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“That’s none of your concern, Mr. O’Malley. You shouldn’t be in here.”
“It’s goddamnDoctorO’Malley, asshole. What were you doing to make her scream?”
The fresh-faced moron ignored Connor and shouted for security.
“Security won’t be necessary,” Zeke drawled from the doorway. His eyebrow shot up when Connor turned to look at him, then his attention dropped to the floor. “You’re bleeding everywhere, Connor. Congratulations.”
The doctor puffed himself up. “As you well know, Mr. Fairfax, there is an order in place restrictingDoctorO’Malley from entering this room. Security is necessary when he refuses to leave, and the nurse in charge is obviously inept.”
Said nurse scowled and folded her arms stubbornly over her chest.
Zeke just wiggled his cell phone in the air. “The court order has been revoked by Senator Fairfax and Judge Swinton. The paperwork has been processed and is being faxed here as we speak for confirmation. Connor has every right to be in the room, and any attempt to further deny him access to Jenna will result in legal action.”
“I…what?” Connor sucked in a shocked breath. “They dropped it?”
“Statements have been reviewed and it has been deemed in Jenna’s best interests to be left to recover as a normally-functioning human being. There’s no medical evidence to imply she’s suffered irreversible mental trauma requiring incarceration. Custody of her rights remain in her hands.”
“I won’t stand for it.”
Connor’s gaze flashed beyond Zeke’s figure to the gathering outside the door. Jenna’s sisters had been joined by the rest of the Abernathy clan, led by the matriarch herself. She stomped into the room, elbowing past Zeke, and squared off to Connor with a furious curl to her mouth.
“Mrs. Abernathy, I’m guessing.” Connor said, using Jenna’s bed as a crutch. He’d be damned if he was going to sink to his knees in front of the bad-tempered crone. “Pleasure to finally meet you.”
His sarcasm sailed over her head. Ilene’s resemblance to her daughter—actually, all three of them—was ridiculous. For a moment, Connor thought he’d snapped forward in time, thirty years to when Jenna aged gracefully. But his Jenna wouldn’t be this bitter, so…abhorrent on the inside. Ilene’s rotten core stained the skin she wore.
She stamped her foot in its Gucci-clad heel, so the sole cracked on tile petulantly. Her voice rose as she stated again, “I won’t stand for it!”
“Sit down and shut up then,” he suggested, his manners and patience shattering like glass under her judgmental stare. He started to wobble, cursed as his thighs quivered. “You shut up and listen.”
Bristling, Aaron barged into the room, eyes alive with hatred so deep, Connor wondered if they’d been acquainted in a previous life. The way Jenna’s father looked at him was the same way Connor had skewered Sire with his gaze. “Don’t you dare talk to her that way! How dare you!”
He wasn’t strong enough to stand in a fight, Connor mused, but again, he was damned if he would bow under the threat of violence. He’d drop to his knees for no one but Jenna. “How dareyoudo what you’ve done to Jenna? You took deliberate steps to take her away from everything familiar in her life as it is now. You put her in a position where the same psychopath she escaped could get his hands on her again, and forwhat? The sake of giving her a few days to get used to the idea of having a family again, of trying not to disappoint you and diminish your memories of the girl she was?”
The silver fox was fast on his feet, a lot faster than Connor was in that moment. Braced for impact, ready for the crack of bone on bone, Connor inclined his head and waited for the first punch.
Zeke’s arm shot out like a steel bar, clotheslined Aaron and stopped the older man in his tracks. A second later, his fingers fisted in the man’s pristine shirt, hefted him so the tips of his shiny black leather loafers scuffed the floor. “Anyone who decks an injured man—especially the one who saved his daughter’s life at great personal risk to his own—is a fucking coward. Connor was shot twice protecting Jenna, and don’t you damn well forget it.”
“Penelope,” Ilene hissed. “Her name is Penelope!”
“Seems to me, her name is whatever she wants it to be.” Zeke shook Aaron once, hard enough to knock the man’s head back, then set him carefully back on his feet. “This is a hospital room and there is a patient in residence. You will show respect.”
Aaron hurried to his wife and was promptly set aside with a wave of her manicured hand. He remained at her back, a guard dog with a fraction less bite, and kept his mouth shut.
“You need to sit down, Con? You’re white.” Zeke asked pleasantly. “And still bleeding,” he added for good measure with a sly smile. “Busting those wounds open wasn’t a good idea.”
“Was at the time,” Connor muttered. He nodded after a moment, deciding sitting was a better option than collapsing in front of his future in-laws. They already despised him for whatever reason; no reason to give them an excuse to see him as weak as well.
Connor grimaced when Zeke walked over to the visitor’s chair the nurse offered, carried it one-handed to him. The show-off. His eyes narrowed when his friend set it beside Jenna’s bed in a silent statement, then winked and helped Connor into it like an old man.
Hell, he felt like an old man.
“Our daughter was abducted. She’s been gone for almost three years and then we find out she’s been cloistered away in some backwater town in the middle of nowhere when she should have come straight home tous.” Ilene’s wrath was a living thing, a snake with an agenda. “What else we were to do but intervene when that government agent told us she’d been found?”
“Cloistered away?” Connor shook his head in disgust. “Jenna couldn’tspeakwhen I found her. Couldn’t say a damn word for weeks. You have no idea, no goddamn idea what I’ve been through with her, what we’ve been through together.” He leaned back gingerly, reached through the bedrail until his fingers touched bare, soft skin. “You might not like that she uses a new name now, or that she has friends of a different…style,” he said tactfully, giving those Gucci shoes another glance. “Her hair’s changed, she might talk differently, her sense of humor and her tastes could have altered. Twenty-six months of captivity and torture do things to people.”
“And the months she’s spent with you twisting her up in this alternate reality she doesn’t belong in? What has that done to her?” Ilene spat.
He heard his teeth grind, forced himself to relax his jaw before it cracked. “If you’re referring to the months where I bathed her, fed her, treated her wounds and comforted her after every goddamn nightmare, I’d watch your tone. Jenna learned how to be human again. She had to be taught how to sleep in a bed again, to eat with a knife and fork. How to talk.”
