give a shit whether it’s practical or not,” I said to Jax in an irritated tone. “I’m a billionaire. It wasn’t all that difficult to make it happen. Taylor hates hospitals, and after what she’s been through, I’m not going to make her stay here one damn second longer than she has to. We got Harlow set up for home treatment with her mother in Carlsbad, and Taylor is coming home with me. End of story.”
I took a slug of bad hospital coffee, and grimaced.
We’d landed in San Diego yesterday, and Taylor had gone through rigorous testing to make sure there were no underlying injuries that the Lanian doctor had missed.
Now that all the tests were nearly completed, and everything was negative, I was taking her home. My home.
There wasn’t a single thing they could do here that I couldn’t do for Taylor at my house.
It sure as hell wasn’t like I didn’t have the space for her. I owned an enormous house in Del Mar, on the beach. It was the perfect location for Taylor to recover.
Harlow had already been discharged to her mother’s care early this morning,
Yeah, I could have gotten Harlow’s key so Taylor could stay there, but she’d be alone.
That was not happening.
The woman could barely stand on her own, much less take care of herself.
Something had happened to me while she’d sobbed her heart out while I’d held her on my lap. I’d promised that I wouldn’t let anything, or anyone hurt her again, and I was keeping that damn promise. I was going to stay close to her until she was completely over this whole incident, emotionally and physically.
Holy fuck! I never wanted to see her cry like that ever again.
I glared at Jax, who was sitting across the table from me in the hospital cafeteria, as he shook his head. “Uh, no offense intended, bro, but you look like shit. Have you been here since we landed?”
I raked a hand through my hair. He was probably right. I needed some sleep, a shower and a shave. “Of course I have. What was I going to do? Leave her all alone after everything she’s been through?”
“There’s about a dozen people Marshall could have gotten here last night that hadn’t been through an entire rescue situation already,” Jax pointed out. “And it’s not the whole homecare thing I’m worried about. We set it up all the time. With family. Nursing care—”
“She doesn’t have any family,” I barked back at him, hating the fact that Taylor had no close family that gave a damn about her. Not because I minded taking care of her, but she should have…someone. “As her employer, I’m stepping up to the damn plate.”
Jax had stayed until it had gotten late the night before, but he’d gone home once Taylor had gotten situated back in her room.
He’d just come back about fifteen minutes ago, and dragged me down to the cafeteria for coffee while Taylor was in radiology for one last x-ray.
“She’s going to need physical therapy, and other treatment,” Jax said reasonably. “Not only that, but somebody is going to need to help her out for a while. Until she’s back on her feet, she needs a nursing assistant or a homecare professional. What the hell, Hudson, are you planning on making your multimillion-dollar beach house into a hospital? I get that Taylor is currently homeless because Harlow is in Carlsbad now, and that she also gave up her apartment in Stanford when she came to San Diego as our intern for the summer. But the hospital is perfectly willing to put her in a transitional unit while she recovers, or we can get her a place fully staffed with medical personnel round the clock—”
“Not. Happening,” I growled.
During a moment of weakness, Taylor had confessed that she hated hospitals because she’d spent a lot of time watching someone she cared about die in one of them.
The last thing she needed was to recover in a goddamn institution that heightened her discomfort, or a furnished apartment with only strangers to take care of her.
She needed a place to rest. To relax. To wind down. Somebody around who was actually familiar to her.
Right now, that recognizable person was me.
Marshall had already offered to set everything up, and have a nursing assistant with her every hour of the day in addition to a crew member from Last Hope.
That shit wasn’t going to cut it. Taylor needed…me.