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If he hadn’t done that, the car that was jumping the light, accelerating, would have missed their rear bumper by a hairbreadth as they zoomed beneath an amber turning red.
Instead, Alexandra’s expression flashed to horror in a blinding light. There was a screech of metal and an impact that rotated the car, throwing Rafael toward her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
RAFAEL WAS BEGINNING to appreciate Alexandra’s hatred toward her parents. He’d always seen her mother’s superficial nature and timid deference to her husband as pitiful. Humbolt was a self-important bully who occasionally needed a threat of legal action to back off, but he was a coward at heart so he didn’t deserve to be feared.
Then Rafael overheard them trying to transfer his unconscious wife to New York and nearly came out of his skin.
They must have heard about the crash on the news and leaped on the first plane to Rome, but their concern was very much for themselves, not Alexandra.
“A move like that would be dangerous.” That Italian-accented voice sounded like one of their doctors. “We haven’t detected any bleeding on the brain, but we’re presuming concussion and treating her accordingly.”
“But why isn’t she waking up? We can get better treatment in America,” Winnie Humbolt claimed.
Better than a world-class private hospital in Rome? Rafael’s driver had been conscious enough to identify them to the medics, ensuring they were given top-level care from the moment they arrived. The driver was also receiving treatment here and thankfully would make a full recovery.
Rafael wouldn’t take a full breath until he heard the same thing about his wife, though.
“We’re keeping her sedated as a precaution,” the doctor said in a placating tone.
“Tell your chief of staff to make the arrangements.” Anson Humbolt used the brisk tone of a man who was used to stepping on people to get what he wanted.
“Doctor,” Rafael rasped in the strongest voice he could muster. It made his entire body throb.
A man in a white coat pushed through the cracked door, revealing Winnie and Anson Humbolt hovering in the hall, looking wrinkled and weary from travel.
“If you allow them to take my wife anywhere, you are the second person I will kill on the way to getting her back.” Humbolt would be the first.
It was a laughable threat, given he was still swimming in anesthetic from the surgery he’d had last night, to pin his broken leg. He could only see out of one eye and the twenty stitches on his arm gave him only one good one for swinging a punch, but he meant every word.
“Rest, signore,” the doctor urged him. “Your wife is stable and her vitals are strong. She isn’t going anywhere until she wakes and we can assess her condition.”
Aside from hitting her head on the window and bruises from her seat belt, she had escaped serious injury, but he wished they would wean her off the sedation so he could see that for himself. The physical pain in his body was nothing compared to the urgency to know she was all right.
It took another day. The doctor told him in the morning that they would ease up her medication, but it would take until later in the afternoon for her to come to.
Rafael was dozing off the semisolid meal they’d fed him, trying to ignore the acute pain he was in, but he was keeping his own dosage of painkillers light, wanting to be sharp enough to monitor everything that happened across the hall.
When he heard Winnie cry, “Doctor! She’s awake,” he urgently thumbed the call button until his nurse hurried in to see him.
“Get me to her,” he ordered.
A burly orderly appeared, but moving off his bed into a wheelchair was an ordeal that almost had Rafael fainting from the pain. His need to see Alexandra was all-encompassing, though. He gritted his teeth and waved an impatient hand.
He was pushed into her room in time to hear her say, “No. I don’t know who these people are.”
“What about me?” he demanded.
The figures gathered around the bed parted, allowing him to see the pale, delicate face of his wife. Her expression widened in alarm at his bruised, beat-up, unshaven face.
Was that fear that flashed behind her eyes? He reached out to take her hand.
“You know who I am. Don’t you?” How could she not? They were two sides of the same rare coin.
Everything is in place for a clean split.
No. Absolutely not. It wasn’t possible. Besides, she loved him. She’d said so.
