I could understand that.
Mostly.
“That’s exactly who I want to talk to,” I muttered as I made my way out of the NICU.
Thankfully I didn’t see her anywhere, so I thought I was home free.
I made it all the way out to my car, gathered my paperwork that I needed for my insurance, and headed back inside with my head down as I scanned the papers.
A gust of wind sent a chill down my spine and I looked up. As I looked up, I didn’t see the curb, which meant that I almost face-planted into the bushes that separated the entrance from the exit.
“Shit.” I laughed, looking down at the roses that I nearly took a nose dive into. “That would’ve been bad.”
I maneuvered myself around it just in time for another gust of wind to slap me in the face.
The top paper blew out of my hand and I cursed, ducking down to pick it up, but just as I was about to reach for it, the wind blew again, pushing the paper out of my reach.
This happened four more times before I finally pinned it to the wall of the hospital.
As I was about to stand up straight, furious whispering had me freezing.
“I don’t care what you have to fucking do, Dr. Messings. This is a big fucking deal. She’s working with my child. A child that I’m not supposed to have, and she knows it.” Eerie growled angrily. “No, I don’t care if you don’t work on the NICU floor. You do work at this hospital, and likely have more pull than you realize. Do something!”
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
