"Well, my mother's gift was dark. With a touch and a focused thought, she could deliver death." Rio scoffed under his breath and held up his own lethal hands. "Manos del diablo.">Dylan smiled. "You like him."
"I do," her mother confessed. "Just my luck I should find a real gentleman - who knows, maybe my true prince? - when it's too late for me to fall in love."
Dylan shook her head, hating to hear that kind of talk from her. "It's never too late, Mom. You're still young. You have a lot of living left to do."
Shadows crossed her mother's eyes as she looked up at Dylan from her recline on the bed. "You've always made me so very proud. You know that, don't you, baby?"
Dylan nodded, throat constricted. "Yeah, I know. I could always count on you, Mom. You were the only one in my life that I could count on. Still are. Two musketeers, right?"
Sharon smiled at the mention of their long-running reference to themselves, but there were tears glistening in her eyes. "I want you to be all right, Dylan. With this, I mean. With my leaving you soon...with the fact that I'm going to die."
"Mom - "
"Hear me out, please. I worry about you, sweetheart. I don't want you to be alone."
Dylan wiped at a hot tear that ran down the side of her face. "You shouldn't be thinking about me now. Just focus on you, on getting better. You need to think positively. The biopsy might not - "
"Dylan. Stop, and listen to me." Her mother sat up, a stubborn look that Dylan recognized very well coming over her pretty but fatigued features. "The cancer is back, worse than before. I know it. I feel it. And I've come to terms with it. I need to know that you will be able to come to terms with this too."
Dylan looked down at their clasped hands, hers masked in yellow latex, her mother's nearly translucent, the bones and tendons stark beneath the cool, too-pale skin.
"How long have you been looking after me, baby? And I don't mean just since I've been sick. From the time you were a little girl, you were always worrying about me and trying your best to take care of me."
Dylan shook her head. "We look out for each other. That's how it's always been - "
Gentle fingers came up under her chin, lifting her gaze. "You're my child. I've lived for you, and for your brothers too, but you were always my constant. You shouldn't have had to live for me, Dylan. You shouldn't have had to be the adult in this relationship. You should have someone to take care of you."
"I can take care of myself," she murmured, not very convincingly when the tears were streaming down her cheeks now.
"Yes, you can. And you have. But you deserve something more out of life. I don't want you to be afraid to live, or to love, Dylan. Can you promise me that?"
Before Dylan could say anything, the door swung open and one of the attending nurses came in with a couple new bags of fluids. "How we doing, Sharon? How's your pain right now?"
"I could use a little something," she said, her eyes sliding to Dylan as if she'd been hiding her discomfort until now.
Which, of course, she had been. Everything was much worse than Dylan wanted to accept. She got up from the bed and let the nurse do her thing. After she was gone, Dylan came back over to her mother's side. It was so hard not to break down, to be the strong one as she looked down into the soft green eyes and saw that the spark in them - the fight that needed to be there - was gone.
"Come here and give me a hug, baby."
Dylan leaned down and wrapped her arms around the delicate shoulders, unable to dismiss the fragility of her mother's entire being. "I love you, Mom."
"And I love you." Sharon sighed as she settled back against the pillow. "I'm tired, sweetheart. I need to rest now."
"Okay," Dylan answered, her voice thick. "I'll just stay here with you while you sleep."
"No, you won't." Her mother shook her head. "I won't have you sitting here worrying about me. I'm not going to leave you tonight, or the next day, or even next week - I promise. But you need to go home now, Dylan. I want that for you."
Home, Dylan thought, as her mother drifted off to a drug-induced sleep. The word felt oddly empty to her when she pictured her apartment and the few possessions she had there. That wasn't home to her. If she had to go somewhere now, somewhere she felt safe and protected, that pitiful hole in the wall wasn't it. Never really had been.
Dylan rose from the bed and turned to leave the room. As she wiped at her teary eyes, her gaze lit on a shadowed face and broad shoulders silhouetted by the hallway lights outside.
Rio.
He'd found her, followed her there.
Where her every instinct should have been to run away from him, Dylan went to him instead. She pulled open the door and met him outside her mother's room, incapable of speaking as she wrapped her arms around his solid warmth and wept softly into his chest.
Chapter Twenty-three