And then the nurse came back with something injected into the IV, and Ivy soon didn’t think anything at all.
* * *
Cade paced outside in the waiting room, his guts ripped to shreds. He’d hit a wall down in the hall, and now his knuckles were bleeding … leaving a trail of blood under his feet. He didn’t even feel pain. He could cut off a limb and not feel pain … for his pain was centered deep, so fucking deep inside him, he was already dying a slow death.
He’d let down his guard with Ivy. Forgotten that he wasn’t a deserving man. Forgotten how easy it was to wish to be dead. No, he’d seen her and wanted her, wanted to be better for her. He’d thought he could be healed, he could pretend that, with her, his life could be normal like the rest of them. Pretend he could be happy with her.
But how could he? He was broken and he couldn’t make her right.
Nothing could make Ivy right.
A cramp gathered in his chest at the thought of the ways he’d taken her, the ways he had insulted this disease she was quietly fighting without him. The way Ivy had kept those lovely small breasts concealed from him … and agony and fury unlike any other toppled him over and sent the nausea up his throat.
Had he been her last fucking fling?
What in the hell had he been to her? A fucking joke? A fucking … manwhore ready to fuck her at her whim? Did she think because he was angry … he did not deserve to know? Did she think he did not fucking care that she … that she … had it?
He wanted to be angry. Aneurism-inducing, murderously fucking pissed. But among all the sensations roiling like a tornado inside him, anger was last on the list. He couldn’t forget her face. Couldn’t stop remembering Ivy as she’d been right now, in that small hospital bed, just like Laura. Pale and frail and scared, and feeling very much alone, and his windpipe shut and his eyes blurred and he wanted to rip his chest out.
Ivy, with her little bald head, crying for him not to see her like this. For him to go away.
Ivy, who was always helping people. Ivy, who made Cade want to … live. The hurt spread so deep and so wide, he felt it like a burn spreading up his chest, his throat, to burst into his eyes. He’d known with Laura, even before the wedding. That she was sick, and wouldn’t last.
He’d been “prepared” if that was even possible.
He’d tried to be a good husband. He’d tried to grant her all her wishes, even if he couldn’t ever physically love her the way she’d wanted. He’d punished himself for that flaw for years. But Ivy was spirited and bursting with passion, and she made his body come alive …
He remembered her smile when he’d given her those checks, the way her eyes had shined. Then he remembered how callous and mean he’d been, purposely trying to hurt her, when he told her he didn’t make love to her, he just fucked her. His chest caved when he remembered her last night, curled into that small little ball against him, as though she were trying to disappear inside of him. His heart ached, and he wished he’d had the chance to kiss her breasts and tell her they were so perfect and so pretty.
And now her breasts were being taken away from her …
She was being taken away from him.
He blinked a rush of emotion back from his eyes and bit his fist as he continued blinking fast.
Luke Preston once said billionaires didn’t cry.
But for the second time in his life, this one did.
* * *
Ivy drifted back to consciousness with his face branded in her mind as he’d been when he’d seen her earlier. Her eyes stung remembering, and she wanted to cry all over again, afraid to look down at her chest, afraid to see if they had to take only the lump out, or one breast with it, or both.
She loathed that Cade knew, right now, this second, what they’d been doing to her.
I couldn’t even make love to my own wife.
Oh, God. Her throat shut all over itself. If Cade had loved his wife and hadn’t been able to touch her, how could Ivy ever dream of feeling him wanting to be with her now?
She didn’t know how long she lay there, waiting to know what her future held. If it held chemo, radiation … Cade …
“Miss Summers.” Dr. Sabella came in, his graying hair slicked back, his kind face somehow comforting even though he hadn’t looked at her and was glancing down at his clipboard notes. “You’re likely to experience some pain and tenderness in the areas of incision for a couple of days, for which I will prescribe some painkillers.”
She licked her dry lips and nodded, having trouble forcing words past her throat. “Did you … get it all out?”
“Miss Summers…” He put the clipboard notes aside and lifted his warm brown eyes to her, his expression alarming her. “We couldn’t find it.”
Her heart skipped a beat, then resumed at a frantic pace. “What? Well, where is it?” She mentally panicked. Not even a second had passed, but already her mind had told her a dozen bad things that might have happened. It morphed and went to her lymph nodes. Her blood. It was already in her head. All over her organs.
He squeezed her shoulder, and for the first time, she realized the expression on his face was wonder. “It was gone. The tumor. There’s no trace.”
She blinked, feeling surreal, for in the dozens of scenarios she had gone through in her head before the operation, she had never expected this in any of the outcomes she’d dreamed for herself. She’d stopped believing in miracles when her mother died. And yet, how would you explain her tumor shrinking so totally? Without chemo?
“What have you been doing lately, Miss Summers? Tell me? I’m in awe of this. In my twenty years as a doctor, I’ve seen some marvelous recoveries, but this…?”
“I … well, I’ve taken green shakes every day and read that … graviola drops help reduce cancer naturally … and … I…”
Fell helplessly in love.
Her heart squeezed as she recognized that last.
Yes. She could say it was the graviola drops, and the cruciferous vegetables. She could say it was that her own body’s immune system, which supposedly should have taken care of the cancer in the first place, had finally kicked into overdrive. But then she thought of Cade, who made her feel one with her body again, who made her cherish the responses he could coax from her, who made her happy in her body and no longer betrayed by it … he’d been like a drug. And he’d been better than freaking chemo.