Loving You Always by Kennedy Ryan

steering wheel. “Tell me how this needs to go.”
    “If Cam sees you, it won’t be good.”
    “Yeah, well if I see him it won’t be good.” A growly rumble, Walsh’s voice held the threat of a violent storm. “She was chasing him after a fight? And he was drunk? He’s supposed to take care of her.”
    “Accidents happen.” Meredith shifted in the passenger seat, her fingers plucking at the seat belt. He could see all over her face that she didn’t buy that line of crap. “He couldn’t have known she would follow him out like that.”
    “This is Kerris we’re talking about.” He squeezed the steering wheel. “Did he honestly think she would let him drive drunk?”
    “I don’t think he was thinking.”
    “That isn’t good enough. Dammit, if she dies…”
    The silence following his outburst was almost too painful to sit through. He hoped the fire in his eyes cloaked the bleak desolation enveloping him.
    “You love her,” Meredith whispered.
    He looked straight ahead through the windshield, not acknowledging her.
    “You knew the night before their wedding.”
    “Don’t, Walsh.”
    “Don’t what? Remind you that if you had stopped it she might not be fighting for her life right now?”
    “And you?” Meredith fired back. “You could’ve stopped it at any time. You knew she lo—”
    Walsh swiveled a glance at Meredith when she cut herself off.
    “Actually I didn’t know how she felt until later, but I couldn’t deny there was something special between us. She did enough denying for the both of us, though, and I let her get away with it. I’ll never forgive myself for that.”
    Walsh ignored the burn of tears in his nostrils, gulping back a useless moan. He laid his forehead against the steering wheel, rolling his head back and forth.
    “Walsh, you can’t go in there.”
    He raised his head, loading the glare he leveled at Meredith with every bit of frustration and anger he felt before pulling the trigger.
    “The hell I can’t.”
    “Right now, no one can see her.” Meredith laid a staying hand on his arm. “And until anyone can see her, I just think you being in the waiting room will only agitate Cam.”
    Cam deserved every drop of guilt he was probably choking on right now. Walsh wasn’t worried about him.
    “Look, my family practically built this hospital,” Walsh said. “I’ll find somewhere to hang out. Just call me as soon as she’s out of surgery.”
    Walsh pulled out his cell phone, watching Meredith slip back through the hospital entrance. Good, he still had Dr. Ravenscroft’s number. Not even considering the lateness—or earliness—of the hour, he dialed it.
    “Dr. Ravenscroft here.” His mother’s old physician sounded as alert as he always did.
    “Dr. Ravenscroft, it’s Walsh Bennett. Sorry to call so early, but I need a huge favor.”
    *  *  *
    Half an hour later, Walsh walked into what would soon be the Kristeene Walsh Bennett Cancer Wing, carefully picking his way around a few piles of unfinished lumber. It was still under construction, but Dr. Ravenscroft had assured Walsh that at least one office, his own, was close enough to completion for him to crash there for a while. He followed the doctor’s instructions, taking the needed turns that brought him to an office that was, even though not quite finished, obviously going to be luxuriously appointed. Well, a hospital’s version of luxuriously appointed. Dr. Ravenscroft would have some real office envy if he ever got a load of Martin Bennett’s Persian rug.
    It occurred to him that he had fled New York in the midst of crucial negotiations with Sheikh Kassim.
    “I’ll have to call Dad,” he said to the empty room.
    Someone else could step in for a few…days? Weeks? He wasn’t sure how long Kerris would be unconscious, but he wasn’t leaving until she wasn’t. He’d call Trisha, too. He quirked his lips in a wry smile, remembering Trisha pounding on his door in the middle of the night. He had