The Love She Craves: Selling Her Soul to Declan (2 page)

“I’m helping someone. You’ll have to wait your turn,” the nurse said, copping an attitude as she looked over the rim of her gla
sses at her and promptly turned back to the woman in line.

She tried again. “They brought him in by helicopter….”

“These people were here before you.”

“Please, can you just tell me if he’s alive?” The plaintive tone in the young woman’s voice moved the lady the nurse was helping.

“I can wait,” the woman said, putting her hand on Nyxie’s shoulder and compelling her forward. “Take care of her first.”

“Thank you. Bless you.”

Nyxie wasn’t religious, but always thought it was nice when someone said that to her. Her only experience with religion was attending Vacation Bible School as a kid and even then, she mostly went because they gave her a cookie and a Dixie-cup of Kool-aid every day.

“The last I heard, he’s still alive,” the nurse said. “Alive, but critical.”

The woman picked up the phone handset and pressed a couple of buttons. A few moments ticked off before the nurse spoke into the mouthpiece. “The AeroCare boy’s family is here.”

“Cody Carmichael. His name is Cody Carmichael,” she said hugging a niece under each arm.

“Right. They’re working on him. Someone will be out to talk to you in a few minutes.”

“We can’t go back?”

“You’d be in the way.” The woman rolled her chair back about four feet and spoke to someone in an area that looked like a closet. “Sylvie, the bike accident’s family is here. Are you ready for her?”

Nyxie soon discovered Sylvie worked as the triage nurse. She only wanted Cody’s medical history and she sent Nyxie to sit in the waiting room afterwards.

Nyxie had no concept of time. Lotus and Reina sat unnaturally still, no one saying a word as the minutes ticked away. Every time the doors opened, Nyxie sat up straight, ready to jump up if they called for her.

Eventually, a young nurse wearing blue scrubs and white Crocs came through a pair of double doors and crouched down before her.

“He took the impact on his left side. Left femur, left ulna and radius, broken ribs, concussion and he has internal bleeding. We think it’s his spleen. They’re prepping him for surgery.”

“Please, may I see him before they take him to the OR?”

She looked like she knew she was breaking a rule, but she also knew the boy might die. “Hurry.” The nurse walked quickly and Onyx followed holding her nieces’ hands in a death grip. “Wait here,” the nurse said and frowned when she realized Onyx had brought the girls with her.

Waiting in the corridor for the nurse to return, Nyxie squatted down to speak with Lotus and Reina. “Hold each other’s hand and stay here. I’m going inside,” she said deciding not to let the nurse change her mind. “I’ll only be in there for a couple of minutes. Bear-Bear’s in charge until I get back.”

The girls tried to smile but Reina looked terrified and Lotus’s pale cheeks were streaked with rivulets of tears. She gave them both a quick kiss on their foreheads.

“It’s going to be okay.”

Nyxie hated to lie. Nothing was going to be the same. Even if Cody lived, his recovery would be long and painful. And now CPS would step in. Were they going to take all three children away from her? Would they take them away from the most stable, loving home any of them had ever known—including Onyx?

If CPS needed to get involved, why hadn’t they done it twenty years ago when they could have helped her sister and her, long before Cody was born, long before her sister ran away, gave birth to two babies and became a meth-head?

Dr. Declan Stryker finished consulting with the ER resident, gave the kid a quick glance and was about to head to the OR to begin scrubbing for surgery. He turned and there stood the girl from high school he had fantasized about at least a thousand times.

His eyes darted to the name tag she wore for confirmation and he stood there confused for only a second until he made the connection from Onyx to Nyxie. If she’d used that nickname in high school, he’d never heard it. But then again, he’d never really known her.

He and his parents had moved to the farm town of Chimera Flats, population six thousand and change, his junior year. His father had been hired as the head football coach for the West Texas town and Declan quarterbacked the team. But it wasn’t until the new freshmen came in his senior year, that he saw Onyx Carmichael for the first time.

He’d never lived in a small town before so he didn’t know about the collective consciousness of an inbred community. It reminded him of a Borg hive out of
Picard’s Trek
. Everyone knew everyone, and they all knew each other’s life story. He quickly learned she was
persona non grata
.

Waifish in appearance with jet black hair, huge brown doe eyes and a delicate bone structure, Declan was attracted to her vulnerability. He didn’t understand his burgeoning proclivities, but he did find himself drawn to the loner.

“M-may I see him?” she asked barely sparing a glance at him. That hadn’t changed. If Onyx’s eyes ever met his in school, they immediately turned away.

Declan flipped open the chart and looked at the parts of the paperwork that hadn’t drawn his notice before.
Cody Carmichael, age twelve
. Declan quickly did the math and realized Onyx couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven when he was born.

“What’s your relationship…?”

“I’m his sister and guardian.”

“We’re getting ready to take him upstairs. It’ll have to be quick.”

He only waited as long as it took for her to clear the doorway before he charged out to get ready for surgery.

Christ, he’d have to get his mind off
of her if he was going to concentrate on saving her brother. But damn she looked hot in that short pink waitress outfit. Oh, just the idea of banging her in that dress; made every cell in his body stand up and take notice.

He wondered which came first: his attraction to women who seemed helpless and his desire to dominate them, or his attraction to her.

2

Declan Stryker peeled the plastic gloves off his hands and freed his face from the mask. As he glanced at the clock, he wondered where the time had gone.

He checked his appearance quickly to make sure there was no blood on his scrubs and finding none, he made his way to the surgical waiting room. Thankfully, the operation had gone well so far and the tough little kid was hanging in there.

Onyx Carmichael sat in a corner chair looking pale and shaken. The two girls he’d spotted as he left the trauma bay sat on the floor next to an open box of pizza. Offhandedly, he noticed they shared a small cheese pizza and thought it wasn’t enough to feed three people. Hell, he could eat that much by himself—not that he ate pizza very often these days.

A slice of pizza with no more than a couple of bites out of it, sat on a brown paper towel on her knee as she stared sightlessly at a point in the carpet. The younger girl pretended to feed her teddy bear a bite before she took a nibble of her crust.

“Aunt Nyxie, are you saving yours for Cody? He can have one of mine, too,” the older girl said snapping Onyx out of her thoughts.

“No, Lotus, eat your pizza. The hospital will feed Cody while he’s here.”

“I feel bad eating pizza without him.”

Onyx nodded and lifted her food toward her mouth. She paused with her slice in midair when she spotted him looking at her. Dropping the half-eaten slice back into the box, she rose to her feet and in turn, the girls did as well.

“How is he?” she asked impatiently not waiting for him to speak.

“He’s still in surgery
but he’s holding his own. We had to work in teams. Dr. Patel and I opened up his abdominal cavity to stop his internal bleeding. He took four units of blood and his spleen had to be removed.”

“He can have mine,” she jumped in.

Under other circumstances Declan might have made a disdainful comment over the prospect of performing a spleen transplant but he held back. Normally, that would have been fodder for his friends and him to joke about, but he’d never make fun of Onyx. Even in school, there had been times when the jocks were looking for a victim and her name had come up. She never knew he had thwarted several incidents that would have been directed at her.

“He can live without a spleen. Has the neurosurgeon talked to you yet?”

“No. No one has said anything until now.”

Declan frowned
not feeling comfortable discussing part of the surgery he didn’t perform. He wasn’t even the boy’s attending physician, he was a second year resident. “The pressure on Cody’s brain from the swelling was getting too high. The neurosurgeon felt the best way to give him a chance was to remove part of his skull. So when you see him, prepare yourself, his head will look malformed.”

Declan glanced at the girls and wondered where their mother was. He’d heard the older girl call her
Aunt Nyxie
. Why would their mother leave them with her at a moment like this? Surely, they realized children couldn’t go into the Surgical Intensive Care Unit. And even if they could, the sight of the boy would be traumatizing.

“The orthopedic surgeon is in there now setting the broken bones. I’d say he’ll be in surgery another two to three hours.”

“Oh, God, he’s so little,” she whispered. “How can someone so small have so many injuries?”

He might have pointed out the boy was hit by a truck, but he knew she did not need the question answered.
Stay
on
point
.

“When he comes out, we’re going to keep him in a medically induced coma for a while to give his brain more time to heal.” If she
didn’t already seem devastated he would have prepared her for seeing him on a ventilator but he already felt he’d buried her up to her neck. And Onyx always appeared so vulnerable even now he wanted to protect her.

He could see her fighting her emotions. “Is he going to l-live?”

Declan hesitated. He hated to give a definite answer when there were so many things which could go wrong.

“It’s still touch and go, Onyx. If he makes it through the next seventy-two hours without complications, we might have reason to be optimistic,” he said cautiously. “Do you have any questions?”

Her huge brown eyes stared up at him filled with pain and confusion. He could tell she felt overwhelmed.

He felt overwhelmed, too, to see her so unexpectedly. For God’s sake, he was one of her brother’s doctors not an eighteen-year-old horny teenager. Ignoring the way his cock strained towards her inside of his pants, he told himself he must remain professional and stop imagining her naked, on her knees, tied up with ropes and striped with pink welts.

“My mind is an absolute blank.”

He wished his was. He had to get away from her. “I think that’s pretty understandable. I’m on duty for a few more hours, so if you think of anything, just ask the volunteer at the desk to page me.”

“I don’t think you told me your name.”

His head tilted to one side as he wondered if she was joking. He pulled the cap off his head as if seeing his sun-streaked brown hair would somehow jog her memory. “You don’t remember me?”

Nyxie shook her head. “You’re the doctor who let me see Cody before surgery,” she said, kicking his ego in the balls.

How could she not remember him? He was the star quarterback of the Chimera Flats football team, big man on campus. He made speeches at the pep rallies for the love of Pete.

“Chimera Flats High School…. You were a freshman my senior year.”

Was it his imagination or did she pull the girls in front of her and take a retreating step away from him? Was she protecting the girls or herself?

“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice only a fraction louder than a whisper.

“Don’t be. I doubt we spoke more than once or twice. I’m Declan Stryker. My father—”

“Was the new football coach,” she finished, withdrawing further.

He smiled and
nodded. She remembered his name but hadn’t recognized him. “That’s right.”

Declan’s smiled faded as he realized she wasn’t pleased to see a friendly face from high school. But he doubted there were many people in high school she would consider friendly. He’d never seen her hanging out with anyone, not that he spent much time in the freshman hall, but he saw her every day in the cafeteria, eating alone at the second to last table. Even when the long table filled up, everyone left open spaces around her.

Nyxie broke eye contact first as her attention was drawn to someone entering the room. Declan turned, expecting to see the parents of the her nieces, but instead he found two Chimera Flats police officers pointing out Onyx to a pair of Lubbock cops and a woman who had entered the room with them.

“Are you Onyx Carmichael? I am Rosita Gomez with Child Protective Services. We have some questions for you.”

Declan, acutely aware of the other families awaiting news of their loved ones in surgery, ushered everyone into the consultation room off the main waiting room. He couldn’t say why he didn’t leave. It was none of his concern. She just looked like she could use a friend.

Nyxie sat down on the sofa with a girl under each arm, holding them protectively to her sides. The cops hovered as if they expected her to fight.

Christ, had they come to arrest her?

“The boy who was hit,” the social worker said as she looked down at her paperwork for his name. “Cody Carmichael, you’re his sister?”

“And guardian,” she stated.

“Are you? We have no record of you receiving guardianship of anyone.”

“I’ve always taken care of Cody. A piece of paper doesn’t mean anything.”

The woman frowned and scribbled some notes on a page. “And where are your parents?”

“Daddy died two years ago. Mama is…gone. She’s probably dead, too.”

More notes.

“When was the last time you saw her?” the CPS worker asked.

Onyx gnawed on her bottom lip and hesitated. “Lotus, Reina, go back in the other room and finish the pizza.”

“You’re going to leave them alone again?” The woman’s tone and demeanor throbbed with condescension.

“We’re in the next room,” Nyxie protested.

“Someone could take them.”

Nyxie folded her arms over her chest and stubbornly lifted her chin. “Oh, that’s right; predators always prowl surgical waiting rooms looking for unattended children.” She turned to one of the Chimera Flats cops. “Lew, will you go with them? Lotus and Reina don’t need to hear about my mother—or theirs.”

“Sure thing, Nyxie,” he said in a tone that made Declan understand he knew her and meant her no ill-will.

Onyx waited for them to leave the room before she spoke again. She leveled her eyes at the woman with a steely cold countenance. He instinctively knew the look was a façade.

“The last time I saw my mother; my father raped her and choked her into unconsciousness. When I woke up the next morning, she was gone. I don’t know if she got up and left, or if Daddy got rid of her dead body.”

A Lubbock cop grabbed the radio mic on his shoulder. “What’s your mother’s name?”

“Mandy Carmichael.”

“Mandy or Amanda?”

Nyxie looked confused. “I don’t know. No one called her anything but Mandy.”

The cop gave her a hard stare. “Did you report her missing?”

She shrugged and shook her head. “Daddy said she ran off with a truck driver. I wanted to believe him.”

The older cop stepped away and called his dispatcher about wants or warrants on Onyx’s mother while the caseworker continued to interrogate her.

“How did you get custody of the girls—they do live with you, don’t they?”

“My sister asked if they could spend the night and she never came back.”

Many questions went back and forth between them about the girls’ names and her sister’s name, before they began to get down to specifics about Cody’s accident and her whereabouts at the time.

“I have to work,” Onyx said as if speaking to a child and Declan cringed internally knowing the tone would only serve to provoke the woman. “Do you have any idea how much daycare costs for three kids? It would cost nearly as much as I make.”

“You know there’s financial assistance available to help low income families with daycare?”

“There is?” The rise of the timbre of her voice told Declan she had never known help was available. “I didn’t know. No one ever watched us when we were kids.”

The woman sneered. “Don’t blame your irresponsibility on your parents.”

“Jesus Christ!” Declan cursed no longer able to sit quietly by. “Kids get hit by cars with their parents ten feet away. This was an accident. Can’t you see this woman cares for these kids and is doing her best?”

“Some people’s best isn’t good enough. She’s neglectful and not even apologetic about it,” the woman said. “I’m taking the girls today and the boy when he’s well enough to be discharged. You have two minutes to say goodbye.”

“No, I beg you; please, don’t take my kids away.” Her eyes darted around the room looking for someone who could help her.

“Theatrics will only make this harder on them. I have no qualms about having you arrested if you try to interfere.”

Nyxie’s desperation showed clearly on her face as she led the way to where the girls sat with Officer Lewiston. “Don’t try anything stupid,” the Chimera Flats cop said, grabbing her arm. “It’ll only make things worse. As it is, the D.A. won’t bring charges unless we pursue them, and I know the chief doesn’t want to do that.”

The pizza box filled the trash across the room and the girls sat in the chairs staring up at the TV mounted near the ceiling. Kneeling down between the two girls, Nyxie started to cry.

“This woman’s going to take you to a new home. You know the phone number to the diner—you can call me there any time. Say the numbe
r every morning when you get up so you don’t forget it.”

Lotus leapt out of her chair and wrapped her thin arms around Nyxie’s neck. “Don’t send us away,” Lotus pleaded. “I’m sorry I forgot to call the ambulance.”

“I don’t want you to go, Lotus, I don’t. I would never send you away as punishment. We don’t have a choice. If I can figure out how, I’ll fight this,” she said, her voice noticeably wobbling. “C’mere, Reina, there’s enough room in my arms for both of you. Don’t forget me, Reina, okay.”

“I love you, Aunt Nyxie.”

“I love both of you more than you’ll ever know.”

The cops pried the girls off her neck and carried them fighting and crying out of the room. Onyx put her hands over her ears to block out the girls’ screams as they moved further away leaving her alone in a room full of curious staring eyes.

In a fugue state, she dropped into a chair, bent at the waist and hugged her legs, rocking to comfort herself. A low keen, like the constant engine noise of a car, surrounded her.

Declan sat beside her for five minutes, ten minutes, twenty. Had it not been for the moaning noise, he might have thought she’d gone to sleep with her face buried between her knees.