Chapter 14

By the time they returned from their walk in the woods it was six o'clock and Cole, making up the excuse of a headache, told Dawney that he was going to rest for a couple of hours and to take that time as well to take a hot bath and relax. She asked him, worriedly, if everything was all right and if he wanted an aspirin, but he told her that it was not necessary and that a little rest would put him back on his feet.

The Aspen doctor's house visit had gone as he had predicted: the doctor Wyatt, as well as the doctor Ortega, his personal physician, had been on his game and had told Dawney that yes, the surgery had been successful and he was on the road to recovery, but even if he was not to take heart medication, it was better that he still be in convalescence for a month and that someone watch over him.

“We can never know. Mr. Young is familiar with heart attacks and, another heart attack, could be fatal to him.”

Dr. Wyatt had followed the script perfectly, and in fact, when he had left the chalet, Dawney was decidedly more convinced.

Now, however, that he had succeeded in convincing her, and could say that he had a whole month to show her that he had changed and make it up to her, he wondered how to continue his plan.

He had never been a patient man, although compared to when he was a silly little boy of twenty-one, now that he was thirty-three he was much improved in that aspect.

With Dawney, however, whether he liked it or not, he would have to be. That afternoon he had proposed to her to make the Christmas tree together, but after he had seen her yawn a couple of times during their walk in the woods, although she had tried to hide it, an unexpected sense of protection had awakened in him and, so on the spur of the moment, he had decided that the tree could wait.

Dawney needed to rest and relax. He just hoped that, now that he was in the master bedroom and she was in the guest room, and with two free hours ahead, she would either take the opportunity to try the hot tub or get some sleep. As for him, he would take the opportunity to calm down or take an icy shower to calm his hot spirits'.

When he had seen her in the front doorway of the kitchen, wearing white ski pants and that turtleneck sweater that seemed to make her eyes even greener, there and then he had thought of turning off the gas, yes, but to get close to her, encircle her waist with his arms, and shower her with kisses. Not only was she a beautiful woman, but she was also very intelligent and determined. She was also very courageous, because doing a job like the one she did, in which you could yes save lives, but also be faced with death in its rawest form, was not for everyone and required a considerable amount of cold-bloodedness, as well as the fur on the stomach.

A woman like that would not have let her get away, in fact: he would not have thought twice about asking her to marry him.

“Hey, man, where did you come up with this idea?” he asked himself, surprised by that thought. “You have just found her again after ten years and you are already thinking about wedding? Don't you feel like you're rushing things a bit too much?”

Yet the idea of marrying Dawney did not seem so absurd to him, even though he had never been a believer and, as a young boy, often liked to call himself a “passionate follower of Satan” and, on one occasion, an incident of which he was still deeply ashamed, he had defecated in the flowerpot of a church just for the sake of angering the priest and to show his Razor Edge bandages that he stopped at nothing and that Ozzy Osbourne, compared to him, was just an amateur.

For her, however, he would not only be ready to reconnect with the church, something that would certainly have made his mother very happy, since she was the one who had obliged him and his siblings to go to Mass every Sunday and on the recommended holidays, but also to put on the most elegant tuxedo and wait for her standing in front of the altar. It would have been beautiful to see her walking down the aisle of a church wearing a white gown and a veil covering her face. It would have been beautiful then, months later, to watch her carrying their baby boy or girl.

The thought of Dawney with a baby bump, and pregnant with his son or daughter, was enough to cause him a violent and painful bulge at the level of his groin.

He sighed. “You're really desperate, huh Cole? You really suck,” he said to himself, sarcastically.

And it was only the first day. With forty-six more ahead of him, since, before arriving at his private airport in Aspen, he had proposed to Dawney, during the trip aboard his private jet, to stay until the end of January.

In return, he would have paid her three times the salary they had originally agreed upon.

She, at first, had tried to refuse, saying that she could not stay too far away from the ER and that, surely, her big boss would object, but when he shot her the amount he would pay for that trouble, she thought about it for a while, then agreed, albeit reluctantly.

Sighing again, he turned his head and looked at the black alarm clock that sat on the nightstand next to the four-poster bed: twenty past seven. It was forty minutes until the “second date with Dawney.”

One thing was certain: if he did not want to arouse her suspicions, frighten her, or make her clam up again, he had to solve that “little problem”...by himself.

Although, the last time he had done so, he was thirteen years old and a kid in the midst of a hormonal storm.

***

Finding two free hours ahead, Dawney had taken the opportunity to take another shower, change and get some rest. It had been a grueling day, far too eventful for her liking, but just before drifting off to sleep, she had been awakened by the phone ringing.

At first she had thought about not answering it, but when she had seen Bette's name on the cell phone display, she had decided to answer it.

“Good evening Sleeping Beauty! Strange but true, but I have a good half hour break ahead of me. So, tell me: how was your first day working with the handsome billionaire?”

She had spent the previous fifteen minutes giving her an account of her day, from the time Cole had sent a limousine with a private driver to pick her up at home until they had parted, about an hour and twenty minutes earlier, with the promise to meet at eight o'clock.

It was now twenty past seven, and Dawney, calculating that Bette still had about fifteen minutes of break time, decided that she would greet her at half past seven, so as to give her time to change, freshen up, and get back to work. Now the situation was quiet, but before long, and she knew it, all hell would break loose in the ER.

It always happened that way on weekends, and, Friday night was no exception.

“Man, you don't know how much I envy you, Daw Daw,” she said, calling her by the nickname she had given her on the first day she had started working in the emergency room of the L.A Hospital, “the snow, the woods, a wood and stone chalet, the Christmas tree, a handsome man...it all sounds so romantic!”

“See that you don't run too fast, Betty Boop,” Dawney retorted in a joking tone, apostrophizing her with the nickname she had given her in response to her “Daw Daw”, “I am only here for work, not for fun.”

There was a pause on the other end of the phone.

“Dawney...why, when Mr. Young was hospitalized, did you tell everyone not to tell him that you worked on a permanent basis in the ER?”

Gosh, of course Bette could be really perceptive when she wanted to be!

“Have you already decided what you will do on thirteenth February for your thirtieth birthday?”

It was still almost two full months away, but the whole department was already excited. Bette had promised, already two months earlier and with autumn just beginning, that for her “thirtieth” she would throw a huge party with everyone in the ER common room. That way, if there were emergencies, they could take action right away and come back later to the party.

“Dawney...don't change the subject...” Bette told her, serious. “Come on, we have been working together on ambulances for five years now, and we are friends! We've been through a lot together...”

Dawney bit her lip, not knowing whether or not to open up to her. With the exception of Mark, who knew the truth and who found her in front of the ER door and rescued her first, no one else knew what had happened, and she had always been careful not to tell the details of that night.

Or at least, those few she remembered, since she had been in an alcoholic coma for a week before waking up.

Then when Mark had seen her again, five years later, during her first day of work in the emergency room of the L.A Hospital, he had promised and sworn to her that he would not breathe a word to anyone about that night.

Nor did Karin, who was her sister, know all the details...could she trust in Bette?

“Ten years ago, I was dumped in front of the door of the L.A Hospital emergency room,” she started to tell, “I don't remember much, except that earlier I had attended an after show party with Razor Edge, a rock band that I followed at the time. They gave me a cocktail laced with different drugs...I was already drunk, though, and when I drank it, I felt terrible. Mr. Young...Cole...was frightened, he didn't want any consequences...and so, as the world around me got darker and darker, he loaded me into his car, wrapped me in a blanket, then dropped me in front of a door marked “Emergency Room” and sped away in his car, skidding. Then everything went dark, I was getting sicker and sicker, I felt like I was going to die...then, when I came to, I was confronted by Mark, our “veteran,” who explained me what had happened. He...saved my life, and in a way it was also to his credit that I decided to change my life, resume my studies and become a rescuer.”

More silence. Then Dawney heard a very colorful expression, which made her jerk on the bed.

My, of course when Bette was cursing, she certainly did not save the volume of her voice!

“But, sorry...so are you telling me that you already knew Mr. Young?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” Dawney admitted. “He was the guitarist of the rock band I used to follow, the Razor Edge.”

“Putaine merde,” commented Bette.

When she did not want to make herself understood by her colleagues in the ER, Bette often spoke in French, the native language of her mother and her stepfather, who were from Paris, but in this case the meaning resulted clear even to her, who spoke only English and had begun only a few years ago to study Spanish and Portuguese in order to be able to understand the Latin American patients who occasionally she happened to meet in the ambulance during routine service...or their family members, who had the bad habit of speaking very fast and often did not speak a single word of English.

“Yes,” Dawney commented, finding herself agreeing with her. “It's a big mess to deal with.”

Silence.

“What do you intend to do?” Bette asked her.

“What I have been called to do,” answered Dawney. “My job and that's it. I talked to the doctor in Aspen today, and fortunately, his condition is more encouraging than I thought. But I will still have to stay here a month, at least until the next visit.”

“Hmm...what is he like?”

'Another easy question to answer,' she thought, ironically. “I don't know. He's...different from how I remember him, then he got teetotal as well. Teetotaler him, Cole Young,” she emphasized, “that when I went to the Razor Edge concerts, he was either always drunk or high on some questionable substance. Even though he played the electric guitar like a god.”

“Has he treated you well so far?”

“I can't complain,” she had to admit. “He gave me a very generous deposit to buy me what I needed for Aspen. He got me a dream breakfast in a limousine. And he also gave me a set of designer bath and beauty products.”

“Wow,” commented Bette. “If there should be anything you don't like, remember your best friend and colleague.”

“Without a doubt,” Dawney said. She looked at the alarm clock on the nightstand and saw that it was half past seven. “I have to go now. I still have to take a shower and change, and in half an hour I have to see how Mr. Young is feeling,” invented, even though her hair was still damp and she had already changed, opting for a purple tracksuit with a gold logo on the shirt and a double vertical gold stripe along the seams of the pants.

“All right, I'll leave you, partly because all hell is going to break loose here soon. Be good, Daw Daw, and don't drive your billionaire lover too crazy.”

“Ha, ha, very funny, Betty Boop!”

“See you soon chèrie.”

“Bye bye, beautiful,” she answered and, soon after, closed the communication and placed the phone on the bedside table.

She looked around, for the umpteenth time. The room was very cozy and, to herself, she was looking forward to “fact-testing” it and sleeping in it that first night.

The bed was firm, but also soft, warm and comfortable, and, the three comforters, gave her the impression of lying inside a cloud.

It was by far the most comfortable bed she had ever been in...who knows what it would be like to make love to a man in such a bed?

“Halt, dangerous thought, Dawney!” she admonished herself. “Remember this, always: you are only here for work, nothing else.”

And it was only the first day.