I followed her behind the double doors and down a corridor.
“As you were informed, she’s been awake on and off.” The nurse stopped walking and cleared her throat. “I’ll warn you that Ms. Gallagher’s appearance may be somewhat alarming.”
I didn’t bother to tell the nurse that I’d seen things exponentially worse than alarming. Horrific. Nightmarish. Gruesome. Those were appropriately descriptive adjectives of the carnage I’d witnessed. Many of the scenes, I’d caused. A tiny woman lying in a hospital bed was the last thing that would alarm me.
Or so I thought. The woman who’d infuriated me like no other ever, sent my blood pressure skyrocketing with her inability to follow simple directives, and caused me to consider strangling her on countless occasions, looked like a broken doll lying on the gurney.
Her skin, already pale as alabaster, was ghostly white save for the purple bruises that marred its otherwise flawlessness. Beneath the edges of the thick bandages covering most of her scalp, I could see that her long inky-black hair had been shaved. The worst of what I saw, were the straps tying her arms to the bed’s rails. I lifted the sheet and saw the same with her legs.
“Is this really necessary?” I slowly turned when the nurse cleared her throat but didn’t answer. “What?”
“I’m sorry, Mister…”
“Torcher.”
“Right. You have five minutes, after which, I’ll need to accompany you back out to the waiting area.”
I shook my head and looked back at Siren. “I’m not leaving.”
“But you can’t remain—”
“Watch me.” I seethed, looking over my shoulder at the woman who was half my height and probably a quarter of my weight.
“Well, I suppose that since you have Ms. Gallagher’s power of attorney, you would be considered her next of kin.”
When she left, closing the door behind her, I pulled a chair closer to the bedside. I untied the bindings and studied Siren’s features in a way I couldn’t when she was awake. She’d never kept her devil tongue still enough for me to take my time appreciating her true beauty.
Like her hair, her lush eyelashes were black, as were her thin eyebrows that I’d seen more often raised in annoyance with me rather than at rest like they were now. Her angular cheekbones were pronounced on her oval face, more than her button nose, lush mouth, and soft chin.
Her appearance was similar to the photos I’d seen of my own grandmother, Nanna Ryan, when she was in her mid-twenties like Siren was.
You would think that two people who’d spent as much time together as Siren and I, would’ve talked about our families, but we hadn’t.
I’d never said, but like her, my mother’s family was Irish. Maeve Ryan-Torcher’s family hailed from Kinsale in County Cork, only sixteen miles south of the city bearing the same name as the county. The port and fishing village was best known for the hard-drinking yachtsmen and fishermen who spent whatever time they had off the water, on the nearby golf courses.
I’d visited a few times with my grandmother, the last of which was only a month before she passed away.
I knew from the background report I’d received on Siren from both the CIA and the Invincibles, the private intelligence firm she and I had accepted our last mission from, that her mother died when Siren was a teenager. There was no name listed as her father on her birth certificate.
In the same way I’d never been able to sit and stare at Siren’s exquisite face, any perusal of her body I’d done was only when she wasn’t looking. She was a wisp of a thing but with boobs that made everything she wore look sexy as fuck, even the cotton hospital gown.
When she shifted and groaned, I looked up into her wide-set Arctic-blue eyes.
“Smoke.” Her voice was soft but made gravelly by the since-removed intubation tube required during her surgery.
“Siren,” I murmured, stunned when she looked at the palm of her delicate hand as if she was reaching out to me.
“Closer,” she wheezed.
“Don’t try to talk,” I said, scooting the chair forward.
Her eyes surveyed the room, and she looked at me questioningly.
“You’re in Fernwood Hospital, about an hour outside London. Do you remember anything that happened?”
“No.”
“You were shot during an op. You’re lucky to be alive.”
Her eyes opened wide. “An op?”
“We were on Konstantine von Habsburg’s detail at Broadmoor Hospital.”
Siren sunk deeper into the pillow, her brow furrowed. “Detail?”
Admittedly, I’d rarely heard the woman’s voice be so subdued, unless she was speaking to someone other than me, but its frailty was worrisome. I remembered the doctor saying Siren’s memory might have been affected by the series of strokes she’d suffered, but she clearly knew me.
“What’s the last thing you recall?”
She shook her head and closed her eyes. “The island,” she whispered.
The island? I clenched the fist she couldn’t see and willed my body not to react in any other way. Of everything she might have said, that was the last thing I expected. I barely recalled it myself, not only because I’d pushed it out of my thoughts so many times, but also because of the rum-induced haze I’d been in on the one night when the heated passion between us turned from hate to lust.
Siren looked down at her open palm a second time and then up at me. “Smoke?”
I leaned forward and stroked the area around the place where the intravenous line was taped against her skin. “Siren…”
“Please,” she whispered.
“What?”
“Hold me.”
If she were any more alert, I would call her out for fucking with me, but the longing I saw in her eyes was too sincere.
I stood, trying to figure out a way to get my six-feet-five, two-hundred-and-sixty-pound frame positioned in such a way that I could put my arms around her without ripping out her IV or crushing her.
When she scooted her body over, the sheet moved with her. I could
