He heaves a sigh and sits in the chair facing me, leaning over with his elbows on his knees. “Well, there’s no way in hell any of us are letting you go alone. Can you even stand?”
I place my feet on the floor and rise without issue. Despite the light-headedness from not eating solid food for two days, I feel more or less stable. I even rise onto my toes and do a couple easy lifts before darkness starts to creep into the edge of my vision and the world goes wobbly. I sit down hard and groan, holding onto the bed until the room stabilizes and my vision clears.
Mad’s lips are pressed in a straight line as he regards me. “Tell you what. If you can get your strength back enough to walk a flight of stairs by tomorrow morning, I’ll make a case for you going, but you’re not doing this alone. I’m going with you, got it? And if the doc disagrees, I want you to listen to her.”
I reluctantly agree, and when the others return, Maddox is true to his word. Except when he explains the deal we just made, Callie’s expression morphs between anger and betrayal, and faint nausea flickers in my belly unrelated to my hunger. I want to tell her I’m sorry, but that would be a lie.
“Please.” I splay my hands on my lap, hating the distance this situation has forced between us. The last thing I want is to drive a wedge into our fledgling relationship, but I’m not above begging. I need her more than she realizes, and an icy lump takes up residence in my gut when it becomes clear I could very well lose her if I follow through.
She just stares at me, jaw clenched, for several seconds while the others silently find seats around the room. Someone has bags with delicious aromas drifting out, but my earlier hunger has been superseded by dread. I want to beg again, because the last thing I want is to lose this woman, but I don’t see any other choice.
Then she swallows and closes her eyes, shaking her head slowly. When she opens her eyes again, they’re filled with resignation and tenderness, and I nearly sob with relief.
“I have two conditions to this fucking insane plan,” she says.
“Anything, baby. I will do anything you want.”
She nods. “First, you better be walking on your own by tomorrow, like your brother says.”
“Not a problem. Just let me get my strength back with whatever food Nina brought. What’s the second thing?”
“I’m going with you.”
34 Callie
I know it’s crazy of me to even think about going to Mexico with Mason. In the few seconds between his brother’s speech and Mason’s plea, my mind cycled through all the potential outcomes. But I kept landing on one thing: I don’t want to lose him again.
It’s insane. We’ve only known each other for a matter of days, even though we technically met three years ago. But this man has been on my mind off and on for the duration, and discovering he never died, and that he’s an amazingly thoughtful, passionate, caring man, makes it all the more difficult to let him slip through my fingers.
Because I know deep down that if I let him walk out of my life right now, I will lose him, and that thought terrifies me more than any risk I might assume by insisting I go with him.
My rationale isn’t that far off the mark. He just had surgery on his spine. While it’s important that he gets on his feet soon anyway, I’m not about to let him leave the country unsupervised. He’ll need a competent doctor in the event something goes wrong. I don’t trust him not to risk his health, or his life, to ensure his daughter makes it out of there. If nothing else, I need him to know he has me to return to as well. I wasn’t exaggerating when I told him I loved him. As crazy as it sounded when I said it, it still felt right. Far more right than any of the times I said it to Barnaby.
I don’t leave his side for the next twenty-four hours, despite his eventual jokes about me cracking the whip. But his determination to prove he can perform is evident almost immediately. Once he gets a good meal, he insists on being unhooked from the spinal catheter so he can get on his feet unhindered by tubes and wires.
I try to get him to start with a walker, but it turns out he doesn’t need it. His mobility isn’t in question, but the pain he’s dealing with becomes evident when he starts to pass out at the second landing in the stairwell. Maddox barely catches him before he topples over.
He paces himself after that, finally agreeing to listen to his body’s limits and not let it get out of hand. I still suspect he’s enduring more than he needs to for the sake of remaining alert, but by the time my mother returns with the official approval for the trade, he’s more than ready to get going.
Mom is a different challenge altogether, and a far more rigid one at that. We’re standing outside Mason’s room when I announce that I’m going to Mexico with Mason, and she stares at me in disbelief for several seconds, as if I was just speaking complete gibberish. When she finally regains her voice, she says, “Absolutely not.”
“I wasn’t asking permission,” I tell her. “I am going.”
Her jaw tightens and her eyes flare with anger. We’ve had many stand-offs like this in my life, which have almost always ended in some compromise that left us both short of our true desires. This isn’t a situation I’m willing to give on, though.
“There’s absolutely no point in you risking your life for this, Callie. Whether
