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“I see them!” Brodie shouted and waved his hands in the air. “Gabrielle!” He jumped up and down, and Rufus barked some more.
Jackson yelled for Lena. I kept shouting for Melody, jumping, waving. I was extremely excited and relieved that we’d found them. Though, we didn’t know how to get to them.
Jackson tugged his phone out of his pocket and pushed the slider over, then pressed another button. “Doc. We need your boat…Meet us at the fishing hole…Of course, the same old one…I know it’s raining…The girls are out in my old dinghy and the motor crapped out. They’re stuck in the middle of the lake…Okay. And Doc? Hurry, it’s fucking cold out here.”
By the time Doc arrived with his boat and we managed to get the girls in, it was completely dark. The rain had let up some, but it didn’t stop. The women were all drenched.
“Asher…” Mel slurred my name as I lifted her out of the dead boat and into Doc’s. “I’m so…c…c…cold.” Her teeth chattered rapidly. Lena and Gabby weren’t in much better shape. “I fe…fe…fell in. I ca…ca…can’t feel my toes.”
I wrapped a blanket around her and pulled her tightly against me. “You’re safe now.”
“Saffff,” she uttered, pressing her head against my chest and closing her eyes. God, her skin was red, almost as if she had a sunburn, and I was astonished at how cold her hands were when I covered them with mine. Her arms and cheeks were freezing, and I tried my hardest to rub some warmth into her.
We took them all straight to the emergency room. Lena and Gabby checked out okay, but Mel was so cold, they worried about her physical condition since she had fallen in the lake and had gotten soaked through and through. When they found out she was pregnant, they decided to keep her overnight. I stayed with her. They wrapped her feet and legs in heated socks and blankets and put some warm mittens on her hands, then covered her with more heated blankets.
She slept most of the time. I sat in the chair in the room and couldn’t take my eyes off of her. I couldn’t leave. This whole thing, being here in the hospital, reminded me of my mom and those last few days before she died. I couldn’t lose Mel. She was all I had. Everyone I’d ever loved had been taken away from me. I couldn’t lose her, too. Yeah, I had brothers now, but that love still needed to be earned. Nurtured. Love didn’t happen instantly just because you were blood. I couldn’t say I didn’t love them, but I couldn’t say that I did either. At least not yet.
I’d had something special planned for tonight with Mel, something to fixus. But it would have to wait. My babies—Mel and my actual baby—needed to rest and recuperate a little while first. So, I waited and watched.
