By the time they’d entered and were standing in a waiting room that bore cartoon characters all over the walls, she was sweating. She could feel beads of it sliding down her spine and her hair kept clinging to her face no matter how many times she tucked it behind her ears.
“Are you sure you’re up to this?” He took her hand and squeezed gently. They were waiting for the duck who’d greeted them to come back and grant permission to pass through the castle door. “You look ready to pass out again.”
She did feel ready to pass out, but she was loath to admit the obvious.
She could feel the panic coming, but knowing what was happening and being able to stop it were two different things. “I have to—I have to get out of here.” Before the horrible, terrible clawing shredded her from the inside out. While his expression was still forming a frown, she bolted out the door and immediately found herself standing in the middle of a city she couldn’t remember.
One hand on the stitch in her side, one on the ache in her chest, she searched for a street sign. A building sign. Anything that would help ground her back in something remotely approaching reality.
Intersection. She needed an intersection. She ran again. Skidded to a halt at a corner where dune buggies and chariots crisscrossed in busy confusion along with pedestrians. She read the street signs. They were in French and meant nothing to her.
“Please,” she said frantically, “please can you help me?” She stretched her hand toward a man in a gray suit and red tie who swerved away with a look of pure distaste. She whirled again toward another pedestrian. Dark sunglasses perched on her patrician nose. “Do you know where the hospital is?”
Laurel’s mother tugged down her sunglasses with scarred wrists. “You have to choose,” she screeched.
Laurel gasped, her eyes flying open. But instead of her mother, she stared into Adam’s frowning face.
She blinked. She wasn’t standing on a strange street corner in Houston. She hadn’t run out on her child, yet again.
She let out a shuddering breath. She was with Adam.
The father of that child.
And they were parked at the curb in front of a small house.
“You were having a bad dream,” he said. “You want to talk about it?”
“No.” She rubbed her eyes, wishing she could also rub away the dregs of the nightmare. Was it better to have a dream about a panic attack or actually have a panic attack?
At least she didn’t feel like she was having a heart attack. So maybe that was progress.
“Where are we?”
“My place.” He pushed open the car door and climbed out, moving stiffly. “In Rambling Rose.”
She looked quickly at the house again.
Then Adam opened her door. “Come on.”
His fingers closed warmly around hers as she climbed from the car. But as soon as she was standing beside him, he let go of her again.
She crossed her arms in front of her, tucking away her hands. “I didn’t know you wanted to stop in Rambling Rose.”
“Only to switch to my truck.” He opened the trunk and removed his overnighter and her canvas tote. She wasn’t even sure when he’d moved them from the back seat. “I talked to the hospital again while you were sleeping. The fever’s gone.”
She blinked. “Just...just like that.”
“Just like that.”
She was relieved. Desperately so. She also felt decidedly off-kilter. “How long did I sleep?”
“Five hours.” He strode up the quaint stone walkway to the front door and pushed open the door, waiting for her. “It’s too hot to stand out there in the sun.”
She ducked her head slightly and went inside.
There was nothing remarkable about the house’s interior. The door opened straight into a small living room occupied by a drab couch, a couple of worn chairs and a scarred coffee table that looked straight out of the sixties. “You’ve mastered the Early First-Apartment style, I see.”
“Picked up everything at Mariana’s Market.” He dropped his overnighter and her tote on the couch. “It was cheap and it gets the job done. Sorry if it doesn’t live up to the Hudson standards.”
She bit her lip. “That’s not what I meant.”
“I know.” He went through a doorway. “I’m putting on a shirt that fits,” he said over his shoulder. “Then we’ll get going. There should be cold drinks in the fridge if you want to grab a couple. If not in there, then check the garage. There’s a spare fridge out there, too.”
She plucked her hairbrush from her tote and dragged it through her tangled hair as she glanced around. Three doorways led from the living room. She assumed the one he’d taken went to the bedrooms. She chose the one in the middle.
Vile orange tile covered the kitchen floor, but it struck her as very clean. Adam always had been a neatnick. She’d been the one who’d left her clothes tossed around carelessly.
She pushed that memory to the back of her mind and yanked open the small, old-fashioned refrigerator.
Inside, save the label-less brown bottles that she instinctively knew contained beer that Adam had brewed, the metal shelves were nearly empty.
She closed the fridge and opened the door on the opposite side of the room, correctly assuming it led to the garage.
There wasn’t anything as ordinary as a vehicle parked inside, though. What Adam hadn’t spent on furniture, he’d more than made up for in brewing equipment. Large stainless tanks lined one wall. Supplies were stacked neatly on shelves on the other wall. There were plumbing lines and flow pipes and pumps and electrical equipment, and for a moment she remembered the rudimentary setup he’d had back in New York.
“You find something to drink?” Adam’s voice called from inside the house and she quickly wiped away the moisture that had formed at the corners of her eyes. She crossed to the gigantic stainless steel refrigerator on the far wall.
Still no food to speak of, but there were several bottles of
