“But…”
“Despite his ignorant handling of his courtship with you, he is a smart and capable man. He will protect your father from further business stress until he is well again.”
“That is good to hear,” the doctor said. “You can go home, Miss Wentworth. Your father will not wake for several hours.”
“I promised I wouldn’t leave.”
“So, you will stay.” Hera patted her hand again. “And I will stay with you. Sandor, you must go home and rest. You have much to take care of tomorrow caring for two big companies.”
Sandor tried arguing, but it did him no good. Hera Christofides was more than a match for her son when it came to being stubborn. Sandor arranged with the doctor for the two women to share a room near her father. Wealth brought with it certain privileges, especially in a private hospital.
Ellie slept fitfully and was beside her father’s bed before breakfast the next morning.
His eyes opened and he searched the room with his gaze, stopping when he saw her on the far side of his bed away from the door. He smiled, his expression filled with gratitude. “You’re here.”
“Where else would I be?”
“I wouldn’t have blamed you if you’d gone home and refused to come back to see me.”
“Ellie would never do such a thing,” Hera said from the doorway.
“Mrs. Christofides, I did not realize you were here.”
“Ellie needs me right now.”
Those words were so sweet to Ellie’s ears. No one had ever “been there” for her like Hera was insisting on doing, or even Sandor had done the day before, or with his phone call just after 6:00 a.m. that morning. He’d somehow known she wasn’t sleeping and had called to make sure she was okay.
He had offered to come to the hospital, but she’d known he had enough to keep him busy with his company and her father’s so she’d told him not to come.
“Thank you for being such a good friend to my daughter.”
Hera waved her hand dismissively. “It is my pleasure. She would be my daughter-by-marriage soon if you and my son had not messed up so spectacularly.”
George winced. “Point taken.”
“Ne…yes, I can see that it is.”
Ellie reached out to take her dad’s hand. “We don’t have to think about that right now.”
He squeezed her hand convulsively, as if he was afraid she’d pull away. “I would like to talk about it, though…if you don’t mind.”
Ellie chewed her lip nervously. “I don’t want you upset again.”
Hera pulled a chair near his bedside and sat down. “I’ve spoken with the nurse in charge. Breakfast will be delivered in twenty minutes.”
It was such a mundane sentence, but it broke the tension starting to permeate the room.
Ellie’s dad nodded. “Honey?”
“Promise you won’t get overwrought again.”
He smiled at her use of the old-fashioned term. “I promise.”
“What do you want to say?”
He sighed and smoothed his blanket before he began to speak. The uncharacteristic hesitancy caught at Ellie’s heart. “I approached Sandor with the merger idea after the way I saw he looked at you.”
“What are you talking about?” Sandor had looked at her?
Her dad met her gaze, his own unflinching. She could tell he was determined to be fully honest. “I won’t pretend it was all altruism on my part. I’d realized long ago you had no interest in running the company. Taking on a partner who could give me grandchildren to inherit the company made sense.”
“He could hardly make those grandchildren without my cooperation.”
“Exactly.”
“So you offered him half your company if he would marry me?”
“Yes, but Ellie, I knew he wanted you, too. Personally.”
That was something she was still very much uncertain of, but she didn’t deny her dad’s take on it. She saw no point in doing so. Apparently he had believed Sandor wanted her and that’s really all the was relevant to this conversation.
The thing was, he’d overlooked something pretty major in her estimation. “Is that supposed to make it all better? What about whatI wanted?”
“You looked at Sandor Christofides the way your mother looked at me when we first met.”
“Like what?” Ellie asked, more because she was hungry to hear about her parents and what it had been like between them than because she wanted to know how her dad thought she saw Sandor.