Page 41 of Diamond Desire
Then the prick doctor had carried on speaking with the words I wished he had started with. The ones where he explained they had stopped using their hands and had tried the defibrillator. The very machine that had brought my girl back – the one that had made her come back to us from death like the fighter I had always known she was.
Sapphire was going to be fine, but she had been declared dead for two and a half minutes. Her heart had stopped beating and for the rest of my life, regardless of how many decades it might have been, nothing in the universe would ever feel as long as that two and a half minutes. Nothing in the world would make me ever take for granted another beat of her heart.
Even now, a couple of days later, as I waited for her to come around from her injuries – the plethora of them she had received in her captivity that I hadn’t fucking rescued her from – time didn’t feel half as long. So what if I had to sit around for hours doing nothing but watching the way she breathed? I would take that over the two and a half minutes I’d lost her any day.
Around dawn, not long after I had ordered Sapphire’s men home for a shower, food and nap when the doctors had removed her catheter and stitched her up, the stark white suite room door creaked open. I barely restrained a yawn as I glanced up at it,hand on my gun just in case it was an undesirable looking to take a pop shot whilst my girl was resting.
If it was anyone but a doctor or those I had granted permission to, I would shoot them in the head. Who fucking cared if I was in a hospital with witnesses? I had no fucks left to give and Raya owned the place – she would fix it. The same way she has fixed every other person’s injury, the mansion, and all other aspects of the Red Diamonds and our businesses during Sapphire’s absence and my inability to care about anything but her rescue.
Raya wasn’t too bad for a Gomez woman. I’d have almost said I liked her had I not been too stubborn to admit I liked a woman other than… other than nobody else.
Speaking of women, one disturbed my silent stewing for the billionth time that day, but lucky for her, she was allowed to do such a thing and I lowered my gun instead of using it on her.
“Why, Mr Montana, fancy seein’ you here.” Ruby shimmied into the room, her short pleated green dress damn near blowing off her in the slight breeze from the open door.
“I told you to go and get some sleep.” Aiden and Ruby had left barely three hours prior, and I had ordered them not to return until they were fully rested. But it seemed, once again, those around me were not respecting my authority or fearing disobeying me. They were openly doing it.
I weirdly liked it, even if it was annoying.
“I slept. Repeatedly. With Aiden and without.” She winked at me as she dropped a duffle bag onto the nearby armchair, careful not to spill the tray of hot drinks in her other hand or drop the box of a dozen donuts either.
“Ruby, I thought you’d been warned about the consequences of being a brat?” With a snort, I sat up in my chair, taking my legs off the footrest and stretching out my aching bones.
I needed a massage or something to get rid of the knots in all my joints, but it could wait. I’d get one when Sapphire could come with me, and we could find a few talented strangers to make us relax for an hour or two. It seemed a nice way for me to kick off myI’m sorry I didn’t rescue youapology tour.
“I thought you’d learned that I don’t think consequences are a real thing.” Ruby handed me a piping hot coffee, and a little brown brag too, before taking a seat on the chair next to me, whining about how I was doing something called manspreading. Which I doubted was even a real thing. It was something she made up like half the shit that babbled out of her mouth that I couldn’t stop listening to like a fucking idiot.
“What’s this?” I inhaled the coffee, more desperate for it than I had known I could be. The hospital had coffee machines, but I’d rather have put a bullet in my head than take a single sip of their watered down bullshit.
Ruby sipped her hot chocolate with a contented sigh, eyes on the mountain of whipped cream filled with a little too much love for something inanimate.
“A paper bag.” She said.
My lips pulled into a scowl. “I meant what’s inside it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you could use those pretty blue eyes of yours to check it out.” Her eyes rolled, and she sipped again, deliberately doing it as loud and exaggerated as she could.
Biting my tongue, I did as she asked, finding a huge freshly baked croissant and a brownie inside. I liked brownies. Lovedthem even. And though I was surprised Ruby had remembered a random fact about me, I was more concerned with eating than questioning her ability to listen in between her talking.
“You bought me breakfast?” I drawled, oddly touched by the gesture even if I couldn’t work out why something so small was making me feel weird inside. “Thanks.”
“It ain’t nothin’” She waved me off before pointing to the duffle bag. “I got all the stuff for Sapphire that you asked for as well as extra. I let Price choose her clothes because he knows what she likes to wear more than I do, but I supervised him, so he didn’t just chuck in a thong and call it a day.”
It wasn’t like the guys couldn’t have packed clothes for Sapphire, but I didn’t trust them to do it. Like Ruby, I had presumed they would mess about and pick something inappropriate or lack the brain cells to remember a bra or whatever else it was she needed to actually get dressed and make herself feel normal again.
Not that clothes and shampoo would do anything for the scars on her skin, the darkness of her hair, and the hopelessness I had seen in her eyes when I’d spotted her on the other side of the patio.
They would take a whole lot more than a pretty dress and smelling like herself.
“What kind of extra? I hope you gave her sensible footwear and not heels.” I devoured the croissant like a savage, barely taking two bites before I was done with it and wishing for more.
“You like my heels, and they are sensible to me.” To enunciate her point, Ruby poked the toe of her latest pair of heels – black thigh-high boots that laced up with ribbon – into my thigh.
It wouldn’t have shocked anyone to know I didn’t give a fuck what women wore. It was even less surprising that I usually didn’t notice the difference between naked women or fully clothed ones. But for some utterly ridiculous reason, I kinda liked stripper shoes now.
I couldn’t figure out why, but they were almost kind of…
“They’re hot, right?” She interrupted my thoughts as she poked me again, a little higher up. “They were a great present and make a wonderful recent addition to my collection.”