The nurse with her—a warm woman who had been kind to me from day one—looked up from charting Shumi’s vital signs when I entered. “Hi, Tavish.”
“Hi, Maria. Any updates?”
A shake of her head. “Her poor brother asked the same—he only left two hours ago after I told him he had to get some sleep. And Mrs.Kumar can hardly bear to see her daughter like this—she was in andout for two short visits today, and looks like she isn’t eating. Such a sad situation.”
Nodding, I touched Shumi’s hand for a moment. “Hey, Shumi, it’s your favorite brother-in-law.”
The nurse continued to write on the chart. “Were you two close?”
“Never got the chance. I only came into the country a short time ago.” I took a deep breath, the medicinal air familiar by now. “Do you think they’ll remember everything when they wake up? From the day of the fire?”
She was compassionate enough not to tell me that they might never wake up. “I’m not sure. Diya did have that head trauma, and Shumi almost drowned, according to the paramedics…We’ll just have to wait and see.”
A silvery shimmer of wind chimes, a child’s laughter.
I jolted to look in every direction around us. “Did you hear that?”
“No, what?”
The night was as quiet as Ani’s breath.
“Nothing.” Heart pounding, I dug up a faded smile. “I think I need some sleep, too.”
—
I expected to spend the night haunted by ghostly wind chimes, but instead, it was another, far more familiar ghost that came to visit me.
“Joss,” I breathed out.
Breathtaking, selfish, dangerous Jocelyn Wai smiled at me, ready for her pound of flesh. “You didn’t think you got away with it, did you, my young lover? I swore I’d haunt you forever for what you did to me. It hurts when you fall that far, that fast. I felt my bones break when I hit the pavement.”
Chapter 52
Jocelyn
“Tavish, top me up.” Jocelyn held out her tumbler.
“This is your third whiskey of the night,” her handsome, dark-haired lover said as he splashed the amber liquid into the fine crystal.
“What? Only three?” She leaned her head against the tall back of her antique armchair and laughed at his stern look as he capped the bottle and put it on the mantel. “I’d hardly know you were Audrey’s son, with how uptight you can be.”
“Audreyhardly knows I’m her son,” was the droll response, Tavish leaning one arm against the mantel.
The man wore a suit well—this one was a dark gray she’d had custom fitted to his slim but muscular frame. “You know what she said to me?” Jocelyn said after a sip of the whiskey.
“Who? My mother?” A cocked eyebrow. “Let me guess, she tried to talk you into casting Raja in your next project. Just FYI—he’s into Botox now, could stand in at the wax museum as one of the exhibits.”
Jocelyn laughed again, this time from deep in her belly. God, but he was clever, his words sharp enough to draw blood when he wasn’t watchingthem—and he’d learned not to watch them with her. Charm grew boring very quickly, but that kind of vicious sharpness? Oh, it was delicious.
“No, that was the last time,” she drawled afterward. “I had to remind her that I only helm my own productions once a year—the rest of the time, I’m a gun for hire, just like her.”
“Oh, I bet she loved hearing that.”
Jocelyn shrugged; she didn’t much care for Audrey the fucking Saint of Hollywood. “She said I should be ashamed, that I was old enough to be your mother. I pointed out that she’d been bouncing on younger cock only a month ago.”
Tavish gave no indication of a reaction to the crass reference to his mother. “It’s only because you’re leading the Oscar stakes,” he said. “She doesn’t usually keep track of my life.”
Jocelyn was never gladder that she hadn’t had kids than when she ran into the unhappy and self-destructive children of her peers. She generally didn’t sleep with them, either. Tavish, however…he might be messed up, but he wasn’t self-destructive in the true sense. He was out for number one.
