She jerked from sleep, blinked her disoriented eyes at me, then launched upright. “What’s wrong?”
“My stomach hurts.” I had to band my arms across it. “It hurts really bad.”
I was seated in the passenger seat of her car in less than five minutes. Her face was completely white as she raced toward the emergency room. I’d been a lucky kid. No broken bones, no major health scares, so we were both in foreign, scary territory. I tried not to think about what was wrong, because my mind immediately went to terrible scenarios and made my anxiety worse.
We’d barely taken our seats in the waiting area before they called us back into a room. People said the emergency room was slow, but it seemed to move at lightning speed for me. The nurse, a woman who looked like she’d seen it all—and probably multiple times—came into the room and took my vitals.
“What do you think’s wrong?” my mom asked.
“I’m not the doctor,” the nurse said automatically.
My mom wasn’t deterred. “Right, but what do you suspect?”
The woman swiped a thermometer across my forehead as I shivered. The “bed” in the room was more like a table with a bend in it, and really uncomfortable. I wanted to curl up into a ball and couldn’t, so instead I gripped one of the metal side arms.
“Is there a chance you could be pregnant?” she asked.
My heart stopped at the same instant my gaze flew to my mother. She knew I was sexually active and had actively encouraged safe sex. But she believed that was happening with Preston, and if I was somehow pregnant? It wouldn’t be by him.
“I’m good about taking my pill,” I said quickly. “And using condoms.”
“Temp is one-oh-one,” she commented, although I wasn’t sure to whom. “My guess would be appendicitis.”
The seasoned nurse was absolutely right—a CT scan confirmed it. By four a.m. I’d been admitted, taken to a room on the third floor, and antibiotics started through my IV. The pain medication they gave me helped, but it also made me shake worse than before.
While we waited for my doctor to come in and talk about the next steps, my mom, wearing the clothes she’d haphazardly thrown on hours ago, dozed upright in a chair beside my bed. I eyed her with a bit of jealousy. I was exhausted, but too miserable and freaked out to sleep. I was hooked up to machines that clicked and hummed, and the room never got quite dark, even with the lights off. Sounds from the hall were steady as well. Heavy beds rolling by. Shoes squeaking on the polished floor.
“Twenty-year-old female. Acute appendicitis,” a female voice said just on the other side of my door. “We’ve got you scheduled for OR two at five-twenty.”
A set of footsteps faded at the same moment a short knock rang out, and the heavy wooden door to my room pushed open without waiting for my reply. My mother stirred and straightened in her chair, perking up as the doctor entered. He made it two steps into the room before he looked at me.
All the air whooshed from my lungs.
Greg froze, disbelief streaked on his face.
THIRTY-TWO
GREG’S STUNNED GAZE went from me, to my mother, then on to the whiteboard beside my hospital bed that listed my stats. As if he needed to see all of it before it really settled in.
“Dr. Lowe,” my mother said, and for the first time in her life, she looked pleased to see him.
He paced quickly to my bedside. His worried expression was so brutal, I twisted away.
“No,” I said feebly.
He didn’t seem to hear me. “How’s your pain?”
Bad, I wanted to say. Terrible ever since you made me leave you. Instead I curled up into myself, keeping a lid on my mouth and my emotions.
“She’s been better the last hour,” my mother answered, rising from the chair and moving to stand next to the bedrail on the side opposite him.
“Good. That’s good.” He shifted back into doctor mode, his focus still on me. “We’ll get you feeling a lot better once we’ve taken your appendix out.”
Then he launched into a whole thing about what the appendix was, why it was going bad, and how it would be removed. His practiced speech about using a tiny telescopic camera and small cuts and scars barely registered. My mother listened dutifully, nodding along and asking questions. I just stared at the two lumps of my feet under the heavy blanket covering my lower body. Was it the drugs they had me on, his presence, or the combination of the two that made it difficult to focus?
“Cassidy.” My name was a soft command in his voice. “Do you have any questions?”
I rolled my gaze to him. He had one of those fitted hats on to keep his hair back, the same blue as the hospital scrubs he wore. No white coat, thank God. Even dressed down in shapeless clothes, he was still masculine and sexy.