believed that. “We have to get you to the hospital.”
“I can wait,” Maggie assured him. She gave him a sweet hopeful smile.
Yiannis returned a glare. But he backed out of the car and studied her through the window to the passenger seat. She had her hands folded in her lap.
“You’re enjoying this,” he accused her.
Maggie gave a little sniff. “I’m not enjoying my hip hurting.”
He grimaced guiltily because, of course, that was true. But still he scowled. “Making the most of a bad situation then.”
She dimpled. “Something like that.”
“You think I can’t change a diaper?”
“I think you can do anything,” Maggie said blithely, which was of course the right answer.
It was also true—and he’d prove it. “C’mon, Harry. Give us a minute,” he said gruffly to Maggie and headed back toward the apartment.
It wasn’t that he’d never changed a baby before. Hell, he’d changed a thousand of them. Well, maybe not that many, but when you came from a family the size of his—despite the fact that he was second youngest of his parents’ children—you didn’t escape babysitting. There were always cousins and nephews and nieces to be fobbed off on the unsuspecting—not to mention, unwilling—bystander.
Now he made short work of Harry’s damp diaper and redressed the boy quickly. Apparently changing babies was like riding a bike. You didn’t forget, even if you wanted to. And Harry was reasonably cooperative. He only flipped over and tried to escape twice, and Yiannis had always had quick reflexes.
“There you go,” he said to the baby. “Now let’s get your grandma to the hospital.”
He scrawled a note and left it on the kitchen table for Misty telling her where they were and to feel free to come and get Harry. Then, carrying the baby, he went back down to the garage.
Harry bounced against Yiannis’s hip and grinned and waved his arms and clapped his hands at his grandmother who returned the salute and the smile.
“You are a man among men,” she told Yiannis as he put the boy in his car seat and figured out how to strap him in.
The nearest hospital was just up the coast a few miles. Yiannis had never been there before, but Maggie knew it well.
“It’s where Walter died,” she said.
“You’re not going to die,” Yiannis said, his jaw tight with conviction.
Maggie laughed. “Not today.”
“Not any time soon.” He wouldn’t permit it. He didn’t say anything else, just focused on getting to the hospital as quickly as he could. When they arrived, he pulled into the emergency area and went to get a wheelchair. But before he could, an orderly and a nurse appeared. They efficiently bundled Maggie into the chair and started into the building with her.
“You can fill out the paperwork as soon as you’ve parked,” the nurse told him.
“I’m not—” he began, but they had already disappeared inside the building leaving him alone.
Well, not quite alone. He had Harry.
He was bouncing up and down in his car seat and making cheerful noises. He even smiled when Yiannis bent down to look in at him.
Yiannis managed a semblance of a smile of his own. “Come on,” he said, going around and getting back into the car. “Let’s go find a parking place.”
By the time he did, then extracted Harry from the car seat and went back to the emergency room, Maggie was nowhere to be found.
“They’ve taken her to x-ray,” the lady at the admissions desk beamed at Harry. “Aren’t you a cutie? How old is he?” she asked Yiannis.
“I don’t know.”
Her brows lifted in surprise.
“He’s not mine.”
“Ah, well. Too bad,” she said. Yiannis didn’t think so, but he didn’t bother saying it. “They’ll be back shortly. She did all the paperwork herself, so you’re home free,” the receptionist said. “You can wait here—” she pointed to a busy waiting room where someone was coughing and someone else looked decidedly bloody “—or in the room we put her in.”
Harry was wiggling. Yiannis didn’t think waiting in a room where Harry couldn’t touch things was going to work. “We’ll go for a walk.” He gave her his mobile phone number. “Call me when she’s back.”
In the meantime, he would wander around outside with Harry and make a few calls of his own. He’d been out of the country, scouting out wood suppliers for the past two weeks. He’d dealt with emails while he was gone, but he had a dozen or more phone calls to return. So he played back his messages and began to return his calls, all the while letting Harry crawl around the grass, while he waited for Maggie to be ready to go home.
He was on his fifth call when the receptionist rang him. “Mrs Newell is back from x-ray.”
He scooped Harry up and hurried back to the emergency room.
“Room three,” the receptionist pointed them down the hall when they returned.
Room three was like all emergency rooms everywhere—filled with machines clinking and beeping as they surrounded the gurney on which Maggie lay. The nurse patted her on the arm. “I’ll be right back,” she said. “I just need to make the arrangements.”
“Thank you,” Maggie said to her. She almost didn’t look like Maggie. The Maggie he knew was quick and energetic—and dressed. This Maggie was wearing a hospital gown. Yiannis’s brows lifted.
Maggie grimaced. She looked strained and pale, though when she saw Yiannis, with Harry on his shoulders, she managed a smile.
“Hurting?” Yiannis guessed. But he grinned at her because she would expect that.
“A bit.”
“They’ll take care of it,” he assured her. “You’ll be fine in no time. Ready to run that marathon you’re always talking about.”
“That’s what they tell me. Well, not the marathon part, but the rest.” But she didn’t sound happy about it.
Yiannis grinned, hoping she would, too. “Well, maybe a half-marathon, then,” he said cheerfully. “It’ll be okay,” he assured her.
“They said that, too.”
It wasn’t like Maggie not to look at the bright side. He studied her closely. “Well, then—”
“It’s broken.”
He blinked. “What’s broken?”
“My hip.” Her voice was
