With a Kiss (10 page)

“There’s also a nasty concussion we want to keep an eye on.”

Liam once more nodded his understanding.

“Now that you’re responsive, I’ll need to examine you for—”

“No!”

The doctor had barely taken a step forward before Liam had his back pressed hard against the sloping frame of the hospital bed. His ribs screamed in pain. His head felt as if it were being split open. Other injuries quickly made themselves known. His wrist caught fire. A sharp stabbing pain sliced up through his rear.

There was no way he could let the other man lay a hand on him.

The doctor hesitated for a moment, a touch of sympathy joining the impatience in his eyes. “I’ll make everything as painless as I can, Liam, but this needs to be done.”

Liam nodded his understanding, but there was no way in hell he could make his heart stop racing or release his painfully tight grip on the bedding.

As the doctor cautiously approached him once more, Liam stared down at his knuckles. He focused as hard as he could on the cramp that spread through the hand and up his arm. That was the only thing he allowed into his mind.

Everything else was happening to someone else, someone who was a long way away, someone who wasn’t even a little bit scared of having another man’s hands on him, someone who wasn’t reminded of an even more painful touch with every movement. It was someone else who was being moved so that intimate parts of his body could be examined, someone else who was finally rearranged again so he lay on his back again.

“You can relax now.” The words must have been spoken to that other man. Liam did his best not to eavesdrop on a conversation that couldn’t possibly have anything to do with him. There was no way in hell anyone could be stupid enough to order him to relax—to think he was capable of obeying such an order.

“Liam.”

A hand came to rest on a shoulder. It shook him very gently. One brain cell at a time, Liam turned his attention away from the hands he’d been staring at for the last fifteen minutes.

Yes, he remembered now, those were his hands. And that was his shoulder that someone was shaking, wasn’t it?

He looked up, into the doctor’s eyes.

“Do you have any questions?”

Liam cleared his throat before he even attempted to speak, but the words still came out in a thin rasping sound. “Which hospital am I at, please?”

“St. Luke’s,” the doctor said. “Does it matter?”

Yes, it mattered. Liam could barely stop himself from looking over his shoulder as if he might find that some fluke had led him to be sharing a room with Marcus. But, of course, he wasn’t. Marcus was probably long gone now.

“I…” Liam swallowed down the lump in his throat and tried again. “When may I leave?”

The doctor peered at him over the top of his glasses. “We’re still waiting for a few test results to come back. Even if we weren’t, you’re in no condition to go anywhere. I’m putting you under observation for twenty-four hours minimum.”

Liam looked down. He was just as trapped there as he had been back in Ralph’s house. It didn’t look like there were steel bars on the doors and windows, but there might as well have been.

Turning his back on the door as the doctor finally left his bedside, Liam curled up into as small a ball as his injuries allowed and pulled the blankets tight around him. It was all he could do not to give in to the temptation to tug them up even further, all the way over his head, as if he were a little kid who could escape the monster who’d shared his bed as easily as he’d evaded those he’d thought might live beneath it.

* * * *

“Liam?”

Liam tried to open his eyes. One side of his face was still a mass of pain, but somehow he managed to pry both lids up.

A nurse stared down at him, barely disguised horror in her eyes. The rest of her expression was cheerful and reassuring, but that didn’t quite conceal how she really felt. Even while his vision remained blurred, Liam recognized her. She didn’t belong in this part of the hospital at all—she should have been up with Marcus. “Jenny?”

The nurse crouched down by the side of the bed so he didn’t have to tilt his head in order to see her properly. “How are you feeling?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” Liam murmured, but he couldn’t make the words sound convincing. “Can I go home now? I…”

She made any other words pointless when she shook her head. Liam didn’t have enough strength to fight about it.

“I do have a nice surprise for you, though,” Jenny said, with an even brighter smile.

Liam frowned slightly. He’d been to the hospital lots of times. There had never been surprises involved before. He wasn’t at all sure he was capable of dealing with any other shock to his system.

“Someone has come all the way down here, especially to visit you.”

The words turned the world slow and sticky. The air around Liam congealed. There was no oxygen in it. A vacuum pulled every molecule of it from his lungs. In slow motion, he managed to shake his head.

That movement woke up other muscles. His shoulders came to life. His arms pushed against the bedding, trying to scramble away from the idea.

He couldn’t be there. Ralph never came to the hospital. In all the times he’d sent Liam there, he’d never once come to visit. He just tossed him in a taxi and paid off the driver. That was the way things were supposed to be.

Twisting his head, Liam looked around the room for any sort of escape route, but there was only the door leading into the hallway, and that was the door that Ralph was going to walk through at any second and…

His back pressed against the pillows hard enough to send waves of pain rebounding through him, up through the cleft between his buttocks and into every other part of his body. Footsteps sounded in the hallway. Something squeaked against the freshly mopped floor.

A wheelchair came into view, a blanket tucked neatly around the legs of whoever was sitting in it. Liam dragged his gaze up to the person’s face.

Marcus…

Liam turned his head toward the nurse, but his eyes remained locked on Marcus’ face for far too long.

“No!” Finally he managed to look across at Jenny, eyes pleading. “No, Jenny, I… I don’t want to see him. Please, tell him to—”

“Liam?”

It was too late. The strong, deep voice already emanated from inside the room. Liam turned away from it as quickly as he was able, painfully rolling his body toward the window and turning his face into the pillow.

The cotton was soft, yet it scraped against his injured face like sandpaper.

Another squeak of rubber wheels against the lino floor sent a second wave of panic through Liam. No. He might have been able to take the rest, but the idea of this sort of pain invading his one refuge, of Marcus seeing him like that—that would make it real. It would make it inescapable and—

“Leave us.”

“Liam?” Jenny asked.

Turning his face farther into the pillow, Liam tried to hide from her as well, as tears flooded his eyes. Gentle fingers stroked through his hair. A moment later, he felt something touch his hand. Hard plastic gradually wormed its way beneath his palm. “Just press the button if you want me. I’ll be right outside. Okay?”

A moment later, the door into the tiny room clicked closed. Marcus was still there. Even while he refused to look in the other man’s direction, Liam could feel the vampire’s presence. The room wasn’t quite the haven Liam remembered Marcus’ room being before the other man woke up, but an unexpected calmness slowly seemed to settle over the space as the seconds passed.

No one said a word. Liam frowned into his pillow. Unease quickly began to bubble inside him. Marcus remaining silent because he slept was one thing. Marcus silent when he seemed to have put so much effort into coming to talk to him hinted that all wasn’t as well for the other man as Liam desperately wanted it to be.

Very slowly, he forced open his eyes and turned his face away from the pillow. The world remained blurry for a few seconds. As it cleared, Liam saw Marcus sitting directly in front of him, studying him very seriously.

Liam closed his eyes again, knowing what the other man must see when he looked at him and hating the whole world for that right then.

Something brushed against his hand once more, but it wasn’t plastic this time. Marcus’ hand slid into his, just as Liam had held the other man’s hand so many times over the last few months, on those occasions when he’d needed human contact and hadn’t thought the other man would know or care that their fingers were wound together.

“I’m sorry,” Liam whispered.

“Hush.” The word was gently spoken, but that didn’t make it sound any the less like an order. Liam had no doubt that Marcus expected it to be obeyed. “You have nothing to be sorry for—except not waking me before you left.”

Liam pried his eyes open once more. The other man’s hand was bigger than his, his fingers longer, they wrapped around his hand perfectly, completely encasing it and protecting it from the world.

Liam didn’t try to make any sort of excuse for anything else. There didn’t seem to be any hope that the other man would take any notice of it if he did. Liam had the distinct impression that Marcus wasn’t the type of man to accept excuses under any circumstances.

Silence descended. It remained until Liam couldn’t stand it anymore. “It…it’s good you’re feeling well enough to get out of bed,” he whispered.

Marcus lifted his other hand and very slowly moved it toward Liam’s face. There was no threat in the gesture—probably because Marcus seemed to be working very hard to ensure that was the case. His fingertips carded through Liam’s hair, brushing it back off his face.

Liam almost smiled at the gentleness, until he realized that the other man was merely trying to get a better view so he could assess the damage more easily.

“How much pain are you in?”

Liam shook his head and ignored the way the gesture made his head ache all the more. “I’m fine, I just—”

Marcus’ fingertip came to rest against Liam’s mouth, quickly silencing him. It pressed against a part of his lips that weren’t split, but that still didn’t make the touch entirely painless. Somehow, Liam managed not to flinch.

If he pulled back, he had the horrible feeling that Marcus might take his hand away, that the vampire would never want to touch him again. Liam couldn’t let that happen. He needed Marcus’ touch far too badly to risk losing it.

“Vampires and humans are different,” Marcus said, his expression very serious. “Vampires are stronger, more resilient. We don’t feel pain the same way humans do. Even so, I’m not a fool, Liam. You’re not fine.”

Liam swallowed rapidly, unable to look the other man in the eye when he spoke to him like that. It brought back far too many memories, not of his time with Ralph, but of a life before that, of those times when he’d been caught being naughty as a child. His eyes turned watery at the memory. If his parents could see him now…

“Try to answer my question again,” Marcus ordered. “How much pain are you in?”

Liam turned his attention back to Marcus’ hand. When he’d been really little, his mother had held his hand when he’d been sick. That had made him feel better too. He found himself tightening his hold on Marcus’ fingers, scared that the other man might try to take them away.

He was completely incapable of lying. “A lot,” he whispered. He was in a lot of pain. “The doctor said they can’t give me anything too strong because they don’t want to mask any indications of a concussion and…”

Marcus shook his head, freeing Liam from the responsibility of finding more words to add to the end of the sentence. The vampire was silent for a few moments. He stared down at Liam’s hand, his expression emotionless.