Moronic assumption on his part.
When he was nearly to the nurse’s station to inquire, he stopped.
Dumb ass. If she weren’t conscious, she’d likely be in ICU.
The lone nurse at the station, a brunette wearing scrubs with cartoon frogs all over them, looked up at him and smiled. “Hellooo,” she purred. “Something I can help you with?”
Nate flashed a smile and shook his head, then backed away. He returned to Sophie’s room, more confident that she was only napping.
He stopped a couple of feet from her bed and stared, finally taking in the sight of her, the details he’d missed when he’d flipped out before. The bed dwarfed her, and the white sheets somehow made her skin look even paler. She was connected to oxygen and monitors and hadn’t moved a muscle since he’d barged into her room the first time, as far as he could tell.
Her head was propped up about thirty degrees, and the blankets hit her mid-chest, revealing a stiff-looking mint-green hospital gown that did nothing for her complexion. Sophie’s dark, shoulder-length hair was a mess, sticking every which way on her head, fanning out on the pillow.
And yet his heart pounded.
He shook his head against the reaction. Sauntered toward the large window that would likely show a distant view of San Amaro Island if there weren’t layers of buildings in the way. It was only a half thought, though, as his mind and his gaze veered back to Sophie Alexander.
She hadn’t stirred, and he should probably get the hell out of here, give her some privacy. Get some sleep himself, as he’d been up for going on thirty hours now, with the exception of finally drifting off about thirty minutes before he’d had to wake up at the station this morning. Maybe sleep would cure the fucked-up compulsion in him to touch this woman, to pull her into his chest and protect her from further harm.
Fucked. Up.
He turned to walk out. Made it almost to the door but then stopped, the need to check one more time whether her eyes were open too overwhelming to ignore.
They weren’t.
The modest-sized room swallowed her up, and Nate couldn’t stand the idea of her waking up all alone. He picked up a wood-framed vinyl chair from the wall, set it down at the foot of her bed, and settled into it to wait.
Awareness licked at Sophie’s mind. Pain. Her head ached, and her throat burned like it was on fire.
Fire. The memory bounced around her brain, expanding to take up all the space. An acrid bitterness filled her mouth, her nostrils. Seemed to permeate all the way down to every organ inside of her.
She’d been in a fire. Could’ve died in a fire. An image of thick smoke made her heart lurch in fear.
Panicking, she forced her weighted eyelids open and, without moving her head — because shit, it hurt — she drank in details, urging her brain to work. No smoke. Only a memory. White ceiling above intersecting with a pale yellow wall opposite her. A sleek, flat-screen TV was bolted up high, angled downward toward her bed. Something tickled her upper lip, and when she tried to scratch it, her fingers ran into a tube. Oxygen, she remembered.
She tried to breathe in to comfort herself, but air in her throat … it hurt like someone was scraping her windpipe with needles all the way down.
“Sophie?” A deep, soothing, baritone voice from near her feet startled her. As she turned her head toward it, a face popped into her blurry-edged vision.
His face. The one who’d helped her.
Hazel eyes, almost amber-colored, peered down at her beneath creases of worry on his forehead. His short hair was the color of pecans — not blond, not quite brown, with a hint of auburn around the edges — and his facial scruff was long enough to appear soft instead of bristly.
She felt discombobulated, as if she were living in a slow-motion cartoon. Everything was fuzzy, her senses sending weak signals, but she remembered this man had saved her life.
“How you feeling, Sophie?”
She clung to the smoothness of his voice, like warm, melty caramel spreading around her, comforting her. Giving her empty mind something solid to hold on to.
Her attempt to speak failed. She opened her mouth to request a drink, but no sound came out. Swallowing around the desert-dry rawness in her throat made her eyes water at the stab of red-hot pain, and she vowed not to do that again. She pressed a hand to her neck, expecting to feel exterior damage, so painful was the inside passageway, but her fingers found only smooth, clammy flesh. Clearing her throat would likely make speaking possible, but hell no, she wasn’t about to try that — not when air rubbed like broken glass through it.
“Water,” she whispered, squeezing her eyes shut against the pain that came with the attempt.
“I’ll get you a drink,” the man said, and gratitude became a tangible warmth in her chest.
She heard his footsteps, three of them. When the footsteps brought him back to her side, she opened her eyes and found him holding a powder-blue plastic cup with a straw sticking out. She tried to sit up.
“You don’t need to move,” he said, directing the straw to her mouth, the cup to the side of her head. “I’ve got it. Just drink.”
