"If the salary's right, I'd love to work at your offices." Where, she realized, her hot-pink cast would look right at home. Where, more important, she thought, she'd feel right at home.
Elise and John arrived on the receding wave of Claudia's perfume. With her family gathered around her, Lucy learned more about how the McMillan & Milano security personnel had controlled the crowd shortly after she'd fallen. John had called Carlo on the way to the hospital for all the details. Wrench, the rest of the Silver Bucket and their road crew had been arrested.
"The cops had to pull Carlo off the pyrotechnics guy," John said, sounding smug in that quiet way of his. "If Carlo hadn't been a former cop himself, they would probably have arrested him, too."
Then someone turned on the television and there was Lucy on the news. A video camera had caught her demanding Wrench to stop the show to calm the crowd. After she'd been pulled into the pit - the whole room had winced at the sight - the lead singer had cut the instruments with a slash of his hand. As the fans settled down, the camera had taken one last shot - and in it Lucy had seen a dark figure arrowing through the pack toward the place where she'd fallen.
Carlo found me, she thought. He would have been the one to pick her up and find her help. The hospital would be too much for him, she could understand that. But she knew, just knew, it was he who had picked her up from where she'd fallen and delivered her to the medical personnel.
Then he'd gone back to his dark corner, where he liked to observe life alone.
Later, the family left Lucy in her narrow bed. She tried to get out of bed to go with them, but the nursing staff insisted she stay a few more hours, and she was really too tired to argue. Her eyes closed as the dwarf drumming in her head finally put it on mute.
The room held dawn light when she opened her eyes again. Between the tall box of Godiva and the flower arrangement bristling with birds-of-paradise, she spotted Carlo's expressionless face.
"Hey," she murmured. "It's the right order. You come right after candy but before flowering plants."
A frown creased his forehead. "Shall I call a doctor?"
"Even an MD can't make a man better than chocolate."
"Your head injury...I'll come back later." He started to rise.
Blinking, she put out a hand. "You are here. I thought I was dreaming again. Last time it was a dwarf."
He settled back in the chair beside her bed, and she pushed at the table to see him more clearly. "It is you."
"It is me." His hand smoothed the thin blanket where it draped over the side of the mattress. "Are you okay?"
She remembered. "Better than okay. I have a new job! Claudia stopped by last night and made me an offer."
He nodded, as if taking that in. "Life is looking up, then."
"Yes." It was, she supposed. Because last night she'd thought things between her and Carlo were left so awkward that they could never be in a room together again. "You can go now, though," she said.
His gaze jumped to hers. What was that expression in his eyes? "You want me to go?"
"Well, um, whatever you feel like..." Lucy heard herself stepping into that familiar I'll-say-anything-he-wants role. Closing her eyes, she took a breath, then opened them again. "You're welcome to stay. It's nice to see you. But I know that hospitals make you uncomfortable."
"A lot of things make me uncomfortable," he muttered. He smoothed the blanket again, and she noticed the skinned knuckles. So she thought, he really had decked the pyrotechnics guy.
"You're hurt," she said, reaching out to brush his fingers with hers.
He caught her hand, then nodded at her cast. "You're hurt. I hate that you're hurt."
"I understand." And she did. It was how he'd changed after Patrick McMillan had died in his arms, under his watch. Carlo didn't want to care that deeply again and so...he didn't.
Carlo rubbed across her fingernails with the pad of his thumb, his gaze trained on their joined hands. "You're giving up too easy again, Lucy. You're willing to take less than you deserve. Less than you want."
Her heart started beating faster in her chest, as if it understood more than her mind. What did he mean? What was he saying?
"Pat's death put me in the shadows, Lucy. You lured me out."
"I'm not a trap." Her whisper was fierce. "I never meant to trap you." And if he didn't want to...to care for her, then she wasn't going to let it ruin her life.
"Still, I couldn't resist all the sticky sweetness."
That had her thinking about sex. About chocolate whipped cream and hot, intimate kisses. "Not fair."
"All right." His voice sounded strained. "But Lucy, just don't tell me that it's too late. Not now that I've stepped into your light."
She looked up. His face was still stone-hard, so expressionless it made her heart ache. "Too late for what?"
"For you to tell me again what you want?"
Oh, talk about traps. Her heart's speed went up another notch, but she still wasn't sure what he was getting at. She only knew she wasn't going to live a life where she did all the giving and the pleasing and the telling.
"So I have to take all the risk, is that it? You want me to jump and then you'll decide if the water's fine?"
He was silent a long minute. Then his gaze met hers. He sighed. "Lucy Sutton, you are one tough woman."
Apparently he couldn't see the untough sting of tears in her eyes, because she had the sudden sense that everything was going to be all right.
Carlo brought her hand to his mouth and kissed each one of her fingers. "Here goes, baby. Don't blink, because I'm about to execute my best dive."
Lucy's heart leaped and beat soft butterfly wings that made it hard to breathe.
"I'm in love with you, Lucy. You don't know - or maybe you do - how much I didn't want to be in this place, because I thought experiencing those feelings would be my worst nightmare. That they'd make me vulnerable to the kind of pain I felt when Pat died, to the kind of pain I've seen on Germaine's face. It seemed so much easier, more comfortable, saner, never to want to do that..."
"Couple thing," she finished for him.
He squeezed her fingers. "But then...but then I saw you fall and my vision of a nightmare changed entirely. Never letting you know what you mean to me, never seeing you smile or laugh or even cry - why, baby, why are you crying? - would be so much, much more terrible."
Leaning across the mattress, he laid a soft kiss on her lips, taking a tear or two away with it. "There's no time to waste, Luce. I get that now. Will you be my light, my love, my hope for happily-ever-after?"
Later, Lucy would make him pay for proposing to her when she had bedhead and was wearing a faded hospital gown. Secretly she would always think it was the most perfect moment in her entire life.
Later, Carlo would apologize profusely when she complained. Loudly, he would always tell her - truthfully - it was the most perfect moment of his entire life.