I froze.
Literally, I tried to stand up, but my knees were frozen in my half-bent position, which actually put me behind a bush that was partially blocking me from Eerie’s view.
“This baby belongs to a man that doesn’t know I had his child,” she hissed. “You helped me, and if we don’t figure this out, you’re going down right along with me.” She shuffled, causing dirt to fly in my direction. Still, I held still. “What about getting him moved to a different hospital? There’s only a matter of time before he starts to look like him, and someone’s going to notice. The man’s too damn distinctive. He already has his goddamn cleft chin.”
Nausea burned in my belly as things started to make a sick sort of sense.
I moved, keeping low, until I reached the hospital doors, papers all but forgotten.
Then I ran to the elevators and tried to calm myself down.
It wasn’t working.
I felt bile rise into my throat as I went over the words I’d heard her speak.
Almost on autopilot, I went back to the NICU floor and scrubbed myself down.
Donning my gown, I walked into the NICU and placed my papers on the charge nurse’s counter.
Then I wandered over to Stanley’s incubator and stared.
He has his cleft chin.Chapter 9
Always give 100%. Unless you’re donating blood.
-Text from Reggie to Nathan
Nathan
I shuffled slowly to the door, so fuckin’ sore that I could barely see.
We had a SWAT call last night that turned into a goddamn three-ring circus shit show.
The call had started out fine. A routine—if one can say holding his wife at gunpoint was routine—man who’d walked in on his woman cheating on him and had decided it would be better to kill her than try to make sense of her cheating.
We’d talked him down, gotten the gun into our possession, and had been walking the dumbass man to the squad car when he’d decided he would rather be dead than go to jail. So what had he done? He’d run out in front of a fuckin’ train.
A. Fucking. Train.
He’d been only seconds away from getting the life knocked right out of his body when I hit him and took him down onto the other side of the tracks.
Sadly, the tracks had been raised up to go through a marsh—luckily that marsh was down thanks to a drought over the summer—and all we ended up doing was falling ass over tea kettle down a rather large hill.
Needless to say, I’d saved the guy, but I also wasn’t a young whipper snapper eighteen-year-old anymore. I was a grown ass adult that didn’t seem to take the hits as well as I used to.
Opening the door, I was half expecting to see one of the boys off the SWAT team or my dad. It wasn’t either, even though my dad was supposed to be here over an hour ago.
I instead opened the door to Reggie’s non-smiling face.
I blinked at her, staring hard, and said, “What?”
She looked… pissed.
Pissed and haunted and nauseous all at the same time.
Then a niggle of worry started to roll through me. Reggie being here could only mean one of a few things. And one of those was that she had news about my dad.
“Oh, fuck,” I said, jumping to the likeliest of conclusions. “Is my dad okay?”
Reggie’s face instantly went soft.
“No, this isn’t about your dad. This is about something else.” She ran her hands down over her face, groaning into them. “I don’t even want to tell you this. I’m sure it’s going to make you lose your shit.”
So I may or may not be notorious for losing my shit. I was always a hot-head. I’d been one since I was old enough to breathe. At least, that was what my father liked to tell me.
When I’d grown into my six-foot-four body, he’d said that I finally filled out enough to be able to handle being a hot-head.
Apparently, talking shit when you were tiny was frowned upon unless you could back it up.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
If it wasn’t my dad, could it be hers?
“Fuck!” she shouted.
I glanced over Reggie’s head to see three of my fellow SWAT team members outside. We had all of their attention.
Dax was washing his truck shirtless. Ford and Ashe looked to be installing a car seat into Ford’s truck. Then there was Saint who was sitting on his front porch drinking a Gatorade, looking to have just come from a run.
They were all now staring at Reggie and me.
“Babe.” I wrapped my hand around Reggie’s wrist and tugged it free from her face. “Tell me what’s going on.”
She looked sick.
Like she was about to throw up any second.
“Fuck me.” She blew out a shaky, steadying breath then said, “You remember seeing Eerie at the hospital?”
My stomach immediately soured upon hearing Eerie’s name.