Take a Chance on Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

taxpayer-funded update. Ivy followed on his tail, intending to ask at the nurses’ desk for directions back to her apartment or even to call acab. Did they have cabs in Deep Haven? The desk was empty, the nurses probably occupied with their patient.
    Across from the desk, an emergency room bay held two beds, one of them cordoned off with a curtain.
    Darek plowed right up to a cluster of women standing vigil in the middle of the hallway. The older woman—Ivy would guess she might be Darek’s mother—had bobbed blonde hair and smart red glasses, her arms folded over her chest as if trying to hold herself together. One of the girls, maybe his sister, had her blonde hair tied up in a hairnet and sported a short-sleeved black shirt with a Pierre’s Pizza logo emblazoned on the breast. The other looked younger, maybe even in high school, petite and brunette. She wore a pink tie-dyed T-shirt, low-hanging sweatpants, flip-flops. Her pink toenails looked freshly painted.
    Ivy had correctly pegged them as family judging by the way Darek lit into them. In fact, the entire county might be able to hear him.
    “Where is he?”
    “Calm down, Darek. It’s just a few stitches,” the older blonde woman said, but her voice shook.
    “ Stitches? Sheesh, Mom, what happened?”
    “I put him to sleep in Owen’s old bed, but he climbed up on the top bunk. I didn’t even know until I heard him scream.”
    Darek made a face, something of pain. “You have blood all over you.”
    At that, Ivy gave the woman a closer look. Blood smeared the collar of her shirt.
    “Head wounds bleed a lot—”
    “Head wound! Does he have a concussion?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Darek pushed the rest of the way through the crowd and pulled aside the curtain.
    Ivy saw a man—probably Darek’s father for the resemblance to him, with his scowl, blue eyes, wide shoulders under a canvas jacket—holding the hand of a little boy.
    A cute little boy. With curly blond hair that hung in spirals around his head and brown eyes. He wore Spider-Man pajamas, his feet bare. And blood saturated his shirt, coated his face. A nurse pressed gauze to a wound over his eye while the child fought back tears.
    How well she could remember sitting in a hospital, fighting back tears.
    Then Ivy’s breath stilled in her chest as the nasty man she’d spent the last hour with transformed before her eyes.
    Darek moved around the gurney. “Hey there, Tiger.” He forced a smile despite the trauma in his eyes.
    “Daddy!” The boy started to whimper and pulled away from the nurse to throw his arms around Darek’s neck, burying his face in his shoulder.
    Darek held him tight, rocking him.
    “Tiger looks just like Darek at this age,” Darek’s mother murmured. “I can’t believe I didn’t check on him.”
    “It’s okay, Mom. These things happen. He not only looks like Darek, but he has his father’s wild streak.” The younger daughter slipped her arm around her mother’s shoulder.
    “Thanks, Amelia. I just wish he was a bit easier to corral.” She turned to the other girl. “Grace, is your shift over?”
    “No,” the blonde pizza girl said. “But when you called about Tiger, trying to find Darek, I got off. One of the other girls filled in for me. I’ll make up the hours later this week.”
    “Poor Darek. Did you hear that he went for five hundred dollars tonight at the bachelor auction? Some out-of-towner bought him,” Amelia said. “Clearly she didn’t know what she was buying.”
    “Oh, be nice, Amelia. Darek is a fine catch for any woman.”
    “Mom, seriously. Darek is about as dark and wounded as they come. He’s never getting married again. He wouldn’t have gotten married the first time if—”
    “So we’re having the party here?”
    They turned at the voice, and the sliding doors closed behind a man with dark, tousled hair, sporting a leather jacket, jeans, hiking boots. He strode past Ivy, toward the family.
    “Casper!” Amelia went into his