“Well, I’m breathing, which tops some of our other moments by that fact alone, but I’ve never been this scared,” I admitted.

“Me, either.” Every line of his body was tense, and I knew it would remain like that until he saw me in recovery. “Well, if this is as bad as it gets, how do you think we’re handling it?”

“Like pros.” He was so close that his face consumed all of my vision, blocking out the hospital around me, and with it a portion of my fear.

“Right. I love you. You are the best thing that has ever happened to me. My life started the moment I breathed into you, and I can’t think of a better use for my breath now than to use it to say, ‘I love you,’ for the rest of our lives. I’m going to marry you, and we’re going to have gorgeous, green-eyed babies who will turn us gray with their recklessness.”

My heartbeats paused, then hammered. “Is that a proposal?” I whispered, terrified of both answers.

He shook his head, his dimple making an appearance. “No, a warning. Trust me, when I propose, you’ll know it.”

I leaned up and kissed him, thinking of when he’d told me the same thing about his kisses. “Trust me, when I say yes, you’ll know it,” I whispered against his mouth. “I love you.”

“I’m sorry, but we have to get going,” the nurse said behind a small sniffle.

We didn’t say good-bye. Jagger held my hand until he couldn’t reach beyond the painted red line in the hallway, and then I was alone. When they told me to count backward from one hundred, I mentally counted the reasons I loved him, but I didn’t get past ninety-four.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Jagger

I’ll be around, but you won’t see me, because you never really did. But I’ll find someone who will, and I’ll start my own family, not as a Mansfield. Prescott can stay with you and drown with your expectations. Jagger will fly way above them. Way above you.

“Do you want to know?” General Donovan asked as he came into the waiting room. “I just spoke with Will.”

I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter.” Nothing mattered except the blonde who currently had my heart out on the operating table.

She’d been in surgery three and a half hours for a procedure that should have taken a flat three. Each movement of the second hand took a minute. I counted twenty-three chairs in the waiting room, and one hundred fifty ceiling tiles. “You’re driving me crazy,” Morgan whispered.

“She should be out.”

“No news is good news,” she countered, flipping the page on Paisley’s Kindle.

“We’re in a hospital. No news is usually dead.” I cursed my slip.

“And they call me dramatic.”

The door opened and a scrubbed doctor headed for the Donovans, but it wasn’t Larondy. I was halfway across the room before I thought about standing up.

“We found something,” he explained. A weird sense of calm swept over me, numbing the panic. “She needs to have her mitral valve replaced. We couldn’t tell the extent of the obstruction until we were in there, and the valve isn’t salvageable.”

Mrs. Donovan sagged into her husband. “Right now?” she asked.

“It’s best to do it while we’re in there, yes.”

“I didn’t want this in the first place. Oh, Lee.”

“Ma’am, this isn’t a complication of her surgery, but of her heart. It’s a good thing we did the septal myectomy. We’ve already removed nine grams, and the pacemaker wouldn’t have helped the obstruction. She would have been back in here before too long.” He lifted the clipboard. “Who wants to sign?”

Her instincts had been right. She’d saved herself. “Do it. She doesn’t want another surgery. Get it done now,” I ordered.

Her father studied me carefully, then nodded. “He’s right. She would want you to do it now.” He took the clipboard and signed, then handed it over.

We waited another hour before I couldn’t take it anymore. I paced the hospital like a caged tiger, with no goal or destination in mind. They had her heart open. Right now. Doctors were touching the most precious thing in my world, and I had zero control.

People moved around me, oblivious to the fact that my world hung in a precious balance. Probably because theirs did, too, but the noise…the noise was too fucking much. I paused at the chapel and pressed in on the doors.

Blissful quiet came over me, and my ears slightly rang from the abuse they’d been taking all day. Even though I was alone, I picked a pew at the end and sat in a church for the first time since my mother’s funeral. I bowed my head and began to pray. I made every deal I could think of with God, in the hopes that he existed and listened. I would do anything, give anything, as long as she lived. Anything.

I don’t know how much time had passed, but my hands had gone numb where they supported my head, and I was no longer alone.

“She’s out and in recovery,” General Donovan said, his voice full of reverence that had nothing to do with where we were.

My head fell back, and my eyes turned skyward, where the small stained-glass skylight rained down color. “Thank you.” He dropped a folded piece of paper into my hand.

“Paisley wanted you to have that. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to deliver a death letter before she lived.”

I turned the note over and shoved it into my pocket.