Time to Hide by John Gilstrap Read Free Book Online

negotiate.”
    It all made sense, Nicki supposed. It wasn’t entirely different than her own circumstances. She’d seen the futility of fighting her father, too. “So, why didn’t you mention this before?”
    Brad tossed off a shrug. “You’d already lost your mother. I didn’t want you hating your father.”
    â€œAnd now?”
    He gave a rueful chuckle. “Well, now that I’m telling the story, I’m hating him myself, so I guess I don’t care.” He didn’t like the dejected look that invaded Nicki’s face. “Do you want to talk about this anymore?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œGood.”
    â€œYou know what I would like to do?”
    Something stirred in Brad’s gut. “Tell me,” he said.
    â€œI want to go back to the room and soak in that gorgeous bathtub.”
    Brad had to be careful here.
    Nicki squeezed his hand. “I had a wonderful time. But if I don’t get some rest, there’ll be hell to pay later. Really.”
    Brad stood and offered his arm, hoping that his erection didn’t show. “Shall we?”
    He escorted her out of the ballroom, overdoing it a bit with standing straight and tall. “Ever feel like you’re about to turn into a pumpkin?” he asked under his breath.
    Nicki thrust the point of her hip into him playfully. “As long as I’m with my prince charming, it doesn’t matter.”
    * * *
    Nicki had never seen so much polished marble. It was a deep rose color, with swirling veins of white and black.
    She ran the water warm—just the other side of cool—and dumped in the contents of the tiny plastic bottle of bubble bath. She pressed the button that launched the Jacuzzi jets and thirty seconds later, the lather of thick bubbles was dense enough to walk on.
    Nicki slipped out of her ball gown, draping it on the hook on the back of the door, and eased herself into the water. The hiss of the bubbles filled the room with white noise. One of the most disappointing complications of her disease was the need to avoid super-hot baths to keep her heart from racing too fast as it tried to slough off the heat. Keeping the heart rhythm normal was the rule of the day, every day. Don’t get too excited, try not to exert too much, and the ever-thickening blood vessels in her lungs would be able to handle the load. For now, anyway.
    The foam expanded all the way to her chin before she realized that she’d forgotten to take her rat poison. The thought made her groan aloud. The pills were all the way across the room, standing sentry next to the other prolonger-of-life, her Digoxin, a water pill that kept her tissues from absorbing the liquid from her blood and turning her into the Pillsbury Dough Boy.
    The pills can wait, she thought, and she closed her eyes. If there really was a just God, then heaven would have lots of really big bathtubs.
    You’ve got to take your meds. This was the part of her that bothered her the most: the part that wouldn’t just let her relax. Ever.
    There was no sense fighting it. Gathering herself, she rose out of the tub, quick-walking carefully on the marble floor over to the sink, where she snagged the two bottles and quick-walked back to the tub. The round-trip couldn’t have taken more than ten seconds. She’d forgotten to grab a drinking glass, of course, but that wasn’t such a big deal. She took her meds dry all the time. With her hands covered in white bubbly mittens, she expertly popped the caps off the pill bottles, dropped those little babies into her palm and tossed them back. They tasted a little like soap this time, but they went down. She laid the bottles on the wide edge of the tub, behind the Jacuzzi controls, so they couldn’t fall into the bath, and she lay back and closed her eyes. She tried to imagine that the water was the way she used to like it, hot enough to make a good cup of tea.
    The bubbles consumed her,