Lost Bride Chapter 14

TWELVE

THE MEETING

Lucy looked up and saw strings of twinkling electric lights beyond the trees and the familiar lawn that sloped down to the Hudson River. It was the wedding venue.

“Rory! We’ve done it!”

He struggled to lift his head.

She found a leafy spot for him to lie down, then she tore part of her underskirt and tied it on a tree limb to mark the spot. “I’ll be right back.”

Lucy ran right into a bridal procession in her tartan gown, yelling, “Call an ambulance. I need a doctor! Someone’s hurt!”

There was no doctor at the wedding, but one of the guests was a paramedic. While the wedding proceeded, the paramedic followed Lucy to Rory. “He’s got an infection. He needs antibiotics.”

“What happened to him?”

While they waited for the ambulance, the paramedic attended to Rory and managed to ask too many questions that Lucy couldn’t answer. She rode with Rory to the hospital and watched them wheel him away. Then she sank into a waiting room chair and buried her face in her hands.

Every hour or so, someone came to give her an update. They were giving him strong IV antibiotics, but he’d been septic when he’d arrived, so they were cautious about his prognosis. When pointedly asked, they couldn’t say whether he would pull through. Hour after hour, it was the same thing. At one point, they said he was stable. That was good, she supposed. But they were only cautiously optimistic.

A loud commotion woke Lucy from her slumber. How she’d managed to sleep in a hospital waiting room chair spoke to her exhaustion. She heard Rory’s voice as nurses and orderlies rushed by. “I’ll not be poked like a pincushion. God’s wounds! What’s this?”

“That’s your catheter, hon,” a nurse said.

Lucy followed the commotion and found Rory sitting up, ripping IVs out of his arm and swinging his legs over the side of the hospital bed as three orderlies struggled to restrain him.

“Rory! It’s okay. Let them work on you. They’re saving your life.”

He stopped and looked at her as she stood in the doorway.

“You’ve been sick. Let them help you.”

He gave her a questioning look, and she nodded. Everyone stared at her for an instant then proceeded to reconnect his IVs and equipment. A doctor ordered something that sent Rory back to sleep.

When they’d gotten him hooked up to his IVs again, a nurse came to Lucy. “Would you like to sit in here with him?”

“Yes!”

The nurse smiled. “It’s as much for us as for you. You’ve got a calming effect on him.”

“How is he?”

She smiled. “The fact that he had the energy for all that is a good sign.”

“He’s not like that usually.”

The nurse nodded. “It’s the sepsis. Give the meds time to work.”

Lucy was pretty sure he would have reacted the same way even if he’d awoken in a hospital room with a hangnail. Two IVs, monitors, and a urinary catheter would have been enough to send any eighteenth-century Highlander reaching for his sword. The nurse left, and Lucy sank into the chair beside Rory’s bed.

She didn’t know how long she’d dozed before a nurse woke her. They were moving Rory from the ER to a room. They were full of questions about his insurance coverage, but she told them he was visiting from out of the country, so she would have to get his travel insurance information after he woke. That bought her some time.

When Rory was settled in his room, Lucy picked up the phone by his bed and tried to call her mother but got her voice mail.

“Mom, it’s me. I’m back. I’m with a sick friend in the hospital, and I was wondering if you could come by. I can’t very well stay with Tyler, so I was hoping I might stay with you. I’m kind of stranded here, so do you think you could stop by Tyler’s and bring me my purse? Make sure my phone’s in it? And some jeans and a T-shirt?” She left the hospital name and number and hung up.

She had to get out of her tartan dress. People were starting to look at her strangely, or maybe she was only beginning to notice.

Six hours later, Lucy’s mother hadn’t called back. Since she’d retired a year earlier, Wendy Buchanan spent more time out of the country than in. God knew which elder hostel, or even which country, was housing her now.

Lucy was asleep with her head on her arms at the edge of Rory’s hospital bed when the phone rang. She bolted upright and looked about for a couple of seconds before she recalled where she was, then she picked up the phone.

“Hi, honey! I just got your message.”

“Mom.” She was unexpectedly overwhelmed to hear her mother’s voice, but she pulled it together. “Where are you?”

“I’m on safari.”

“Of course you are. Why wasn’t that my first guess?”

“I’ve been worried about you. Are you okay?”

“Yes, Mom, I’m fine. I just needed some time.” Lucy felt that warm, comforting feeling she could only get from talking to her mother.

“Well, you could have let someone know where you were. That was freaky, seeing you walk through that cave. And then we looked everywhere and couldn’t find you. Where did you go?”

“Long story.”

“Oh, well, I had to borrow a sat phone. I probably shouldn’t talk too long.”

“Okay.”

“Stay at my place. You know where the key is. I fly into Newark the day after tomorrow. See you then!”

“Okay, Mom. Mom?”

“Yes, honey?”

“I love you.”

“I love you too. See you soon!” Her mother said it in that matter-of-fact tone she’d used since Lucy was a young child being put on the bus in the mornings.

“God’s teeth,” Rory grumbled. “I could use a wee dram.”

Lucy glanced over to find Rory looking at her as if he hadn’t been alternating between feverish delirium and unconsciousness for days. Lucy realized she had a death grip on Rory’s hand, so she loosened her grasp. “Sorry.” She looked around. “I can’t get you a whisky, but I might be able to scare up some ice chips.”

“Ice chips? If you cannae at least get me a tankard of ale, I’ve no use for you, woman.”

Her head whipped back toward him. He was lucky he was grinning.

Lucy spent the next couple of days explaining all the strange things he was seeing. He was fascinated by the phone and the TV, taking turns with each item, touching buttons and watching what happened. Lucy walked in from a quick trip to the bathroom to find him on the phone, chatting with someone.

“Oh, aye. Well, I dinnae go this far from the castle as a rule, although I do ride into Inverness once or twice a year. Aye, on horseback. How else?” He listened for a moment. “I like your accent too. What am I wearing? Well, not much at the moment.” He looked up at Lucy. “What a strange thing to ask.”

“Yeah.” She took the phone away from him and hung up. “Rory, you can’t just call strangers. Some of them are, well, strange.”

“She asked where I was from, so I told her Kildermoor Castle, and one thing led to another.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m afraid of. Look, Rory, you can’t just tell people you’ve got a castle in Scotland where you wear a kilt and ride horses and have crofters that farm your land and pay you rent. If one of the nurses hears you, they might extend your stay for a psychological evaluation.”

“Is that bad?”

“For you, it would be.”

One of the things about Rory she’d always admired was his willingness to listen to others. She would defy anyone she knew to find a twenty-first-century guy who could listen like that. “Just let me do most of the talking until you’re checked out.”

His eyes were twinkling.

“What?”

“You’re quite bossy in the future.” When he smiled at her like that, he could say pretty much anything, but she would never share that with him.

She handed him the TV remote. “Here, play with this for a while.”

He set down the remote and took hold of her hand. “I could, but this is far more interesting.” He pressed his lips to her hand.

Lucy grinned. “Somebody’s feeling better.” She practically giggled, but her smile faded quickly when she looked up at the doorway.

“Tyler.” She recovered from her momentary shock as he handed her a grocery bag.

His expression looked like a cross between sheepish and a deer in headlights. For some reason, animal similes were all she could manage for Tyler.

He stared at her as if she were a ghost, which she was, in a way. “Your mom called me. Her flight was delayed.”

“Oh. I wish that she hadn’t bothered you with this.”

He shrugged. “We looked all over for you after you disappeared through that cave.”

“Yeah, pretty much.” That worked as well as any explanation she could think of. There was no use trying to fill in more credible details.

Tyler glanced toward Rory then continued, “Your history major-barista friend—”

“Brittney.”

“Yeah, Brittney. Turns out she wrote a college paper on slavery in New York. Short version—not the version she shared with us, by the way—she was convinced you’d found an old runaway slave tunnel that led down to the river.”

Lucy’s brow furrowed as she listened with interest, then she nodded. “Uh, yeah, that’s more or less how it went.” She shrugged. “I needed some me time.”

He looked down and nodded. A moment of awkwardness passed, then he gestured toward the shopping bag. “So… purse, phone, and charger, and some cash. Your car’s downstairs in the lot. Parking lot ticket is in there too.”

“Thanks. I’m sorry about this.”

He nodded. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I am.” As she said it, she realized how completely all right she was. At the same time, she thought she detected a tinge of sadness in Tyler’s eyes.

“I’m Rory Munro.” With a frosty smile, Rory bowed his head slightly and regarded Tyler with what must have been the eighteenth-century version of a laser death ray.

Lucy’s mouth hung open for a moment. “Oh, sorry. Tyler, this is—”

“Rory. We’ve met.” Tyler looked as though he had a right to object to Rory’s presence but remembered he didn’t. “And Rory is…”

“My boyfriend.” She nervously blurted it out, and now there was no turning back as the words spilled forth. “Yeah, we met in Scotland.”

Tyler nodded, looking confused. “Scotland?”

She flipped her hair. She never flipped her hair. “Yeah, I just went there,” she said with an uneasy laugh. “Oh yeah, Rory has a castle there. His father’s the laird. When he’s not here with me, he wears kilts and rides horses. He taught me to ride. We go riding a lot. On the glen. That’s a valley, and—”

“Lucy,” Rory interrupted. He smiled graciously, but his brow was a tiny bit creased. “Would you mind checking to see if the nurse has my ice chips?”

Lucy squinted, but Rory just smiled back and raised his eyebrows.

“Uh, sure. C’mon, Tyler, I’ll walk you to the elevator.”

They endured awkward small talk while they waited. He told her she could come by anytime to get her belongings. She still had a key. She said she would call first and probably go on a weekday so she wouldn’t bother him, by which she meant so she wouldn’t have to see him again.

She exhaled in relief when the elevator door closed between them. Seeing Tyler for the first time since the wedding had been awkward and painful, but most of all, it had been a relief. She was glad that was done.

And they were done.