He smiled. “So I’m told.”
She leaned forward, rested her forehead on his right shoulder, still clutching his hand. “Of all the jobs you could have had, Eli Garrett, why did you have to be a cop?”
“I tried flipping burgers at Sully’s. They kept falling on the floor.”
“That isn’t funny.”
Eli arched one eyebrow, then winced. “I think it is,” he said.
“Then you’re crazy.”
“Maybe you had to be there.”
She made a scoffing sound.
He went right on talking when he should have been, well, healing. “Do I have stitches in the back of my head? Feels like it.”
“Staples,” Brynne wailed, partly in horror and partly in frustration.
“For a small woman, Gretchen packs a wallop.”
Brynne felt her mouth twitch. “Stop it!”
“Stop what?”
“Stop trying to make me laugh! This is serious!”
“Is it? People get hurt every day, Brynne, all over the world. And it’s often a lot worse than this.”
“Cops get hurt every day,” she argued stubbornly.
“I can’t quit,” Eli said.
She knew that. And she wouldn’t ask him to turn in his badge.
To Eli, law enforcement wasn’t just a job, or even a career. It was a calling, as surely as if he’d been a minister or a priest.
But could she live with that?
He turned his hand, cupped her chin in his palm, caressed her cheeks lightly with his rough fingertips. “I love you, Brynne,” he said, softly. “I have since we were kids—I was just too clueless to realize it.” A brief pause; she watched him summon the last of his energy. “You don’t have to respond to that. I just want you to know how I feel.”
Brynne’s eyes stung fiercely, and she had to tuck her lips in and press them together hard just to keep from sobbing again. Eli was badly hurt, and he’d regained consciousness less than half an hour ago.
He did not need to deal with a hysterical woman.
“I love you, too,” she said. “So much.” Then she gave a teary little burst of laughter. “Here we are in a hospital room, declaring our feelings for each other. No candlelit dinner or romantic sleigh ride for us.”
Eli smiled, squeezed her chin softly, dropped his hand. “Is this the part where I grovel?”
Brynne swiped at her eyes with the sleeve of the tatty old sweatshirt she’d put on to paint after her mom and dad left Bailey’s for their house.
“Absolutely not. Groveling can definitely wait.”
A crooked grin. “Good.”
She was serious again. “I love you,” she repeated. “But I’m honestly not sure I have what it takes to withstand the day-to-day realities of your job, Sheriff Garrett.”
He was quiet for a long moment—so long, in fact, that Brynne thought he’d dropped off to sleep. Clearly, that would be the best thing for him, given the beating he’d taken from Gretchen Lansing; his poor, battered body needed all the rest it could get.
But then he asked another question, one that surprised her a little.
“Would you really want to live in a world without cops, Brynne?”
“No,” she replied, after taking a few seconds to ponder her reply. “But I’d love to live in a world that didn’t need cops.”
Eli closed his eyes.
Another brief silence fell.
He ended it with a wistful, “Wouldn’t we all?”
With that, he slept.
Brynne sat there, watching him, for several long minutes. Then, weak-kneed with shock and weariness, she got to her feet and shambled out into the corridor, past the nurses’ station and into the waiting room.
Cord and J.P. were pacing, moving in opposite directions, passing each other without making eye contact. Neither one of them had said more than two words since they’d arrived; the constant walking was their vigil.
Sara sat huddled in one of the hard plastic chairs, talking on her phone.
Melba was absent; she’d probably gone home. Brynne certainly hoped so, because she’d been through a lot that day.
“He’s sleeping,” Brynne said, to everyone in general.
Dr. Marisol Storm, the coroner’s daughter and a staff member at Painted Pony Creek County Hospital, appeared in the wide doorway of the waiting room, holding an electronic tablet in one hand and a stylus in the other.
She was in her midthirties, a strikingly beautiful woman with raven-black hair and large, thick-lashed amber eyes. Her mother, Alec Storm’s ex-wife, was Hispanic, and Marisol had divided her growing-up years between the Creek and Mexico City.
Knowing she was Eli’s attending physician, everyone went still, their attention turned to her.
She smiled, and the effect was breathtaking, even under those circumstances.
Brynne slanted a glance in J.P.’s direction, realizing only after the fact that she was checking his reaction. Unlike Cord, J.P. was still single, and he and Marisol had dated for the first year after he was discharged from the armed forces.
Injured in combat, J.P. had been at Walter Reed for six weeks, then returned to the Creek, with Trooper, his service dog, a constant companion.
“We can all be grateful,” Marisol said, “that Eli Garrett has one of the hardest heads in the state of Montana. His skull is fractured, but we think it will mend, given time. The swelling in his brain is definitely going down.” She paused, consulted the tablet she carried, went on. “He’ll have to stay with us for a week or so, but unless he has a setback, we’ll be moving him out of the ICU tomorrow or the next day and into a regular room.”
Sara, who had been a bulwark of strength since she’d arrived at the hospital, shortly after Eli was brought in, crumpled with relief and began to cry.
Brynne crossed the room, sat down beside her friend and took her into her arms.
Sara pressed her face into Brynne’s shoulder and wept without shame.
Neither Cord nor J.P. spoke, though they looked almost as worn-out as Eli had when Brynne kissed him goodbye and left his room.
Marisol swept them all up in her golden gaze. “I think you should all go home and get some rest,” she said. “Especially you, Sara. Eli will almost certainly be his old self in six to eight weeks, but it’s going to be a long, difficult haul in the meantime, and he’ll need his family and friends to be in tip-top shape.”