“She could be. Trey needs someone to adore him.”
“Or smack him upside the head with a two-by-four.”
Jo shot me a look in the glow of the dashboard. “What is with you two? I thought you liked him.”
“I do.”Too much. “I just...”
“Never got over being treated like his bratty baby sister?”
Never got overhim. “Something like that.”
Mr. Laurence’s suite on the third floor of the hospital was decorated like a three-star hotel room with lots of dark wood and an adjoining bath. A large flat-screen TV dominated one corner. An actual lamp cast soft light from a table by the window. Apparently donating a medical wing bought you something nicer than the standard private room.
But no amount of donor money could disguise the hospital bed or the glowing, blinking, beeping machines. Mr. Laurence lay connected by tubes and wires, his face gray above the blue hospital gown. A bruise bloomed in the crook of his arm where they’d jabbed an IV. A clear oxygen tube forked under his nose. Even his eyebrows appeared sparser, tamed. He was sleeping.
So was Trey. He’d pulled the recliner close to the bed, extending one arm through the raised bar to hold his grandfather’s blue-veined hand. Tenderness for them both swamped me.
Trey opened his eyes. For a moment, I stood frozen, lost in the darkness of his gaze, transported back in time to Paris in the early-morning light.
“Amy.”
I trembled. “Hey,” I breathed. “I thought you might need a few things.”
His gaze dropped to the bag in my hand. “For Mr. Laurence,” I’d explained at the nurses’ station, and they’d waved me through, even though regular visiting hours were over.
Carefully, Trey uncurled his fingers from the old man’s hand.
“Don’t get up,” I whispered. “I’ll leave it on the table.”
“Stay.”
“I don’t want to bother you. Your grandfather...”
“Is doing much better.”
I glanced doubtfully at the bed where Mr. Laurence breathed on, undisturbed. “I should let him sleep.”
“He is sleeping. Best thing for him,” Trey said.
I remembered how I felt when it was Momma in the hospital. Despite Trey’s assurances, he must be scared.
“Please?” he added.
“Well... Just for a minute.”
Trey came around the bed. His baggy shirt and basketball shorts made him look like the boy I remembered. Except for the man-stubble. He was broader through the shoulders, too, and there were character lines in his face that hadn’t been there at fifteen or seventeen or even twenty-seven. His hair was still dark and rumpled and when he smiled I still swooned inside like a twelve-year-old girl.
“I went to your house. Miss Dee packed you some things. I wasn’t sure what you’d need. There are clothes. And, um, toothpaste and stuff.” The housekeeper’s eagerness to help had not extended to letting me paw through Trey’s underwear drawer. He looked at me, his face unreadable. “I hope that’s okay.”
His arms went around me. My body recognized the feel of him, the hard frame and lean muscles, before my brain registered the hug. I don’t know how long we stood, our bodies aligned, our breathing gradually finding a rhythm. When he let me go, my knees were weak and he was half-aroused.
He smiled crookedly. “Thanks.”
For the clothes? For the hug?
I cleared my throat. “No problem.”
He sat—not in the recliner, but on the banquette under the window, leaving room for me beside him. I eyed the space nervously.
