Taken by Chance (21 page)

chapter
25

Lena woke with a
start, her neck already cramping. Hospital chairs sucked. Why? Why, if you knew
people were going to be sleeping in them, would you buy chairs that were so
uncomfortable?

She rolled her
neck and heard it crack sickeningly. She was going to be in terrible shape if
this kept up.

“Morning,
sleepyhead.”

Lena’s eyes shot
open. “Thea?”

“The one and
only.”

Thea was trying to
joke, but her voice was scratched and sore, and she had no color at all. Lena
was torn—she was unbearably happy to see Thea up and talking and just
being
Thea
, but it was the first time
she’d ever seen Thea look…frail.

It was terrifying.

“How are you
feeling?” Lena asked, moving to Thea’s bed. It felt so good just to hold her
friend’s hand and feel Thea squeeze back.

“Better than I
look, probably,” Thea said. “They told me that’s normal, and that you shouldn’t
be scared.”

“You’re lying,
aren’t you?”

“No, though I
would if I needed to. Stop looking at me like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Lena laughed,
kissed Thea’s hand, her forehead,
her
cheek. Her
family was back.

“Sorry. I told you
I was screwed up, remember?”

“Excuses, excuses.
Oh no,” Thea said, suddenly worried. “Have you told John?”

“Oh, shit,”
Lena
said. She’d only just heard of the guy, but that wasn’t
an excuse, as Thea would say. She hadn’t even thought of him. “No, but I can.
I’ll call him.”

“Please,” Thea
said. “He’s probably been calling me or been by the house. His
number’s
on the fridge and in my phone. Do you have my
phone?”

Lena checked her
bag—she knew she had Thea’s phone. “Crap. Battery’s dead. It must have
been searching for a signal, I didn’t even think. I’ll go back to the house and
call him right away.”

“Hold on one
second,” Thea said. She was too tired to sit up properly, and her voice sounded
like she’d swallowed sand, but the woman could still deliver a Look like
nobody’s business. “You came to talk to me about Chance. What did you do about
that?”

“Thea…”

“You’re not using
me as an excuse, are you?” Thea demanded.

Ouch.
That…that hit close to home.
What was Lena supposed to say?

“I wouldn’t call
it an excuse,” Lena said carefully. “More like an illustration of a point I’d
already made.”

“Lena,” Thea said
sharply. “What did you do?”

Lena felt just as
dumb as she had in the kitchen. Something about Thea’s no-bullshit style and
penetrating stare could make the most gifted debater wilt, and Lena wasn’t
entirely confident in the first place. In fact, she
knew
her decision, and her reasons for them, weren’t entirely
rational. But that didn’t mean they were wrong. Emotions, people, hearts, and
minds—they were rarely rational. That’s what made them fun.

And what made them
dangerous.

“I told him it
wouldn’t work,” she confessed. “I told him I was too screwed up. And it’s true,
Thea, you know it is.”

Thea gave an
exasperated sigh and somehow managed to turn up the intensity on that stare.

“You are an idiot,
you know that?”

“Yes?”

“Listen to me,”
Thea said, pointing a finger. That got Lena’s attention. She couldn’t remember
Thea ever, ever pointing a finger at her. “You’re afraid of getting your heart
broken one day, so instead you’re going to break two hearts today? You’re
afraid of losing happiness eventually, so you’re just going to make sure you’re
never happy in the first place? Do you see how that makes no sense at all?”

Lena looked at the
cold linoleum floors, the weight of Thea’s logic proving too much. She was too
tired.

“It’s not supposed
to make sense,” she said finally. “It just is.”

~ * ~ * ~

This had been
easier than Chance thought it would be. Adra had gotten him an address,
somewhere in the Hollywood Hills, and boom. Done. Now he was standing on the
steps, waiting patiently for Roddy Nichols to get up and get over his hangover.

When the door
opened, Chance didn’t wait. He walked in, pressing a binder to Roddy’s chest.

“Dalton? What the
hell are you doing?” Roddy said. He looked like he needed sleep. Sleep and
possibly some detox.

“I’m going to make
you some coffee,” Chance said, calmly walking through the open house to a
gorgeous glass-walled kitchen. “And you’re going to read that for me, right
now, and then you’re going to tell me what you think of it. That’s what we’re
doing.”

Roddy followed
him, waddling as fast as he could. “What? You can’t just show up
unannounced—”

“Obviously I can,”
Chance said, opening cupboards until he found a coffee grinder. This guy had a
nice set up. “C’mon, Roddy, I’m a good guy to have in your debt. Besides, I’m
not leaving until you do it, so it’s not like you have a choice. You don’t even
have to like it. You just have to read it. You like it ground fine or coarse?”

Roddy slumped onto
his breakfast bar in defeat, binder in hand. “Fine. But make me a Bloody Mary,
too, will
ya
? Otherwise this is going to get a whole
lot worse before it gets better, believe me.”

~ * ~ * ~

Thea was just
not
going to let it go. And now that
John was here—John, who was this ridiculous silver-haired dreamboat, all
doting gestures and dirty jokes and a deep tan—he had ganged up on her,
too.

“It’s not just
me,” Lena tried to explain for the millionth time. “It’s him. That’s the point.
I can’t do this to him. I can’t do it to myself. If you saw a disaster coming,
wouldn’t you try to avoid it?”

Thea harrumphed.
“John, do me a favor? Get us some coffee?”

John smiled, his
eyes crinkling in that distinguished way some men have. “I will give you some
private time, yes. But you don’t get coffee. Caffeine, remember?”

“Pseudoscience,”
Thea mumbled, but Lena saw her eyes as she followed John out. Yeah, she loved
him. And he clearly loved her.

It was the major
bright spot in Lena’s life, at the moment.

“You are actually
more of an idiot now than you were yesterday,” Thea said.

“I can’t, Thea,”
she said, quietly. “I can’t do that to him.”

“What? Give him
what he wants? You dummy, I want to see you happy before I die, and apparently
that could be sooner than I planned for. Listen, this is something you don’t
understand,” Thea said, propping herself up on her pillows. “Me? I’m meant to
be on my own most of the time. It’s just how I’m built. And John
gets
that. He’s the same way.
We work together
,
we fit
. But that
is not how you’re built, honey. That’s why you keep trying with all kinds of
guys who aren’t right for you, even though you don’t think you’ll ever find
love. Have you ever stopped to think about that? How strange that behavior is?”

Lena sat down, her
butt protesting against the horrid hospital chair one last time. “Actually,
no.”

“Yeah, well, this
time you’ve found him, and you’re screwing it up. Look at me, Lena. You’re just
scared, but you need that boy. He gets that. Why don’t you?”

~ * ~ * ~

Lola kept
giggling.
Giggling
.
To the point where Chance was starting to worry.

“What is wrong
with you?” he asked her.

Immediately his
cousin put on her game face. “Nothing. Honestly. I swear.”

Chance stared at
her. So that was a lie. But he didn’t have time to figure out what the hell was
going on with Lola at the moment. They had an appointment of sorts, and his
plan had to work.

“Did Ford set you
up?” he asked.

“I set me up,”
Lola said, looking down into her cleavage. “Roman would kill me if I let
another man tape a microphone there, good cause or no. But Ford tested it. It
works.”

“Good. You
remember the deal?”

“Yes, and it’s
delightfully ridiculous. I’ve never gotten to do spy versus spy stuff, Chance,
this is pretty awesome.”

“This
ain’t
a fun outing for your amusement,” he said, glowering.
“It’s to help Lena.”

Suddenly Lola
fixed him with that lightning glare, and he knew he had nothing to worry about.
“Chance, I am not going to allow this scumbag to get away with blackmailing you
or extorting Volare, and I’m certainly not going to let him get away with
hurting Lena. Let’s go get this bastard on tape.”

Chance smiled and
pulled his car into the lot below Paul Cigna’s apartment complex.

“We’re already
here,” he said.

~ * ~ * ~

Lena rode the
elevator up to Thea’s floor feeling…
well,
she should have
been feeling better.
The first night of sleep in her own bed,
a shower, fresh clothes.
She should have been miles ahead of where she’d
been yesterday.

Instead, though,
there was the growing sense that things were profoundly wrong.

She tried to shake
it off until she arrived at Thea’s room to find it empty. She would have
flipped out—she did flip out for about a second—but one of the
nurses caught her.

“She’s upstairs,” the
nurse said. “Moved to a private room.”

A
private room?

Upstairs?

Lena hadn’t been
aware that hospitals had different levels of comfort, but apparently this one
did. She walked into Thea’s new room to find her friend reclining on a pile of
pillows, resplendent in her luxury, doing her best Gloria Swanson impression.

Lena laughed.
“Seriously?”

“I only have one
more night,” Thea said regally. “It might as well be a good one.”

“Ok, but how can
you afford this?”

“My treat,” a
voice said from behind her.

The
voice.

Chance.

Lena would have
thought that, at such a profound moment, she’d have equally profound thoughts,
something that fit the occasion.
But no.
What she
thought was,
Thank God I washed my hair.
The next thing she thought was,
My God,
look at him
. As always, he was effortlessly gorgeous, the sun from the big
windows on the top floor shining on those eyes, that chin, that chest. He
looked comfortable, thumbs in his front pockets, his jeans worn and relaxed,
his
shirt hanging flawlessly off his shoulders. But more than
that he looked comfortable to
her
—he
looked like home.

“Oh Jesus,” she
said.

Lena felt all the
familiar signs: her stomach lurched, her chest tightened. She had no idea what
she was going to do. What he was going to do.

“Don’t mind me,”
Thea called from her bed of luxury. “Just pretend I’m not here.”

“If you pretend to
be asleep, I’ll get you one of those little drinks with an umbrella in it,”
Chance said to Thea. His eyes held Lena’s steadily. She couldn’t have moved if
she’d tried.

“Done,”
Thea
called.

“Chance…” Lena
tried.

“Quiet,” he said.
“I need you to listen.”

Lena blinked. She
obeyed, instinctively, and she was glad to, it made sense to her, and she was
just so happy to have anything at all make sense—and at the same time,
there was a softer edge to what he’d said. To the look he was giving her. To
the way he came over and held her hands.

 
“There’s some things I have to show you
first,” he said, getting his phone out of his back pocket. “It’s pretty clear
to me, Lena, that you still don’t trust the world to treat you right. You don’t
think good things can happen for you. You don’t believe in anyone, least of all
yourself. Well, that is some bullshit. Watch.”

His phone started
to play a shaky video, something he’d evidently shot himself. An auteur Chance
was not, but Lena recognized the man on camera immediately: Roddy Nichols.
Roddy Nichols, looking miserable and hungover in his bathrobe.
Reading from a binder—
her
binder. Her script.

“What—” she
murmured.

“Wait for it,”
Chance said.

On screen, Roddy Nichols
flipped to the last page in the binder, then flipped back to the beginning,
then looked up at the camera in alarm.