Home Again

Madelaine swallowed hard, thinking. “No,” she said at last. “I don’t hate him.”

He smiled. “Love him?”

The question caught her off guard. In her mind she saw a dozen pictures of Angel as he’d once been, the laughing, dark-haired boy with the big dreams, the boy who’d stolen her heart and kissed her for the very first time. Then came the darker images, the memories that hurt. “No. I don’t love him.”

“Good.” He pushed to his feet and rested his hands on her desk, giving her a meaningful look. “He needs you, Madelaine.”

“Don’t do this to me, Chris. Give him to someone else.”

“No one else is as good as you, damn it, and you know it. This young man is going to die, Madelaine. You’re his best hope. At least meet with him.”

She stared at Allenford, knowing that she had no choice. She couldn’t just let Angel die. “Okay, Chris.”

He smiled. “Great.” He turned, heading for the door. Just as he opened it, he turned back around. “I’ll need your report today. If he’s going to get a new heart, he needs to be placed on the UNOS list immediately. And remember, we have to handle his celebrity status with kid gloves. I won’t have this hospital’s reputation compromised.”

“Right.”

Allenford left her office, closed the door behind him.

Madelaine sat, still stunned, her glassy eyes trained on the door.

Angel DeMarco was back.

Chapter Six

She stood outside Angel’s door so long, it became noticeable. Finally footsteps came up behind her, a warm, bony hand pressed against her shoulder.

“You okay, Madelaine?”

She stiffened, forced her chin up, and drew her gaze away from the name on the door. “I’m fine, Hilda,” she said, turning slowly to face the small, no-nonsense nurse who ran the transplant team like a drill sergeant.

Hilda beamed up at her, her birdlike head tilting suddenly to the right. “I was going to see our Mr. Jones. Shall I wait until you’re done?”

“Yes. I’d like some time alone with him.”

Hilda gave her a quick wink. “If the staff knew who he was, you’d be stampeded. Only Sarah, Karen, and I will be allowed in here. We’ll handle the security.”

Madelaine tried to dredge up a smile, she really tried. “Good.”

“Hollywood types,” Hilda said disapprovingly. “According to the Enquirer—and God knows they’re reputable on such things—he drinks like a fish and screws anything with tits bigger’n his.” With another pat on the shoulder, Hilda turned and scurried down the hallway, vanishing into her office.

Madelaine took a deep, steadying breath and marched into the lion’s den.

He was sleeping. Thank God.

Quietly she closed the door shut behind her. Weak autumn sunlight shone through the small window, giving the room a respite from the cold impersonality of fluorescent lighting. The narrow, metal-framed bed cut the room in half.

He lay as motionless as death, the washed-out gray sheeting tucked haphazardly across his chest. Dark brown hair lay in a tangled heap against the white cotton of the pillow. His chiseled face looked sunken and too thin; his lips were pale. A stubbly growth of black beard shadowed his triangular jaw and darkened his upper lip.

Even so, he was so handsome he took her breath away.

She sank unsteadily to the chair. For a second she couldn’t think about his illness or what was at stake here. All she could think about was the past and how much she’d loved this man.

He had swept her, laughing, into a whole new world. A world of lights and possibility and hope, a place where rules and responsibility didn’t exist. She’d clung to him, giggling, believing, following wherever he led, so proud that hers was the hand he wanted to hold. She’d fallen in love with him in the wild, abandoned way that only teenagers could. Making excuses during the day to be together, sneaking from her father’s austere house in the middle of the night. It was the first time she’d ever disobeyed her father, and it had made her feel recklessly confident.

With the distance of so many years, she knew that she’d never really fallen in love with him, not in the way that lasts. She’d been consumed by his brushfire passion, transformed by him.

There had been that night, under the old oak tree at Carrington Park….