Nickolas-1 (17 page)

“Dr. Grant? Just do the test. Ms. Becky doesn’t want any information. We’ve discussed this. Please, just finish up so that we can all move on,” Libby said.

Nick looked down at Morgan. She had her left arm over her eyes and her body was trembling. He could see the tears streaming down the side of her face.

He looked at Mrs. Sugar as she shook her head at him. Something wasn’t right.

He wasn’t sure what it could be, but he knew it deep in his heart.

Nick looked over at Damon as he ran a flat instrument over Morgan’s belly.

When she jumped, he soothed her and asked her to lay still. Suddenly, the room was filled with the sound of a heartbeat. Loud and clear. Fast, the beating was so fast. Damon was looking at a little monitor and so he looked too.

Christ. There was a body, small and round. He could make out the beating then; the little heart was pulsing over and over. Then a hand pressed against the monitor, a tiny little hand with fingers so small that he could have put the whole thing into his watch pocket. He burst out laughing. A baby. Morgan had a baby in there.

Nick looked over to Damon just as he was pulling out a large friggin’ needle.

He felt himself sway slightly. He watched, mesmerized, as he slowly pushed the needle into Morgan’s belly. Then he heard her whimper.

Blindly, he reached for her hand and when he touched the back of it, she grabbed him tightly. She clenched him once more, then pulled her hand away and pushed it under her back away from him. The tears were coming down faster now and she was shaking harder. He wanted to knock his brother away and pull her into his arms and comfort her.

“Almost done now, Morgan,” Damon said to her. “You’re doing great.” He watched as he pulled the syringe out and put the tip into a vial and pushed the plunger into it. Clear liquid sprayed into it, and then he turned to Mrs. Sugar.

“Mrs. Sugar, you need to take this and put it into the envelope and then seal it.

Nicky, you need to initial that it is the fluid that I removed from Morgan Becky at sixteen-twenty.”

Nick watched as the vial was verified, and he signed his name across the seal and then again on the receipt that he had watched the procedure. A courier was standing by to take the envelope to the lab on Seventeenth Street. When he went back to the little room, Morgan was gone. The nurse said that they took her to x-ray to do the ultrasound. She would be in her room in about an hour.

“Can I go with her? I’d like to...I don’t know, I want to be with her, I guess.” He didn’t know why, but it seemed like he should.

“I’m sorry, Dr. Grant, but you aren’t her family. Dr. Sheller is very strict about that. You could go back to her room and wait for her.” He didn’t know where she was, so he went back to her room to wait.

When they wheeled her in forty minutes later, he jumped up to help them lift her over to her freshly made bed. He’d been dozing off and on since he’d figured out the chair was as comfortable as it looked.

Morgan was pale and had been crying again. He could see how swollen her eyes were. He could tell she was fighting hard not to say something when the two guys dropped rather than laid her onto her bed. The nurse that came in with them ripped into the men in a heartbeat.

“Be careful, you lummox, she’s hurting. Didn’t anyone ever explain to you two that this is a hospital and people are hurt when they come in? We aren’t supposed to hurt them more trying to care for them. Now, get out before I box your ears. Ms. Becky, Dr. Grant said that you could have something for pain if you’d like it. I think you should take it. You have a really nasty bruise,” Nurse Fist told her.

“No. Thank you, but no. I’m okay.”

Nick watched her roll to her side again. He thought she was trying to tune him out, but he wasn’t having any of it, not today. He needed to talk to her and he needed her to stop crying. Rubbing his chest again, but more over his heart this time, he thought about crawling into the bed with her and holding her tight.

Ms. Fist glanced over his way, but didn’t say anything. When she was out the door, he tried talking to Morgan again.

“Morgan, don’t be an ass. If you hurt, take something for it.” He knew that he could have worded that differently, but he didn’t want her to hurt.

“Get out. I’ve taken your tests, now get out.” She had said it so low, he wasn’t sure if he’d heard her correctly.

“Morgan, honey, we need to talk about things. I think there has been a few things said that shouldn’t have—”

“I’m not your honey and I said to get out. Now. Dr. Sheller said you’ll have your results tomorrow. I want you to go away.”

“Morgan, I want to...” He jumped back when she sat up quickly. Her lip was still swollen and her eye was still closed from the beating she’d taken yesterday.

There looked to be about a dozen stitches in her cheek, sealing the deep wound.

He didn’t notice that, not right now. All he could focus on was her belly. In the move from the gurney to the bed, her gown must have shifted, exposing her entire swollen frame when she sat up.

Morgan’s skin was tight and hard-looking along her abdomen. Her small frame looked oddly disproportional to the size of her belly. Her breasts had been full before. He remembered their weight and fullness in his hand and mouth.

Now, they were larger and fuller than he remembered. Her nipples, a rosy shade of pink, were distended and darker. A deeper pink, almost rose. And then there were the bruises.

All along her ribs and arms were deep, purpling marks, some as large as his fist. There was a perfect imprint of fingers where someone had wrapped their hand around her upper arm and squeezed her hard. Her tight left thigh was bruised as well with an angry cut that looked deep and painful. There was a large bruise below her distended belly, just above her hip where Damon had taken the sample from her.

“Ah, Morgan, honey. I’m so...”

“
Get out
! Get out now. Please, I beg you, just go away. Please, just go away.” She pulled the sheet over her and lay back down. She was sobbing now, loud and hard. His heart broke for her. He started to go to her, to make her let him hold her. But the nurses, the entire shift, it looked to him, came rushing in at that moment. One of them ushered him out and closed the curtain to surround her bed. Even just on the other side of the door, he could still hear her crying. He wasn’t sure he’d ever forget the sound.

“Come on, honey. You’ll be all right. That man say something to you? I’ll have one of them orderlies run him right outta the hospital. Bastard. Men, who the hell needs’em? Come on now, you’re gonna throw up if you don’t calm down.”

Morgan just wanted everyone to go away. She body ached in ways and places she’d never realized, and her heart hurt in way she didn’t realize it could.

Damon had told her he’d be in to talk to her later tonight. Give her her options.

Options. She didn’t have a clue what sort of options he thought she might have, but she nodded to him anyway.

Nickolas still didn’t believe her. Not that she really thought he would. Why should he? She’d tried to trap him, hadn’t she?

When Damon had told her that Nicky was going to be a witness to the procedure, she wanted to shout at him, “No!” but Nickolas needed this for some sort of closure, and she wanted...she wanted to thumb her nose at him. He’d hurt her.

Morgan realized two weeks ago that she was letting him hurt her, and she resolved to do something about it. It was then that she realized that she loved him, despite all that had happened. Her foolish heart had decided that he was what it wanted and that was all there was to it.

When she pulled her hand to her cheek for the comfort, she realized she didn’t have her sleeper. She felt around under the sheet looking for it and couldn’t feel the soft terry cloth anywhere. She’d had it last in the examining room down in x-ray. She needed her sleeper.

“I had a blue thing, a sleeper. Can you help me find it? I had it downstairs.” The other nurses had left, but Shannon has stayed.

Morgan liked her. She was the kindest person she’d met in the hospital. Not that everyone else hadn’t been great to her, but Shannon had been friendly and nice to her.

“I’ll call down and see if you left it on the bed. You’ll need to get another one of those, won’t you?” Shannon walked out of the room and left Morgan wondering what she meant.

~~~

“Nicky, it’s Byron. I’d like to know if you can meet me for dinner. I have something I’d like to discuss with you. It’s important.” Nick didn’t want to meet him or anyone. He wanted to go back to the hospital and sit with Morgan. But the staff had said she was having a really bad night and they’d had to give her something to relax. She was sleeping. He had actually thought he’d have a better chance of talking to her relaxed and half comatose, but he didn’t think they’d agree.

“Yeah, okay. But a bar. I want a drink with dinner. Oh, and Damon is with me, is that okay?” Damon had been with him most of the early evening. Damon still wasn’t speaking to him, but he’d been tagging along all the same.

“Yeah, sure. The more the merrier. Have you seen Morgan? I mean tonight.

Have you been in to see her tonight?”

“No, I went by her room and the nurse said she was sleeping. Said she’d had a bad afternoon and had to sedate her.” Nick had wondered about that too. Was it because it was less than twenty-four hours until truth time, or was there something else? She looked like she could use a good meal and several days of uninterrupted sleep.

“All right, I’ll see you at that place on Tenth?” Byron had just ringed off when his cell rang again. It was Spencer. “Hey, Spence. What’s going on?” It was really late for him to be calling, at nine-thirty.

He and Meggie were usually sound asleep.

“Meggie and I are in town for the night. We came in to see Morgan, but she’s asleep. Meggie wants to know if you’ll take her to dinner. She said you owe her.” Nick smiled. Sure, Meggie wanted to have dinner with him.

“I was just going over to Bergen’s with Damon and Byron. If she doesn’t mind her other uncles coming along, I’ll pay up there.” He waited for him to relay the message to her and could hear her clapping her hands. It sounded like she was happy with the idea.

“Yeah, we’ll meet you there. I wanna talk to you about something too.” This time, he made it all the way in the car before his phone went off again.

His Mom. As Damon was driving, Nick put the phone to his ear to put on his seatbelt as he answered. “Hi, Mom. Everything okay?” Again, another early riser up past ten o’clock. He wondered if Dan was with her.

“Hello, Nicky. I was wondering if you’d like to have dinner with me tonight?

I don’t want to eat by myself. Also, I want to talk to you about something. It’s really important.” Her and everyone else, it seemed.

“Yeah, we’re all going to go to Bergen’s. You want to meet us there?” He was sure that nothing any of them had to talk to him about was going to bode well for him.

“Us? Who’s with you now? Oh, my, here’s Jamie and Devin. We’ll all meet you there. If you hear from Dan, tell him to come there.” And she hung up.

Great
, he thought. All the gang was here now. Now he wished he’d driven his own car. Then if they made him too mad, he could just leave. Riding with Damon made for a less than graceful exit.

By ten-thirty, they were all seated in a huge private dining area. In addition to his brothers and Meggie were his mom, Dan, Jacob and James. It was almost eleven-thirty by the time they ordered and had their salads.

“This is very nice. I’m very glad you all are here in town tonight. Did anyone get to see Morgan earlier tonight?” His mother beamed around the table.

“Yeah, about that. How many of you are planning to be there tomorrow when the results come in?” Devin asked the room after the waitress left.

Everyone in the room, including the children, raised their hands.

“Okay, let me rephrase that. How many adults are going to be there tomorrow? My office isn’t big enough to house a brigade.”

“Deal with it, young man. We all want to be there for Nicky. When will Morgan get the results, before or after?” His mother asked. “I’m assuming she won’t be traveling to your office.”

Nick hadn’t thought of that. She was on bed rest until Tuesday morning.

Then, he’d meant to ask Damon about her results of the examination, but had gotten side tracked by all the phone calls.

Nick saw Devin glance quickly at Damon. “What is it? What’s going on with Morgan?” Nick asked sharply. He knew it was a little too sharp when Jacob backed up in his chair.

“She won’t be getting the results. Mrs. Sugar is going to be there to answer any questions, but Morgan is... Morgan doesn’t get the results. She doesn’t want them,” Devin said.

“What do you mean, she doesn’t want them? How will she know..?”
Because
she already knows
, he thought. She’d known all along who the father of her baby was. This had all been a...trick of some sort, a slick, sick trick. “Christ.” Nick stood up. He suddenly needed to talk to her. He didn’t have any clue what he was going to say, but he wanted to talk to her. He wished he’d never met her.

No, that wasn’t true. He wished he’d of done things differently, but he was very glad he’d met her. Very glad.

“Nick, I’m going to ask Morgan to marry me. Tomorrow, before the results are read,” Byron said. He pulled a jeweler’s box from his jacket pocket and set it on the table in front of his salad plate.

Nick was suddenly weak in the knees. It was a good thing he’d not stepped away from the table, he thought, or he’d be on his ass on the floor.

“Really? Not if I ask her first,” Spencer said as he, too, pulled a blue box out of his pocket. Tiffany’s.
Shit and double shit
. “I talked it over with Meggie, and she said she really liked Morgan. I think we could get along well enough.” He pulled his daughter up in his lap as he spoke and smiled at her.

Damon didn’t say a word, but put his baby blue box on the table, as well.

Three brothers, three rings.

Damn it. They were not going to marry her. It wasn’t their baby, and he had to do something to stop them from making the biggest mistake of their lives. He stood again and was just ready to blast them all to hell and back when Devin’s phone shrilled in the silence.