He rolled off me and I sat up, knowing that lying on the mat and demanding that he continue to hold me would be off-putting at best and downright creepy at worst. I glanced down at my skirt. Half of it was missing. A panel had been ripped clean off. Why this caused me to blush, I have no idea. It’s not like he didn’t see the whole thing. So what if my underwear was visible? I could hold my skirt closed over the gap. No big deal.
I glanced over at Nick before I rolled to my feet. He had risen to a seated position. He reached out and grabbed the torn fabric of my skirt that was pinned beneath the pile of weights. His voice was raspy when he said, “You could have been killed.”
Gone was the teasing note in his voice. Instead, he sounded truly horrified by what might have happened. I wanted to ease his mind and said, “Thanks to you, I wasn’t.”
Nick tried to push himself up to a standing position, but it was clear that his leg wasn’t cooperating. I could see the sweat bead up on his forehead as he tried to get a knee under him. He looked pale and shaken in the aftermath of the crash. A vein started to throb in his neck.
“Oh no!” I cried. I dropped my skirt and crouched down beside him. “Are you hurt? Should I call someone?”
“No, I’m fine, damn it,” he hissed. “Just back away.”
Of course, I didn’t. Instead, I wrapped an arm about him and tried to help him up. He weighed a ton. I noticed his left leg was nonresponsive. I felt a burst of panic at the thought that my carelessness had somehow caused him to break a leg or sever a nerve.
“Oh my god, you are injured,” I cried. “Lie back. I’ll call an ambulance.”
I tried to help him back down, pushing him when he resisted.
“Annabelle, stop,” he said. “Just . . . leave me be.”
“But you’re hurt,” I protested. “I can’t—”
“What the hell was that noise?” The door slammed open and there was Jackson. He looked winded as if he’d run here. He took in the scene, weights scattered and us on the floor, at a glance. “Christ, I take a minute to go to the john and all hell breaks loose.”
He dashed across the room and grabbed a wheelchair. A wheelchair? He parked it next to Nick and set the brake. I backed away and Jackson swooped in. He reached down with his giant hams for arms and lifted Nick up, setting him gently in his chair.
He leaned down and met Nick’s gaze and asked, “You all right, brother?”
Nick nodded. But he wasn’t. He was pale, sweaty, and breathing hard. He looked rattled, and I noticed his hand shook when he pushed the hair off his forehead. Jackson turned to me.
“You good, Annabelle?”
Like Nick, I just nodded. I was trying to process too much, and I felt as if my brain was going to short out. What was wrong with Nick? Why was he in a wheelchair? Had he always been in one? Is this why I never saw him outside? I had so many questions!
Jackson’s gaze flashed to my skirt. I quickly grabbed the remaining panels and pulled them tight over the gaping hole.
“What the hell happened?” Jackson demanded.
“I fell—” I began at the same time Nick said, “It doesn’t matter.”
Jackson and I both glanced at him. He looked broken in body and in spirit, and I felt my heart clutch in my chest.
“How can I help you, Nick?” I asked.
“You can’t.” He said the words with a finality that hurt.
“But—”
“Just go, Annabelle!” he bellowed. He lowered his voice when he added, “And don’t come back.”
15
Without waiting for a response, Nick spun his wheelchair away from me. Dismissed. I didn’t know him well enough for it to hurt me as much as it did, but it did.
Not wanting to upset him any more than he already was, I began to back toward the door. Jackson cast me a sympathetic look and said, “I’ll walk you out.”
“You don’t have to,” I insisted.
Jackson didn’t acknowledge my words. He simply began walking to the door. I turned and followed, only glancing over my shoulder once at the hunched shoulders of the man in the wheelchair.
We were striding down the hall, not speaking, when I cracked. “Why is he in a wheelchair?”
Jackson shook his head. “Not my story to tell.”
Bro code. I nodded. I hadn’t really expected an explanation, but naturally I had to ask anyway.
“Is there anything I can do?” I asked.
Jackson stopped walking. He turned to face me. He studied me for a long moment. “Don’t let him retreat.”
“Meaning?”
He opened his mouth, looking like he wanted to say more, but he shook his head. He opened his mouth again and then snapped it shut. Clearly, he was sitting on the horns of a dilemma. It would have been unkind of me not to help him out.
“I can’t help him if you don’t give me a clue,” I said. “You don’t have to break his trust just help me to understand.”
Jackson nodded. “Fair enough. Nick’s shut himself off from the entire world. No friends, no family, no visitors, no one gets on the estate. Until you rented the guest house, it was just the four of us—day in and day out. I guess what I’m trying to say is don’t disappear because of this. Be a presence he can’t ignore; that will help him.”
That was it. He strode forward, leaving me to follow in his wake, as if I were a dinghy trailing a yacht. He reached the back door and held it open for me to pass through.
“See you around, Annabelle,” he said. He sounded hopeful.
“Later, Jackson.”
“I hope you mean that,” he said.
I slipped through the open door, clutching my skirt together. There was no sign of the Guzmans, for which I was grateful. I walked across the yard, through the citrus trees, to my own patio. I had the sensation of being watched, and I desperately wanted to turn around and see if Nick was looking out the window, but then I wasn’t sure I could handle it if he was.
I turned my time with him over in my mind. He was devastatingly good looking. He had charm and he was clearly successful. But something had happened to him, something had caused him to lose the use of his leg. An accident? A disease? What? I was obnoxiously curious about it.
I thought about how he’d swooped in and grabbed me when I might have been flattened by the weights coming down on me. I stopped walking.
Mentally, I put myself back in the room. I’d been standing about twenty feet away from Nick when I’d knocked down the entire rack of dumbbells. Huh. I listened to the birds chirping while I drank in the scent of the sweet citrus blooms. The truth was inescapable, and the fact of the matter was there was simply no way Nick could have reached me if he didn’t have the use of his legs, but I had seen his left leg all lax and dragging like it was broken. So what exactly was wrong with my landlord? Not my business. Still, I had to know.