gave a little groan.
“Do I have to?”
“You know you do, honey.”
Eliza reached into her purse to find the four medications Maddie took twice a day, morning and evening. She shook them out and set them on her daughter’s plate. Maddie sighed but obediently picked up her water glass and swallowed them, one after the other, with the ease of long practice.
“My goodness,” Sue exclaimed. “What’s all this?”
“I have to take pills for my heart,” Maddie said. “It doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to and the pills help it, plus I have a little machine in there to make sure it beats the right way. When I get bigger, I might get a new heart like my friend Paige.”
“Oh. Oh, my.”
Jim and Sue both looked astonished. It wasn’t an uncommon reaction. Maddie seemed healthy most of the time. She was healthy, just like other children—to look at her, it would be impossible to know she had a rare, idiopathic form of juvenile cardiomyopathy, a thickening of the lining of her heart.
For the past few years, her condition was wonderfully stable. While the disease was incurable, the pacemaker helped steady her irregular heartbeats and the medications she took slowed the progression of her condition but she would probably need to be put on the heart transplant list before she hit puberty.
The harsh reality constantly prowled through Eliza’s thoughts like a huge, voracious beast that never slept. With the help of her specialists in Boise, Maddie was a happy, well-adjusted girl who was hardly bothered by the fact that she lived with such a serious condition.
Eliza intended to keep it that way.
“She has a heart condition,” she explained. “It required the implantation of a pacemaker when she was two. But she’s doing very well now.”
“I’m a trouper. That’s what my mom calls me.”
“Sounds like that’s exactly what you are.”
She looked up at the voice to find Aidan had returned to the dining area while her attention was focused on Maddie. He watched them with an inscrutable expression.
“You’re a trouper with a horse named Bob,” Jim said.
“Bob comes to the hospital with me when I have to stay there. He likes the nurses a lot, especially when they feed him candy.”
“Well, sure. Who wouldn’t?” Aidan said as he sat back down.
Eliza shifted, uncomfortable that he had overheard the discussion for reasons she couldn’t have explained. She was, no doubt, already an object of pity to him, the widow who had just lost her job and had been hit by a car within five minutes. Throw in a daughter with a serious heart condition and it was a wonder she didn’t have her own personal violin trio following her around playing mournful tunes.
This man had everything he could ever want or need. He was insanely wealthy, powerful, successful. She, on the other hand, probably presented a pathetic picture to him and she hated it.
Aidan Caine, of all people. Why did her path have to cross with him?
She had nurtured a completely unreasonable resentment toward him and Caine Tech since Trent’s death. Logically, she knew he wasn’t to blame directly. He hadn’t even been at the fateful meeting that afternoon.
Her emotions weren’t very rational, however. It was easier to blame him than to accept that her husband had been on a self-destructive path since Maddie’s diagnosis.
She took another spoonful of soup as she listened to Aidan speak with Jim about one of the horses. She had to get over this. The man had been kind enough to give her and Maddie a comfortable—even luxurious—place to stay for the night. She could manage one night in his home and then she would move on without having to speak with him ever again.
Maddie yawned suddenly and set her spoon down with an impolite clatter that made Eliza wince a little. “I’m tired, Mama,” she announced. “Where are we going to sleep tonight?”
Aidan set down his own spoon and slid his chair back from the table. “You both look like you’re ready to drop. I’m sorry to keep you so long out here. Let’s go get you settled.”
She wanted to protest that he could at least finish his dinner but in truth she was exhausted and was more than ready for this miserable day to be over.
The sooner she went to sleep, the sooner she could wake up and begin to figure out how she was going to put life back on an even keel for her and for Maddie.
AIDAN LED THE WAY through the house toward the bedroom suite Sue had suggested might be best for Eliza and her daughter. He really hoped he was going in the right direction. How embarrassing would it be if he got lost in his own home?
He couldn’t believe all the work that had been finished since he’d last seen the house. Though Sue and Jim had kept him apprised of the progress with pictures and even a few videos, the change was remarkable.
When he first saw the house, the logs had been dark and dreary. Since then, an army of workers had sanded and varnished them until they glowed a warm honey.
The changes he had wanted to make to the bones of the house had been completed in record time and Snow Angel Cove now boasted new paint, new carpet and updated electrical and plumbing systems.
A decorating team had come in with new furniture over the long Thanksgiving weekend. He was happy with the result as he studied the furnishings, though he couldn’t help thinking something still seemed missing.
He wasn’t very good at that sort of thing, which was why he tried to hire people who were.
“Is this our room?” Maddie asked when he paused outside the guest suite Sue had suggested.
“Yes. Do you like it?”
She walked into the room, with its gas fireplace, four-poster bed and floor-to-ceiling windows facing the lake. “I like rooms that are pink, usually, but this one is nice,” she said. She looked tired, he thought, more concerned about her than ever now that he knew she suffered from a heart condition.
“It’s a lovely room,” Eliza said. “Thank you.”
Like her daughter, she showed clear signs of exhaustion. Her mouth drooped a little at the corners and she gripped the back of the armchair in the room to steady herself.
The bruise above her temple looked dark and ugly against the pale loveliness of her features. He couldn’t look at it without guilt drenching him like somebody had tossed a bucket of ice water in his face.
He could have killed her and Maddie both.
Yeah, the tires had been terrible on the rental vehicle and black ice had contributed to the accident, but some part of him would always wonder if his own reflexes had somehow been slower than they should have been.
Could
