AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She’s alive, a little voice whispered in Cody’s head. She’s alive! “Is she conscious? Can I see her?”
“You can see her, subject to certain conditions, but she’s not conscious. We’ve medically induced a coma to help her body deal with the trauma. She won’t be coming out of that for some time.”
“What conditions?”
“We try to keep the ICU—the intensive care unit—as sterile as possible, to minimize the risk of infection to the patient. But we don’t exclude a patient’s loved ones—even though she’s in a coma, she might be able to hear you. We can’t quantify how much that matters in cases like this, but...” The surgeon made a face of frustration. “It does help. I’ve seen it myself.”
“I need to see her,” Cody said simply.
The surgeon nodded. “One of the ICU nurses will tell you what you need to do.”
* * *
Ten minutes later, scrubbed and clothed in blue surgical garb, Cody walked into the dimly lit room where Keira lay. A nurse was there in attendance, checking readouts and doing things to various pieces of equipment, some of which Cody vague remembered from his own hospital stay. But he ignored her.
He walked to the bed and gazed down at Keira with love welling inside him. She looked so small and fragile lying there; readout wires attached everywhere, a saline drip connected via a clear plastic tube to her arm, a breathing tube in place. Her chest rose and fell, the movement slow and measured. But she was alive.
They’d washed all the blood away, and she was deathly pale, which made the sprinkling of freckles on her nose and cheeks stand out. Her red-gold curls were subdued beneath a paper cap, and her expressive brown eyes were closed, but she was still his darling. And she was alive.
He started to take her hand but caught himself and asked the ICU nurse, “Can I touch her?”
“So long as you don’t interfere with anything connected to her,” the nurse reassured him in an undertone. “And don’t touch any bandages.”
His left hand enfolded Keira’s left hand, the only part of her he dared touch as he stood by her bedside. There were so many things he wanted to say, all the things he’d thought of while he’d been waiting to hear if she’d survived—love me, need me, marry me. All the things to which he desperately wanted to hear her say, “I will” in response—but the presence of the nurse inhibited him.
Instead he squeezed Keira’s hand and said, “I’m here.” She didn’t respond, but he hadn’t expected her to. The fingers of his right hand brushed gently against her cheek. She never stirred, but her skin was warm to the touch. That meant she was alive.
He glanced at her right chest and shoulder swathed in bandages, and relived in slow motion the moment that would haunt him forever. Keira stepping in front of Callahan, firing her weapon. His own anguished cry of rage and denial. The bullet slamming into Keira, spinning her around and knocking her to the ground. Callahan firing his Smith & Wesson. And he, emptying his Glock’s thirty-three-round clip with deadly intent and even deadlier accuracy.
The veneer of civilization had vanished in that instant; he had wanted nothing more than to obliterate the men who had shot his woman. It was primitive, visceral. It was nothing like when he’d helped kill Pennington, the only other time he’d ever taken a human life. He’d known as he fired tonight he was too late to protect Keira; but he could avenge her. And he did.
Now as he stood watching each breath Keira drew he accepted that he was only human after all. His conscience troubled him, but there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. Deal with it, he told his conscience, remembering another time and another place, and Callahan telling him the same thing. Deal with it.
Not every man would understand what had driven him tonight, but Callahan would. Cody drew a small measure of comfort from that knowledge. He felt a kinship with the other man, almost as if they were brothers. Maybe, in a sense, they were. They both knew what it was like to love a woman to the edge of death...and beyond. And each of them had been willing to kill or die to keep his woman safe. The only difference was Callahan had saved Mandy every time. Cody had saved Keira twice, but...
