The Scorsolini Marriage Bargain

Still feeling dizzy, she pushed to her back to complete the roll, but instead of coming down on the mattress, she felt nothing but air and then landed on the floor with a thump. She could hear someone whimpering and she wanted to help them, but she couldn’t move. She tried to focus in the near darkness, but could barely make out the shape of her nightstand. It looked further away than it had from the bed.

She reached for it, sobs wrenching from her throat and doing nothing to lessen the pain racking her body.

“Therese? What the hell is going on?” The overhead light came on, turning everything from black and white to glaring Technicolor.

It hurt her eyes and she closed them, collapsing against the floor in a shivering heap as Claudio cursed in voluble Italian.

“What happened?” He dropped to her side, his hand on her shoulder. “You are bleeding. I will call an ambulance.”

“No!” She looked up at her tall, gorgeous husband, her eyes awash with tears she was trying to blink back now that he was here to see them. “I need my pain pills. In…the…drawer,” she gasped out around another wave of cramping.

“Pain meds are not going to stop this bleeding.”

“Don’t need to…it’s my period.”

“Like hell. You are hemorrhaging.”

He picked up the phone and she cried out. “No! Please, Claudio…” she gasped and then moaned as pain snaked through her. “Just get me…” She panted, trying to get enough breath to go on. “The bed. Please. Hurts…” She curled into a fetal position.

He dropped the phone and then she felt a blanket settling over her. He tucked it around her as he picked her up, but he did not lay her on the bed. He headed for the door.

“Where…going?” she asked weakly.

“The hospital and you can save your arguments. I won’t call an ambulance if that’s what you want, but you need a doctor.”

“I’ve seen a doctor. Told you…my pills…need them.”

“You need a hell of a lot more than pain pills,” he ground out without breaking his stride.

“Yes. Surgery. Not today.”

“Yes, today. If that is what you need, you get it now.”

“Can’t.”

“Why not?” he asked as he stopped in front of the intercom by their door.

“Not safe.” She looked at him, her face contorting with another spasm of pain. “Please. I need the pills.”

He looked down at her, his eyes narrowed. “You need a doctor.”

“Please,” she begged, in so much pain she would have given anything for those pills.

His jaw looked hewn from rock. “All right, but you had better be right about the blood. I will not let you die on me. Do you hear?”

He jogged back into the bedroom, careful not to jar her and then he gently laid her onto the bed before opening the bedside drawer. He pulled out a prescription bottle, looked at it and then opened it, shaking two tablets into his hand. There was a glass of water beside the bed.

She’d poured it from the carafe and put it there to take her pills with and then spaced it, she now remembered. One of the negative side effects of taking them to begin with was her spotty memory. She lived in fear of taking too many and overdosing, which might explain the number of times she ended up in severe pain wishing she’d kept to her schedule.

He put his arm behind her shoulder and lifted her into a semisitting position and helped her take the pills as if she could not do it herself. And the truth was, she couldn’t. It was taking everything she had not to scream at the agony ripping through her insides.

After she swallowed the pills, he carefully laid her back on the bed.

“How long?”

“Twenty to thirty minutes.”

“Can I do anything else?”

She was in far too much pain to refine on the fact that the man asking had been treating her like a leper for the last few days. “Hot water helps.”

“To drink or to soak in?”

“Soaking…shower, too.”

He nodded and disappeared into the bathroom. She heard water running and then he was back and he was naked. She couldn’t make sense of that and didn’t even try.

She simply tried to control the pain as he picked up the phone beside the bed and spoke some instructions into it about having the bed cleaned and remade. She was just glad he wasn’t calling a doctor in after all.

She had gone through too much to keep her secret from the media…she didn’t want to risk it with a doctor. Even a Scorsolini Royals approved one.

“I am going to undress you.”

“Okay,” she said woozily, the drugs taking effect quickly because she’d taken them without food.