friend?”
“We’ve dated in the past.”
“Who sent you a potted plant?”
“My assistant.”
“And the yellow roses?”
“I did.”
The deep, booming voice drew everyone’s attention toward the door. A tall, commanding figure stood in the entrance, filling it with his powerful presence.
“I’m glad you could pull yourself away from the set to visit our daughter.” William St. James entered, making sure the door closed behind him.
Marlena straightened, leveling a narrowed look at the large man making his way to the hospital bed. “Our daughter? You gave up that right twenty years ago.”
Colin’s attention remained on Emma, who pulled the covers up until she was almost hidden beneath them.
“And now that Derek is gone, you want to reclaim what is mine.” Marlena’s voice vibrated with possession.
Emma averted her face, staring away from her parents. Colin advanced closer, wanting to protect Emma from the two people who should love her the most. They squared off, confronting each other at the end of their daughter’s bed. Marlena, not much over five feet, should have been intimidated by William’s sheer size of over six and a half feet. She wasn’t. She matched him glare for glare.
“Contrary to when she was a little girl, our daughter is a grown woman now and can make her own choices.” William inched closer to Marlena, his arms rigid at his sides.
“Not while she’s sick and vulnerable. I won’t let you take advantage of her like that.”
A sheen shimmered in Emma’s eyes. She squeezed them closed. Colin’s heart bled for the woman in the hospital bed, listening to her parents battle over her as though she were a prize in a dogfight.
Colin laid a hand on Emma’s shoulder, wanting to convey support. She didn’t shrink from his touch. That in itself told him how distraught she was over the scene being played out in her hospital room.
“I can protect her. She’s in danger.” William’s hands bunched into fists.
“I can care for her until she’s well. I’m just as capable of hiring a small army to protect my daughter as you are.”
Finally, as though she realized he was touching her, Emma shifted away. “Stop it, you two!” Even though the words she uttered were forceful, her hoarse voice came out on a weak thread.
“For how long, Marlena? Until some man catches your fancy? Or a movie you have to star in sends you halfway around the world? What about the one you’re working on right now?” Oblivious to his daughter’s plea, William uncurled his hands, then knotted them again.
“Jealous I have an exciting life while yours is only filled with boring—”
“Stop it!”
Emma’s words swung both her parents around to face her. Side by side, at the end of the bed, they stared at her. Her mother’s expressive eyes were huge while her father’s veiled his expression.
“I need you all to leave. I won’t be in the middle of you two fighting. I’m tired,” Emma murmured, her voice growing weaker with each word said. As though to emphasize how exhausted she was, her eyes slid closed and some of her tension siphoned from her.
Marlena frowned, glared at her ex-husband, then nodded toward the door. Colin suspected Emma’s mother wanted to resume the argument in the corridor. As she headed toward the door, her jaw set in a determined look while Emma’s father finally exhibited some emotion—hatred.
The intense feelings that churned the air in the small hospital room rocked Colin. He wasn’t even a member of the family, and he felt weary from the brief skirmish waged in front of him, a stranger. What kind of life had Emma St. James been exposed to while growing up, the daughter of two bitter parents each of whom used her to get to the other one? He’d seen it before, and it often left deep scars in the child caught between two warring parents.
He peered down at Emma, her face finally relaxed as the silence flowed, chasing away the echoes of her parents’ exchange. She was petite like Marlena Howard, but that was where the similar physical attributes ended. Beneath the scratches and bruises on her face, he noted a beautiful woman with long black curly hair and soft brown eyes that spoke of emotions she wished she could control. How similar were they beyond the physical?
He’d accomplished what he had set out to do when he’d come into the room. She knew he had hit her with his car. But there was so much more he wanted—needed—to do. And yet, the closed eyes and motionless body told him she wanted him to leave, too. He moved toward the door, his guilt still bearing down on him. He couldn’t blame her for not wanting to talk to him.
He had reached out to grasp the door handle when he heard her say, “Stay, please.”
THREE
Emma shifted on the bed, trying to stifle a moan from escaping when pain lanced through her. Her head and shoulder ached and every square inch of her body was sore, as though a herd of elephants had trampled over her. “I’m sorry you had to be a witness to that.”
“I’m sorry you had to be.”
The reverend’s voice was a deep baritone, smooth sounding with just a hint of a Southern drawl. What did he look like? She tried to imagine him from the way his voice sounded, but it was useless. He could be twenty-five, forty or sixty. She couldn’t tell by the mere sound of his voice. Frustration churned her stomach. As a photographer, her profession centered around the visual, and she had no idea what the man talking to her looked like.
He cleared his throat. “Is there a reason you wanted me to stay?”
Emma heard her mother’s voice from the hallway. Heat scored her cheeks as she thought of all the people in the corridor listening to her mother and father fight. Their marriage and breakup—in fact, all her mother’s three other ones—had played out in the tabloids, making her promise to herself never to have her life plastered before the public like her mother’s. She preferred being behind the camera, not in front.
Emma licked her dry lips and said, “No particular reason. I just—” She couldn’t admit to this stranger that she’d had a sudden fear of being left alone with only darkness around her. She’d always been afraid of the dark and now she lived in it. A tremor of alarm quaked through her.
His footsteps approaching the bed made her tense, her fingernails digging into her palms. The scraping of a chair nearby echoed through her mind, ridiculing her with how helpless she was, lying in this bed.
“I’ll stay as long as you want me to.”
Kindness coated his words, causing a spurt of anger to well inside her. “To appease your guilty conscience?”
“Yes and no,” he replied slowly as though considering his answer carefully. “I tried to avoid you on the highway, but you spun into my path. That’s something I’ll have to live with.”
“No, that’s something
