The Boss's Proposal (13 page)

“Of course it does. It changes everything.”

“Why?” he demanded. “I'm not that other guy. It's not the same situation. I'm not married, I'm not lying to you, I'm not using you. Dammit, I love you.”

Panic sprinted through her. “Don't tell me that,” she ordered, voice shaking. “I don't want to hear your lines.”

“It's not a line.” And he never would have thought it would hurt so much that she'd think so.

“I don't know why you care, anyway. You're going back to Dubai in a week. There's no reason to keep this going.”

“I'd say there are a lot of reasons to keep it going,” he said angrily. “We're good together, you and me, really good. But that doesn't matter to you, does it? You've been looking for an excuse to run from the beginning. This isn't about you and me, this is about Elliott Seymour.” He held on to the steering wheel and stared out through the windshield.

“You've got a choice, Max,” he said finally. “You can let it go. But you don't really want to hear that, do you? You'd rather keep doing the same thing you've always done, keep buffing up that pain. I always thought you had guts, but now I wonder if you really do. Maybe for the easy stuff, but when it comes to you, though, when it comes to really risking yourself, you're as big a coward as they come.”

He turned the key in the ignition, but she already had the door of the car open. “Where are you going?” he demanded.

She was out before he'd finished saying the words. “Forget it, I'll walk from here.” She had to be out of the close confines of the car, she had to be moving. If she could do that much, maybe she could stop thinking about everything she'd lost—the man she loved, her reputation, possibly even her job. A headache throbbed in her temples as she strode down the
sidewalk. At the door to the BRS building, she hesitated, tempted, oh so tempted to keep moving. With every fiber of her being, she wanted to avoid going inside. She straightened her shoulders and strode forward.

Her cell phone rang, and she felt a clutch in her throat. Dylan. She was furious and frightened, but somewhere deep down, almost too far down to admit, she wanted him back. The phone rang again and she dragged it out. “Don't you ever—”

“Max.”
It was her mother's voice, but the tone sent chills down her spine.

“Mom, what's the matter?”

There was a silence. “Mom?” Max repeated.

“Max, come quickly. Your fa—your father's had a heart attack.”

T
he coronary care unit was dim and hushed. In this quiet place, no sense of the outside world intruded, only the beep and shush of the life-support machines. Privacy didn't exist for the critically ill—instead of separate rooms, the beds stood in open bays separated by dividers, allowing the staff to easily monitor and reach the patients. A brightly lit nurses' station occupied the center; around the periphery, all was dim.

Max followed the nurse to where her father lay unconscious, covered with a pale blue blanket. He looked gray and shrunken in some indefinable way. Fear choked her as she stopped beside his bed. Breathe, she ordered herself.

“Oh, Daddy. If you wanted attention, all you had to do was tell us.” She gave an awkward laugh and reached for his hand. “You've got to get through this. We need you back. You're strong,” she told him. But he looked so weak. She swallowed. “You've got to get through this for all of us. Most of all for Mom, because I don't think she can do without—”

Across the room, an alarm shattered the quiet. Bright lights flipped on all over the floor. Instantly, the staff sprang into action. “Code blue on 303,” someone said urgently. Furious activity replaced the calm. Everyone there seemed to converge on the same bed all at once. “Defib, stat,” a voice demanded. “Get me that adrenaline,
now.
”

Adrenaline sprinted through Max's veins. A nurse walked over to her swiftly. “We need you out of here, pronto.”

Max headed toward the big double doors that led out to the real world. Behind her, she heard the thud and snap of the defibrillator. “We're losing him,” someone said.

Then she was outside the doors and they were closing behind her, sealing out any further sounds.

But her heart still hammered, as though it were trying to do the work for the person who'd coded behind her. As though it were trying to do the work for her father. She hadn't told him she loved him, Max realized. There hadn't been time.

The families in the waiting room looked like refugees from some natural disaster, clustered together in
anxious knots, hands clenched, faces pale. An almost palpable tension filled the air. Whoever had decorated the room had chosen subdued colors, probably intending them to be calming. Of course, anybody who thought colors could make a difference in a situation like this had never been through one.

Max crossed the room to her mother. Amanda McBain mustered up the ghost of a smile when her daughter sat down.

“How is he?”

Heartbreaking, Max thought. “Fine,” she said. And compared to the patient in 303, he was fine. “They're going to be taking him into surgery.”

Amanda's expression tightened. “They said they would.”

“It's a good thing, Mom,” Max said. “They'll fix whatever's wrong so he can recover.”

Please, let him recover.

It was funny how everything suddenly got very simple in a situation like this. An hour before, her life had seemed unbearably complex. She'd felt buffeted by emotion at every turn: anger, sadness, loss, humiliation. Everything she'd tried to protect herself against for years had come to pass.

Now, none of those things mattered. They all seemed distant, receded into some distant, unreachable past. She couldn't even cry. Now, there was room for only one emotion—fear.

Max took her mother's hand. “Where's Cady?”

“Keeping an eye on the inn. We've got guests,
someone has to. Damon's out in Las Vegas this week.”

How much harder it must have been to be Cady in that moment, unable to know exactly what was going on. And Walker down in New York, scrambling to get a flight up. It was going to take time for the family to get together, Max thought.

She only hoped they had enough.

 

“It looks like you and Max did the job,” Hal said to Dylan as they walked out of the BRS conference room after the debriefing.

Dylan nodded. It was hard to remember that it mattered. He'd gone through the session on automatic, his mind returning over and over to Max and what had happened between them. She hadn't shown up in the office after they separated. It wasn't like her to walk out on work, but maybe she'd needed some time to get her emotions in order after their…what? Argument? Breakup? How could he tell his father the truth of why she had skipped the debriefing when he had no idea what the truth even was?

It was a hell of a thing, he thought later as he sat at his desk, waiting for the travel agent to find him a ticket to Dubai. He'd spent the better part of his adult life avoiding commitment. And now, when he'd finally found the woman he wanted to be with for good, she wanted nothing to do with him. It would have been almost funny if it hadn't been so pathetic.

And if he hadn't felt so damned empty.

He rose to walk past Max's office, glancing at his watch. Over three hours had gone by since she'd walked away from his car. It was hard not to wonder where she was. And yet the last thing he could do was call her. She'd made it very clear that was no longer his prerogative.

Dylan knocked on the open door of his father's office. “Any word from Max?”

Hal glanced up. “No. I've got to say, I'm starting to wonder. It's not like her to miss a meeting and it's definitely not like her to just disappear for half the day.”

“Give her a call if you're worried,” Dylan suggested.

Please.

“I probably will,” Hal said, reaching for the phone.

Dylan made himself walk out of the office, even though everything in him screamed to stay, if only to hear her voice. But he'd heard her voice in the car. It still tore him, the things she'd said. Her hurts had been deep and lasting and it was naive to think they might suddenly evaporate, that like Glory's sculpture, the wall might transform to an open gate. Maybe at some point she'd get past it, but it wasn't likely to be soon. And it wasn't likely to be with him.

“Dylan.”

He turned to see his father coming out of his
office, staring at him. Dylan felt the quick clutch of fear.

“What happened? Where is she?”

“Portland General.” Hal paused. “Her father just had a massive heart attack.”

 

Time passed differently in the hospital than it did in the outside world. In the waiting room, with its glare of fluorescent lights, the minutes crawled by while they wondered and waited. And yet there was no sense of time in this place where they couldn't see daylight, couldn't see the movement of the sun. It was like the outside world didn't exist. It was like they'd always been trapped in this place and this endless moment of uncertainty and fear.

Max tried without success to focus on a magazine. Across the room, a younger couple spoke in urgent tones too low to be overheard. By the door, a gray-haired volunteer in a blue vest sat at a desk with a green phone. Max glanced at the door for the third time in as many minutes, as though doing so would make the surgeon appear.

For hours now, her father had been in the operating room. For hours now, they had waited for word.

Next to her, Cady shifted restlessly. “Do you think we're ever going to hear from them?”

“Eventually.”

“They could at least give us an update.”

There was no point in being impatient with Cady when she was only voicing what they all thought.
“I imagine they have other things to do, Cades,” Max said.

“It's not like I want them to stop. I'd just like one of the nurses to stick her head in the door and let us know how it's going.”

“I'm sure it's going fine.”

Unspoken was the worry that the reason they hadn't heard anything was because things weren't going fine at all. Max stared unseeingly at the magazine, resisting the urge to look again at her watch. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a movement at the door. Her head snapped around.

And instead of a surgeon or a nurse, she saw Dylan.

She should have felt something, Max thought: anger, surprise, relief. But it was as though from the moment of her mother's phone call, she'd been enveloped in a hermetically sealed bubble where normal emotions couldn't penetrate. The events of earlier that day that had mattered so much now seemed like nothing, like they'd happened to another person in another life.

Maybe she should have felt something other than a sort of dull disappointment at Dylan's appearance but it wasn't possible when her ears were straining for the sound of the doctor's footsteps or the ring of the phone on the volunteer desk. It wasn't possible when she knew that a team of surgeons was fighting desperately to keep her father alive.

“Max.” Dylan stood before her. “I'm sorry to hear about your father”

“Thank you.”

He shifted. “What can I do?”

“I don't—”

The phone rang and they all stared at it. The volunteer answered it. She held her breath.

He glanced up. “Mr. and Mrs. LeFevre? You can go in now.”

Disappointment flooded through Max as she watched them walk out. She stared at the door to the waiting room a moment, then looked up at Dylan. For an instant, some faint, dull echo of feeling penetrated the bubble, but then it was gone. “I don't…We're fine,” she said. “But thank you for coming.”

Thank you for coming. It was a sort of thing people said at funerals, Dylan thought. Her face was drawn with lines of worry, her gaze shell-shocked.

He hadn't shown up expecting anything. Certainly, he hadn't shown up expecting to continue their earlier conversation, or for her to fall into his arms. At this point, what was between the two of them had to be the last thing on her mind. The focus could only be on her father.

He probably should have stayed away. He'd tried to work for a while after his father had given him the news but it had been no good. Love didn't turn off and on like water out of a spigot, he was discovering. And maybe she didn't want him in her life, but just then if there was anything at all that he could
do to make things easier for her he had to be there doing it.

No matter what she thought of him.

He checked his watch. Nearly five. “Have you guys eaten at all today?”

Max gave him an abstracted look. “I don't remember,” she said vaguely. “It doesn't seem very important right now.”

“If you want to be there for him, you have to eat. They have a cafeteria—”

She was shaking her head before he finished the words. “We can't leave. He's in surgery. They might come any minute.”

“You don't have to leave. I'll go get it. You guys just tell me what you want.”

“Anything,” she said as her mobile phone rang. She answered swiftly. “Where are you?”

Dylan could hear the voice of the other person on the line but the words weren't clear.

“Okay,” Max said. “Come when you can. We'll see you soon.” She disconnected and turned to her mother. “That was Walker. He's on the plane at LaGuardia. He says he couldn't get a rental car but he'll take a cab out.”

“Call back and tell him to forget the cab,” Dylan cut in. “I'll go get him.”

“Don't you have to be at work?” she asked, then noticed the time in bewilderment.

“The workday's over. Anyway, this is more important. You guys need someone to run around and
do things while you're stuck here. You don't need to be worrying about getting Walker from the airport. I'll take care of it. Just let me know what you need done.”

He saw the flicker of gratitude in her eyes and it was enough.

So as the hours passed and the day slipped into the evening, he chased down food, he brought coffee. He brought Max a change of clothes so she could get out of her suit and heels. The surgery went on, and they watched, and waited, and wondered.

Finally, Dr. Kiernan walked in. “Mrs. McBain?”

And every McBain in the room came to attention.

Amanda swallowed and stood.

“Your husband is out of surgery. The valve in his heart tore, which is why the repair took so long. We have him all patched up now. The next twenty-four hours will be most critical. If he makes it through that, he has a very good chance of surviving.”

The doctor held up his hand before any of them could say anything. He looked exhausted, Dylan saw, with deep circles under his eyes. “Now, I want to be careful how I say this. When the valve tore, there was a lot of internal bleeding. When that happens, the body starts trying to compensate. He could be just fine, but you need to be aware that other damage could have taken place.”

Amanda swallowed. “What does that mean?”

“Possible organ damage, for example to the
kidneys. There also could have been a period of oxygen deprivation.” He hesitated. “He could have sustained some brain damage.”

The skin on Amanda McBain's face turned dead white. But she squared her shoulders and her voice was steady when she spoke. “When will you know?”

“We're going to keep him in the medically induced coma for the next few days to help with his recovery. We'll start bringing him up out of it on Tuesday or Wednesday. At that point we'll see where we're at.”

It was time to go, Dylan thought as he watched the surgeon walk away. This was a family matter. For a short while, he'd been able to help, but now Walker, Damon and Tucker were all there. Max had plenty of support. There was nothing for him to do. He couldn't intrude in this private time. So what if he needed to be there doing something for her? It wasn't about him. It was about what Max needed.

And right now she didn't need him.

He walked over to where she sat by her mother. “I'm sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to let you know that I'm going to leave you to your privacy and head out.”

Amanda reached out to take his hand. “Dylan, thank you so much for everything you've done,” she said, the strain evident in her voice. “We can't thank you enough.”