Nickolas-1 (3 page)

Morgan glanced at Ms. Parker. No hope for it, she’d heard.

“Thank you, Officer Denty. I appreciate you giving me the time out of your busy schedule to let me know.” Morgan started to walk away, toward the exit, hoping she could get out before he said something else she didn’t want everyone to know.

But Mrs. Parker jumped in. “Wait! Wait right there, young lady.” Morgan turned when she yelled; she had been drilled on stopping when told. “Officer Denty, are you going to do anything about her things being destroyed?

Destruction of property? Invasion of privacy? You know, do your job?” The officer answered Mrs. Parker, but never took his eyes from Morgan.

“There weren’t nothing there really. Little bit of clothes, some books, nothing to get all twisted up about, is there, Ms. Morgan?” It was that tone, the tone that said,
You agree with me or find yourself at the
wrong end of my fist sometime in the near future.

“Nothing worth getting upset over, Ms. Parker. Really, it’s all right. I have the important stuff with me. Please, it’s okay. I’m okay with this.” Morgan looked at her and hoped she would just back off. She didn’t need any more trouble right now.

“Morgan is her first name, not her last. Morgan, go to Nick’s area and wait for me there. And I mean right there, you understand? Mr. Denty and I have a few things to discuss in private.”

Morgan hesitated. She didn’t want to. She didn’t want to go back to the arrogant ass, nor did she want to leave this woman alone with the cop. She actually though Ms. Parker might hurt him.

“Yes, ma’am.” She moved toward the curtained area, dragging her feet as she went.

Margaret had said his area, not right at his bedside, so Morgan waited on the outside of Nickolas’ curtain, pacing back and forth, muttering to herself. “I’m an adult, not a child, and I wish people would flipping remember that. What does she think I’ll do, roam around the hospital and cause trouble for someone else?”

“I would say that’s a yes. Trouble does seem to follow you around fairly close. I’ve been to this hospital more in the past twenty-four hours than I have been in the past twenty-four days,” Nickolas said from the other side of the curtained area.

Morgan saw red.

Morgan flipped the curtain back so quickly that the nurse standing next to his bed jumped like she’d been struck by something. Morgan paid little attention to her and lit into the man on the bed.

“Why you arrogant, pigheaded, overbearing, egotistical prick. You have the nerve, the very nerve, to make this my fault.
Mine?
Are you seriously thinking that you had nothing to do with this entire event?

“First, you told that security guard to detain me, to keep me there until you got your stuffy ass down there to grace me with your presence. And I warned him not to touch me, but, oh no, he had to ignore that. Then you’re the one who came to the halfway house to see me—I didn’t invite you there. And you’re the one who let himself get close enough to Big Martha to be used as a shield. It was you who ... who, oh, shit! I’m gonna be sick.” She glanced quickly at the nurse now, and ran in the direction she indicated, holding one hand over her stomach and the other over her mouth.

Morgan hated getting upset, especially mad upset. She really hated getting mad and loud upset. She heaved the very little food she’d had on her belly and sat there on the floor for several minutes afterwards, just resting and thinking.

Shit! I can’t go back to the halfway house. Now what the hell do I do?

Morgan didn’t have any clothes, just the ones she had on and the three or four pair of panties she always carried with her. There was also an extra T-shirt and some clean socks. The prison had given her five hundred dollars when they had let her go, and she had wisely put that in a plastic baggie in the waistband of her jeans. She still had over four hundred and fifty of that left.

Her other belongings, the ones now destroyed rubble at the house, were two books that she’d not finished reading, three more T-shirts, another pair of jeans, bras and more panties. There was also an assortment of toiletries. She’d not purchased anything else, thinking—well, hoping really—she’d be able to get a job before she needed a coat and things like that. She didn’t have any family, so there were no letters from home, nor any pictures.

She was still deep in thought when someone knocked at the bathroom door.

“Morgan, are you all right?” Ms. Parker must have finished with Denty. She had really hoped that she’d just go home with her son and forget about her. No such luck.

“Yeah, I’m fine. I’m coming out in a second.” She stood up and dug into the big bag and found her toothbrush and toothpaste. She took several paper towels and, after wetting them really well, she washed down the sink and the spigots with the soap in the dispenser. She wasn’t a clean freak, but she was in a hospital where people were sick. She didn’t want to take any chances with catching something lingering. She didn’t mind dying, would probably welcome it, she mused, but she didn’t want to spend the next ten years dying from something she’d caught here. After thoroughly brushing her teeth and her tongue twice, she opened the door.

Nick looked up at three of his brothers. He was not amused by their presence, or their comments. Damon had come on the scene just as Morgan had started her tirade at him. He had rushed around the curtain in time to see her beat it to the bathroom to be sick. Then when Jamie and Byron had come in, Damon told them the story in great detail and with lots of embellishments.

“She did not call me a self-righteous prig. If you are going to tell the story, at least tell it without lying,” Nick told Damon. “Where is she anyway? Mom said she was having issues with her and she’d be right back.” He was in a room now, and his head was hurting a whole lot less now that they had given him something for the intense pain shooting from his temple to his eyeball. He rubbed his chest again, and noticed that Damon was starting at him intently.

“You gonna get that checked? Or am I gonna have to have Mom haul your ass in my office again?” Damon, the second oldest, was a doctor. He’d been a great surgeon until a few years ago, when he’d quit the hospital without a backward glance and opened his own practice in the same building as Nick owned.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve had a really shitty day, in case you hadn’t noticed.” He leaned back against the bed and tried not to think about the burning in his chest. He needed to focus on something besides the pain. He thought instead of the girl who had disrupted his otherwise...okay, boring life.

“Mom said that she doesn’t know where she is and she’s trying to find her.

She seemed pretty upset when I saw her before I came in here. Who is this chick anyway?” Spencer said as he came in the door with his youngest brother, Devin.

Great! Just friggin great! All five of them. Could this day get any worse?
Nick groaned loudly when Damon started the story over yet again, with even more elaborate details from Jamie and Byron who weren’t even in the room when it happened.

“You all had better have a kiss for your poor old mother, or I’m going to get really mad.” Margaret Parker always made a grand entrance. “Chick? I’ll have you know she is a grown woman. And if I hear that derogatory word from your mouth again without referring to a baby chicken, I
will
wash it out with a bar of lye soap, young man. She’s my friend still, no thanks to your brother. I’m trying to find her a steady job and now housing, if I can locate the little nitwit.” She simply stood by the only chair in the room and Nick watched as his brother Byron nearly fell over getting up for her to sit down.

He smiled at her grouse. His mother was, by and far, the most loved mother of all time, he was sure. She had her six sons wrapped quite tightly around her little finger. And she knew it.

After the lavish compliments, hugs and kisses, they settled down on any available place they could in Nick’s private room. He had had to move his legs twice to make room for two of his brothers. Devin ordered pizzas for them, plus the nursing staff, and had bribed one of the delivery people stop and get a six pack of his favorite dark beer. It helped that he owned the shop, he supposed.

They were all successful, men of worth, as their grandfather had called them.

Each of them had gone to college on an academic scholarship, despite the fact that they could afford any university they wanted to go to.

Spencer and Jamie were university professors, Spencer with tenure. Devin had his own practice, and also a tenant in his building as a criminal lawyer.

Damon, too, had a practice in the Grant building. Byron had an office there, as well, but was seldom in residence. He was a famous artist and potter. His staff worked from the third and fourth floors, taking orders, setting up shows and keeping track of Byron, who needed a keeper more than any kid would.

“Wait! She was staying at the halfway house where I was ... where that ...

where I was hurt.” He
so
did not want his brothers to find out that he had nearly been Big Martha’s lover in a house of recently released prisoners. Women prisoners.

“Well, that’s where she was until she had to rescue you today. Apparently, while she was here, a few of Big Martha’s crew went in and tore all of her things up, and what they couldn’t destroy, they set fire to. And because of the

‘disruptions’ she caused, she’s been told she can’t stay there any longer. And now ... now I can’t find her.” Nick felt his mother’s pointed glare at him and flushed. He was rubbing his chest again before he knew it.

“When was the last time you saw her, and where?” Damon was speaking to his mother, but watching him. Nick put his hand under the blanket. Damon’s penetrating stare was starting to make him uncomfortable, and before he knew it, he was back to rubbing again. Well, fuck.

“She was in the hall with that cop, Denty. I really despise that man—

arrogant asshole. I sent her back to Nicky to wait so that I could give him a piece of my mind, but when I got there, she wasn’t. Did either of you see her?” Nick looked at his brother when his mother asked him.

“She was with him when I got here, but took off to the ladies room seconds later. She was sick, she said. She’d been browbeating this one here and suddenly needed to throw up. That pretty nurse came in just after, and we got busy moving Nick up here. I didn’t think to check on her since then. You?” Damon nodded toward him.

Nick hated to admit it, but he hadn’t thought of her either. “She couldn’t have gotten far. I mean, didn’t you say she was beaten up, too? I still don’t understand why you didn’t just make her get checked out—you have no problem telling
us
what to do on a daily basis.” He started to glare at her, but decided that wasn’t such a smart move. He loved his mom very much, but frankly, she still frightened him a tad.

“She isn’t my son, and, by far, more than a little—” She stopped when his room door was thrown open.

“Ms. Parker? That woman you were asking about? They just found her down in x-ray. Somebody knocked her out with something. They’re taking her to ER

now. I don’t know any more than that.” The obviously flustered nurse came in and took Nick’s blood pressure, then
tsk, tsked
at the elevation.

After a few seconds of noisy silence, his mom slapped Damon on the arm to get him moving. “Don’t just stand there. Go to ER and see to her!” And he took off.

Morgan suddenly popped open her eyes. It paid to be alert and ready at all times when you were in prison, and now that she was out, it wasn’t any different.

The man sitting in the chair directly in front of her simply stared, not saying a word. He didn’t move, but continued to look back at her. A quick glance around the room told her a couple of things. She was in a hospital room, not a cubical in the emergency room. And she was in a private room, and it was a really nice room at that.

Morgan rolled to her back and moaned at the pain that shot through her body. She closed her eyes against the onslaught of agony that raced to every nerve in her. She wondered vaguely if there was a single muscle that didn’t hurt right now.

“You have a deep concussion to the left side of your head, just above your ear. I had to put in seventeen stitches to close it up. X-rays show no brain swelling, but we’ll check it again in the morning with another one to be sure. You have two broken ribs, as I’m sure you felt when you rolled over like that,” Damon Grant said. She looked back over at him.

Morgan didn’t say anything. What was there to say? He’d put the stitches in so he was a doctor; he dressed much too nice to be a nurse. She didn’t need to ask him what had happened, or who’d done it. She knew the answer to both of those questions too.

Moving her right hand over her abdomen, she felt her money missing, and that they had not catheterized her. It took her two tries to talk. Her throat and mouth felt Sahara dry. “Money?” She was in one of those less than modest hospital gowns so figured someone had seen it and taken it. Hopefully someone honest.

“One of my brothers has it. He has a safe in his office; he put it in there for you. As soon as you’re released, he’ll bring it back to you.” She nodded at him.

Morgan moved her hands to her lap and touched the needle on the back of her hand without letting him see what she was doing. She pulled it out gently and then, using the tape from the site, bent the tubing and taped it closed. Next, she moved her hand along the bed rail to find the controls to the bed.

Morgan’s head was spinning, and making out the arrows and other icons on the thing made her a little lightheaded. She pushed one of the buttons and nearly screamed out loud when it stretched her out by lowering her flat. Quickly pushing another button had her rising up. She glanced over at him and noticed that while he was still sitting in the chair, he had now moved to a more alert position by sitting on the edge of the seat.

“You may not want to go too far up. You’re pretty beat up. And with the broken ribs, it’ll be painful.”

It already was, she wanted to scream at him, but bit her lip to keep quiet. She had to stop once; fear of passing out from the shear intensity of pain had her taking in deep breaths until she could move again. When she was as far upright as she could physically stand, she stopped moving. It was another minute or two before she felt she could move on to the next phase of her plan.