“Bradley, come with me. Callie’s been poisoned. The hospital is sending a chopper to get us. I want you checked out as well.”

Bradley opened the doors so Wes could carry Callie outside. A distant roar of a chopper gave him the barest glimmer of hope.

Callie’s lashes fluttered and for a second he saw her eyes. The pupils were dilated.

“Wes.” She lifted one hand as though to touch his cheek, but her hand fell limp into her lap and her head rolled back.

“No, baby, please hang on.” Tears cut like knives across his eyes as he held on to her. This was all his fault.

“Callie, listen to me. I can’t live without you. Do you hear me?” His voice broke as he clutched her tighter. A helicopter rose up over the trees and came overhead, slowly lowering to the ground.

Wes, with Callie in his arms, rushed to the paramedics who opened the doors and lifted a medical stretcher out. Bradley stepped back as the medics got to work strapping Callie in before they loaded her into the chopper. Then Wes and Bradley climbed inside.

The paramedics began to work on her and Wes shouted over the roar of the helicopter’s rotating blades what poison Callie had been drugged with. He watched as they inserted an IV into Callie’s arm to get fluids into her.

“Sir.” Bradley held out Wes’s phone. “You had better call her father. He should be flown in from Colorado immediately, just in case…”

Tears blotted out Wes’s vision, making it hard to see the numbers on his phone. He finally dialed. It was hard to hear, but he pressed one hand over his other ear.

“Hello?” Jim Taylor answered on the second ring.

“Jim, it’s Wes. There’s been a situation…” How could he tell the man that he might lose his daughter just like he’d lost his wife?

“Callie?” Jim’s voice was breathless, as though shock hit him hard. “What’s wrong?”

“Jim, you need to get to the airport. I’ll pay for a private charter to get you in twenty minutes.”

“God damn it.” The older man’s voice broke. “What happened to my baby girl?”

For a long second Wes struggled to find words.

“It’s a long story, Jim. I can’t tell you now. She’s been poisoned. We are on a life flight to the hospital.” Unable to speak anymore, he shoved the phone at Bradley who continued to speak to Jim.

Wes took Callie’s left hand and laced his fingers through hers, squeezing.

“Please stay strong, Callie. I need you. You can’t teach me to love and then abandon me.” He swiped a hand across his face and it came back wet with tears. He had lived a charmed life, everything at his fingertips.

Everything except love.

Love had found him and now he would lose it.

Chapter 26

Out of the darkness a gold light blossomed before Callie’s eyes. It grew from a tiny pinprick into an expanding horizon of glorious color. A shape loomed ahead. A sphinx. The warm stone was carved with familiar symbols. She reached out to touch it. Invisible fingers covered hers, squeezing lightly, then tighter. A breeze ruffled against her face, reminding her of the downy soft feathers of a bird.

“I can’t live without you.” The words were uttered so frantically, and were so wonderful.

“Can’t live without you,” she repeated, smiling deep inside. Why did she like those words? Who said them? Strange questions bounced through her mind, like a dozen bright tennis balls…bouncing away…The green court beneath them changed, deepened to a forest and the tennis balls shrunk to flashing fireflies. The thick scent of summer filled her lungs. She drew a deep breath, then looked about. Another pale yellow-green light shone through the gloom.

A lantern.

Four boys sat around the lantern. Small tents were erected behind them. They laughed and sang, roasting marshmallows over a tiny sputtering fire.

“I know you!” she cried out excitedly. The memories were so close, she could almost touch them. She ran toward them, but as she reached them, the boys were swallowed by the shadows. The small flames licking at the logs spit and crackled before the fire died. Gray smoke drifted up in serpentine coils before it vanished.

A loud roar, so loud. The sphinx was angry. It shook its head and clawed its paws in the desert sands. She tried to find it, but it was gone and the golden horizon was gone, too. She could still feel that invisible pressure on her hand as everything threatened to fade back into darkness.

“You can’t teach me to love, then abandon me.”

That voice. Dark, rich, seductive, yet full of anguish.

She knew that voice. It dropped into her like a stone into a deep well, striking a part of her that awakened at that sound. That voice belonged to a man, a man she belonged to.

“Please, find me!” she screamed out, hoping he could hear. Where was he? Why couldn’t he find her?

“Please,” she begged. “I don’t want to go.”

Go. There it was, a strange pull by something inside her, trying to force her into a deeper darkness, one where there would be no more light.

She focused on the darkness around her and then down at her hand. The pressure was there. It hadn’t left. She poured every bit of her strength into it and squeezed back. The invisible pressure tightened around her hand in return. Vibrations rolled through her, like deep notes of cellos humming and dying, then striking again.

“She’s responding,” a new voice said. “Sir, please let go of her hand. We need to—”

“No. I’m not letting go.”

“Never let go,” she tried to say, but her tongue was thick and wouldn’t move. The world around her was a fuzzy gray, like a heavy fog had dropped down from the mountains by her home.

Home. She missed the mountains, the silver birch trees with leaves that turned a bright yellow each fall. Leaves burst into a view before her, swirling in circles, caught up by the wind and into a whirling fire around her. Crisp air stinging her eyes and nose as she rode up winding trails.

“Callie, open your eyes.”

It was him. Her lifeline. The one she belonged to. Light sparked across her eyelids as they fluttered weakly. She needed to see him, the man who owned her heart.

Bright light burst through as she finally got her eyes open and she whimpered as her entire body quivered and then went very still from weakness.

A face leaned over her, blotting out the fluorescent lights above.

Wes. The name finally came back to her, and as he stared at her so grimly, she frowned back. Flashes of another Wes, one laughing, smiling, seductive, so full of fire and life, almost hurt to remember. The man gazing down at her was gaunt, his eyes lined with fatigue and a shadow of a beard tinting his jaw with a ruddy brown shade.

“What’s wrong?” The words were barely above a whisper, but he exhaled in relief and stroked her cheek with the back of his hand. She wanted him to smile, to see that man she’d fallen in love with and not this ashen-faced ghost.

“Thank God.” Tears coated the tips of his lashes.

“Wes,” she repeated, a tad stronger. In bits and pieces the night of the club came back to her but everything beyond her fight with Corrine was a terrifying blank slate.

“Hush, just rest. You’ve been through a lot, darling.” Wes’s hand gripping hers shook faintly.

“What happened? The Monet…”

He bent to press a kiss to her forehead. “It was Stephen Vain. He was the thief. He and Corrine were partners. He poisoned you with Jimsonweed at the club and waited for me to bring you home. Then he blackmailed me into giving him the real Monet in the black room before he would tell me what poison he gave you.”

Callie had to focus on what he said, but once she processed it all, she squeezed his hand again. She had been a pawn for Corrine and Vain to use to get the Monet?

“He got away with the Monet in the black room?”