Free The Rousing: A Celtic in the Blood Novella by Jess Raven, Paula Black Page A

pepper-spray, but then she'd have some serious explaining to do about her unprovoked assault on me. Something told me she’d be claiming the whole thing had been an unfortunate accident.
    Wearing my borrowed hospital scrubs, and carrying my few tattered possessions in a yellow plastic bag, I left Liam’s room, determined to head home for a long hot shower and a change of clothes. My hair was matted with blood and the scratches on my face had scabbed over and were itching like a mother. Safe to say I was avoiding mirrors like a Bram Stoker vampire.
    Feeling a little woozy on my feet, I stepped out into the brightly lit corridor, cast my eyes to the nurse’s station just up the way, and paused. Adriana was standing at the desk, seemingly arguing with a nurse. Her blonde hair was scraped back in a ponytail. Her face, makeup free, still looked a little red and puffy, but it was obvious there was natural beauty underneath all the slap she normally wore. Probably one of the reasons Jack had married her. I’d told myself a hundred times while I sat waiting in that chair that her insults hadn’t gotten to me, but there was no denying the sting, or the guilt I felt for having been with her man. It was one of my few hard limits: taken men were totally out of bounds, even if they were as delectably seductive as the likes of the heroically flawed Jack Pembroke. I’d been on the receiving end once, and it wasn’t a place I ever wanted to be again. In truth, I felt kind of sorry for Adriana, clinging on for dear life to a cheating husband, desperate to lay the blame at the feet of the women he seduced, rather than the man she clearly still loved, in spite of his failings. There but for the grace of God I might have gone. What would have happened had I not walked in on Alec and Sally that day, if my father’s appointment with the dementia specialist hadn’t finished early because the therapist’s kid broke his arm in the school yard? I might have wound up just like Adriana, chasing the ghost of a soulless marriage. It really didn’t matter how beautiful the man was, or how good a lover. If he didn’t respect you, then he wasn’t worthy of your heart. I’d had a lucky escape with Alec, and with Jack Pembroke too. Both times, I’d gotten away before the damage was fatal. I saw that now. Sometimes, when I thought life was dealing me a bum hand, really it was working behind the scenes to save me from a world of heartache. My near-death experiences up at Bronach house had me thinking a lot about fate and destiny, and how things happened at a certain time for a specific reason, and it was about to happen again.
    “I’m sorry, Miss Cavallo,” I heard the nurse say, “but I can’t let you in to see Mr. Pembroke. Immediate family only at this time. It’s hospital policy.”
    “But I am family,” Adriana insisted.
    “What is your relationship to the patient?” the nurse demanded.
    “I’m his PA,” she argued, “I do everything for him. I pick up his underwear from the laundry for chrissakes. I order his groceries. We might as well be married.”
    “Unless you are legally married, Miss Cavallo, or you can prove to me that you are an immediate blood-relative of Mr. Pembroke, then I am terribly sorry, but you are simply going to have to wait until his condition is more stable and he is in a position to accept visitors.”
    The plastic bag fell from my hands and I felt the blood drain from my face, all the way down into my feet. My back hit the breeze-block wall, and I slid to the ground, Adriana’s voice becoming muffled, as though I’d been dumped in a fish bowl and was witnessing the argument underwater.
    “This is an outrage,” she shouted, tossing a bundle of papers from the desk. “What kind of shitty little backwater hospital is this? Do you even know who we are?”
    “I know you are not Jack Pembroke’s wife,” was the nurse’s clipped reply. “Now, I suggest you calm the hell down, Miss Cavallo, or Thomas