Tripp didn’t dare say anything, but damn. The dollar signs were adding up.
“But her neck. I mean her throat. Won’t she need to recover from throat surgery first?” Andy asked.
Doctor Smith’s dark-brown eyes lit up with enthusiasm. “Which she’s doing right now, as we speak. The days of keeping patients with spinal compression fractures in bed, while they turned into vegetables, are long past. I’ve already assigned her own personal physical therapist. After a short stay in a rehabilitation center, Gracie Fox-Armstrong will go home with Trish and stay with her until she’s not needed. She’ll teach your daughter how to meet her goals and stay the course. Gracie works at one of those facilities I mentioned. She’s a doll. It’s exciting, isn’t it?”
Tripp ran a rough hand over his hard head. “Feels more like hell on steroids.”
Smith turned those bright dark eyes on him. “I understand your sister survived a heinous attack last night, is that right? That she’s lucky to be alive?”
Tripp nodded, not going to out Trish any more than she’d already outed herself.
“As her primary homecare specialists…” Smith’s gaze rolled from Tripp to Andy and back again to Tripp. “It’s essential that you two believe this is an opportunity for Trish, not an impossible obstacle she’ll never get over. It’s a second chance. Focus on what I just said. She’s lucky to be alive. Let that be the mantra you start and end each day with. Prove it to her. Make her believe she’s the luckiest person in the world. That she can do it. Because she most definitely can.”
“Kind of like ‘if you believe it, you can be it?’” Andy asked.
“‘Fake it ’til you make it,’” Tripp muttered what Ashley had said. Only with Ashley, miracles seemed doable. Real possibilities. But with Trish…?
“Exactly!” The excitement in Smith’s voice was palpable. “Your daughter is lucky to be alive. Will the next year be tough? Absolutely. Will it be worth it?” He grinned with all the energy of a kid on a sugar high. “That’ll be up to you.”
“And Trish,” Tripp added, but without the hopped-up faith in a woman who’d crapped all over her family—most of all, her mother—that this stranger had.
But Andy seemed encouraged and hopeful, and Tripp wouldn’t rain on her parade. Yet he couldn’t help but think: Here we go again. False hope followed by crushing disappointment, Trish’s modus operandi. Her everloving MO. Too bad Smith had no concept of her track record. It was easy to believe in miracles when you weren’t the guy in the foxhole fighting through yet another one of Trish McClane’s shitstorms.
Andy must’ve picked up on his gloom and doom. She reached over and patted the back of his hand. “We can do it this time, Tripp. I know we can. You’re home. You’ll help me, won’t you?”
“What kind of question is that?” he groused. “Of course, I’ll help. You’re my Mom. That’s what I do.”
“How about Trish?” Smith asked, those damned bright, brown eyes too sharp, maybe even all-seeing. Like Jameson’s.
Discouraged or not, Tripp gave his words right back to him. “She’s lucky to be alive.”
I hope Mom believes that line of BS, because right now? I sure don’t.
Chapter Twenty-Five
After she checked the peep-hole and unlocked the deadbolt, Ashley opened her door to a pale, depleted version of the man who’d left her last night. Tripp’s face was lined with fatigue, worry, and defeat. He stared at her, his crystal green eyes devoid of his usual enthusiasm for life. Even his hair looked limp.
“Do you have to go right back?” she asked. Pulling him into her place, she shut the door, snapped the deadbolt in place, and locked them in.
“Not right away. She’s out of spinal surgery, and she’ll be in ICU for a few days, maybe more. She’s still out cold. Mom’s with her, and everyone else is still there in case Mom needs anything, but I just...” He shrugged out of his leather jacket, then the double holster she hadn’t realized he’d still been wearing. Huh. Two black pistols. The holster went over the back of her couch. Both pistols went to the top of the hutch over her antique, Amish roll-top desk.
His heated gaze rolled over her like a steamroller. She’d dressed to meet his mother this morning, in her comfiest jeans, a lavender knit top with a cowl collar, and running shoes with purple laces. She still didn’t have her messenger bag or her phone. They were in Tripp’s apartment. But she had him; she’d be safe without them. Err, not that she’d ever had Tripp, but the thought was certainly tantalizing enough to make her palms sweat and her heart flutter. “But you can’t stay,” she told him.
“I shouldn’t.” His lashes lowered. He ran a hand over his face, ending at his chin. “I’m just so damned tired. Mom and I have been cleaning up after Trish for so long…” Exasperation groaned out of him. “Yet here we are again. Working our asses off so she can shit all over us again. But mostly on Mom. She’s always carried the brunt of this… this mess.”
Ashley clamped her hand over his wrist to pull him into her kitchen for coffee or something. “Are you hungry? I’ve got—”
“No, thanks. I’m so damned caffeinated, I couldn’t sleep if you drugged me.” With a gentle tug, he pulled her into his arms. “You’re what I need right now. Just you.”
Ashley melted against his thickly muscled chest, content to listen to his heartbeat. To feel his nose in her neck and his breath on her skin. To know he was safe. No matter when or what,
