Star-Crossed (42 page)
“I’m buzzing the doctor. Looks like she’s really waking up this time.”
“Who is that?” Jules asked in confusion, blinking against the lights to look up at Wyatt.
Wyatt winced. “You’re in the hospital, darlin’.”
“What?” Jules frowned, her eyes still fluttering to keep away the light while trying to focus on Wyatt’s face. His eyes were bloodshot, with dark circles beneath them. He had a least three days’ beard growth and looked worse than she’d seen him since Tabitha left. “What happened to you?”
337
“Why don’t we focus on you instead,” Wyatt suggested in a soft, soothing voice.
Which in itself would have freaked Jules out. “How ya feeling tonight?”
“My neck hurts.” She reached up to touch it, but Wyatt caught her hand. A pained sob of frustration burst out of her. “Why are you picking on me?”
“I’m not picking on you. Come on, Ju Ju Bean, I want ya to work on really waking up.”
“I’m really awake,” Jules mumbled, though her eyes were closed against the glare.
“Dang light’s too bright.”
“You got a nasty concussion.” Wyatt flipped a light switch somewhere, and the room got considerably darker. “Better?”
“Mmm,” she hummed as she reached up to scratch her neck.
Wyatt caught her hand once more. “Come on, they’re gonna have to tie your hands down if ya keep trying to pull at it. They wanted to do it when you tried to wake up the last time, but I stopped ’em. I know you’d hate that.” Something about that had Jules fighting harder. If she was in a situation where people could tie down her hands, she needed to be more alert than she felt. She wanted to rub her eyes and wipe away the last bit of sleep away, but Wyatt was holding both her hands like a big bully.
“Mrs. Wellings?”
Jules looked to the side, wondering who Mrs. Wellings was. All she found was a nurse with white hair and a friendly face. She was round and looked like she should be baking cookies for her grandkids instead of standing there watching Jules get bullied by her twin brother.
“Mrs. Wellings, I’m Dr. Miller. I’ve been taking care of you. How are you feeling?” Jules swallowed against the dryness in her throat and turned to look at a tall, older man standing next to Wyatt. “Been better.”
338
“Okay,” he said in a soft voice as he leaned over and touched her face. “Your color’s improving. Can you look at me, Juliet?”
“She goes by Jules,” Wyatt cut in.
The doctor held up a penlight and instructed, “I want you to follow this with your eyes.”
Jules did as he asked, but hearing her full name had her asking, “Where’s Romeo?”
No one answered, and Jules put up with the doctor doing a series of other mundane tests while an uncomfortable silence hung in the air. She was still fighting to wake up more fully and started taking stock of her other aches and pains. Wyatt finally let go of her hands and knowing touching her neck was off limits, she started messing with the sheets, feeling something uncomfortable around her waist, like a belt against her skin.
“What is this?”
“We’re monitoring the babies.”
“The babies? What?” Jules looked to her brother in confusion.
Wyatt was rubbing a hand against his forehead the way he did when he was extremely stressed out. “She doesn’t—”
“Dr. Carver has been coordinating with me on your treatment. We’ve paged him.
He’ll be here shortly. He’s one of the best ob-gyns in our area. He specializes in high-risk pregnancies.”
“What is going on?” Jules asked Wyatt wildly. “What happened to me?”
“What’s the last thing you remember, Juliet?”
“Don’t ask her that.” Wyatt hissed at that doctor.
Jules became more aware of everything. The hospital room. The doctor. Wyatt, who looked like he was about to come out of his skin from anxiety. Then other
339
memories started flashing at her. Running away. Marrying Romeo under the magnolia tree. The guns. The blood.
Jules started to hyperventilate. “Where’s Romeo?” The monitors were beeping faster. She didn’t care as she reached past the doctor for her brother. “Where is he?
Where’d he go? I wanna know where he is!”
“Can you have them call Dr. Carver again?”
Jules started crying. Something in her knew Romeo was not okay. Someone would have told her otherwise if he was. Her voice was soft, broken as she pleaded in a choked voice, “I need to know where he is.”
“Y’all need to take ’bout ten steps back.”
“Mr. Conner—”
“It’s Sheriff Conner, and I said
back up
,” Conner growled in his scariest, most intimidating voice. “She’s overwhelmed, and I need two minutes. Ain’t nothing gonna change on those machines in that amount time. Lemme talk to my sister.” Jules reached for Wyatt when he leaned over her, and she clung to his shoulders, shaking with fear as she whispered in his ear, “Is he dead?”
“No.” Wyatt shook his head. “And you ain’t either, but you got to calm down, Ju Ju Bean. ’Cause they’re gonna come in here and pump ya full of drugs if you don’t.” Jules blinked past the tears, trying to focus on Wyatt’s face that was nothing but a blur. “Is he gonna be okay?”
Wyatt was quiet for a long moment before he whispered, “I dunno.”
“Oh God.” Jules tried to cover her face with her hands, but her shoulder hurt something fierce, and the damn IV was getting in the way. She finally gave up. Her whole body felt weak, and she dropped her arms and cried while completely exposed.
“He’s gonna leave me alone. I just know it.”
340
“Hey, look at me, darlin’.” Wyatt grabbed her chin, forcing her eyes to him. “You ain’t gonna be alone. You heard the doctor say you got something else to live for, right?”
Jules thought Wyatt was talking about himself, but he touched her stomach gently and she looked at him in confusion. “What?”
He gave her a smile, his light eyes crystalline. “You’re pregnant.”
“I’m gonna have a baby?” She swallowed past the sob. “Is that true?”
“You’re gonna have two of ’em.” Wyatt gave a broken laugh. “Talk ’bout paying for past sins. Here’s hoping they ain’t half as big a handful as we were.”
“But I took tests.”
“You took bad tests. They did one of those video things, and you could see ’em bouncing around in there like little jumping beans. I saw ’em myself.” Jules tried to absorb that, but fresh tears slid down her face and all she could manage was, “Tell me what’s wrong with Romeo.”
“Why don’t we worry ’bout what’s wrong with you instead,” Wyatt countered. “I think you ought to work on getting healthy and strong and give those little Ju Ju Beans a break, don’t you?”
Jules touched her shoulder, feeling the bandage beneath the hospital gown. “Wha-what—” She was still struggling with the fog in her brain. Her whole head seemed stuffed full of cotton, and moving was incredibly difficult in a way that was more than pain. It was like her body weighed a thousand pounds more than it had before. Still she fought to concentrate and asked, “Are the babies gonna be all right?”
“Doctors said they should be. They had to do a few things they weren’t thrilled
’bout, but you’re twelve weeks. I guess that makes it better. I reckon with you and Wellings as parents, the little Ju Ju Beans should be hardheaded enough to be fine. They haven’t used that many drugs, but they’ve been giving you blood transfusions and—”
“Blood transfusions?”
341
“You had a cut on your neck. Glass or something.” Wyatt’s eyes darkened. “You were near dead when I got to the hospital. The lady doctor’s here. You wanna talk to him ’bout the babies?”
Jules wiped at her face and nodded. “Yeah, lemme talk to him.”
“I bet they’ll do one of those things”—Wyatt gestured to her stomach—“so you can see ’em.”
“Okay.” Jules swallowed hard and looked to the new doctor who walked up.
“Will you lemme see them?”
“Absolutely,” the doctor said with a warm smile. “We’re happy to see you awake and alert. How are you feeling?”
“I feel like I wanna know what’s going on with Romeo.” Jules choked against a fresh surge of tears. Even with the cotton in her brain, the panic was overwhelming.
“Why won’t anyone tell me what’s—”
The doctor smiled and grasped her wrist to cut her off. “Do you want me to order the sonogram now?”
Jules nodded and wiped at her eyes again, but the tears didn’t seem to want to stop flowing. “Yeah.”
“Then let’s do that, and we’ll let Dr. Miller work on better assessing you.”
“Why’s it so hard for me to think?” Jules asked herself more than the doctor. It was so frustrating. If she could think clearly, she could demand real answers. Out of desperation she reached for her brother. “My brain’s not working right.” Wyatt grasped her hand in his. “You’ve been laying in this bed for a while now. I ain’t all that surprised things are foggy.”
“Help me until I can think. Don’t let ’em just pacify me. Don’t you do it neither!” She squeezed his hand tighter to make her point and with a note of pleading told him,
“Find Romeo. You fix it for me, Wy Wy. Promise.”
342
The doctor and nurses surrounded Jules and forced her to think about other things, but she noticed what Wyatt was hoping she didn’t—he never promised.
* * * *
It was long past dark before Wyatt finally made it across the hall in the ICU. Clay and Melody had driven over from the hotel after Jules woke up. Melody was better at distracting Jules than Wyatt was, but even Melody was running out of things to help Jules keep her mind off Romeo.
The longer Jules stayed awake, the clearer her thinking became and the more demanding she got. There was no way they were going to make it through the night without Wyatt giving her a straight answer. He had been staring at the room across the way for the past few hours, desperate for the right break in the storm. He saw two federal agents go in, and he waited until they left before he used the excuse of finding dinner to walk over there.
The door was partially open when he walked in and peered inside. Rather than look at the bed, he glanced at the Moretti brothers. Nova sat on the ground instead of in a chair. His back was against the wall, and he stared at Romeo on the bed as if deep in thought. Tino was lying on the floor, his head resting on Nova’s thigh. He appeared to be asleep. They had beds in the ICU, Wyatt knew, because he used one last night to try and get a few hours rest, but it hadn’t worked out too well.
Why Tino was sleeping on the floor, he had no idea, but knowing how hard it was to get sleep when they were under stress, Wyatt backed away.
“You can come in, Conner,” Nova said without looking at him.
Wyatt frowned. “How—”
“Size fourteen police boots make a very distinct sound against linoleum,” Nova explained. “I heard you stomping from across the hall.”
“Why’s he sleeping on the floor?” Wyatt asked as he walked into the room.
“’Cause he doesn’t wanna leave.” Nova sighed. “But he’s exhausted.”
343
Wyatt glanced to the other side of the room. Romeo was such a huge man that even with the larger hospital bed, he seemed too big to fit. This room was filled with more of everything than Jules’s was. More equipment, more beeping and clicking, more tubes running into Romeo, and Wyatt remembered again why he’d been avoiding answering Jules’s questions. Seeing Romeo, prone and pale against the white sheets, had Wyatt feeling extra grateful as he told the brothers, “She’s awake.”
“We heard,” Nova said softly. “Congratulations.”
Wyatt paused, wondering if it was protocol to apologize that his sibling was a little less shot up than theirs was. Figuring that would rub salt into an already painful wound, he said, “They think the babies are gonna be fine. They told Jules there ain’t nothing to stop ’em from being completely healthy.”
“Can I see?” Tino asked groggily, rolling onto his back, his head still on Nova’s thigh. “I saw them rolling that machine up to her room—”
“Ultrasound,” Nova filled in for him.
“Yeah, I wanna see them,” Tino said with a wistful smile. “Can we see Romeo’s babies the next time they do it?”
“Well”—Wyatt shrugged, fighting for the right words—“she’s been frantic ’bout Romeo and—”
Nova snorted. “That means, no.”
“I didn’t say that. I just need to tell her something first, or she’s gonna be asking y’all ten million questions you might not feel like answering.”
“What does she wanna know?”
Wyatt huffed. “I think she wants to know if she’s gonna have a husband to help raise these twins.”
Nova turned and arched a dark eyebrow at Wyatt. He looked exhausted. He was still wearing the same clothes he’d had on when they released him from jail. Wyatt had seen him get to the hospital, but he wasn’t going to tell Nova he’d seen the tears and 344
wild panic as he yelled at doctors, calling them idiots for trying to explain in layman’s terms why his brother was in emergency surgery. He saw the FBI agents pull him aside to question him too, even while he was frantic over his brother—which, even Wyatt had to admit, was pretty damn inconsiderate.
“You can tell her,” Nova started, a small smile tugging at his lips, “that yeah, she’ll have a husband to help.”
Wyatt sucked in a stunned breath, staring at Nova hopefully. “Really?” Nova nodded, his smile becoming more confident. “The surgery went well. They think he’s gonna be okay. They got him in a medically induced coma to help him heal a little, but they’re gonna try and bring him out of it tomorrow.”
“He’ll never fight again,” Tino said sadly. “Something about his kidney.”
“He lost one,” Nova added.
Wyatt groaned, thinking about how hard Romeo had trained. He couldn’t help but feel guilty over being responsible for Romeo missing his last fight. “I’m sorry.”
“Why? He’s got another one,” Nova asked, misunderstanding. “You can live with one kidney easily.”
“No, ’bout the fighting.”
“Shit.” Nova laughed, shaking his head. “Who gives a fuck about the fighting?
That one bullet missed his heart by an inch. The other bounced around his insides, and the worst of it was taking out a kidney when it could have been so much more extensive.”
“That’s true. Who gives a shit ’bout the dang fighting? I retired without a championship belt, and I ain’t any worse for the wear.” Wyatt smiled and took his first clear breath since hearing about the shooting over the police scanner. The fear had been choking him for two days. “There are more important things in life.”
“Can Tino come watch the next time they do the sonogram?” Nova asked. “I know it’s sorta a private thing.”
345
“Nah. Jules ain’t shy, and they just rub that thing over her stomach. Both of you can come and see it. The babies look like little people already. It’s weird. Little hands and feet.”
Tino’s smile became wide and bright. “That’s cool!”
“It is cool,” Wyatt agreed. “But, twins! Christ! They’re a nightmare. My dad was gray before forty.”
“Do they know if they’re identical yet?” Tino asked curiously.
Wyatt shook his head. “They don’t know. They’re in their own little sacks and everything, which they say is good. Makes things easier, but they can still be identical.”
“They’ll just do a DNA test after they’re born,” Nova offered. “If they’re the same sex, you won’t know for sure until then.”
“Why do you know the answer to everything?” Wyatt asked because it was something he’d noticed about Nova. There wasn’t a question you could ask him that he didn’t have an immediate, correct response for. “And how the fuck do you know what my shoes sound like? Who does that?”
“’Cause I’m smart, Conner.” Nova sighed. “Unless I’m letting Gino stare at Romeo’s GPS tracking information on my laptop. That was pretty fucking stupid. I’m sorry. I can’t let you leave without saying that. I was tired. I wasn’t thinking. I know not to trust anyone, but—”
“You don’t trust anyone? Ever?” Wyatt asked sadly.
“Aside from my brothers? No, I don’t. Look at what happened when I did trust someone. Gino was my cousin. He was always around. I eventually let my guard down, and he betrayed my brother to Frankie when I did.” Nova’s face contorted in fury as if reliving a terrible memory. “He got Romeo’s location off my laptop, and he was texting the entire trip. He kept needing to stop. Gino was holding me back the whole way, making sure they made the hit before we got there. I fucked up by not seeing it, and we nearly lost Romeo and Jules because of it. I wish I could kill that fucker all over again just to see his face when he knew I figured it out.” 346
Yeah, Wyatt had to agree, Nova had fucked up, but knowing they were going to make it out of this mostly unscathed, he wasn’t going to give him hell about it. It didn’t look like Nova needed any help beating himself up over everything.
“You didn’t hurt Jules and Romeo,” Wyatt reminded him softly. “You didn’t pull the trigger.”
Nova gave Wyatt a haunted look. “That’s what you think.” Wyatt didn’t know how to respond to that; it was an ominous, open-ended statement that led Wyatt’s mind in a thousand dark directions until finally he asked,
“Am I supposed to say sorry ’bout your father? I know he was one of the fellas who died.”
“I’m not sorry.” Nova shrugged and reminded him, “I’m the one who killed him.”
“I’m not sorry either,” Tino added and looked over at Romeo. “Frankie wasn’t our real father.”
“Well, I guess that makes three of us ’cause I ain’t sorry either,” Wyatt admitted as he looked away, trying to imagine what it was like for Nova to kill his own father. “I’m gonna go tell Jules ’bout Romeo. She’s making herself sick worrying.” Wyatt turned to leave, but Nova called out, “The cops told me you called up and gave your statement. That you were the reason I got released so fast.”
“I just told ’em the truth. That we’d been working together to find Romeo and Jules. I knew you didn’t know ’bout any of it. I’d been talking to you the whole drive here. If you shot someone, it had to have been to protect your brother—and my sister.”
“I saw you talking to the Feds too.”
“Same thing, Moretti. Not like I’d lie for ya. I just told ’em the truth.”
“Yeah, but you’re a sheriff,” Nova whispered as if reminding himself of that fact too. “I’d probably still be in lockup if you hadn’t stepped in. You didn’t have to call. I know you were dealing with other things.”
347
No, Wyatt didn’t have to call, but if the roles were reversed, he would have wanted to be there in the hospital, not sitting behind bars. “I saw some federal agents stop by a few hours ago. You still in trouble?”
Nova sighed. “Conner, I was born in trouble, but that’s my fucking burden to bear. No sense losing sleep over it. Life dealt you better cards. Be grateful for it and stop worrying about my shit.”
“You could get out,” Wyatt suggested, seeing that despite all of Nova’s sharp intellect, he was still very young. “I saw that stock went up to fifty-four dollars a share, and it’s still rising. You’re incredibly intelligent. You could do anything you wanted, something legitimate that’d keep the Feds off your ass and give you a real life.”
“Yeah, right.” Nova’s gaze turned hard once more as he looked up at Wyatt.
“Thanks for stopping by.”
Rather than get annoyed by the sharp change to Nova’s temperament, Wyatt left.
He walked back to Jules’s room thinking about his own cards in the game of life. As strange as it was, Nova Moretti was making Wyatt realize the hand he was dealt wasn’t half as bad as he thought it was.
348
