Hadn’t she had enough of this hospital in the past few days without choosing to come again to visit the room of her mother’s sworn enemy.
She could tell herself that it was only about discussing the welfare of those babies sleeping back in Luna’s nursery, but she’d hardly said anything after reaching his truck. She’d barely breathed inside that cramped space where the scents of his cologne, sweat and hard work melded into something much too appealing for her own good.
Asher hadn’t spoken, either, but he’d probably just been too preoccupied with handling so many problems at once. Was that why she’d offered to go? Because focusing on his issues for a while would be easier than thinking about her own?
“...this is,” his voice traveled from inside the room.
Suddenly, Asher was back to her at the doorway. He looked different as he’d stopped by her restroom before they’d left and had slicked back his hair with water. Had he made that adjustment for his dad’s benefit, even if his father wasn’t awake to notice it?
“You coming in?” he asked.
“Oh, right.”
She stepped farther inside, walking as close to the wall opposite the bed as was possible without flattening herself against it. A single-patient room, of course, it had rich wood accents and a recliner that looked suspiciously like leather instead of the usual plastic-chic decor. Maybe a celebrity room would have the best equipment that money could buy, but none of it had purchased Payne’s recovery from the coma.
A thin brunette Willow immediately recognized as Ainsley Colton waved at her from a straight-back guest chair that looked out of place against the rest of the amenities.
“This is—”
“Hey, don’t I know you?” Ainsley asked, interrupting her brother’s second attempt to introduce them. “Aren’t you Willow Johnson?”
“Uh. Yeah.” In addition to it having been a few years since she’d heard that name, she was surprised that Asher’s sister knew it. Most royalty weren’t familiar with commoners. “It’s Merrill now.”
“I don’t know if you remember me, but I’m Ainsley.”
Willow cleared her throat. “Yes, I remember.”
Ainsley looked back and forth between them, clearly curious about seeing them together. “Willow and I went to high school together.”
Asher shifted and cleared his throat, gripping his hands together. “Ainsley’s the corporate attorney and on the board of Colton Oil, and Willow owns the day-care center where Harper will be going, but it sounds like you know each other already.”
“We passed each other in the halls a few times, anyway,” Ainsley said.
Willow wasn’t sure what to do with the discoveries, first, that she hadn’t been as invisible as she’d once believed in high school and, second, that Asher was uncomfortable having his sister seeing them together. She tilted her head so that she could see past the privacy curtain to the bumps of the patient’s feet.
“Sorry to hear about your dad,” she said to them both.
“Thanks,” Ainsley said.
For a few seconds, Asher’s sister stared at the patient, and then she turned back, her eyes shiny.
“He’s a fighter, though. He’ll be back to drive us crazy at the office before we know it.”
The truth hung in the air among them that Payne had already been lying in that bed for nearly four months, but no one gave it a voice.
“He’s looking better every day,” Ainsley said.
Despite her reluctance, Willow stepped forward so that she could see the patient. If the way he looked now was an improvement, she couldn’t imagine how horrible he’d appeared in the beginning.
She’d never seen Payne Colton in the flesh before, but this man looked nothing like the towering multimillionaire whose photo filled local newspaper pages. Small and frail, he hardly resembled the evil nemesis from her childhood imagination, either. His familiar head of white hair looked clean but stood up in all directions. Though his usual beard and mustache had been shaved off, silver whiskers sneaked out from the edges of his oxygen mask.
Willow swallowed over yet another discovery: a hospital bed could serve as a great equalizer. Outside it, he might have been the powerful Payne Colton, but between its sheets, he was just another patient, a host for an IV tube and the subject of vital-sign monitoring. Ainsley stood and crossed to the door. “The nurses keep getting after us for having too many visitors in the room. We’re only allowed two at a time, and we’ve had as many as five, so if you two will be staying awhile, I’ll escape a tongue-lashing this time and head home.”
“That’s fine. You can go.”
As Asher stepped around the side of the bed and rested his hand on his father’s arm above where the IV line was taped, his sister glanced back at him.
“I didn’t know you were friends.” She pinned him with a curious glance before turning it on Willow.