West of Want (Hearts of the Anemoi) (3 page)

“Welcome back,” the deep voice said.

Ella had almost forgotten someone was there. She released the straw and with effort made herself look up.

The nurse stood next to the side of her bed. She blinked and squinted. Focus slowly returned. He towered above her. His hair was short and dark, unruly curls just at the ends. Close-trimmed facial hair set off an angled jaw and lips pressed in a concerned line.

“More?”

She frowned. The straw stroked her bottom lip. She opened, eagerly drank more of the water. Her throat rejoiced.

“Thank you,” she mouthed, no sound emerging.

“Don’t try to speak. Just rest. And be well.”

She sighed. And slipped into nothingness.

In the early morning gloom, she awoke again. A man, all broad shoulders, stared out through the slats in the blinds. Green scrubs. Her nurse again?

“Water,” she croaked.

He was at her side so fast, she must’ve blinked. A couple of times. She hadn’t seen him move.

This time when she offered her thanks, she could manage a rasping whisper.

His lips curved up, the smallest bit. “You’re welcome.” Intense slate-blue eyes stared down at her. “How are you feeling?”

“Dunno,” she murmured, licking her lips. “What happened?”

His brow furrowed. “You don’t remember?”

She closed her eyes and concentrated. A lump formed in her throat and swelled. “Marcus.” Flashing images of a ferocious storm joined the memory of her brother. “Dead.” She swallowed hard, the sound thick and tortured in her own ears.

“He died?”

Something in his voice begged her attention. She blinked up at him. He’d gone totally still next to her, his expression grave and alarmed. Ella frowned. “Yeah.”

“When this happened to you?”

She opened and closed her mouth. The hair on her arms raised, the air taking on a warm, electrical quality. Obviously, some good drugs dripped into her veins. Still, his intensity did seem weird. Why was he so upset?

He grasped her hand. “Ella, did he die when this happened to you?”

Her gaze fell to his engulfing grip on her fingers. So warm. Her skin tingled where they touched.

The big man leaned across the path of her vision to capture her attention. “Gods, woman, answer me.”

Her head swam. From the effort of remembering the question. From exhaustion. From the roiling power behind his piercing blue eyes. She shook her head once. “No, not then.”

His whole body sagged. The air in the room cooled and calmed. He stood up and turned away, lacing his hands on top of his head. Ella missed the warm connection immediately, but was equally consumed with watching him. For a moment, he muttered and paced along the length of her bed, roughly scrubbing his palms over his face. He had the slightest sprinkling of gray at his temples.

His every movement radiated power. The green scrubs pulled across the muscles of his shoulders, back, and thighs with each step. His very presence took up the whole side of the room in which he paced. He exuded a raw masculinity her body recognized, even if she was in absolutely no position to respond to it.

“You okay?” she scratched out.

He whirled on her, eyes guarded, muscles tense.

The movement was so unexpected, she gasped. Her heart raced, unleashing a series of throbs in her shoulder, neck, and head. She groaned.

“Damn it!” he bit out. He rushed to her and pushed a button on the side of the bed. A big hand smoothed over her forehead. “I’m sorry.”

Ella’s eyes clenched shut against the pounding torment rooting itself behind her eye and ear. But his touch helped. How amazing the power of human touch.

Then it was gone.

Her gaze scanned the room. Empty. A ball of panic bloomed in her gut. Where had he gone? And why had he left?

The door to her room pushed open and a woman with brown skin and pink scrubs breezed in. “Well, welcome back, Ms. Raines. It’s good to see you awake.”

Ella could only manage a drawn-out moan. The nurse was pretty, her smile open, and she wore her black hair in a curly natural style. The woman made pleasant small talk with her while she checked her vitals and entered her findings into a computer on a swivel stand.

“Don’t you worry, now, we’ll get you feeling better in no time. Can you tell me your pain level on a scale of one to ten, with ten the worst pain of your life and one pain-free?”

Licking her lips and forcing herself to focus, Ella considered the question. How did one judge pain? Her shoulder was a good solid six. The throb vibrating through her skull, a seven. But her heart, oh, her heart might never recover. A ten for sure. But Ella supposed that wasn’t the kind of pain the nurse was asking her to describe. “Maybe a seven,” she rasped.

“Okay, honey. Let’s see what we can do about that.” The woman inserted a needle into the IV. Cool solace slid into her veins and tugged at Ella’s consciousness. She almost gave in, before she thought to ask. “The man? The male nurse?” she slurred.

The woman smiled and shook her head. “Musta been a good dream. Only us ladies on this unit.” She went right on, explaining procedures to Ella in case she needed anything, but Ella’s attention drifted away, stolen by the pain medication and the memory of a man who didn’t exist.

…

Zephyros hovered outside the woman’s hospital window, a moth to a flame. He couldn’t explain it, but every effort to leave her since the ambulance crew had carried her off the boat throbbed deep in his chest until he nearly suffocated.

He was just so damned drained. Guilt over hurting her sat like a weight on his chest. Being immersed in freezing water all that time had weakened him to the point he should’ve returned to the Realm of the Gods to be restored. And, if those weren’t enough, Eurus’s lie about Chloris, Zeph’s ex-wife and the first woman he’d ever loved, picked at his brain until he’d driven himself nearly crazy worrying holes into the ridiculous story. Just more of Eurus causing chaos. Had to be. And damn if it hadn’t worked.

Still, he’d have to talk to Father about whatever scheme his brother had in the works.

Zeph’s gaze scanned over the woman sleeping in her bed. The conversation with his father could wait. He just wanted…what? To see her conscious. To know she’d be okay. So he waited. Part of him believed he’d be able to leave when her family showed up. Even if he couldn’t see her awake, he could at least stay until those who would take care of her arrived.

Three days passed.

And she hadn’t awakened.

And no one had come for her.

So Zephyros stayed. He refused to leave her alone, even if she didn’t know he was there. He’d caused this, and he wanted to make it right. Though he couldn’t do a true healing in such a public place, he infused what energy he could into the air of her room, directing it to surround and ease her.

But it wasn’t enough, not nearly enough. His uselessness roiled in his gut, squeezed his heart.

Damn it, he should’ve returned to the Realm of the Gods after his nephew’s anniversary party last week. Even as he’d hovered on the fringes of the partygoers, grief and loneliness had him grinding his teeth to keep his turmoil to himself. Never should he have come into the human realm feeling that way. Clearly, he’d had no business being among mortals.

For that matter, how he’d thought an anniversary party would’ve been anything other than salt in his ancient wounds, he had no idea. He was pleased Boreas’s son, Owen, had found his happiness after so long. The god deserved it and his wife, Megan, was completely worthy of him—Zeph saw that the first time they met. But he couldn’t handle stepping inside someone else’s happily-ever-after, especially when he’d never have one himself.

So he’d raged.

And this woman had paid the price for his torment. Ella, he’d heard the nurses say. Just thinking the name calmed him.

Lingering around the hospital for three days, elemental during the busier daytimes, more often human during the quieter nights, Zephyros had studied the woman, wondered about her. He’d overheard the nurses say she had no family, no husband. How was that possible? Even bruised and battered, with tubes and wires and monitors crisscrossing her body, her youth and beauty shined through. With her eyes wide in her face, dark circles beneath, and bottom lip fuller than the top, hers wasn’t a conventional beauty, but it appealed to him, made him want to know more. How one such as her could be all alone in the world, he simply couldn’t fathom. Or maybe it was just that he didn’t want to, that imagining what caused her solitude just might make him examine the reasons behind his own.

When she’d finally awakened, he’d been torn. Her emergence from unconsciousness should have freed him to depart. But he found it oddly appealing to take care of her, to bring her a drink or hold her hand. His whole existence was about bringing life and marshaling the rebirth of nature after winter’s slumber, and yet those small acts in the dark of a hospital room somehow felt more meaningful.

And then she’d asked him if he was okay. When was the last time someone had expressed care for him instead of contempt? Instead of betrayal? So unexpected, the two words had jolted his heart. Blanketed him for a long moment in a rare sensation of peace.

All of this explained why, three days into the very season his lineage fated him to usher in and oversee, Zephyros, the Supreme God of Spring, Master of the West Wind, found himself haunting a human hospital, standing watch over a mortal woman.

When the female nurse left the room, Zephyros sighed and snaked through the gap in the window frame. Each hour, nurses came in to do routine checks, until finally Ella’s eyes blinked open in the late afternoon. Her awakening heralded a parade of hospital personnel through the room. A doctor gave her a thorough exam. A nurse removed various tubes her conscious state no longer required. A nutritional aide delivered a plastic tray of covered food.

Ella eyed the food and licked her lips. The aide positioned Ella so she could reach everything, and removed all the lids and covers since Ella only had one useful hand. Her right arm, injured somehow in the storm, sat immobilized in a sling. Zephyros grimaced at the watered-down sauce covering limp pasta noodles, but his bigger reaction was an intense desire to feed her from his own hand, to provide her the nourishment that would return her to health. Regardless, she ate with gusto like, well, like a woman who hadn’t eaten solid food in three days. When everything was gone except a container of lime Jell-O, she wiped her mouth, pushed the tray away, and dropped her head back against the pillows.

“Bet you think this is hilarious, don’t you?”

Zephyros’s disembodied gaze cut to her, startled at her speech though there was no way she could know he was there.

“I can just hear you, going on and on about how this is proof positive you’re such a better sailor than I am.” She chuckled ruefully and shook her head. “But I’m still not the one who took out a whole section of dock. I don’t care if you were sixteen.” The smile dropped from her face. Her breathing hitched. “I brought her back, though, Marcus. Somehow I got her back to the marina.”

Zephyros frowned at the mention of the man’s name, but couldn’t deny he was mesmerized by her words and the expressiveness of her face. When she fell asleep again, he stayed. Not because he had to, or felt he should. But because he wanted to. It probably wasn’t in his best interest—and certainly it wasn’t in hers—but where else did he have to be, anyway?

Janet looked at her. “Doctor’s gonna want to know if you have someone who can take you home, stay with you for a few days. Just to be on the safe side. You didn’t have any ID on you when you came in,
so we only had the name and information the marina provided the EMTs.
They said you didn’t have any family here, and we didn’t have any way of contacting anyone.”

Ella nodded, wondering which of her longtime buddies had found her on the
True Blue.
She wasn’t looking forward to facing him, whoever he was. “I’ll have to take a cab home, but if I can make a call, I have someone who I can arrange to come stay with me. Would that work?”

The nurse frowned for a minute, but finally said, “Should. Go ahead and make your call, though, and get those arrangements set up. You really ought to have someone with you.” She moved the room phone to the tray next to Ella’s breakfast.

“Thanks,” Ella said as she picked up her fork. “I’ll call right after I eat. I’m
starving
.”

“An appetite’s a good sign.” Janet smiled and left.

Ella groaned and the fork sagged in her hand. She had no one to call. Parents were gone. Marcus was gone. Craig…she scoffed…no way she’d ask him for help. Not after everything. Among her friends, most lived an hour away in D.C. and had families and jobs of their own they wouldn’t be able to walk away from to come play nursemaid. Not to mention, she had no desire to see the pity in their eyes, to watch them tiptoe around all the landmines in her life.

No thanks.

She’d be fine. What choice did she have? She’d been one of two her whole life, literally, now she needed to go it alone. If everybody else could do it, so could she.