Fire and Ice - Anne Stuart [88]
Jilly opened her eyes again, ignoring how much her head hurt. “Yes?”
Lianne bit her artificially enhanced lip. “If you want me to, I can come back with Jenkins in the morning. If you want my company. I can change my plans.”
“No need, Lianne,” Jilly said, closing her eyes. And a moment later her mother was gone.
She really must be pumped full of drugs, Jilly thought, as tears seeped out from behind her closed eyes. She had no more illusions about Lianne, and hadn’t had any since she was twelve years old, maybe even younger. She’d just been feeling so vulnerable recently, and the drugs were breaking down any of her lingering defenses. She hadn’t needed a mother in a long time. She needed to remember that.
It was a good thing Summer wasn’t around. Jilly had had a hard-enough time convincing her sister that nothing had happened with Reno. Summer had come racing back to California as soon as she heard what had happened. And she knew Jilly far too well. Right now there was nothing she wanted to do more than bawl her head off, and Summer, already skeptical, would jump to conclusions. And really, she wasn’t crying about Reno. She was just crying.
She tried to shift on the narrow bed, then realized she had things attached to her. IVs and blood-pressure monitors and even something attached to her finger. Whatever they were giving her was doing a decent job of killing the pain—maybe just a little bit more would knock her out completely. If only she could find a button to push.
A little oblivion, just for the night. Tomorrow she’d deal with her aches and pains, accept the fact that her mother had the emotional attention span of a gnat, and she’d make plans. She wasn’t sure what those plans were going to be, but they’d include being far away from here. Far away from anything at all familiar.
Tomorrow she was going to figure out where to run. One thing was certain—she wouldn’t come back until she damned well wanted to.
It would serve Reno right if she just disappeared. Not that she knew where he was. Her misery had nothing to do with him, and no one would be likely to tell him she was gone. She’d managed to convince her sister nothing had happened, and Taka would politely ignore anything he’d happened to observe.
No, she would run as far and as fast as she could, and she wouldn’t come home until she’d made peace with everything.
It should only take a decade or two.
In the meantime she was going to sleep. If someone would just come in and give her more…
Reno had been perfectly willing to mug a doctor in order to steal his coat and name tag, but in the end it had been much simpler. The locker room was easily marked, no one was inside, and no one bothered with locks. It was a shame—he was in the mood to hit someone—but he accepted the fact that life was going to give him a break. The coat he found was a little small but it still fit, and it belonged to Dr. Yamada. Perfect. He grabbed a stethoscope and went out to prowl the midnight floors of the hospital.
No one gave him a second glance. He’d grabbed a pair of weak reading glasses—the bottoms of the frames were just enough to distract from his tattoos. They gave him a headache, but that was the least of his problems. Studious Dr. Yamada could move through the floors without anyone giving him a second glance.
It took him almost an hour to find her. She was in a private room at the end of one of the darkened corridors, and he managed to bluff his way past anyone who questioned his presence. The night staff was just as happy to leave him alone, and no one noticed when he slipped inside her room, closing the door silently behind him.
He was half afraid he’d be too late. Whoever had tried to kill her could have gotten there ahead of him, finished the job. But he looked at her and breathed a sigh of relief.
She looked like hell. She had stitches on her cheekbone, bruises on her pale skin and one eye was swollen shut. She was lying in the hospital bed and she looked very small for such a force of nature.