Shane stopped short at her order, helplessly watching in defeat as she and her partner loaded the stretcher into the back of the ambulance. Bellamy passed the keys to Jackson, who wordlessly went to start Shane’s truck. Out of sheer instinct, she put her hand on Shane’s shoulder, realizing only after the fact that he might not want her to.
He clutched her hand for a second before slumping into her, and she barely got her arm around him in time to hold him up.
“Okay,” she whispered, biting back tears with every breath. “Okay. Jackson’s waiting, Shane. We’re going to follow them the whole way there. Come on.”
The redhead jumped out the back of the ambulance, slamming the doors to the rig with finality before turning toward the driver’s side.
“I’m sorry,” she said over her shoulder. “I really am. But I promise we’ll do all we can to keep him safe.”
Shane’s eyes surged with raw emotion as he looked at her. “I’m holding you to that.”
With a nod, the woman climbed into the ambulance and pulled out into the dead of night.
Shane fought the urge to vomit as Jackson navigated the turns on the main road down the mountain. His head reeled with unanswered questions and impending dread, only one of which he could do anything about.
“How…how did you know Grady needed help?” he asked Jackson, whose stony blue gaze didn’t move from the road as he answered.
“After I left your place, I stopped by the Double Shot to see what was going on. It was pretty dead, so I decided to take off, and I saw the ambulance pulling in as I passed by on my way home. Teagan said Grady called nine-one-one, complaining of chest pain. That’s when I called you.”
Shane reached behind the seat for Bellamy’s hand. She’d managed to squeeze herself across the narrow bench in the back of the truck, which couldn’t be comfortable, but she hadn’t even hesitated to get in.
“He was working on that tranny, doing the job by himself,” Shane realized out loud. From the looks of things, Grady had gotten a good deal of the work done, too, so he had to have pulled a ten-hour day, maybe even twelve, considering Lucky Gunderson’s Cadillac. That kind of day would’ve exhausted Shane, and he was in perfect health.
He swallowed past the Sahara desert in his throat. What would it end up doing to Grady?
“He said he would call me. He was supposed to call me when that stupid tranny came in.” Shane let out a low curse under his breath, and Bellamy’s hand froze in his.
“This isn’t your fault, Shane.”
“This is absolutely my fault,” he snapped, his gut triple-knotting. “He’s my responsibility. I knew he’d already had one heart attack, and that he was working too hard. I should’ve been there.”
“Okay, take it easy. Getting upset sure won’t fix anything,” Jackson said with care. “Let’s just get to the hospital. Do you want to try to call your, uh, father?”
Fuck. This was going to go from bad to worse. Shane pinched the bridge of his nose. “No.”
No way was he having that conversation with both Jackson and Bellamy in the truck to overhear it. It was going to be bad enough without an audience. Damn it, he hadn’t even had a chance to tell Bellamy the truth.
But he couldn’t worry about that now. He had to focus on Grady.
“My father hasn’t wanted to see Grady for twenty years. A few more hours should suit him just fine.”
As soon as his father showed up, every secret Shane had ever kept would be out in the open, and there would be no hiding from any of it.
With that, he let Bellamy’s fingers slip from his, letting her go before she could do it first.
Bellamy stared into the cardboard cup of cold coffee in her hands, catching her distorted reflection in the dark liquid. The clock on the wall showed half past midnight, and although she was weary down to her bones, sleep was the furthest thing from her mind. She rubbed her forehead, irrationally hoping the motion would jump-start her brain into making sense of the last few hours.
Shane had bolted inside the hospital doors the minute Jackson had pulled up to the glass and brick façade of Riverside Hospital two hours ago, and they’d met him in the waiting room of the ER. All of their questions had been met with the polite yet firm assurance that the doctor would come out and speak with them shortly. As soon as it had become clear that “shortly” was a rough translation for “a hundred years” in hospital-speak, Shane had disappeared for about ten minutes, presumably to call his father.
His father, who he’d avoided mentioning like the plague. The older man had to have something to do with why Shane hated the city so much—Charles Griffin was a paragon of Philadelphia high society. Even his money had money, for God’s sake. Bellamy’s family was financially comfortable, sure, but they didn’t hold a candle to that.
Shane had lied to her about all of it. Who knew what else he’d said wasn’t true?
Taking a deep breath, Bellamy forced her thoughts back to the here and now. Shane prowled the ten by ten path of linoleum in the waiting room on a restless loop, his work boots echoing a hollow thud into the squares with each step. Jackson had given up on trying to sardine his large frame into the hard plastic chairs in the waiting room, opting instead to lean back across the entire row for a better fit. A year-old Car and Driver magazine sat in his lap, untouched, as he stared at the walls, and Shane did yet another abrupt about-face in the corner of the waiting room. The steady clomp-clomp of his steel-toed Red Wings alternating with the deafening silence set Bellamy’s teeth on edge, but she said nothing. Finally, the doors leading to the ER hissed open on automatic breath.
“Shane Griffin?” A tired-looking man in pale green scrubs stared at them with kind yet serious eyes.
“That’s me,” Shane said, nearly hurdling the row of chairs between him and the doctor. Bellamy’s heart beat so wildly against her ribcage that she half-expected it to break free.
“I’m Dr. Russell. I’m taking care of your grandfather.” He extended his hand for a handshake, then flipped an electronic chart from under his arm. “As I’m sure you suspect, your grandfather suffered a myocardial infarction, which is the medical term for a heart attack. We’ve ruled out the need for angioplasty, but we have him hooked up to the ECG to monitor his heart rhythms. He’s also getting oxygen, so his body won’t have to work so hard at breathing.”
Oh, sweet Jesus. Just breathing on his own was too hard? Bellamy slammed her eyes shut over the pool of tears forming there, willing herself not to cry.
“We’re also giving him some Beta blockers, which help to lessen the strain on the heart, and some pretty heavy-duty pain killers to ease his discomfort. I want to get him in for an MRI so we can see what sort of damage we may be dealing with, and he’ll probably spend some time in the ICU, just to be on the safe side.” The doctor paused, probably to let everything sink in for a minute, but Shane didn’t waste a single second.
“I want to stay with him.”
Dr. Russell shook his head. “Visiting hours are strict in the ICU, and nearly one in the morning doesn’t qualify. I’m sorry. Plus, what he needs above all else right now is rest. The first twenty-four hours after a heart attack are the most precarious. We’ve got the best cardiac unit in the area, so he’s in great hands. But he’s not out of the woods yet. After he’s stable, we’ll see what the MRI says and go from there.”