He was already sitting on the edge of the bed, reaching to turn on the lamp. "Yes."
"Do you know an Elodie West?"
His head swiveled around so that he could look at the other side of the bed, where she should have been sleeping as soundly as he had been. But it was empty, and when he touched the sheets, cold.
Dead cold.
Clay was beginning to have an uncomfortable flashback to the phone call he'd gotten five years ago about April. But he swallowed hard and said, "Yes."
"I'm Officer John Clark, Mr. Carver, of the Harden P.D."
"And?" he asked impatiently. He wished the damned man would just spit it out, whatever the news was.
"Your name was in her wallet as her emergency contact. There was an accident. Ms. West was taken to the hospital."
Every corpuscle of blood he owned froze in his veins. Not again. He wouldn't—he couldn't—live through it again.
"Was she—" he corrected his tense, "is she all right?"
"I don't know, sir. She was alive when I last saw her, although she's hurt pretty bad."
Clay shot up and began gathering his clothes. He almost shut off the phone before asking, "Where'd they take her?"
"Liberty Med."
He hung up the phone and tossed it on the bed, shucking into his jeans without underwear and throwing on a t-shirt while calculating how long it was going to take him to get to the hospital, who he knew that he could call before he got there to see what was going on with her—if they'd tell him anything.
Clay fired up his pickup, and laid rubber getting out of the driveway and down the dusty road off the ranch. He tried to stay positive in his mind during the fifteen-minute drive, but it was hard. This was just way too close to home—to his heart. It was the nightmare of five years ago replaying itself. He was afraid that, by the time he got there, she was going to be gone, just like April had been, and again, he wouldn't have had a chance to say goodbye to another love.
Another love.
He loved April.
But now, he also loved Elodie.
And Elodie was here with him—at least for now, he grimaced. He couldn't bear the idea that he might lose her, too, especially having just come to the realization that he loved her as he'd loved April. The same, he thought, but different, because Elodie was as different from April as the sun was from the moon. He was a different person than he'd been with April, a little older and little wiser, and much more of a workaholic than he'd ever been with April, who had done her level best to distract him from his work at any given opportunity, up to and including calling him for phone sex on occasion.
Since her death, he'd thrown himself into his work, and Elodie had only just begun to scratch the surface there—in fact, she'd always tried to be very careful about not interrupting him. He didn't think she'd ever called him during a work day at all.
There was so much more for them to do—besides phone sex at work. They had just begun to come together, really, after all that time of barely knowing each other. He wanted it all—he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her, if she'd have him.
If she lived to be asked, it was the first thing he was going to say to her when he saw her, he swore. The very first thing.
Clay put his accelerator to the floor, flying down 295 well past the fifty miles an hour speed limit around the city, then cutting off on exit four over to Danforth street to get to Liberty Med. He parked in the E.R. parking lot, in a police car spot—damn the consequences and the parking garage—stalking through the sparsely populated lobby and past the receptionists as if he owned the place, his eyes sweeping for any sign of Elodie, calling out her name and opening doors he shouldn't have, attracting a following of nurses and, eventually, security guards.
Chapter 13
"Sir, sir, you're going to have to go back to the waiting room, sir." A large man who wasn't quite Clay's size tried to convince him and corral him back there, but Clay wasn't going anywhere except to Elodie's side.
"Elodie West?" The receptionist heard him yelling "Elodie", and knew immediately who he was. "Are you Clay Carver?"
"Yes—where is she?"
"What's your relationship to her?"
The look Clay gave her made the small round woman look away uncomfortably. "Where is she?" he repeated, his tone making it perfectly clear that he didn't intend to ask again.
"If you'll just take a seat—"
Since she didn't seem to be prepared to be any help, Clay pushed off the smaller security guards and barreled into the exam area, where there were about twenty beds with curtains pulled around them, surrounding the nurses' area in the middle. "Elodie?" He was fully prepared to peep into all of them in order to find her, and he started doing just that when an older, white-haired man came up to him.
"Clay?"
He knew Dr. Jay Douglas from way back, and it was the first time he felt like he'd seen anyone who was going to be of any help to him. "Where is she?"