Rose gasped, falling back against her car seat. He grabbed her, cradling her against his chest.
“I’ll get her the best care, Rose,” he vowed. “She’ll be all right. I promise you.”
She stared up at him, her brow furrowed. Then she embraced him in a flood of tears.
“Thank you,” she wept.
Xerxes held her to his chest, stroking her back, murmuring words of nonsensical comfort. All he could think about was that he would do anything, absolutely anything, to make her grandmother well. Anything to make Rose happy.
When she finally pulled away to look up at him, tears were streaming down her face. “Why are you being so good to us?” she whispered. “You don’t even know her.”
“No,” Xerxes said quietly. Looking down at her, he stroked her beautiful face and felt a lump in his throat as he said, “But I know you love her. That’s all I need to know.”
Chapter Thirteen
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IT WAS almost midnight when Rose finally collapsed in her old childhood bedroom.
Trembling with exhaustion, clasping the same pink cardigan she’d worn in Mexico more tightly over her arms, she sank down on her small single bed, staring blankly at old posters of rock stars she’d pasted as a teenager over the peeling, faded floral wallpaper. A beloved old teddy bear looked down from her bookshelves, next to baking trophies she’d won at the local fair in high school. Downstairs, she could hear her family talking in low voices as they moved over the creaky floorboards. She could smell her mother’s clam chowder bubbling on the stove.
She was home. Nothing had changed. And yet—Rose looked at Xerxes’s dark form in front of her window—everything had changed.
They’d both changed on the jet into clothes more appropriate for the cold rain of northern California. Now wearing black pants, a white shirt and a black woolen coat, he looked out at the lights twinkling in the distance. “Is that your family’s old factory?”
Rose had spent most of her childhood sitting in that window, reading books and staring out dreamily at the rainy gray surf beneath the ocean cliff. She knew every view from the rambling Victorian house by heart. “Yes.”
A few dim lights still illuminated the old hollow shell of her grandfather’s factory, which had once employed half this small town making chewy taffies in the heyday of the 1950s and 1960s. But Rose didn’t want to talk about the factory. She didn’t want to hear Xerxes tell her yet again that it was a hopeless situation and she should let it go.
Instead, she wanted to breathe in this moment and just be grateful. Grateful that her grandmother had lived and was getting better. Grateful that she herself was finally home.
Crossing her ankles and tucking her black jeanclad legs beneath her, Rose looked up at him. “Thank you.”
Blinking, he glanced back at her. “For what?”
“How can you even ask? For everything you did for Gran.”
He shrugged. “I did nothing.”
“You’re wrong,” she said softly. “You brought me home.”
He gave her a wry smile. “Your grandmother didn’t know whether to hug me or slap me, did she?”
When they’d arrived a few hours earlier, Xerxes had already summoned the top cardiologist from San Francisco to meet them at the local hospital. The doctor had run tests on her grandmother’s heart and confirmed it hadn’t been an actual attack, but an “episode” that was no lasting cause for concern, as long as Dorothy Linden adjusted her diet and started getting more regular exercise.
The elderly woman, for her part, stubbornly maintained that no exercise or diet changes were necessary because she’d just had a broken heart worrying about her granddaughter.
And no wonder. Rose had discovered that Lars had explained her disappearance by telling them Rose was just a flighty, runaway bride who’d changed her mind and couldn’t be bothered to contact her family. That was his big explanation!
Rose growled. If she hadn’t hated Lars before, she’d have certainly hated him now. Rather than admit any of his own guilt, he’d left Rose in the position of having to explain to her grandmother—who was still in the hospital for observation, at the cardiologist’s insistence—why Rose, supposedly a married woman, had disappeared for days after her wedding only to reappear here today with another man on her arm!
Thank heaven for Xerxes. He’d been her rock through all of this. Looking up now at the set of his jaw, at the hard lines of his handsome face as he stared out the window of her bedroom, Rose blinked back tears. When she’d tried to explain to her family what had happened, she’d floundered helplessly.#p#分页标题#e#