The Wedding Favor Read Online Free PDF Page A

with her. Would have, if he hadn’t passed out. What was he thinking?
    Sure, sound asleep, with her pink eyeshade and her blond hair all mussed up, she looked sweet and vulnerable. But now that he was sober, he remembered why he hated her.
    The trial. Two days of hell. Stark terror, she’d called it. Well honey , he thought, you have no idea.
    Partly because he wanted to, partly because he had to, he summoned it up, made himself remember every minute of those two awful days.
    The first had centered on the wrongful death claim—hospital bills, and actuarial projections used to calculate how much Lissa’s life would have been worth in dollars and cents if she’d been allowed to live it. Eighty years, she should have had. She’d gotten twenty-three.
    Then the second day—yesterday—they’d fought about pain and suffering. The defense’s theory was that Lissa’s estate wasn’t entitled to damages for her pain and suffering because she’d never regained consciousness after Jason Taylor plowed into her favorite mare, killing it and pinning Lissa, who was riding the mare, to the trunk of an oak tree with his Hummer.
    Lissa was knocked out by the impact, then slipped into a coma at the hospital. Though she lingered for five long days, neither her doctors nor any of the staff ever saw her wake up.
    But Ty did. He was at her bedside around the clock, and when she’d opened her eyes in the dead of the fourth night, he’d been looking right at her. His heart had jumped straight up into his mouth.
    “Ty,” she’d said, and he could still hear her thready voice. “Honey, you’ve got to stop this.”
    “Stop what?” he’d asked, disoriented.
    “This.” She slid her eyes to the right where a ventilator wheezed, pumping breath through the trach in her throat and into her damaged lungs, and to the left where an IV rack held seven bags of liquids, all running into the lines in her arms.
    “I can’t stop it, Lissa. They’re keeping you alive while you get better. While you heal.”
    “I’m not healing, baby. I’m hurting.” Her words puffed out on gusts of breath, timed to the ventilator’s rhythm. “You’ve got to let me go. Let me go now, you hear?”
    “Lissa, baby, I can’t.” Tears rolled off his cheeks. “I can’t go on without you, sweetheart. You need to stay with me.” He clutched her hand. “Just try to get well, now. Just a little bit better, so I can take you home to the ranch. I’ll wait on you hand and foot, honey. You’ll see. You’ll be strong again before you know it.”
    A smile ghosted across her face. “I love you, Ty. I’ll always love you. Remember that when you feel lonely.” Her eyes closed again.
    “Honey? Lissa baby?” He squeezed her hand, got no response. She’d slipped back under. And left him alone.
    His chest opened up, a hole that gaped from front to back, and a frigid wind blew through it. It sucked his breath out, and his heart, and left him empty. And oh so lonesome and cold.
    Twelve hours later, he signed the consent to discontinue life support. He pulled the plug on his wife, the love of his life.
    He’d managed to tell his story to the jury without breaking into a million pieces. But when Victoria Westin, on cross-examination, had asked him if it was possible that he’d simply dreamed that conversation, or perhaps hallucinated it—which would be completely understandable given the stress he was under, his fatigue, his grief—he’d fallen apart.
    Just like that, after seven years, he’d crumbled.
    Oh, the jury didn’t see it, he held it inside. But he’d be putting himself back together for a long time to come. And he had Victoria fucking Westin to thank for that.
    Unsnapping his seat belt, Ty shot his seat up and lunged out of it, a reckless move that made his head spin, but he was too mad to care. Momentum propelled him down the aisle to the restroom. He slapped the door open and kicked it shut behind him.
    Christ, it was too much to ask of him. To