There was silence on the other end of the cell phone for several seconds, and then a woman’s high pitched voice squeaked, “Is this some sort of prank? How does Angela know someone like Nick Manning? She’s never mentioned it to any of us before.”
Nick swore beneath his breath and counted to ten before replying acidly, “She can catch all of you up on that some other time. Put your father on the line now.”
“But we’re just getting ready to cut the cake! Didn’t Julia tell you it’s my son’s eleventh birthday? Can’t I have my father call you back in, say, fifteen minutes?” whined Marisa.
Nick thought it was a very fortunate thing that Angela’s sister wasn’t here at this very moment, because, while he’d never been violent towards a woman in his life, he’d have been sorely tempted to slap Marisa’s face – hard. “I don’t give a shit about your kid’s cake,” he bit out. “Frankly, I wouldn’t care if your father’s about to have an audience with the frigging pope right now. Put – him – on – the – fucking – phone – now.”
Marisa’s voice was much more subdued as she stammered, “O – okay. Hang on a sec, I’ll get him for you.”
Nick glanced over at the twins, both of whom were giving him the thumbs up, and he couldn’t resist grinning in return. And then a man came on the line, sounding completely confused.
“Hello? My daughter said you were calling about my Angie. Is she all right? What’s happened to my baby?”
Nick forced himself to remain calm as he quickly introduced himself, then filled Gino Del Carlo in on the situation. “She’s about to go into surgery, Mr. Del Carlo, and they weren’t very clear on how long it might take. But I suggest you and your wife leave Carmel as quickly as possible so you can be here when she wakes up. I’ve got Angela’s cell phone with me, so you can call as often as you like for updates during the drive.”
Gino sounded upset, his voice raspy as he assured Nick they would be on the road within the next few minutes. “My wife – she can be a little stubborn sometimes, so it might take me a few minutes to get her out of here. But we’ll be there as soon as we can. Just – don’t let anything bad happen to my Angie, please? I – I know I’ve been a lousy father to her, haven’t been there for her when she needed me. But I love her more than anything else, Nick, I always have. Would you tell her that for me, please?”
“I will,” assured Nick gently. “Though I really think she’d prefer to hear that from you.”
He ended the call, but kept the phone with him. And then he was completely taken aback when Lauren – who just hours earlier had thrown a knife at his head – got up and gave him a hug.
“You’re even more of a badass than I am,” she admitted. “And whether you know it or not, Manning, you just proved to all of us that you’re in love with Angie. And as soon as she wakes up, you’d better tell her that yourself or you’ll wind up on your ass again. Deal?”
Nick laughed in spite of himself. “Yeah, deal.”
***
It was already past the dinner hour, but Nick wasn’t the slightest bit hungry and thus far had resisted all of Julia’s pleas to eat something. Nathan, who was clearly infatuated with his gorgeous wife and seemed reluctant to leave her side even for a minute, had advised Nick to give in gracefully since eventually Julia would get her way. But he’d been spared the ordeal of having to once again refuse both the sandwich and the bowl of soup she’d been trying to force on him by the arrival of the surgeon who’d operated on Angela.
The news, so far, was positive. They had drained the blood that had pooled up inside her brain tissue and everything looked clean. But the surgeon had warned that they really wouldn’t know for sure if the procedure had been successful until Angela woke up and they could perform a few simple tests. There was still the very real possibility that she would need additional surgery, or that complications could arise, and the next dozen hours or so would tell the story.
And when the surgeon had said that one of them could sit with Angela once she was out of recovery, Nick and Lauren had had something of a face-off, each one stubbornly insisting that it ought to be them. It had been Julia – sweet, calm Julia who Nick already liked a whole lot better than her very difficult twin – who had placed a hand on her sister’s arm and murmured quietly, “Angie would want Nick there with her. We both know it. So let him go in first and then you can sit with her after a bit, okay?”
“Fine.” Lauren had pouted sullenly. “But if he’s not going to eat that sandwich you bought him, I call dibs.”
Nick had been all too happy to sacrifice the sandwich he didn’t even want in exchange for getting to see his angel first. And the exact minute the nurse had beckoned him inside the hospital room, he was sitting by her side, picking up the hand that wasn’t punctured with the IV needle.
There was a white bandage on the side of her head where the burr hole had been drilled, but Nick was grateful to see that they’d only had to shave a very small patch of her beautiful hair. The rest of the long raven tresses were tumbled over her pillow, and he carefully smoothed them out, running his fingers through their silky length. Her face was almost as white as the bandage but she looked peaceful and pain free as she continued to sleep off the effects of the anesthesia. The scrapes on her hands had been cleaned up, and to look at her now it was hard to believe how bad off she’d been a few hours ago.
He placed a soft kiss on her palm before bringing it to his cheek. He cleared his throat a couple of times, but his voice still sounded raspy and uneven when he finally spoke.
“I know you can’t hear me right now, Angel, and maybe that’s a good thing,” he began. “Because I’ve got a feeling I might need to rehearse this little speech I’m about to make a few times before I get it right. As you know, I’m not very good at this stuff – talking about my feelings, sharing secrets. I’ve always dismissed it as sappy and sentimental, but the truth of it is that it scares the shit out of me to open up to anyone.”
He talked to her about his parents, how he’d been tossed and tugged between them growing up like some sort of beach ball. About how cold and distant his father had been, and how much Nick had hated all the rules set down for him. And then he told her about his mother – his sweet, slightly loony mother and how every day had been a party for her. He explained about how his need for privacy, for secrecy, had stemmed from all the summers he’d spent with his mother and her celebrity friends, and how his own privacy had been violated too many times to count.
“And when I saw how unhappy my father was with his second – and now third, wife – and how my mother’s idea of a long term relationship encompassed a few months – well, it pretty much turned me off on the ideas of love and commitment,” he admitted. “So I was determined that I’d never end up in the same sort of situation myself, avoided getting serious with a woman like it was the plague.”
Angela’s eyes fluttered weakly and he paused, hoping that she would wake up now and that the doctors could confirm everything was okay. But she merely gave a tiny sigh and kept sleeping, and Nick continued on haltingly.
“And then I met this beautiful, smart, funny and very, very sexy young stockbroker. And I knew from the minute I looked into her gorgeous eyes that we could have something good together. Except I was still scared to death about having a long term relationship, so I deliberately made things as difficult as possible for you, set down ridiculous conditions that no sane person would ever agree to. And I did that to scare you off, so that you’d go running away and I would just forget you and move on to the next woman, same as I always had. “
He squeezed her hand a little tighter. “But you surprised me, Angel.
Shocked
me, more like it. I never, ever expected you to actually agree to what I demanded of you, and I sure as hell never dreamed you could continue to go along with it for so long. And I knew – I always knew, I think – how you felt about me. Because the only reason anyone would have tolerated the way I treated you was because you loved me.”
Nick took several deep breaths before continuing, knowing that she couldn’t hear him but not certain he could deal with hearing himself admit this next part out loud. “When you came home that day from your cousin’s wedding, all upset because of the fight you’d had with your mother, I knew then that things couldn’t go on between us the way they had. No matter how many times you told me you didn’t care about getting married, I knew it wasn’t the truth. So I forced myself to act like an unfeeling asshole, to break things off with you, and tell myself in the process that I was doing what was best for you in the long run. Except that was a lie, Angel. I ended things because
I
was the one who’d gotten too close to
you
. I’d found myself starting to care about you,
really
care, and that sent me over the top.”
He kissed each of her fingers carefully, then brushed an errant strand of hair from her forehead. “Staying away from you after that was one of the toughest things I’ve ever done. You have no idea how many times I started to call you, or stop by your place. I never gave you back your keys, and there were at least ten times I parked outside your building and thought about going up. Strictly to check on you, I told myself, but that was a lie, too. And then I heard through the grapevine that you’d quit your job, went to another firm, and I knew that was your way of moving on. So I left you alone and hoped that you’d find the right guy for you someday, a guy who wasn’t all screwed up like I was and who could offer you a nice, normal sort of relationship.”
The monitors that Angela was hooked up to kept up their steady little rhythm of beeps as he continued to talk in a low, soothing voice. “When I saw you again in April, I was torn apart. I never imagined that you would have taken our breakup so hard, that it would have hurt you so badly. I never imagined,” he added hoarsely, “that you loved me that much. So I’ve been stumbling along these last few months, trying in my usual take charge fashion to make it all up to you. Except that I’ve got no fucking clue about how to have a real relationship, so of course I’ve screwed everything up in the process.”
He gave a short, bitter laugh. “I was even jealous of Dwayne, you know? Oh, not because of his incredible good looks or anything. Like your pal Lauren told me earlier – once a dweeb, always a dweeb. No, I was jealous of him because he made you smile.
Really
smile. And I’m not sure you ever smiled like that for me even once. It made me realize just how big of a jerk I’d been to you when we were together, and how much I still had to learn about making you happy.”
Nick brushed his knuckles against her cheek, relieved to find her skin cool to the touch. “But when I kissed you that day down in Pebble Beach just before Julia’s wedding, I knew I still had a chance with you, that you still cared about me. And yet I kept fighting it, knowing full well that I’d have to change my ways if I wanted to get you back. And it scared the crap out of me, Angel. Me – big, bad Nick Manning, who’d terrorized some of the best quarterbacks in the NFL, the same guy who once told a billionaire that I wouldn’t take his account because he wanted too much control over it. I faced all of that stuff without the slightest hesitation, no fear whatsoever. But compromising my rules in order to have you back in my life – that fucking terrified me, backed me into a corner and so I kept away from you for a few weeks.”
Angela continued to lay motionless, her long, dark eyelashes resting like plush fans on her cheeks, her breathing steady but controlled. Nick squeezed her hand a little tighter, as though willing her to wake up so that the doctors could assure him that everything was fine now, that she’d come out of the surgery like a champ. She
had
to be okay, he thought despairingly, just
had
to. After everything he’d put her through over the past years, everything her family had put her through since birth, Angela deserved to be happy, deserved to be treated like a princess. Deserved, he acknowledged with a sigh, to be loved.
“I should probably be writing all of this down somewhere,” he said jokingly. “Because I really doubt I’ll be able to remember it again. More than that, I hope I don’t chicken out and lose my nerve to actually tell you when you’re fully conscious. Because you deserve to know the truth, Angel, and the truth is that I care about you – a lot more than I’ve let myself believe until recently. And, honestly, I don’t know what it feels like to be in love with someone, because that’s never happened to me before. So maybe when you wake up we can talk about this love thing, and you can help me figure out if that’s what I’m feeling right now. All I know is that I need you in my life again, Angel, and that I’m willing to do whatever it takes to make that happen. And that if anything happens to you – well, I can’t even think about dealing with that right now. So if all that put together means that what I feel for you is love – well, hell. Then, yeah, I’m guessing I love you.”
As Nick continued to watch her carefully for any signs of awareness, the corners of her mouth began to twitch upwards in a semblance of a smile. And then those long, luxurious lashes of hers blinked twice, three times, and she slowly opened her eyes.
“Yeah,” she whispered, her smile broadening. “I would say that’s love. Because that’s exactly how I feel about you, Nick, and I’ve been in love with you for years.”
He laughed just before bending over to press a soft kiss on her lips. “Fess up now, Angel. How long have you been awake and how much of all that did you really hear?”