Beneath a Southern Sky - By Deborah Raney Page 0,92

them sobbing bitterly.

After a long moment, she extricated herself from his arms and stood beside the bed, spent.

His head dropped into his hands, and he scrubbed his face as if to wash away the terrible truth. He must have seen in her tortured eyes that it was all true, everything she had said.

A ragged sob came from his throat, and he started to beat on the mattress with scarred fists.

“Nate, please.”

But he only punched harder and then began swinging his arms wildly, fighting the tubes and needles. He began to wheeze, struggling for air. Coughing racked his body, and he gasped for breath.

Daria ran from the room, shouting for help.

A nurse appeared seemingly from nowhere and ran toward Daria. Another nurse came close behind her.

While the women restrained Nate and administered oxygen, a third nurse came in with a syringe.

“Mr. Camfield,” she shouted over the commotion, “I’m going to give you something to calm you down.”

The injection took effect almost immediately, and he stopped thrashing. Though his eyes remained open, his breathing calmed and he relaxed visibly.

Daria stood in the doorway, trembling violently, watching what seemed to be a scene from a horror movie.

“He’ll be okay now,” the older of the nurses told her. “The sedative will make him very drowsy. He’ll probably sleep for a long time. It would be best if you’d come back tomorrow.”

Daria nodded numbly.

Totally drained of energy, she slipped from the room and went back down the corridor. She drew in a tremulous breath. Her mind could hardly grasp all that had just transpired.

Guilt poured over her—a horrible sense that she was betraying Cole—as she realized that she wanted nothing more right then than to run back into Nate’s arms, to comfort him, to hold him tightly to her and rejoice that he was safe, that they had been reunited. To rejoice over the little daughter their love had created.

She wanted to bury her face in her husband’s chest and cry for the years they had lost. Her husband? No! Nate wasn’t her husband anymore. He couldn’t be. Could he? But he was! She had never divorced him.

She thought of Cole, pictured the utter devastation on his face when they had learned the news that Nate was alive. It was the same expression she had seen on Nate’s face moments ago. Nathan’s face became all tangled up with Cole’s in her mind, and she felt as if she were being physically ripped in two.

Dear God, she loved them both! Why wouldn’t she? Who could expect anything else of her? The blood rushed to her temples, and she could hear her own heart pounding in her ears.

She had to make some sense of the nightmare she was living. She had to find someplace where she could think and pray. She was afraid she would faint, but she kept walking, faster and faster until she was almost running.

Breaking out through the front doors of the hospital, she gulped in the fresh air. She waited for her heart to steady its pace, waited for her head to clear, but instead confusion multiplied with every labored breath she took.

She slid into her car. Gripping the wheel, she crept through the parking lot like an automaton, and pulled onto the highway.

Twenty-Seven

She drove in the rain without any sense of direction, simply following the cars in front of her, stopping where they stopped, turning where the road turned. When Daria recognized the exit for the residential area where Jack and Vera Camfield lived, she decided to go see them. But it struck her now that they had more than likely been at the hospital all this time. Unsure what else to do, she entered their subdivision and wound her way through the maze of tree-lined streets until she came to their stately home. She’d only been there once since returning to the States, to drop Natalie off for one of her weekend visits with her grandparents. It still surprised her sometimes to consider that Nathan had grown up with such wealth. He had been so different from his parents. No, she corrected herself, he is so different from his parents. She had spent the first few months after Nathan’s “death” correcting herself when she thought of him in the present tense, and now she was doing the same thing with thinking of him in the past tense.

She pulled onto the wide drive and, wiping her perspiring hands on her slacks, got out of the car. The rain was still falling lightly