the last group meeting.
“Something like that.” His tone was dry. “A load of pipe fell on me. I’ve got a broken leg.”
She’d never been to Swedish Hospital. Well, truth told, she’d been born there. But she hadn’t been back since.
So finding where she was supposed to go, especially feeling rattled, was tricky. And even once she’d arrived, she still had to find the emergency area and Max who had told her he was going to need surgery.
“Not till I get there!” she’d said at the end of his phone call.
“Well, I’ll tell them to wait,” Max said wryly. “But I don’t suppose they’ll pay much attention. Don’t worry, kid. I’ll still be here whenever you get here. I’m not going anywhere,” he added wearily. “Damn it.”
Neely had said the same two words several times over by the time she finally found herself in the emergency section at Swedish Hospital and hurried toward the reception area.
“I’m here to see Max Grosvenor,” she said breathlessly. “I’m his daughter.”
The receptionist smiled, consulted her list and said, “Yes, we’ve sent him to the Orthopedic Institute for surgery. If you’ll just go out there and across the street.” She pointed in the direction Neely should go. It was the direction she’d just come from.
Neely thanked her and hurried back the way she’d come. The multistory Orthopedic Institute was almost brand-new and definitely state-of-the-art. The receptionist there looked up Max’s name and said, “He’s in surgery, dear.”
“But—” But of course Max was right. It wasn’t up to him, and naturally they’d need to get on it as quickly as possible.
“We have a lovely area where you can wait,” she said and gave Neely directions. “The doctor will come out and talk to you when he’s finished.”
“Thank you.” Neely gave her a quick smile and, still worrying, followed the directions to the waiting area. The last time she’d been in a hospital was when John had suffered a heart attack. Swift and, ultimately, fatal. It wasn’t the same thing at all.
But it had been as unexpected as Max’s accident was, and somehow even though her mind told her to relax, her body was on adrenaline overload. She walked right past the waiting area without realizing it.
“Neely.”
She spun around at the sound of the voice calling her name. “Sebastian?” She stared in consternation at the man standing in the doorway to the waiting room. “What are you doing here?”
“Max called me.”
She let out a breath. Of course he had. She might be Max’s daughter, but Sebastian was his second in command. Slowly she turned and walked back to the room. There were several other people sitting and waiting for other patients. They glanced up disinterestedly as Sebastian led her to a small conversational group and gestured for her to sit down.
She sat. Sebastian sat in a chair next to her. He looked calm and composed, the way he always did. The Iceman returns, Neely thought.
But looking at him more closely, she knew she was wrong. There was tell-tale strain on his face. His jaw was clenched. As she watched, he flexed his fingers, as if he would have cracked his knuckles if he’d been willing to display any feelings at all.
“Did you get here before they took him into surgery?”
“Just.” Now he did crack his knuckles.
“Is he going to be all right? How bad is it?”
“I don’t know a lot. Apparently they’re talking about pins and plates. He didn’t sound thrilled. But he didn’t know too much yet. I suppose it depends on what they find when they get in to do it.”
“Yes.” Neely swallowed. “He’s going to be livid that he won’t be able to go climbing over things, that he’ll have to oversee from the office.”
“Yeah, well, he’s not going to.”
“Not going to what? Stay in the office? He’ll have to!” Trust Max to not know his own limits. She shifted in her chair and gave a despairing shake of her head.
“No, not oversee,” Seb said. “He’s going to be laid up too long. There will be things he can do, certainly. But not the projects he has to be on the ground for. He can stay home and work on new designs. But as far as the other stuff goes, I’m overseeing or delegating.”
His words took a minute to penetrate. The significance of them took even longer.
Finally Neely cocked her head. “What other stuff?” she asked.
And Sebastian ticked off several projects that she knew Max was involved in. “I’m delegating those,” he said. “But I’ll keep an eye on them.”
“And Blake-Carmody?” she asked, because that had been Max’s baby, the one he’d brought her in to work with him on. Was she going to get to do that one?
“That one,” Sebastian said, “is mine.”
* * *
If Neely thought Sebastian was a workaholic before Max’s accident, it was nothing to what he became afterward.
“You don’t have to do everything,” she said. It was like a mantra, she said it so often over the next few days, because regardless of what he’d said about delegating, he didn’t seem to be delegating at all.
He was up at the crack of dawn, working hour upon hour, going between the office, all the construction sites, the design meetings and the hospital where he kept Max updated but, by his own admission, “not very updated,” because Max needed to rest.
Sebastian, apparently, needed no rest at all.
Or needed it less than he needed to prove something to himself.
He was gone before she even got up in the morning, and he rarely got home in time to grab a late meal before Neely went off to bed. One night he didn’t come in before she went to bed and he wasn’t there when she got up, so she wondered if he’d even been home at all.
“No,” he said when she asked him later that morning when she stuck her head in his office at work.
“You can’t go without sleep.”
“I caught a nap on the sofa.” He jerked his head toward the small one in his office. She couldn’t imagine how anyone over the age of ten could have caught any sort of nap on it, without becoming a pretzel in the process. Sebastian was six feet two inches of solid muscle and bone. And stubbornness.
“Not good enough,” she said.
He gave her a steely look. “I didn’t have time, okay? I’ve got to get up to speed on Blake-Carmody. I have a meeting with the committee on Friday and Max said they still had some reservations about the lobby and atrium.”
“Can I help? I just had a meeting with Blake. I know how he thinks.”
