like really freaking smart.
He’d also been groomed from nearly infancy to take over the family business.
According to this article, after showing a love for math at an early age, his parents had sent him to the best schools money could buy. From the time he was in kindergarten, he was privately tutored. The journalist commented that the money had been wasted because all the tutors in the world couldn’t teach Jude the one thing he’d possessed since birth—instinct. From the age of thirteen, rather than partaking in after-school activities, Jude had helped his father make major business decisions.
A knock at my door startled me from my reading, and I quickly slammed my laptop shut in shame.
Grace breezed through my door like a breath of fresh air in autumn. “Good morning, sweets. Heard you had a rough evening. You’re not trying to leave me again, are you?” she asked with a wink.
“Ugh, not anymore.”
The mask over her face hid her smile from me, but I could see the crinkles around her eyes, so I knew it was there, buried under that ugly disposable covering.
“Well, no matter. We’ll get you out of here soon enough.”
Unlike times in the past, I wasn’t as eager to get home. I still wanted to, especially knowing I’d still see Jude, but when I was here, I could see him practically every day. Would that be the case outside the confines of the hospital? Or would it be different?
I had so many unanswered questions.
“Hey, Grace. Do you know anything about the Cavanaugh family?” I blurted out.
“Like, the Cavanaugh family?” She moved around the room as she began checking my vitals and replacing my fluids.
“Yeah, I was, um…watching the news the other day and something about them popped up,” I lied. It was a white lie, so it didn’t count.
“Well, if they weren’t in a movie or on a TV show, I don’t pay much attention, but I do know a few things about the son.”
My heart sped up, but I tried not to appear the slightest bit affected. “Oh?” I asked.
“Yeah, he’s gorgeous—not as gorgeous as my Brian, of course.” She took a seat on the edge of my bed next to my feet to finish our chat.
“I thought he hasn’t been seen in a long time,” I offered.
“Oh, not him. I’m talking about Roman Cavanaugh, the oldest one. He’s been in the gossip magazines since he was in high school. He’s one of those men who are hard to tame. Everyone always wants to know whom he is dating or where he was last seen. He’s like the George Clooney of the business world.”
“And the other brother?” I asked, adjusting my blankets so that I didn’t have to look her in the eye.
“Oh, right. What’s his name? Jude! Oh, hey, like our Jude. They do kind of look alike, except ours has all the tattoos and muscles. I don’t know honestly. He really never became much of a public figure. It’s always been Roman. The press speculated that Jude became extremely introverted after his fiancée died.”
Fiancée?
Died?
“Really?” I croaked out.
“Yeah, the family didn’t release many details until months after the fact. No one even knew he was engaged. Of course, the only Cavanaugh anyone ever paid attention to was Roman,” she said with dreamy eyes and a shrug.
Jude was engaged? And he lost her?
I felt pain and sadness for him. All of it boiled up like an inferno until I felt dizzy from it.
My heart began an erratic rhythm that had nothing to do with my sudden education of Jude’s past.
Grace rose from her spot at the end of my bed and resumed her routine. She turned her back to me as she disconnected the empty fluid bag from the IV stand. “Speaking of Judes, what’s going on with you and our Jude? I heard he caused quite a commotion around here last night.”
The room started to spin, and beads of sweat trickled down my forehead while I tried to vocalize an answer. All that came out was a bunch of useless syllables. Grace’s head sharply whipped around, and I saw her surprised expression through the haze of movements before she reached out to grab my call button.
I heard her shout the words, “Code Blue,” right before I passed out.