I frowned. “Boys with broken hearts.” I tapped the scar on my chest.
She grinned. “I think in this case…” She stepped closer. “This broken-hearted boy saved me.”
She leaned forward and brought her lips to my mouth.
God, I loved her. I could fully admit that I loved her, and wasn’t part of that love for her passion for saving people like my piece of shit father? Maybe he needed her. Maybe Wayne needed Millie, because me and Gran had surely given up on him. Maybe Millie could turn him around … I just didn’t know.
A need to be closer to her burst inside my chest and I reached out, grabbing the back of her neck and pushing her lips harder into mine. She moaned, parting them and our tongues met in a fevered rush.
Reaching out, I cupped my hands under her ass and hoisted her on top of me, walking her back to the bedroom. She pulled back and looked in my eyes, her pert little mouth swollen from my kiss.
“Everything will be fine.”
My heart stopped beating for a few seconds.
It was the last thing Jenna said to me before she ran after Wayne the night she died.
Chapter 20
Millie
Wayne had been in the hospital about five days now. He had medically dried out from alcohol and was fully clean and sober. If I could get him to agree to the sober living facility I’d called this morning, I was going ahead with the surgery on Monday.
At my request Ashton stayed back at the bar to prep for the brunch opening. I stood outside Wayne’s door, gathering my nerve to ask a grown man who was pretty much a stranger to me to go stay in sober living for a year.
I called Gran not ten minutes ago and she agreed to split the sober-living monthly bill with Ashton and I. I just needed to tell Ashton we were doing it. Colin never initially wanted to get into saving failing restaurants, it was my idea. It all started with Marcie’s Diner. Sweet Marcie was a thirty-year-old single mother who’d opened a retro nostalgic diner in Brooklyn but didn’t have the budget or creativity to make it any better than Denny’s. When she posted on the door that she’d be closing her business the very next month, I went home to Colin and declared we were saving Marcie’s Diner.
And we did.
And every restaurant after that. Colin called it my good flaw. It was a flaw because sometimes I saved places that couldn’t afford our fee, or I put way too much emotion and caring into the place and brought my work home with me. But it was still good at the end of the day.
Here we go again. My good flaw was going to save Wayne.
God willing.
I stepped into the room and Wayne looked away from his TV and at me. A wide smile lit up his jaundice face. “Millie, did you hear? The doctor said they got a transplant for me. Goes in Monday.” He tapped his tummy.
I’d asked the doctor not to tell him it was me. I wanted to be the one.
I nodded. “I heard, that’s actually what I came to talk to you about.”
He looked confused. Reaching out, I dragged a chair over to the bedside and sat down, pulling his hand in mine.
“I’m your donor, Wayne.” I smiled, waiting for his happy reaction.
It never came.
His face fell and his palm flinched in mine. “What? NO.”
I looked at him, confused. “Yeah … I’m a perfect match.”
He ripped his hand out of mine and put it up in the air as if trying to push me away. “No, no. I can’t, Millie. Not you.” His voice cracked.
Grabbing his hand again, I held it again firmly in mine. “I’m the only one left, Wayne. The only one willing to do this. I’m all you got.”
He swallowed hard and nodded. “I know and that’s why I can’t. I’ve taken enough from Ashton. If something were to—”
“Everything. Will. Be. Fine,” I assured him. “I’m a healthy twenty-seven year-old woman, only giving a portion of the liver. In six to eight weeks the entire thing grows back.”
