Angel Falls

Val had them—hook, line, and sinker. Julian could see it in the reporters’ feverish eyes, hear it in the sudden, indrawn silence.

Julian’s best intentions cracked under the strain. God help him, he couldn’t let Val hog the spotlight. “You can imagine how I felt when I heard that she’d had an accident. I rushed up here to be at her bedside—”

“Why did they call you?” someone shouted out.

“I was told that Kayla had suffered a serious head injury—”

“Is she brain damaged?”

“Maybe that’s why she asked for Julian!”

Val touched Julian’s shoulder lightly, taking the reins of the story again. “She was in a coma for a month. For a while it looked hopeless …” He hesitated, shaking his head sadly. “Then the doctors discovered that Kayla responded to only one thing—the sound of Julian’s name. ”

A gasp rippled through the crowd; they recognized the taste and feel of it, the story that had just been handed to them. Several reporters glanced at their watches, trying to figure out how to get to their editors before the rest of the crowd.

“Naturally, Julian raced up here,” Val said. “He sat with her, day after day, talking to her, holding her hand, reminding her that there was a man who loved her and was waiting for her to waken. ” He gave them a brilliant, here-comes-the-good-part smile. “Yesterday she woke up. Julian was beside her. The first person she saw. ”

One of the female reporters sighed. “What were her first words?”

Julian started to answer; no one was listening. “She—”

“Is she brain damaged?”

“Is she still in love with you, Julian?”

Julian sighed. They didn’t care about the miracle of Kayla’s awakening. All they wanted was “the story,” the gilt-edged fairy tale—or, better

yet, a scandal. A death. Anything sensational.

He looked around, at the faces. A few he recognized. They came and went, these low-rent reporters from the tabloids. It wasn’t a job that any normal human being could stomach for long.

They were a reflection of his life. Funny, but he’d never realized that before. He’d always dismissed the media as a necessary evil; you couldn’t get famous without them. But now he saw the empty black space that ringed the spotlight. Nothing captured in a glass lens was real.

But Julian had no life except that which was filmed, and that made him the blankest spot of all. He’d traded everything real for the split-second brightness of a camera’s flash.

“That’s enough for today,” he said, wishing he’d never talked to them.

Val grinned. “You’ve got your headline, kids. The kiss of True love wakes up Sleeping Beauty. ”

As Liam walked out of Stephen’s office, he heard his name paged over the hospital’s system. He grabbed the nearest phone and punched in his code. The message was from Rosa. She was waiting for him in the lobby. It was an emergency.

He saw Rosa before she saw him. She was standing in the center of the room—unusual for a woman who always sat in a corner with her head down—with her arms crossed. Even from this distance, he could see the way her mouth was drawn into an angry line.

Something was wrong.

Up close, he could see the worry lines etched around her eyes and mouth. “Rosa?”

“You see what he has done?”

“What are you talking about?”

She took a deep breath. “I am muy upset. I am listening to the radio at home while I make the tortillas for tonight’s supper, sí? And I hear the local news. ” She cocked her head toward the hospital’s front doors, where a crowd was gathered around Julian. “It is the big story, Dr. Liam. They are saying that Julian brought his true love out of a coma. ”

“Damn it. ” Liam ran down the hall and into the lobby. He saw the crowd gathered outside, and headed for the doors.

Reporters circled Julian, angled toward him like supplicants, microphones instead of prayer books in their outstretched hands. They all talked at once, their questions climbing over each other in a frenzied outburst.

“When will we get to interview Kayla?”