At Any Moment (Gaming The System Book 3) (21 page)

Once he’d finished, I was allowed back inside while he made notes to her chart on his tablet. “She was down to her last three rounds when this happened, and her white blood count is far lower than I would like. So we are going to discontinue the chemotherapy.”

Emilia threw a weak fist pump in the air. “Yesss!”

“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “Is that safe? I mean…if you originally determined twelve rounds and she’s only had nine—”

“We were erring on the side of caution, Mr. Drake, given her circumstances. Her counts are down. She needs to rebuild her immunity. At this point, chemotherapy is no longer effective.”

“Yeah, you heard him,” Emilia said.

I ignored her. “I’m just—well as you say, being cautious is best. But will the chemotherapy be as effective in the long run if it’s been cut short?”

“We originally increased the dosage on her treatment plan for several reasons. Her age, first and foremost. And given the… the circumstances when she began the chemo…”

The doctor was rather delicately referring to the now-terminated pregnancy. I threw a glance at Emilia, who was resting against her pillow and watching the doctor, but her expression had not changed.

“I’m discharging her into your care today, but I’ll be sending a nurse by every day to run a blood test on her. She needs rest and fluids.”

He signed off on the chart and I felt, suddenly, that I wanted to argue with him. I wanted her to have those additional rounds of chemo. “What if you administered the old drug she was on for the additional rounds? So you could keep going—”

“Hell, no,” Emilia muttered.

The doctor had a long-suffering look on his face. “With her white blood count at the levels they are, she isn’t going to be getting any chemo for a while. This last round wiped her out and while it is an effective drug, the reaction she had to it could have seriously damaged her health. She needs to spend these next few weeks resting. But she’s done with chemotherapy unless something is found in the full body scan that indicates she should continue.”

I opened my mouth again but Emilia, recognizing that I was about to push the issue, interrupted. “Adam…”

I stepped back and took a deep breath. Emilia thanked the doctor and said goodbye. She then sat up in the bed and slowly slid off, walking to me.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “You’re exhausted.”

“I don’t like this,” I said, running a hand through my hair.

She slipped her arms around my waist and snuggled against me. “It will be okay. Can you take me home, please?”

So I waited while she changed into the clothes that my housekeeper had dropped off for her. Heath drove us back to the house and I tried to disguise how utterly terrified I was. As long as she was undergoing therapy, we were doing something. The cancer was actively being fought.

But now, we just had to wait and hope that it had been enough. The feeling of uncertainty was enough to gut me. But never, not in a million years, would I ever let Emilia see that.

Chapter Twenty-Three
Mia

“I can help you with one of those, you know,” Adam said the next morning after we’d awoken and were lying in bed, talking. At my request he’d come to sleep beside me again. It had taken no effort at all to coax him. I think he was determined to keep an eye on me after the scare of the night before.

But after we’d slept in, both exhausted from little to no sleep the night before, I’d found the open notebook on my nightstand and had been looking over the list he’d scrawled down. Adam’s writing was usually very even and neat, so the fact that I could barely read this spoke of the duress he’d been under when, apparently, I’d grabbed on to him and insisted he write down my bucket list.

“What did you have in mind to help me with? Sixty-nine or the sex in public?”

His mouth twisted. “Neither one of those. I was thinking the tango.”

I checked out the top of the list. Number one, as a matter of fact. I wanted to dance the tango? I guess I had thought about it before but it seemed an odd thing to put first.

“Don’t tell me you know how to dance the tango, too…”

“I was my cousin Britt’s practice partner by coercion. It wasn’t just for the foxtrot.”

“Mmm. Maybe you can help me knock out a few of these in the next little while.” I waggled my eyebrows suggestively at him.

“Find someone else for sixty-nine.”

I laughed at him. “Oh, so you’re okay with that?”

“No. Did I say ‘find someone else’? I meant ‘cross it the hell off your list.’”

“I could find someone else. Someone into bald chicks. There’s got to be
someone
out there who’s got a cranial fetish.”

He looked at me, reaching up to rub his thumb along my cheekbone. “All it would take is someone with a beautiful woman fetish and there are too many out there with that…” His eyes hardened. “I found mine. They can all go find their own.”

I rewarded his sweet remark with a tight hug around the neck and he coaxed me out of bed to eat a little something. For him, I managed to chew off a corner of toast though the thought of anything more was still too much for me.

For the next few days, he insisted I stay in bed and I humored him because he was so worried about me. The rest of the gang logged in during every spare moment of that time that they could to help me work on the secret quest. We’d spent time slowly gathering the Sergeant’s allies by doing quests for them: finding the lost wedding ring for a lieutenant, sobering up an old, broken captain, busting a roguish type out of jail, and much to our surprise, going back to the beginning, to the original quest-giver, General SylvenWood. He wouldn’t leave his spot at the city gate until we planted a garden of daffodils in honor of his lost love. Once the allies were gathered, we were ready to make progress on breaching the castle.

With the help of the allies, we safely entered the tunnel while they kept the goblins at bay. And we were fortunate to make our way into the castle. We were almost at our goal, but found ourselves stuck once more.

Three days later, when I was back to feeling close to my old self again—my old “post chemo” self, anyway—it was time to teach Mia to dance the tango. I figured what the hell, I’d go with it.

“So you remember that the foxtrot is slow-slow, quick-quick—”

I shot Adam a sardonic look. “Amsterdam was over ten months ago. I don’t remember that.”

“Well, the tango is a lot like the foxtrot. Except the tango goes: slow-slow, quick-quick-slow. And it’s kind of a slide. It’s not hard to learn.”

“I’m sure hearts are breaking all over the West that Adam Drake is dancing the tango with me.”

He smiled at me. “It’s a sexy dance. I’ll be the first to admit it.”

“Well, if it’s sexy and it’s with you, then I’m definitely in.”

“Britt’s coming over to help me teach you.”

And that’s exactly what they did. Down in the dining room, the long table shoved aside, we had tons of room and even though I had to take a break once in a while to rest, I learned the basic steps to the tango.

This went on until right around noon, when Jordan showed up with a briefcase full of work to go over with Adam. He threw a quizzical glance around the room, raised a brow and said, “What’s this, you’re opening a dance studio?”

“Come on in, we’ll show you how to do the polka!” exclaimed Adam’s cousin, Britt.

Jordan glanced around and gave me a nod. “Hey, Mia, glad to see you’re feeling better. Mind if I steal Adam for a bit?”

I smiled. “Be my guest. He’s exhausting me, anyway!”

Adam left me with Britt and followed Jordan out to his office with an invitation for us all to sit down to lunch together afterward.

***

As we watched them go, Britt, suggested we sit down in the living room with some ice water. I think my comment about being exhausted had concerned her. I gave her a smile. She asked after my mom whom, she’d said repeatedly, she adored and firmly believed she was the best thing that had happened to her father in a long time.

Then, after a brief, awkward pause she frowned and shifted in her seat to face me. “How are you feeling, Mia?”

I thought about that for a moment, mentally assessing my energy levels. The achiness was gone but I still got fatigued very easily. I nodded and we went to sit on a nearby couch. I reached up under my cap and scratched my sweaty scalp.

I glanced out the doorway through which Adam had left with Jordan. If Britt noticed, she didn’t say anything. “So…I know everyone asks you how you are doing all the time. You must be getting tired of that. I am curious, though, about how Adam is doing.”

I smiled. “I’m doing better, thanks. And Adam’s…” I hesitated, looked at the doorway again. I shifted in my seat and fell back against the cushion.

“Intense, stressed out and distracted?”

I returned my gaze to Britt, confused for a second.

“It doesn’t take someone with his IQ to figure that out after spending the morning with him.” she smiled.

I shrugged, looking down. “I’m worried about him.”

“He’s worried about you.”

I nodded and darted a glance at her, wondering how much she knew. It was unlikely that Peter or Adam or even my mom would have told her everything that had gone on earlier in the year.

She reached out and patted me on the leg. “It will be okay. It’s his nature. He’s always been the overprotective type.”

“Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.”

Britt’s mouth twisted. “In high school he got into a lot of fights because of my brother.”

I raised my brows—or
would
have raised them if I hadn’t sweated them off already from the dance practice. I made a mental note to use the Sharpie next time I practiced. “That’s…um…that’s so surprising. Wasn’t he a skinny weakling in high school?”

She laughed. “Adam was skinny, but he wasn’t a weakling. He was an excellent runner. But Liam got picked on quite a bit. Kids are so cruel.”

I nodded. “And so Adam was defending his cousin?”

She shrugged. “Well, it started out that way but the one big incident—he told you about that, right?”

He
hadn’t told me about it, no. But I
did
know from Heath, who had looked into Adam’s background while doing research for the auction. Adam had been the victim of a particularly cruel bullying incident in high school. A group of boys had ganged up on him after a track meet and beaten him up, duct taped his arms and legs and mouth and shoved him into a locker, where he stayed until he was found the next morning. It had been so severe that he’d had to be hospitalized. He never returned to the classroom again, choosing to finish high school early via independent study.

“Uh, yeah, I know about that.”

“Those kids started out by picking on my brother, but Adam deflected their attacks onto himself. Then he became the target.”

I sat stunned for a moment. That was beyond awesome of him.

Britt straightened, perhaps realizing that she might be divulging sensitive information. She cleared her throat. “Anyway… it’s just an example of how he is. He wants to be the big protector…and sometimes it really gets him into trouble.”

I took a deep breath and nodded. She hadn’t implied as much, but that same protectiveness had gotten him into trouble with
me.
His overprotectiveness combined with my stubborn independence had made a near-lethal combination for our relationship. I wondered if we could learn from that mistake and overcome those failings. Or were those shortcomings so inherent to our characters that we were doomed to fail regardless?

Britt must have seen the struggle on my face because she put a comforting hand over mine. “Adam is one hell of an awesome guy. And I don’t just say that because he’s family. I know you two have had a rocky road. And I know that this is probably putting a strain on that, but you know what? I’ve never seen him happier, Mia, than since he’s been with you. You two were clearly meant for each other.”

I’d believed that too, once. I cleared my throat of the prickly tears that unexpectedly rose up. It was so frustrating. I was always shamefully close to tears and had been for months. It was almost as if my body and emotions were acting as if I was still pregnant. I bent my head and rubbed my forehead and tried to think of something else so I wouldn’t make a fool out of myself in front of her.

“I don’t want to lose him…” The shaky words slipped out unexpectedly. I was angry with myself the moment they were out of my mouth. On some level, I almost felt like I deserved to lose him.

“You don’t have to worry about that and I think he’d be upset to find out that you were. I think he’d rather you concentrate on getting better.”

He’d said as much—over and over again.

“In fact, you should make that your birthday present to him, since it’s in a few weeks.”

I smiled. “I’m working on it. And since I have no idea what to get him, I guess that’s as good an idea as any.”

She leaned forward and gave me a tight hug. “I think we’d all be delighted with that. Not just him.”

And I wanted nothing more than to give that to all of them. But cancer was cancer. I had as much control in overcoming it as any other disease, like diabetes or polio or even the flu. It happened. Shit happened. And even though the feelings of unworthiness for all of my many flaws tended to weigh me down, I was slowly realizing that this hadn’t happened to me because I’d been unworthy or hadn’t deserved to be healthy.

The blame for other things still sat squarely on my shoulders , but the guilt for this was fading away and making things just a tiny bit lighter. And for that I was grateful.

Chapter Twenty-Four
Adam

I spent about a half hour with Jordan signing paperwork and going over some details on our pet project when he finally stopped, sat back and rubbed his eyes. “Heard you had a scare the other day. She looks like she’s doing a lot better now.”

“She is, thanks.”

“What’s with the dance lessons? Trying to keep her mind off of things?”

“Ahh.” I sat back, rubbing the back of my neck. “Actually it has to do with her bucket list.”

Jordan looked surprised. “She made a bucket list?”

I tightened my jaw and then released it. “Yeah, she wasn’t doing very well at all. I think she thought she wasn’t going to make it. She’s been kind of down lately so I thought this might be something to get her mind off of things.”