‘Is there anything else? Any pain anywhere?’
Suddenly that didn’t matter any more. ‘Chloe, I’m sorry.’
She stared at him. ‘What for?’
‘The way I left...’
She reddened slightly, and then recovered her composure. ‘We have more important things to think about—’
‘No. No, this is more important.’ He reached forward, trying to touch her arm, but pain shot up his leg, immobilising him.
‘Hey... Hey, it’s all right, Jon.’ She took his hand, squeezing it.
‘Please...it’s not all right...’ He hung on tight to her hand, trying to pull her a little closer. Chloe must have seen his anguish because she moved towards him, her free hand moving to his brow.
‘What’s on your mind, then?’ She said the words quietly. At last he had the opportunity that he’d been waiting for, even if this wasn’t the time or the place.
‘I treated you badly, Chloe. I’m so sorry.’
The pain in her eyes told him exactly how badly he’d treated her. ‘We both said things that we shouldn’t have. That doesn’t matter any more.’
His head was clear now, as if determination to take this opportunity had overwhelmed both the pain in his leg and the effects of the analgesics in his system. ‘What I said...what I did... It was nothing to do with you, and everything to do with me. I told you that I’d made a decision about my future after the divorce, but that wasn’t entirely true. There was no decision, I was just too afraid to do anything else because I’d been too badly hurt. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.’
‘You think I didn’t know that?’ She pursed her lips in a rueful smile. ‘Anyway, I was just as much to blame as you were. I couldn’t just accept it and let things alone.’
‘There’s no reason in the world why you should have, Chloe. I...’
She laid her finger over his lips. ‘We could argue about who was most to blame, if it makes you feel any better. Or we could just say that neither of us wanted to be hurt, and neither of us meant to hurt. Leave it at that, eh? Let it go, because it’s not what we are.’
Relief rushed through him, prompting another agonising jab of pain from his leg. Chloe had found it in that gorgeous, loving heart of hers to forgive him. And if putting the past behind them didn’t change the future, it was at least a start. Jon nodded, and Chloe took her finger from his lips.
‘All right. Now we’ve got that dealt with, you can lie still.’ That schoolmistress tone that he so loved reasserted itself. ‘And tell me where it hurts.’
Nothing hurt any more. Not in the light of her smile. ‘They’ve already examined me. And there’s no pain if I keep still. The ambulance paramedic gave me a shot of the good stuff.’
‘What did he give you?’ She snatched the notes up from the end of the bed and leafed through them. ‘Okay. That looks okay.’
‘Yeah. It was actually better than okay at the time.’ He tried for a grin to reassure her, and must have succeeded in part because she rewarded him with a dazzling smile. All he really wanted her to do right now was to take his hand again.
‘I want to take a look at your leg.’ She glanced at his right ankle, which was covered over with a dressing pad, laid loosely over the top of it.
‘Yes. Please do.’ Jon had tried to look at the leg himself, after the paramedic had taken off his boot and cut the leg of his jeans, but gentle hands had pushed him back down, and firm voices had told him to relax. Chloe’s judgement was the next best thing to his own.
She removed the dressing, tutting when she saw that it had blood on it and throwing it into surgical waste. Her touch was like the whisper of a butterfly’s wing, and she bent over, looking at the ankle from one side and then the other, before tearing open a new dressing and laying it over the wound.
‘Can you see the bone?’
‘Yes, it’s a nasty fracture, but from the X-rays, and seeing it now, it looks like a straightforward piece of surgery. It’ll take a while to heal, but I don’t see any
reason why you can’t make a full recovery.’
It was exactly what he wanted—no, needed—to hear. The unvarnished truth from someone who he trusted. We’ll get you back on your feet in no time didn’t ring true when he knew that it was beyond the wit of anyone to mend a displaced fracture that fast.
‘Thanks. Chloe...’
The door of the cubicle opened and Ben Marshall leaned in. ‘I’ve got the paperwork.’
Chloe practically tore it out of his hand and then directed a dazzling smile at him. ‘Thanks. I’ll take it up now.’