Can't Take the Heat Read Free

child…
    “Kids?” Wes sounds puzzled. “No, of course not.”
    Of course not? Okay, it’s true we planned on waiting a while before having kids, mostly so we could figure out how to handle the day-to-day of raising a child between my weird hours and Sam’s incessant demands on Wes’s time. I guess we haven’t done that yet. Not that there’s any big rush—I’m only twenty-five.
    Shit, no. I must be twenty-eight by now. That would make Wes thirty-two or very close to it.
    “What month is it?” I ask.
    The machine beeps louder, more insistently.
    “You really need to calm down, Ms. Monroe,” the nurse says, an edge of despair in his voice.
    Wes brushes a tangled lock of hair away from my face. “Shh. It’s not that important.”
    “It is important.” I say it even more fiercely than I planned. My eyes sting, and my throat thickens. “I need to know if I missed your birthday.”
    “You shouldn’t be worrying about that right now.”
    I struggle to sit up, but all the tubes and wires make it impossible, which only frustrates me more. “Well, what should I worry about, then? I can’t remember how I got hurt, I don’t know how long I’ve been here, I can’t remember the day we got married. Hell, I don’t even know who’s the President of the United States.”
    “Much to my dad’s distress, that hasn’t changed,” Wes interrupts, the corner of his mouth ticking up.
    Despite my misery and irritation, I let out a gust of laughter. Yeah, that would drive old “get the government regulators off my back” Sam Barrows crazy, all right.
    Another nurse and a doctor—I can tell by the white coat—burst into the room.
    “She’s 162 over 98,” the first nurse says in low, urgent tones.
    Verging on stroke territory. I should get a grip, stop freaking out, but I can’t. It’s too much to process. Or maybe it’s too little. Either way, I’m out of control and I’m not getting it back.
    I reach up to touch Wes’s cheek. He hasn’t shaved in a couple of days, and the dark stubble along his jawline scrapes my palm. This has to be as hard for him as it is for me. Hell, maybe it’s worse, since I have no idea how long he’s been sitting here, waiting for me to wake up.
    “Please, just tell me if I missed your birthday this year.”
    His lips soften into something approaching a smile. “It’s August 23 rd .”
    Three weeks. His birthday is in three weeks.
    “Thank you.”
    Someone says, “Two milligrams of lorazepam, stat!”
    They’re going to put me back under. They don’t want me stroking out. I guess I can appreciate the desired result, even if I don’t care much for the methodology.
    “I’m going to give you the best birthday of your life,” I promise as the nurse pushes the needle into the IV bag’s injection port. I’ve got a matter of seconds before I conk out. “I love you so much, you know.”
    Wes puts his hand over mine. He blinks rapidly, as though he’s holding back tears. “I know, baby. I know.”

    Wes pressed his fingers to his eyes until he saw stars. Of all the nightmare scenarios he’d imagined in the past week, this was one he’d never considered. Perhaps because, on some level, it was a dream come true. From the moment she left him, he had wished for a way to go back and change things. And now, in the most perverse way possible, his wish had come true. For Delaney, at least.
    He still bore the burden of remembering every rotten second.
    “What the hell am I supposed to tell her when she wakes up again?”
    He posed the question to Dr. Jessica Fernandez, Delaney’s neurologist. A dark-haired, dark-eyed woman in her mid- to late-forties, the doctor reminded him a lot of Delaney’s mom, Vivian, who had died of metastatic breast cancer shortly after her daughter graduated from college. The resemblance was both vaguely disturbing and oddly comforting.
    The doctor shifted in the square, vinyl-upholstered waiting room chair. “In most cases like this, I’d recommend