Ice (Thor Book 2), page 10
“You could have just called.”
“Don’t be like this,” he said. “You need help.”
“No, I don’t.”
“How is he?”
His face displayed nothing but sympathy and concern for Toby, and I narrowed my eyes a little.
What was he angling for?
He’d had very little to do with Toby over the years, and as far as I knew, they had only met on some of the major holidays in the past five years.
I explained briefly about Toby’s injuries but brushed over my worries about his mobility, and how tired he seemed to be.
“You’ll have to put him in an assisted living.”
I blinked furiously, wondering if I’d heard what I’d heard.
“No.”
“His apartment is on the third floor, and there’s no elevator.”
Well, shit. I'd been too busy dealing with the here and now, so I hadn't started thinking about where we'd go when they released Toby from the hospital. They wouldn't keep him more than a few days longer, and Harry was right. I'd have to figure something out.
“I have plans,” I said calmly, hoping that he wouldn’t call me on that lie.
“Reena,” he said and tilted his head a little to the side. “You could come home. Tobias could live in the guestroom downstairs. We’d make the house accessible for his wheelchair, and –”
“Toby will not be in a wheelchair for more than a week or two. And Harry, please hear me when I tell you that,” I took a step toward him and straightened my back, which put us at almost the same height. “I have plans,” I finished succinctly.
“Okay,” he murmured. “I have a couple of meetings, so I have to go. Call me when you are ready to come home.”
Before I could get my stunned brain to understand that he hadn’t heard a word I said, he walked away. Then what he’d said registered.
He had a couple of meetings?
Harry hadn’t flown to Denver because of Toby after all. He was there for work. Benson knew a lot of people Harry was acquainted with, so he’d probably heard about what happened from them, and had just taken an hour out of his schedule to pop by the hospital.
“Asshole,” I muttered.
I was so not moving back to his house.
“Who was that?” Cas asked and handed me another cup of hospital-coffee.
“Ex,” I said tersely.
“Huh.”
“He won’t be back,” I added sourly.
“Huh.”
“God, Cas, he’s such a moron,” I snapped. “He doesn’t care about Toby. Never did. And now he suddenly shows up here all fakey-concerned, telling me that we should move back to the house and how Toby can roll around in a fucking wheelchair downstairs.” I raised my hands in an impatient gesture, which made some coffee splash on the floor. “Dear God,” I moaned. “I finally left, and he thinks... I don’t even know what he thinks.”
“Huh.”
“Stop saying that,” I snapped.
“He’s better looking than I thought he’d be.”
“Fake tan. Fake hair color. Fake teeth.”
“But still. He must be sixty?”
“Sixty-three.”
I saw on her face that she did the math, and when her face softened, I shook my head slightly.
“Harry was thirty-three when we got married, but don't look like that, Cas. Please don't. He...” I shrugged in an attempt to make that day sound like something which hadn't been a nightmare. “He saved Toby and me. I owed him so much.”
“He adopted Tobias?”
“No. He never asked about it, and I didn’t want him to. He was Toby’s foster father until I was old enough to get the paperwork done properly.” The relief I’d felt the day the adoption papers were official still made my mouth twist into a smile. “Tobias is my son. Not his.”
“Reena...” She watched me for a few seconds, and then she asked the question written all over her, which was a question I didn’t want to answer. “Why did you stay?”
“Because I'm a coward,” I started, but then there was a commotion outside Toby's room, and I saw how a young nurse looked desperately at me. “Well, shit. Now what?” I murmured, gulped down the lukewarm coffee, and walked toward the mayhem my son seemed to have kicked off.
This was in no way a surprise. Toby was shifting between sulking and roaring since they told him that while he should be able to walk again, he would have to wear a brace on his back. When Toby had confirmed that he understood this, they clarified that for the foreseeable future, he should wear one when climbing, skiing, kayaking, and several other activities, most of which he also wasn't allowed to do at all in a very long time. These were incidentally all Tobias' favorite ways of spending time and part of his chosen profession.
This time, he had accidentally spilled some juice in his bed, which had pissed him off enough to throw the plastic cup straight into the wall. It took all my patience not to yell at him, and while he calmed down, I changed the sheets.
“Are you in pain?” I asked quietly.
“Yeah.”
There was a world of sadness and anger in that simple reply, and I wanted to hug him, but that would just hurt his back, so I settled for sliding my hand over his cheek.
“Baby,” I murmured. “We’ll get through this.”
“How?”
“I don’t know,” I said on a sigh. “I’ll find a way.”
His face darkened, and I could see that a childish temper tantrum was imminent, but before he exploded, the door was thrown open, and Gee Hagen walked in.
“Hello, I’m –”
“I know who you are,” Toby cut her off.
From the look on her face, being cut off was not something she was used to.
“Okay,” she said, sucked in air, and smiled. “I just wanted –”
“To look at me?”
I put a hand on his and squeezed it warningly. It would have been better if Gee had talked to me before barging into Toby’s room unannounced, but there was no need for him to be rude to an older woman who was his grandmother and also a little scary.
“I guess so,” she said evenly, but her smile had become a little tense.
“Well, now you have seen me,” Toby said and tried to straighten, which must have hurt because he winced. “I’d appreciate it if you could get the fuck out of here.”
“Tobias,” I snapped.
“What?” he grunted but backed down a little. “We need to make plans.”
“Plans?” Gee asked sourly, clearly not appreciating the instruction to get out of the room, although I suspected the f-bomb hadn't even registered.
“Toby will be released in a few days,” I said.
“Your aunt –” Gee said, but Toby made a loud, huffing sound, so she cut herself off and restarted. “I'm sure you have plenty of options, but you should know that my daughter injured her leg many years ago. Sissy did most of her rehab in Rogan. The equipment is still there. We can clean out one of the cabins for you.”
I knew who Lovisa Hagen was because everyone my age did. She’d been a promising skier, selected to be on the national team and heading for the Olympics when a man she was involved with had bashed in her leg with a steel pipe. I’d also heard about Sissy from Cas and had in the past few days seen her move without even a hint of a limp.
And we had nowhere to go. I could think for weeks, and it wouldn’t matter because I knew without a doubt that we only had two options to choose from.
It was either Rogan or move back in with Harry.
“Gee,” I said and faced the older woman. “Would you mind waiting outside while my son and I have a short discussion.”
“I wouldn’t mind at all,” she said cordially.
“Toby,” I murmured when the door closed with a soft thud. “It’s either Rogan or move back to the house in Boise.”
He turned his head slowly, and I braced.
“The house?” he drawled.
“Toby,” I murmured. “There’s no elevator in the –”
“Harry’s fucking house?” he roared.
“We don’t have any choice,” I snapped.
“I don’t have any choice. You should finally have a life full of choices, Mom.”
Oh, God, no.
I got why he was so pissed off, but he was wrong.
“I love you,” I whispered. “It is not a chore to care for you. It wasn’t then, and it isn’t now.”
“But –”
We’d have to talk more about how he felt, but this was not the time. Gee didn’t strike me as the kind of woman who waited patiently in a hospital corridor, so we had a decision to make.
“Rogan or Boise?” I asked firmly.
“Fuck,” Toby muttered, which I interpreted to mean that we would go to Rogan.
I opened the door, and Toby’s grandmother almost fell into the room.
Had she seriously pressed her ear to the door, trying to hear what we were talking about?
The smirk on her face told me that she had, and it pissed me off in a big way.
“We will accept your kind offer and spend some time in Rogan,” I stated curtly.
“Because we have to,” Toby chimed in from the bed. Then he added sourly, “As long as I don’t have to talk to my so-called family.”
His grandmother leaned to the side to glare at him, but before they could get into an argument that most likely would get ugly, I shuffled Gee out of the room.
“We appreciate this, Gee. Expect us three days from now. I’ll call Cas with the details.”
Then I closed the door and fought an impulse to flip the lock because that would have been childish, and I was a grown woman, so I should behave like one.
I had barely turned back toward Toby when there was a loud squeal coming from outside. It sounded like Cassandra, and I raised my brows when I realized that Gee had walked into the room to get us to do precisely what I'd just told her we'd do.
Then my phone pinged out that I had a message from Cas.
“Don't worry. We'll take good care of you.”
I tried.
Like me, Ice had barely left the hospital and had somehow seemed to know exactly what I needed when I needed it and had calmly dealt with a lot of practicalities, so I didn’t have to.
So, I really tried, but I couldn’t fight back the sweet feeling washing through me at the thought of Ice taking care of me.
Chapter Nine
Get me some goddamned shampoo
Reena
I was tired and enormously annoyed with just about everything. And Lord knows I tried, but I couldn’t seem to snap myself out of it.
Toby and I had arrived in Rogan, and everyone was bending over at all angles to make sure we had everything we needed.
They had organized two cabins for us to live in, and they were tiny but clean and cozy. I would have preferred to stay in the same house as Toby, so I offered to sleep on his couch. He rejected my offer firmly and seemed relieved to have separate living quarters, and when I thought about it – he would be. He was a thirty-two-year-old man, so he'd want to be on his own. And sure, Toby's wheelchair wouldn't get through the doorways to either his bedroom or the bathroom, but it was an old house, so that was to be expected, and we worked around it.
The fridges in both cabins were full of the kind of food we both liked, which made me wonder who the mind reader was, but I didn't ask.
And a big, old barn turned out to be partly converted into a surprisingly well-equipped rehab-facility. Most of the stuff was old, but it was in perfect condition, and we would have managed with a lot less.
So, I should have been positively giddy with a mix of relief and anticipation of a future where Toby would recover in no time at all.
Except, I wasn’t because he didn’t. He was mostly in pain.
As in, a pain in my rear end.
He dropped crude words, scowled, sulked, and refused to eat properly. The exercises I showed him were done in such a half-assed way I wanted to scream at him.
It also didn’t help my mood that I worried about his lack of progress and spent the nights reading everything I could find about recovering from his type of injury.
“Hey.”
The deep voice shook me out of my coffee induced moment of bliss, and I felt my face soften as I exhaled.
“Black,” I murmured.
When I called Cas to let her know when we’d arrive in Rogan, I’d also asked her to let everyone know that we would appreciate some privacy until Toby had settled in. They had all kept their distance, which I suspected was a foolish part of why I was so angry. I had wanted them to do just that but hadn’t actually expected Ice to acquiesce to my request quite so readily.
I felt a bit stupid when I had to admit to myself that the damned man likely wasn’t interested in pursuing any kind of relationship with me – not that I wanted a relationship with Ice. But he was still Toby’s father, so we should at least be cordial.
Ignoring me did not strike me as very cordial.
Black had not acquiesced to anything and usually showed up with a cup in his hand as I walked outside to sit in the cold winter air to drink my coffee and shake off another sleepless night.
“How bad do you want to hit someone right now?” he asked and sat down next to me on the steps.
“Pretty badly,” I snorted and stared into the pitch-black brew I’d filled my cup with.
“You could hit me,” he suggested affably, but added before I respond to the ridiculous offer, “Or Ice.” He sucked back some coffee, and muttered, “Might not be a bad thing if you do.”
“I’m not gonna –” His words registered, and I whipped around to stare into his amused eyes. “I should hit Ice?”
“Yup,” he said. “He’s turned into a pussy. Don’t want to have a pussy-brother. Pretty sure Tobias doesn’t want a pussy-dad. And you...” He put an annoying finger in my face. “Do not want a pussy-man.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I muttered even though I totally did.
“Yeah, you do.”
I’d never hit anyone in my life, but his smug voice annoyed me, and putting a fist in his face might not necessarily be a bad thing.
“Black, for heaven’s –”
My angry squeal was cut short when there was a commotion in the open area in front of us. A couple of men were shouting something, and Black stood up abruptly.
“Fuck,” he muttered. “This time, I’m gonna get the damned thing.”
I looked in the same direction as him and saw what he saw.
A huge dog watched the commotion from the edge of the compound, and it didn’t look aggressive to me.
“Whose dog is that?” I asked. “Looks like it’s part wolf.”
“Nope, just mixed breed. Mostly husky, with some German shepherd and a few other breeds. Not wolf, though.”
“Who owns him?”
“It could be a bitch, Reena. No one knows,” Black said slowly, and to my surprise, I saw that he’d pulled out a gun from the back of his pants.
Was he seriously planning to shoot the gorgeous animal?
“Oh, please,” I muttered. “Who owns him?” I asked for the third time as I started walking.
“Technically, one of our neighbors, but they have no control of the damned thing. Reena,” Black reached for me, but I sidestepped. “It’s feral. Don’t –”
“Shut up,” I muttered under my breath as I slowly walked across the yard.
What seemed like half of Thor MC had gathered, and I saw several handguns and a rifle. Someone called out to me, but I’d just had it.
I was tired and frustrated, and I might not be able to help my son, but damn it if I was going to let them shoot the poor thing.
The dog started walking slowly toward me, and I sensed people moving, so I raised a hand.
“Shoot the dog, and I shoot you,” I called out, hoping they wouldn’t realize that I had never fired any kind of firearm in my life.
Then I went down on my knees and waited.
The dog slowly walked up to me, and our eyes met. It might have been my imagination, but there seemed to be an ocean of loneliness in his amber colored gaze, and I stretched out a hand, palm up.
“Hey, buddy,” I murmured. “I’m not gonna hurt you.”
The dog watched my hand and seemed to struggle to make his mind up what to do.
“Sit,” I said, quietly, but firmly.
To my surprise, the dog plopped his butt down, leaned forward slightly, and gave my hand a quick lick.
“Reena,” a voice said behind me, and the dog growled quietly.
Ice had apparently chosen this exact moment to stop ignoring me.
“Get me some goddamned shampoo,” I snapped.
“What?”
“This dog needs a good bath,” I clarified loudly. “I intend to give him one.”
The silence around us was brief but deafening.
“Yeah, no,” Ice said finally. “Don’t think he’ll agree to that, babe, but you could give him some food.”
I considered this and swallowed a sigh because he was right. The dog was feral enough for a whole group of badasses to want to shoot him, so bringing the animal into my small bathroom and spray him with water was probably not a good thing.
“Do you want breakfast?” I asked the dog quietly and got a quick lick on my hand again, which I interpreted as a yes. “I will do that, Ice,” I said primly. “Tom will appreciate it.”
“Tom?”
I nodded toward the dog to indicate that this was now his name.
“Cruise?” Ice asked, and I saw a smile in his eyes.
“Oh, please,” I snorted. “Petty.”
“Right,” Ice muttered. “Gotcha.”
Then I marched inside to fill a bowl with some of the leftovers from my unsuccessful attempts to get Tobias to eat properly. While Tom ate, it hit me that my son wouldn’t be able to get out of his bedroom and into the bathroom because of the damned wheelchair he shouldn’t need anymore. If he somehow wobbled out into the kitchen, he would have made some coffee, but he wouldn’t have tried to organize breakfast.
I felt like a pretty shitty mother and started pulling out what I’d need to make pancakes, which Toby loved but mostly got when we went out for breakfast because I wasn’t very good at making them.
