Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (The Rajes #1)(37)

He dropped a kiss on her head.

She looked up at the hospital building. “Thanks for taking me away from here.”

“I’ll take you wherever you want to go, Em. Just promise you’ll tell me immediately if you don’t feel good. That you won’t try to be a hero.”

“Try?”

“Yeah yeah, but heroes must take care of themselves, too, love.”

“So they do. I will be a good girl. If the room starts to spin, I will try not to hit my head on something sharp when I fall. Good?”

“You are not doing a great job of putting me at ease,” he muttered as he helped her into her Volkswagen Beetle. She wasn’t allowed to drive anymore, but her eyes lit up when she saw the car. She loved the bloody thing at least as much as she loved him.

He slid behind the wheel and felt immediately like he had slipped on too-tight shoes. Did he mention it was hot pink? Which was probably why his little sister was grinning like a loon right now.

She waved bye to the nurse and settled into the puffy seats that seemed to have been created for her. The yellow halter dress and six-inch heels she was wearing made her look like one of those celebrities caught on camera while stepping out for ice cream instead of a patient leaving the hospital after a heartbreaking diagnosis.

The nurse stood there watching them drive away with a look DJ had seen far too many times. Emma saw DJ shaking his head at the rearview mirror and elbowed him in the ribs.

“Another broken heart left in your wake,” he said. “Poor gits. They have no idea that Emma Caine’s heart belongs to her art.”

“You better believe it,” she said. “Don’t look so smug, brah’. It runs in the family, innit?”

So it did. When homelessness was where your life started, you fell in love with the thing that gave you hope, that fit you right, that gave you power.

They drove down Palm Drive, soaking in the posh campus, and the posh town it was nestled in. Emma’s forehead puckered with worry. “Who would’ve thought losing your health would be so expensive? I have some money saved up. You don’t have to take this entire thing on yourself.”

When he didn’t answer for a while, she sank deeper into the seat and closed her eyes. “Okay, so I don’t. But I’ll come up with something.”

He reached out and patted the arm folded across her belly. Mum used to wrap her arms around herself exactly this way. “You don’t need to worry,” he said. “I’m a fancy chef, remember? I’ve got enough stashed up. You were right all along about me being miserly and insecure. Good news is it’s going to get us through this.”

“But I don’t want it all gone. You’ve worked your entire life for—”

“For us.”

She dismissed that with an impatient flick of her head. “You shouldn’t have to start from scratch.”

Truth was he’d never not felt like he was starting from scratch. Maybe it was because of those homeless days, but it didn’t matter how well he did, it had never been enough to feel secure.

“Maybe I’ll start blogging about this. That should take my art sales through the roof. Maybe I’ll become an internet sensation and they’ll make a movie: artist lives out her last days trying to make sense of death through her art. We can call it Going Down in a Blaze of Glory!” She made jazz hands. “Surely everyone will throw money at that!”

He stiffened, but she smiled at him. “Relax, I’m pulling your leg. Maybe.” She leaned back into the headrest.

“We’ll sort it all out. I’ve got a gig catering a fund-raiser for a bloke running for governor. Long as I get that right we’ll be okay. Let’s just go home now.” It was strange to use that word here. He’d long stopped trying to figure out what home even meant. When was the last time he had thought of any place as home? Certainly not England. He had no desire to go back there. Had he ever thought of Paris as home? He’d felt established there if not exactly rooted. Like his feet held up even if the land beneath them wasn’t familiar. Did he even want to feel rooted? Or did being rooted just mean you could be uprooted?

But Emma seemed to have found home here, and that meant this was where he needed to be right now.

“When has Chef Caine ever had trouble getting a dinner right?” she asked, smiling, her eyes closed.

Never. For all the things that were going tits up around them, Yash Raje’s fund-raiser was one thing he would not allow anyone or anything to mess up.





Chapter Eleven


They said shitstorms were like dominoes. Okay, so no one actually said that, but recently Trisha’s personal shitstorms were falling so hard and fast they were knocking each other down.

First, Emma had completely thrown her off by refusing surgery yesterday. Then, Nisha wasn’t answering her texts or calls. Then, Trisha had spent five hours in an emergency surgery operating on Dorna Matunge. And lost her.

She pressed a hand to her chest. She had known Dorna all her life, and she was going to miss her. All that wisdom, all that experience she had shared so generously, gone.

They had known there was no hope going in, her brain stem glioma had progressed. But Dorna had been insistent on the surgery and Trisha had thought there was a chance—albeit a tiny one—to make it work, so she had taken a stand on her behalf. Before going into the OR, Dorna had made Trisha tell her all about the technology. Unfortunately, the technology hadn’t been able to help given how far her cancer had advanced.