Читать книгу Hopelessly Devoted To You - Jill Steeples - Страница 16

Chapter Six

Despite her pleadings, her pacts with the devil, her prayers to God and her requests to the Cosmos, Finn stayed resolutely obstinate and showed no signs of waking up. Apart from one awful night a week after the accident when she received a frantic phone call from his parents saying she needed to get to the hospital immediately because…well, just because…they’d tell her when she got there, there’d been no activity whatsoever. Thankfully the panicked phone call had been a false alarm and the sudden dip in Finn’s condition had righted itself to its previously stable condition, which wasn’t great, but it was stable. And with all the other terrifying scenarios out there, ‘stable’ seemed a pretty good compromise to Ruby.

Over the following days and then weeks, Ruby spent every spare moment, when she wasn’t working shifts at the restaurant, at Finn’s bedside. She had two freelance assignments she’d been working on at the time of the accident that she quickly finished off and returned to the clients with a hastily scribbled note. She made a decision not to take on any more jobs for the time being, not wanting to commit to something, not knowing if she might need to rush to Finn’s side at any given moment. Besides she didn’t think she could concentrate on anything for more than a nanosecond as her mind was preoccupied with all thoughts of Finn.

Instead, she sweet-talked Hugo, her boss at the restaurant, into giving her as many shifts as he had available. She would wake up in the morning and either dash to the hospital or get ready to go into work and when she was finished at the one place she would dash off to the other. It was all she could cope with, but she liked the fact that she didn’t have lots of empty hours in the day and she relished the familiarity of the restaurant where, when she walked through the door, Hugo would greet her with a welcoming hug, before she donned her pinny and got to work knowing she would be rushed off her feet for a couple of hours. Hours in which she didn’t have time to dwell on Finn lying helplessly in hospital.

Hugo was an old school friend of Finn’s and Ruby’s favourite of all his friends. They clicked from their first meeting and although Hugo and Finn had since grown apart, preoccupied as they were with their respective work commitments, Ruby had become closer to Hugo having worked for him on and off for the last few years. Over the last couple of weeks he’d been a complete sweetheart, telling Ruby that if she needed to go to the hospital, even if it was in the middle of a shift, then she needed to up and go and not to worry about letting anyone down.

‘Are you all right, darling?’ Hugo asked as they literally bumped into one another through a swing door into the kitchen. His hand on her arm brought her up short, his touch reminding her that her emotions were raw beneath the surface, just waiting to erupt.

‘Yes, fine.’ Ruby laughed and ran a hand through her hair. She took advantage of the moment to take a breath, fanning her hand in front of her face, knowing her cheeks were flushed from the heat of the kitchen.