"I"m ok, it"s just my head was... umm well you were right." She shook her head slightly and moved out of the way letting Draven come in with me still in his arms. Then he spoke and I thought Libby was going to pa.s.s out!
"She fainted at work and has been a bit unstable on her feet, so I brought her home... to get some rest." He said this last part as a hint to get some sort of clue as to where he might put me down but she still didn"t say a word. However we did get a semi response as she pointed to the stairs.
"It"s ok, just put me on the couch." I was already embarra.s.sed enough as it was, but picturing him in my bedroom made me blush. The thought of him laying me on my bed was enough to make my mind burst with pleasure and I didn"t know if I could hide my secret fantasy about him doing this without moaning and giving myself away. As it were, I was going to have no choice in the matter as he ignored what I had said and went for the stairs carrying me up them as though I weighed nothing at all. My sister followed behind like something from a zombie movie.
He reached the first landing but kept going as if he knew where my room was. He leaned down to my face and said "Is your sister Libby all right, she hasn"t spoken a word."
"Yeah and it"s a first!.. she"ll be fine." I said under my breath so only he could hear. He tried to hide a smile. I was in shock... did he just find me funny?
When inside my room he looked around for a moment before finding what he was looking for... my bed. I knew this was the end so I inhaled deeply taking in his scent for the last time, wishing more than anything in the world that I could keep this intoxicating smell forever with me. This was the moment I was both dreading and dreaming about. There was just something about a man that carried you to bed that made my blood boil. But this man, well there was no other that I could imagine ever topping this, even if I wasn"t going to remain in his arms for much longer.
He placed me down tenderly and said, "Here you go." And that was enough to make me close my eyes and bite my lip yet again. But he hadn"t moved, did he want to say something more?
"You better watch that lip of yours or before long you won"t have anything left of it." One side of his mouth curved up into a mischievous grin and my heart was very near to doing a back flip in response.
"Thanks," I said under my breath so he wouldn"t hear.
"You"re welcome," he said over his shoulder as he had turned to face Libby who had now joined us. How had he heard me? I was pretty sure I had only mouthed the words more than actually saying them. Poor Libby must have regained some life back when walking up the stairs as she was now smiling at him.
"Thank you so much for bringing her home but my G.o.d Kazzy what are you trying to do, scare me to death?" OH GREAT, she was back! And she just had to call me Kazzy, like I was five all over again. Draven smiled at this and went to stand next to her.
"It was no trouble, but I would get her to a doctor tomorrow as she might need an X-ray," he said as though they were a parent and teacher talking about me as though I was a b.l.o.o.d.y child!
"NO, I said I will be fine, no doctors...I wo" I nearly shouted this but the pain cut me off and my eyes watered through squinted lids. Draven frowned and Libby noticed.
"She doesn"t like doctors, ever since... well..."
"LIBBY!" I shouted, warning her not to add anything else to that sentence or my life would have ended there and then. Now Draven"s full attention was on my face. I could almost see the cogs turning in his head. He looked as though he was burning to know why I had just reacted this way. Luckily the conversation was interrupted by Frank running up the stairs shouting about the Aston Martin parked in the drive.
"Lib"s have you seen that car, man whose is..." He was cut short once he entered my bedroom and saw the answer to his question standing there with his wife.
"OH shi..I mean Mr Draven Sir." At this Libby froze in horror, as it finally twigged who he was. But Draven turned to Frank and held his hand out to him and calmly said, "Please call me Dominic." Frank shook his hand as though he was meeting a celebrity. Libby also shook his hand but once more she couldn"t speak. I couldn"t help think that this was a blessing.
Frank looked over to me in the bed and said, "Hey kiddo what"s up with you, you all right?" Great now it was Kiddo, what was next, a bottle before bedtime and nursery rhymes?
"It"s no big deal, I fell and now everyone"s fussing." I couldn"t look at Draven anymore. It was still too hard enough believing any of this was still happening. Nope there was definitely no more worries about this being a dream! Frank stepped closer to see for himself what all the fuss was about and then made a face like he tasted something sour in his mouth.
"d.a.m.n, kid that don"t look good, where did you fall? In the ring with Bruce Lee?" Great the one person I thought I could count on and now he had turned to the dark side. And just when I thought it couldn"t get any worse, Libby found her voice again.
"No, she did it in the woods, and then she went to work with concussion, collapsed and then Mr Draven here was good enough to bring her back...himself," she added the last part as though some secret code she was trying to get across that Draven did in fact drive me back here and why the h.e.l.l would he do that!!!???
"Well, I will leave you all and Keira I don"t expect to see you working back in the VIP until you get the ok from a doctor ...understood." Draven said with his authoritative tone firmly back into place. GREAT well this night really couldn"t get any worse, if it tried. Oh no I was mistaken because what came next was far worse than anything that had happened this night. Because what came next out of Draven"s lips would haunt me for the rest of my life!
"Oh and if I were you I would give her a bucket just in case, she was sick earlier." OH DEAR G.o.d! He had known all along that I had vomited in his plant pot! Life just couldn"t get any worse!
"Oh my, ok I will do that...and thank you very much for taking care of her but wait... did you say the VIP." Libby unfortunately hadn"t missed that bit and now I was going to pay for it.
"Yes this was Keira"s second night working the VIP area, did she not mention it?" Draven"s eyes looked questioningly at me but I looked away from his gaze.
"No it must have slipped her mind." Libby said keeping her voice steady and smiling.
Draven nodded at my sister and Frank and said goodbye leaving the room with Frank walking him out. I could hear him asking, "Umm could I just ask what model is the Aston...," as his voice trailed off downstairs.
I wanted to die of shame! It was so bad that tears started to well up in my eyes and thankfully Libby put it down to the pain. She came over and sat on my bed to feel my temperature.
"Oh Kaz, it will be all right, I"ll get you some pain killers." And then I remembered, Draven had taken mine away and he still had them. But then I noticed Libby opening up a bottle of pills that was on my bedside table. It was the same bottle he had taken but how? He must have put them there when he put me down. Libby went into the bathroom and came back with a gla.s.s of water in one hand and an empty bin in the other. I raised my eyebrows and she said, "Just in case"
She handed me the water and I finished it in one, along with the two pills. Strange they looked different somehow but I looked at the bottle and it was the same one as before. So I shrugged it off putting it down to my spinning head and immense headache. After all, this was the craziest night of my life so why should it suddenly start making sense?
"Try and get some rest but wake me if you need anything or if you start feeling worse." She kissed me gently on the forehead and I told her I would be fine as she left the room leaving me with the cruel images of tonight"s events.
No, I would never sleep, that much I was sure about. I lay there and wondered how on earth I was ever going to face Draven again. What must he be thinking of me? The most ironic part was that if I had just left when Karmun asked me to then I could have avoided all of this humiliation but then my mind drifted to the nicer parts of tonight. The part where I was in his arms and the way he held me close as though needing to protect me in some way. Wasn"t that worth all the humiliation in the world?
I mean we had actually had a conversation, of sorts. He now knew things about me, he now knew where I lived, who I lived with and even knew where I slept. But I was missing something here, when had I told him any of that? I hadn"t told him any directions to my house but yet he knew exactly where it was. I didn"t tell him my sister"s name yet on the stairs when he asked me if she was all right, he had said, "Is your sister Libby". And most of all how did he know which room was mine, how would he have known that I slept on the top floor in the attic! This wasn"t making any sense. There was something...different about him. He wasn"t like everybody else and by everybody else I meant... human.
I laughed off my ridiculous thoughts, I mean what was I thinking...not human, I needed help! Maybe this bang to my head had affected me more than I thought. I probably told him these things but don"t remember because I was in pain. Or the best explanation was he probably looked at my records. I mean I don"t remember filling out details but I did get the job thanks to Frank, so maybe he filled something in for me.
I still had all my clothes on so I kicked off my shoes and wormed my way out of my trousers. I was about to take off my top when I stopped myself. I lifted it up to my nose and inhaled, allowing my senses to be overwhelmed with the scent of his body. I pulled the top over my head only leaving my underwear and a vest on but I held the top in my hands and then positioned it close to my head so that I would fall asleep with nothing but that scent to consume my mind.
I woke up the next day to find that I had slept through the whole night without one dream or more importantly a nightmare. I was even more surprised that I had managed to fall asleep at all given the amount of worrying I had been doing as soon as Draven had left. I looked at my bedside table and noticed a mug of now cold tea, as it must have been sat there a while. I looked at the clock. OH, wow it was nearly one in the afternoon. I hadn"t slept this much since being in the hospital. It took me all of two minutes to realise that what had happened last night was in fact not a dream. And a mixture of pleasure and pain rang deep in my head. What a fool I had made of myself and knowing that I could do nothing to take it all back just made the pain part worse.
There was a little tap at my door and then it opened without waiting for a reply.
"Hey honey, how are you feeling today?" My sister"s kind face poked through the doorway and when she realised I was now awake she walked right in.
"I"m ok, still a little sore but I will live to humiliate myself for another day I"m sure," I said in reply and she smiled and looked a little confused.
"What is it?" I said wondering what else could have gone wrong last night.
"Well I think you will need to get dressed as the Doctor"s here." WHAT, no way, never going to happen, what was she thinking!
"AWW Lib"s why did you go and call a doctor, I said I was fine and..." She cut me off holding her hands up in defence.
"I didn"t call a doctor."
"What! Then who did?" She smiled, clearly amused with the answer.
"He said that Mr Draven sent him." Oh no, she was serious. This wasn"t some cruel trick instead it was just a cruel reality.
She left the room giving me some privacy to get changed telling me she would give me ten minutes. But my mind wouldn"t concentrate, as it was still fuzzy and light headed and not just with the huge lump protruding from my forehead. I got up and wobbled like one of those inflatable clowns you hit for fun. My brain wasn"t up to the simple task of walking to the bathroom. Once I finally got there I washed and brushed my teeth but my throat still burned from last night"s vomiting and the thought once more made me shake my head in shame. Once I"d finished in the bathroom I grabbed a pair of black sweat pants from my drawer and put on a fresh pair of grey sleeved gloves and a maroon coloured long sleeved top with a faded football logo of my dad"s old university team. I brushed through my hair quickly pulling it into a ponytail and then went to sit back on my bed waiting for a doctor I didn"t want.
"May I come in?" A voice at the door asked and begrudgingly I agreed.
The man who walked in was at least in his fifties and had a familiarity about him that I couldn"t put my finger on. His eyes were very dark and deep set into his skull. He had a very square jaw and a kind smile that lit up his eyes making him look like a sweet guy. This made me relax slightly but I was still cautious. I hadn"t had a lot of good experiences with doctors and generally as a rule stayed away as much as I could help it.
"Keira I presume, it"s nice to meet you my dear, I"m Doctor Spencer." He held out his hand for me to shake and smiled showing an impressive amount of very white teeth.
"Hi, nice to meet you." Ok so I lied but what I going to say "I"m dreading it so please get it over with."
"Mr Draven tells me you took a nasty fall in the woods and was feeling some ill effects of it last night?" This wasn"t really a question so when I didn"t answer he came over to the bed to look for himself. He carried a black leather bag, one you might expect from a doctor, and placed it next to the bed as he sat opposite me. He lifted my hair out of my eyes, very much the same way Draven had done and the memory made me shiver.
"I"m sorry my hands must be cold, if you could lean your head back for me and I will take a closer look." I did as instructed as he poked around the lump and cut that was in the middle of it. Then he took out a small torch, stethoscope and then the thing I was dreading the most...something to measure my blood pressure.
"That looks nasty. You should really have gone to the hospital and got some st.i.tches." He tutted and shook his head as though I was a naughty child. So I said the only thing in my defence, which so happened to be the truth.
"I know but I kinda have a thing with hospitals." I said as his eyes fell on mine with a weird look of empathy.
"Bad experience I take it." He replied as he shone the flash light in my eyes to measure my responses.
"Something like that," I said before he wanted me to follow his finger. It was strange, his eyes looked at me with a burning pa.s.sion and I felt something strange around him the same as I felt around Draven. It made me wonder if they were somehow related, as I could imagine Draven looking like this when he got older. He was handsome for an older guy like Harrison Ford or Robert Redford. He asked me about my symptoms last night and how I was feeling now.
"I feel a lot better today after a good night sleep." I said knowing he would be the one I would have to convince to let me go back to work. He raised an eyebrow and asked, "Do you usually have trouble sleeping?" Ha what an understatement!
"Yeah sometimes...well I mean lately." I wish he wouldn"t pry. That was the worst thing about doctors they had a way of picking up on everything. And they were usually right on the money.
"Do you take any medication for it?" s.h.i.t! I knew if I went down this route I could easily predict where it would end.
"No." I don"t know why but he looked at me as if he knew it was a lie because he repeated my answer, which is usually a pretty clear indication when someone doesn"t believe what you"re saying.
"Ok, well let"s take your blood pressure." Great, the bit I was dreading. This was the point they all thought I was a nut job!
"If you could just roll up your sleeves for me." He was getting the strap ready to put on my arm and I paused not knowing what to do. He nodded to my sleeves when I didn"t react, so I gave in and did as I was told and rolled them up over my elbow. He looked down at the gloves and frowned.
"Are you cold?"
"I suffer from bad circulation, cold feet as well, do you mind if I keep them on." He didn"t seem convinced and said, "It won"t be for long." And he was about to roll them back when I pulled my arm from under his hands.
"Look I"m sorry Doc but I have this thing with people touching my arms, let"s just put it down to an accident and leave it at that ok." He nodded and looked sad getting my full meaning on the subject. After all he was a doctor and I gathered he had seen this type of behaviour before.
"Ok... let"s measure it on your neck should we?" His jaw tightened when he looked at my arms and then softened when he touched my neck.
"I appreciate it and I a.s.sume that all this will remain confidential?" I nodded to my arms and he knew what I meant. I was at least happy to see we were on the same page.
"You mean Draven?" He smiled and I didn"t understand the meaning behind it. I nodded not wanting to say his name in front of him.
"Mr Draven is only concerned and wants to know when you"re fit to go back to work, anything else will go no further than this room." He said making me relax my tensed arms and sigh in relief.
"Thank you." My voice said with strained emotion. I don"t know why but I trusted this man and I couldn"t for the life of me understand why. He handed me some pills to take that would help with the swelling and pain. He also re-covered the cut taking Libby"s make shift st.i.tches off and re-applying medical ones. He then left the cut uncovered letting the air get to it. I also noticed him studying me and I could see his eyes lingering on my father"s old sweater for a moment before my voice pulled his attention back to my eyes.
"So this means you will tell Draven I"m fit for work?" I asked in the hope that his answer would be the one I wanted to hear.
"Yes, after three days of rest, then depending if you"re fine in that time and have had no more dizzy spells then yes I will." That was not what I wanted to hear.
"Aww come on Doc, look I feel fine, great even and I don"t want to lose my job or anything." I was hoping guilt would work but with the smug look on his face he wasn"t buying it.
"I very much doubt that would happen and if I find out that you haven"t taken my orders on board then I will ring up Mr Draven and tell him you"re not fit for a week!" Oh great, a Doctor with a PHD in manipulation as well as medical.
"Ok, ok three days off work." I shook my head at the thought of not seeing Draven till then and the pain once again came back to my head.
"Not just work, college too." I pulled a face as if to say h.e.l.l no but he continued with "Doctor"s orders" And handed me a note to be handed into the academic office at college.
"I can"t. Look you have never met my History teacher. You have to be dying to get away with not turning up for one of his cla.s.ses." He laughed as though I was joking.
"I will speak to Mr Draven. I know his sister is in the same cla.s.s, so I"m sure she could have a word with him for you." Oh G.o.d that was the last thing I wanted, I had caused too many problems for Draven as it was.
"NO...I"m mean no thanks... that won"t be necessary, I think I have caused more than enough aggravation for Mr Draven without involving him in any more of my problems." He looked hurt at this and again I was baffled by it.
"That"s not how Mr Draven thinks, I have known him a long time and he has always taken care of his staff."
"Oh I have no doubt, but he did enough for me last night and considering it was only my second night I think he has done enough for me to last my life time, I wouldn"t like to push my luck." I said with the memory of me in his arms. .h.i.tting me again like a battering ram.
"Never" My head whipped round to his at hearing the word that was barely spoken.
"Sorry, did you say something?" I asked wondering if I had mistaken what he had said.
"I said fair enough. Well in that case I will be off to report back to the man in question." He got up and held his hand out again to shake mine goodbye. I placed my hand in his and the heat coming from his skin shocked me.
"Goodbye Keira it was a pleasure meeting you and until next time." He said and then let go of my hand leaving me feeling confused. Why would he say until next time? What a strange thing for a Doctor to say, because let"s face it, when was going to the doctor"s ever a good thing?
As soon as he was out of sight I fell back on the bed and covered my face with my hands saying out loud "What must he think of me?"
"What must who think of you?" Libby"s voice sprang from behind my door as though she had been waiting for the doctor to leave. I was not in the mood to talk to Libby about any of this so I said, "Sorry Lib"s but my head is still killing me so I"m just going to take some more pain killers and try and sleep it off, can we talk later?" She nodded and closed the door leaving me alone to fight with my thoughts. I grabbed the pills that the doctor had left and pulled the covers over my head, as little tears started to fill my eyes.
Chapter 20 Obsessions.
My three days off were all starting to merge into one. By the third, I was going slowly insane with boredom and Sat.u.r.day night kept crawling its way back into my mind making me cringe every time. I just couldn"t bear the idea of Draven thinking badly of me. But every time I went over how I acted that night, I just couldn"t expect anything else. I was biting at the bit to see him again but I was also anxiously dreading it. What could I ever say to him to explain my behaviour? There was nothing.
Draven had become like a drug and I was like the junky needing another score. Was this my rehab? I was most definitely ready to overdose on my obsession, because there was only one thing that I wanted and it was the one thing that I would never get... Dominic Draven.
But going cold turkey wasn"t exactly working for me either. Even his name brought Gooseb.u.mps to my skin. After that night of being so close to him I couldn"t think of anything else. I replayed and replayed the scene over and over like a favourite movie. Only I couldn"t decide whether it was a horror or a romance, as it stood, I would say it was equally both with Draven being the romantic part and me being the Horror.
Sunday was what I thought was day one, but I learned later that day that the Doctor had told Draven that I should only go back to work on Thursday night. Sophia had phoned me to tell me this and asked if I wanted her to come round with any history notes from the lessons I would miss. She had also rea.s.sured me that Draven hadn"t said much about that night only that it wasn"t an inconvenience and that he hoped I was feeling better. I almost jumped up and down with happiness at this but it was soon replaced with doubts. Maybe she had just said those things to make me feel better.
Unfortunately my obsessing over the whole thing didn"t end there. I spoke to Libby about it when I had finally risen from my crypt, I say crypt because when I finally got up and looked in the mirror I looked as if I had been living in the seventh circle of h.e.l.l!
I had walked downstairs to the most amazing smell of pizza and knew that they must have ordered take-out as, no offence to Libby, but her food never smelt that good. I realised that I was starving. I hadn"t really eaten much on Sat.u.r.day and what little I had, I had thrown up! It was now nearly seven in the evening and I was so hungry my stomach ached as it growled angrily at me.
"See Lib"s, told ya, once she smelled the food she"d come down...how you feeling kid?" Frank was sat on the couch digging into one of the two pizza boxes, grabbing a ma.s.sive slice and Libby was on his other side eating hers from a plate.
"I"m feeling better thanks, but man I could eat a horse." I sat down and dug in taking one without anchovies. I couldn"t get my head round anchovies on a pizza. In England you never got them as an option and it turned out that I wasn"t missing out. But Frank loved them. Actually there wasn"t much Frank didn"t eat!
"So honey I thought now would be the time to...umm...discuss last night." Libby said this in a quiet timid voice as though not to upset me and I knew she had a right to know but it was still so fresh in my mind, I really didn"t want go into it.