Page 5 of Forbidden Cowboy

I took a deep breath as the nurse held open a door for me.

Chapter Three

Sierra

Iwas torn.

The biggest part of me was very much focused on my brother, but another, smaller part was caught up thinking about the person the nurse had asked about. The man that would be walking through that door any minute.

If it was six years ago, I would have left the room. There would be no point in staying where I wasn’t wanted. But it wasn’t six years ago, and if he wanted to brush me aside like he had before, then he could be the one to leave.

Beau wasmybrother, after all, not his.

Speaking of Beau, he was in rough shape. There were tubes and wires leading from him to beeping machines and bags of fluids I couldn’t identify. His eyes had been taped shut, and the long, auburn eyelashes I had always hated him for inheriting when I didn’t were splayed out under the translucent medical tape, stuck to his face. He had always been pale, but this was different. Even the smattering of freckles that my own face mirrored were ashen. There was a large bruise curving around one eye, and abrasions from what I’d been told was road rash spread across his left brow and cheekbone.

He was in a medically induced coma, they told me. The injuries he’d sustained, both internal and external, were too much for his conscious body to bear. Apparently, it was like a hibernation of sorts. I just hoped he’d wake up from it.

I didn’t feel myself sitting in the chair by his bed, but I did feel my hands sliding across the too-stiff, starched hospital bed sheets to clasp his left hand in both of mine. I hadn’t held his hand in years, but there had been a time that he was always tugging me along, his little sister. I remembered my graduation, only hours before everything had gone wrong, less than a day until I would sneak out of our childhood home and leave everything I had ever known behind. I remembered him grabbing my hand as I ran up to join our family, and holding it in the air like he was announcing me as some sort of champion. Our parents had gotten a photo of that; I knew because it had lived on our mantle, and every time I’d video called them, I’d see it in the background and feel that sharp sting in my chest.

I needed to stop thinking about him, though. My brother was in front of me, possibly dying, and the ridiculously powerful and anxious voice was trying to overpower everything. It was trying to keep me aware of my surroundings likehewas some impending form of danger.

It was almost a relief when I heard the door open behind me. I stayed where I was, however, and refused to look up, refused to turn around. I focused on the dry, calloused hands of my brother, on the scrapes that littered his palm. I focused on the tag with his name on it. The barcode he’d been reduced to in the hospital records.

“Dad,” a small voice whispered uncertainly.

Thatdefinitelywasn’t what I had expected. I tilted my head to the side to see who had entered the room, and I caught a little girl in my periphery. She had waist-length brown hair, and the front was pulled back out of her face. She was wearing a white and blue dress—it looked like it was patterned with some kind of small flower. She had smears of dirt on her porcelain face, and bright blue eyes. Her hand was holding a tan one that stretched out of my line of vision, so I turned myself fully to greet the other adult now in the room.

“Um, hi,” Wyatt said.

I turned my face away from him, if only to hide the misty quality I had felt my eyes take on.

I knew what I would see if I looked at him—sun-kissed skin and dark eyes that I could fall into forever. Hair so dark you could only tell it was brown in direct sunlight, curled into disarray that I had often wondered what it would feel like to run my hands through.

I wondered if he had changed.

I hoped he hadn’t.

I hoped hehad.

“How is he?” Wyatt asked again, and,oh God,his voice was the same as it had been through all of our teenage years.

“Not great,” I choked out, and I hoped he took the emotional quality of my voice to only be about my brother.

Like it didn’t mean anything to him, he stepped closer, and I felt one large palm place itself on my back in what I supposed was meant to be a calming sort of gesture.

“I’m so sorry, Sierra,” he said, voice low.

I saw the little girl that had come in with him walk over to the other side of the bed. I didn’t meet either of their eyes.

“They’re moving him to the ICU within the hour,” I said, “this—this coma is, um, medically induced.”

This time, the emotion in my voice was solely about my brother.

“So… they can reverse it? Wake him up when they want to?”

“I guess it doesn’t always work out that way,” I croaked, and that hand smoothed a circle into my back. “I’ll have to talk to his doctor later—only the ER doctor spoke to me.”

I felt his hand disappear, and I immediately craved the warmth, but soon enough, Wyatt dragged a chair up and sat beside me.