Finally, he wasn’t sure if it was hours or days, he was able to open his eyes, to look around and the pain was…well, it was still bad, but it was at least bearable.
Unfortunately, his little brunette beauty wasn’t by his side. Standing beside him was that same nurse as the last time he’d woken. Had he only been dreaming about the other woman? Had she been a figment of his imagination?
Surely not. The scent, the voice…he knew he’d heard her. And he’d felt her soft hair. It had been curling around his wrist and floating on top of his hip. He hadn’t seen her face, but he was sure that she’d been real.
“Where’s the woman?” he asked, his voice scratchy from lack of use and his eyes felt as if they were barely open. Were his eyes swollen for some reason? He tried to think back, to figure out why he was here in the hospital. But he was more focused on trying to figure out where the soft-haired woman was. He needed her. He desperately wanted to hear her soft voice, to laugh at her debates about math classes and find out what she’d finally decided to do about school.
The nurse shot him a curious look, still not smiling. “Your sister?” she asked, again pausing to write something on the chart at the end of his bed.
“Don’t have a sister,” he croaked out. “The beautiful one. The one that smells good.”
He could have sworn the nurse actually cracked a smile, but then she turned stern once again. “Only family is allowed in during visiting hours,” she stated firmly.
Drake closed his eyes again, but he wasn’t going to sleep through her next visit.
Unfortunately, she never came again. He stayed awake as much as possible but he never saw her return to his side. He asked about her to the nurses and doctors, but all of them gave him the same answer; thin, blue eyes and brown hair. He knew that couldn’t completely describe her and it was almost an obsession to find her, get more information on her.
He spent half of his mental capabilities on devising a plan to get back at the man who had done this to him, and the other half trying to figure out who his mystery woman was. His construction business didn’t falter during his hospitalization, mainly due to the fact that he’d hired many very good employees and they were fully capable of continuing the work on the multiple projects that he had going on across the country. But he wouldn’t let the woman or his retribution leave his mind.
A month after he arrived at the hospital, he was allowed to leave, but with strict instructions on visiting his own doctor or coming back to the hospital for a follow up with his surgeon. He could get the cast off in another two weeks as long as he kept as much of his weight off of it as possible, using the crutches whenever he could. “I’m sure my health insurance is going to skyrocket with this little sojourn,” he said to the nurse as she helped him dress.
The nurse quickly shook her head. “Your entire bill has been paid in full along with a deposit in case you need any other medical assistance because of this accident.”
Drake looked at the nurse strangely. “Who paid all the expenses?” he asked, knowing that the cost would be huge. A month in a hospital, including the long period in which he was in intensive care, wouldn’t be cheap by anyone’s budget.
“The woman we all thought was your sister. She was here all the time that first week, sitting outside your room when she wasn’t allowed in, interrogating the doctors to make sure you were getting everything you needed, bringing us cookies and brownies or just some flowers. I think those were all bribes just to convince us take better care of you,” she joked with a wink as she helped him lower himself into the wheel chair. His leg was still in a cast and several of his ribs were too tender for crutches so he’d be in a wheel chair for a couple more weeks. “You have a very good friend out there. Of course, if we’d known she wasn’t your sister, we wouldn’t have let her into the intensive care room.” She thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “Or maybe we would have. Your vitals definitely were better when she was sitting next to you, holding your hand.”
His foreman and best friend was standing outside the room, ready to bring Drake home for the first time in thirty days. Drake wanted to ask the nurse more, to get a description of the woman he only knew was beautiful with dark, brown hair and tender eyes. He didn’t even remember what color her eyes were, only that they were filled with compassion and hope. Her image had gotten him through the worst of the pain and the hope of seeing her each time he woke up had pushed him to recover more quickly.
When Tony stepped in again, he had a grim expression on his face. “Ready?” he asked.
That reminded him of his plans. Joe Berutelli had done this. He’d remembered the questions, the demands from the shorter man to take bribes, to use different vendors, vendors Drake knew distributed cheaper, inferior materials. Those materials wouldn’t hold up under the long term use of any building and could cause injuries. There had been an argument that afternoon in the man’s office and Drake had stood firm, refusing to relinquish his good name despite ominous threats of chaos and brutality to himself, his family and his workers if he didn’t cooperate with the organized crime gang. After Berutelli had accepted that Drake wasn’t going to play ball, the beating had started.
There had been three goons roughing him up at first. But when Drake was winning, tossing the guys off of him and knocking them out, two more guys showed up, this time with bats. That had been the end of his ability to fight them off. He’d gone down, feeling every punch and smack of the wooden bat.
Drake looked up at his friend, fury raging through his mind now that he was going home. “Absolutely. We have a lot of work to do. Namely, take down one mafia boss,” he replied. “And I’m going to enjoy every moment of this.”
Tony shook his head. “Why don’t we just leave things as is?” he suggested nervously. They had been in the middle of a huge construction job when he’d received word that Drake had been badly beaten and was in the hospital. They all knew who had done it, but Joe Berutelli had come up with a perfect alibi, claiming he had been hosting a party at the time of the attack with numerous witnesses who said that Joe had never left, and also that Drake had left on his own two feet. So the police couldn’t do anything about it.
Drake shook his head, rolling himself out of the room simply because he could now. He had just finished a period in his life when he’d been almost completely incapacitated. He wouldn’t let that happen again. “I can’t let this go, Tony. And don’t worry about anything. I have this all figured out,” he assured the older man.