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“Here.” She looked up to see Ry holding out a cup of coffee to her. “One sugar, one cream,” he said, as if she’d asked.

“I…thank you.” She took the cup, feeling a strange tightness in her throat at the simple fact that he’d noticed and remembered how she liked her coffee.

“Problem?”

“I…” She hesitated, feeling foolish. But there was no way around admitting it. “Nick made this whole thing sound so minor I didn’t even think about it, so I didn’t realize until now Nick will have to stay overnight.”

Ry only shrugged. “Nurse outside mentioned that.”

“You might as well head home. Thank you so much for—”

“You already thanked me a dozen times,” Ry said, cutting her off but not rudely. “So we need to know what time he’ll be released tomorrow.”

“It says here it will be after noon.”

“But you’ll want to be back here earlier, I’m guessing?”

“I…yes.” She grimaced. “If Nick still had his place I could stay there, but—”

“Don’t worry about it. There’s a place less than two miles away that had a couple of rooms available.”

She stared at him almost blankly. “What?”

“I don’t know how nice it is, but it’s close.” She was still staring, stuck on acoupleof rooms. “We don’t have to be there until five. They’ll hold them until then.”

We?“How do you know—”

“One of the nurses told me about the place, and I called while I was in line for the coffee. Oh, and he also said there’s a store up the road about three miles on the right that should have anything we need for tonight.”

She knew she was gaping at him now. “Rylan,” she began; for some reason this seemed to require his full name. “You don’t have to—”

She stopped as he put his hands on her shoulders and crouched down to look her in the eye. “Stop. This is your family we’re dealing with. Your real family,” he amended, with emphasis on the adjective.

She couldn’t stop the moisture that welled up in her eyes. “He has no one else.”Neither do I. Or I didn’t, until now.

“And in essence he saved your life,” Rylan said softly. “So here we are, and we’ll handle it.”

She didn’t know what to say. Even when the tears overflowed and trickled down her cheeks, she couldn’t look away from those deep gray eyes. And when he reached up to brush the droplets gently away with the backs of his fingers, the strangest combination of warmth and need billowed through her.

And she realized with a jolt that this was what it felt like when a Rafferty had your back.

*

“It says thatit’s okay to talk on your cell phone, but you have to use the ear on the other side,” Kaitlyn was saying as Ry moved his pencil over the page open in his small sketchbook. He carried it with him regularly, never knowing when he might see the answer to a design problem somewhere. He wasn’t sure what had started him on it here, just that watching Kaitlyn, so thankful that Nick had come through the procedure perfectly, had made him reach for it.

That, and that Nick had a fascinating face. A mix of the cultures that were his interesting heritage, which according to Kaitlyn was Cuban and French. His fingers had started itching the moment he’d seen the man.

“And,” she went on, “they’ll give you an ID card, in case you set off a metal detector somewhere.”

“I wasn’t planning on flying anywhere any time soon,” Nick said, his tone dry as Kaitlyn sat beside the bed instructing him, while holding his hand. But his expression was unmistakable; she was indeed the family he didn’t have, just as he was for her.

“Well, maybe you’ll feel like it now. You shouldn’t have any more dizziness or palpitations, and you can exercise again. Maybe even go for hikes again.”

“With my favorite fellow hiker?”

Ry looked up and knew who the man meant by the way he was looking at Kaitlyn. With love, just like Mom looked at all of them. And now Lucas, Sydney and Ariel, too. This was why Kaitlyn was doing without, so that Nick didn’t have to. And doing it with class, making sure he didn’t know so he wouldn’t feel the guilt Ry was certain, watching the older man now, he would feel.

“If you want,” Kaitlyn said.