Her Favorite Rival (24 page)

“It’s the other way around and you know it,” he said as he knelt beside the bed and pressed his palm to his mother’s forehead.

Her eyes opened slowly and she focused on him briefly before closing them again.

“Not feeling so good,” she said. Her cheeks were sunken, her face flushed.

“Don’t look so good, either,” he said lightly.

She was burning up, as Vera had said. He lifted the sheet and did a quick check of her arms and legs. He found the culprit on her inner thigh, near her groin.

“Jesus, Mum,” he said, sitting back on his heels, appalled by the ugly red mess she’d made of her femoral vein.

Only truly desperate junkies shot up into their neck or groins. Usually it meant all other means of getting the drug into their bodies had collapsed. That his mother had been playing this particular game of Russian roulette shouldn’t have had the power to surprise him, but it did. Judy had seen more than one of her friends lose limbs to infections like this over the years. She knew better.

“Was only for a little while,” his mother said without opening her eyes. “Until my arm recovered....”

He was already pulling his phone from his pocket. “You need to be in the hospital.”

She didn’t say a word and he assumed she was resigned to her fate. She was no stranger to the emergency room.

He gave the details to the dispatcher and then did a quick round of the house to ensure his mother didn’t have a stash anywhere. While it was unlikely that the police would turn up with the ambulance, it wasn’t unheard of, and the last thing he needed was his mother being arrested for possession again.

He checked all her usual spots—in the freezer, inside the cushions on the couch, taped beneath the basin in the bathroom.

Nothing. Good. Returning to the bedroom, he put together an overnight bag for his mother. He was folding her dressing gown when a knock sounded.

“That’ll be them,” he said.

“I’ll get it,” Vera said.

“Thanks, Vera.” He made a mental note to do something spectacular for her. Maybe treat her to a holiday in Queensland or something.

When he turned his mother was watching him, tears pooling in her eyes.

“I’ve messed up again, haven’t I?”

He moved to the bed and took her hand. The tendons and bones were visible beneath the skin, and he wondered when she’d last had any fluids.

“They’ll look after you at the hospital.”

She closed her eyes, sending a single, fat tear rolling down her cheek.

“It’s okay, Mum,” he said.

What else was there to say?

The paramedics bustled through the door then, stretcher banging against the wall. Zach stepped out of the way as they did an assessment of his mother before plugging her into a saline drip and loading her onto the stretcher for transport to the hospital.

He followed them out into the street, stopping only to lock the house and thank Vera for her endless patience before trailing them to the hospital.

There he watched as his mother was greeted by name by long-serving doctors and nurses who’d seen her far too many times over the years. He did his best to answer questions and resigned himself to a long wait while they rounded up a vascular specialist. It was five in the morning by the time his mother had been seen and a course of heavy-duty IV antibiotics prescribed by a grim-faced woman in her late forties.

Afterward, Dr. Fawkner called him out of the cubicle to talk.

“You understand that if this infection had gone another day or two, there’s a real risk your mother could have lost her leg, possibly her life?”

“She’s going to be okay, then?” Strange that he had enough hope left in him to be relieved.

“It’s going to be a close run thing, and one of our surgeons is going to have to excise the necrotizing skin around the abscess, but my best bet is that she’s out of the woods. This time.”

Meaning his mother would have yet another scar to add to her collection.

He asked some more questions and listened carefully to her answers. Afterward, he returned to his mother’s bedside. She was dozing, her face slack. Even though he needed to get home and get some sleep, he resumed his seat beside the bed. He didn’t have it in him to abandon her while she was sleeping, even though he knew she was in good hands now.

So he sat, and he waited.

* * *

E
VEN
THOUGH
THE
company had hired a bus to transport everyone to the golf course en masse, Audrey chose to drive there the next morning. That way she could make her escape as soon as possible.

Seated in her car in the dusty gravel parking lot, she tucked her hair behind her ears and slipped on her Makers cap, inspecting the result in the rearview mirror. She’d already smoothed SPF 30 sunscreen onto her face and arms, all the better to withstand a day beneath the warm spring sun.

“Okay. Let’s do this,” she told herself before getting out of the car and hefting her clubs out of the trunk. She’d bought them secondhand after she’d been promoted to buyer, back when she’d kidded herself that she might actually develop an affection for the game. She’d given up that particular delusion after her first tournament, but held on to the clubs anyway. It didn’t hurt to look the part, after all, even if her heart was decidedly not in it.

The buggy wheels bounced over the gravel as she approached the clubhouse, shaking her head a little when she saw the crowd of loudly dressed men milling beneath the broad veranda. Bright pink and yellow and lime-green polo shirts were the order of the day, sartorial statements that had been matched in some instances with equally bright plaid trousers.

She wondered what it was about golf that encouraged middle-aged straight men to dress like children’s entertainers. Truly bizarre.

She spotted a couple of suppliers she knew and headed over to say hello. That was what the day was all about, after all—making them feel special, so that next time she asked them to bend over on pricing and cooperative advertising dollars, they’d touch their toes with a smile instead of a frown.

She chatted with suppliers for nearly forty minutes, all the while a part of her was keeping an eye out for Zach. She didn’t even try to quell the urge these days. What was the point? Despite the time that had passed since they’d been naked in his bed, her awareness of him hadn’t simmered down one iota. Telling herself to get over him was clearly a futile gesture.

She wasn’t sure where that left her, but at least she wasn’t wasting a whole lot of energy pretending she wasn’t feeling the way she was feeling.

One of the organizers began calling for groups to tee off around about the same time that Audrey started to worry about Zach’s failure to appear.

He was never late. Like her, he was a stickler for punctuality. Which meant one of two things: he’d either gotten lost, or something had happened.

A dart of fear tightened her chest and she rolled her eyes. She was being a drama queen. Zach was not lying in a ditch, bleeding to death after a car accident. The odds of that were so high as to be absurd. He was simply held up. Or something.

Chewing on her lower lip, she abandoned her buggy and went to find Gary’s assistant, Jenny. Armed with a clipboard, the other woman was looking frazzled as she tried to organize groups and send them off onto the course.

“Jen, have you seen Zach at all? I need to check if he heard back from Black & Decker about the new rechargeable range,” Audrey said.

She felt stupid the moment she added the explanation to her request. Jen wouldn’t care why she wanted to talk to Zach; the woman was clearly more than a little overwhelmed. Paranoia was turning Audrey into an idiot.

“Haven’t seen him. But if you find him, tell him to come see me. There’s been a change to his team.”

“Sure. Will do.”

Frowning, Audrey moved off to one side of the crowd and pulled her phone from her back pocket. She dialed Zach’s number and swore in annoyance when it immediately went to voice mail. He was on another call or his phone was dead. Either way, he was not contactable.

She glanced over her shoulder. Jenny was talking to Gary, pointing to her clipboard, her face a picture of frustration. Any minute now she was going to run out of teams to send out onto the course and everyone was going to notice that Zach wasn’t here. If it was last year’s tournament, Audrey was almost certain she wouldn’t have broken a sweat over it. But this year... Things were so tense at work. Everyone was doing their damnedest not to put a foot wrong. If Zach didn’t turn up for some reason, it wasn’t going to look good.

She tried his number again, and again got his voice mail. She walked to the head of the driveway and squinted up the highway. Was that a black car she could see on the horizon? She waited until it drew closer, revealing itself to be a minibus full of tourists.

She tried his phone again and swore softly when she got his voice mail for the third time.

“Call me when you get this, Zach. You’re about to miss your tee-off time. If you need directions or...anything, just call, okay?”

She made her way back to the clubhouse. The crowd had thinned considerably and Jenny waved her over when she spotted her.

“There you are! I was beginning to think you’d disappeared. You and your guys are up next, okay?”

“Okay, thanks.”

Jenny started to turn away, but Audrey caught her arm.

“Also, I just spoke to Zach. He had a flat tire, but he said he’d be here as soon as he could.”

“Oh, thanks. I might send his team out without him, then, and he can catch up with them.”

“Sounds like a plan.” Audrey smiled brightly before moving away.

Good one, idiot girl. What happens when Zach turns up and doesn’t know he’s had a flat tire?
Or what if he doesn’t turn up at all?

She would look like a big fat liar. Or something.

Well. So be it.

She cast another look toward the freeway.

Come on, Zach. Move your ass
.

Unsurprisingly, his car didn’t miraculously appear. She pulled her phone out and left one last message on his voice mail, telling him the excuse she’d concocted on his behalf. By then Jenny was hollering for her to go tee off with her team and she grabbed her buggy and headed for the first hole.

Zach was on his own. Wherever that may be.

More than anything, she really hoped he was okay.

* * *

Z
ACH
EASED
OFF
on the accelerator as he rounded the final bend and saw the turnoff for the golf course. The car bucked as he hit the gravel driveway, and he throttled back some more to turn into the crowded parking lot. He swore when he saw there was only a handful of staff hanging around the clubhouse.

He’d missed tee-off. Awesome.

He’d been pretty certain he would, given how late it had been by the time he dropped by his place to change and grab his clubs after leaving the hospital, but there’d still been a seed of hope in his heart.

He found a spot and grabbed his clubs and buggy, trying to decide what was best to do. Strike out on his own in an attempt to find his group? Chase after the closest team and latch onto them?

He was still tossing up options when someone called out to him and he realized that one of the women he’d mistaken for clubhouse staff was actually Jenny, Gary’s assistant.

“You got here!” she said as she strode toward him, a relieved smile on her face.

“Yeah. Sorry I didn’t call, my phone was dead and the charger chose this morning to die.” He shrugged ruefully, not even attempting to hide how frustrated he was. “Sorry if I put a spanner in the works.”

“No worries. Audrey told us about your flat tire, you poor thing. At least you know how to fix it on your own—I’m so hopeless I’d have to wait hours for the car club to come find me,” Jenny said, laughing self-deprecatingly.

He narrowed his eyes. Flat tire? What flat tire? Then he understood what Audrey had done for him and gratitude warmed his chest.

“Yeah. I managed to get a message through to her before my phone died completely.”

Jenny was busy consulting her clipboard. “Your team left about half an hour ago. The pros tell me we should allow about twenty minutes per hole, so if you cut across there—” she pointed across the fairway “—and head through that stand of trees you should be able to catch them at the second green. And if you want to leave your phone with me, I can stick it on my charger, since I brought it with me.”

“Great. Thanks, Jen. And sorry again for the hassle,” he said as he handed over his phone.

“All good, don’t worry.”

Zach tugged his cap lower on his brow as he set off across the grass. Even though he was so tired he could barely see straight thanks to his all-night vigil by his mother’s bedside, he couldn’t keep the grin from his face as he made his way to the second green.

Audrey had covered for him. She’d been worried, and she’d made up an excuse for him and put her own credibility at risk by offering it up to Jenny, even though she’d had no guarantee that he wouldn’t land her in it by inadvertently blowing her story or even by not turning up full stop.

She’d put herself on the line for him.

It was a little ridiculous how happy the realization made him.

She liked him, so much so that she’d tried to prevent him from getting into trouble. The thought made him grin like an idiot.

He hit the second fairway and glanced around to get his bearings. Tee off to his right, green to his left.

As Jenny had predicted, the suppliers he’d been assigned to host for the day were taking their turns to putt. One of them spotted him, alerting the others, and they gave him a round of applause as he climbed the slope to the tightly clipped green.

“Nice of you to join us, Mr. Black,” one of them called.

“Thought I’d better give you guys a head start. Don’t want to make you feel too bad when I wipe the floor with you,” he said.

Pure bravado, given his golfing skills, but a bit of macho bull was the order of the day at these kinds of events. He figured he could be forgiven for stretching the truth a little.