The 9-Month Bodyguard

by Cindy Dees

  Quickly, he was waist deep in the pile. Still, there was no sign of her. What was she wearing? He cast his mind back frantically. Pink. Hot pink. He looked around in the deep shadows cast by the emergency lighting system across the stage.

  “Light! I need light over here!” he shouted. No telling if anyone heard him or would respond if they did.

  He grabbed the lip of a mangled spotlight and laboriously rolled the thing, weighing easily two hundred pounds, to the side. It crashed off the stage, causing squeals and more localized panic. He didn’t care. Silver was under here somewhere, hurt, maybe dying. Please God, not already dead.

  He jumped down into the new opening. Squatting, he was finally able to catch glimpses of the stage under the overarching pile. He looked around carefully, squinting to make out something, anything, resembling a human being.

  Over there. Could it be—

  He crawled to his right, snagged his trouser leg on something and ripped it free impatiently. He looked again. A hint of color caught his eye in the gloom. Studying the pick-up-sticks pile above him, he carefully pulled free a long metal pipe. The pile shifted slightly above him, then settled again. He released his breath.

  He crawled another few feet. Oh, yes. That was definitely a splash of pink.

  “Silver! Can you hear me?”

  Nothing. The inert pile of cloth didn’t move. It looked like she was lying in a pocket surrounded by stacked railings and girders. But she didn’t look crushed.

  He managed to draw a breath. Now, if she only hadn’t taken a blow to the head or neck. He ought to wait for firemen to get here. They had extraction training for collapsed structures. But what if she was seriously injured? Dying? He couldn’t afford to wait.

  Eyeballing the stack overhead and doing his best not to bump or dislodge anything, he slithered mostly on his belly under the worst of the pile and toward where she lay, still and silent.

  Finally, a lifetime later, he reached her.

  He plastered a hand to her throat. Nothing. Oh, God. He moved his hand slightly to the side and something jumped under his fingertip. He held his breath. Come on. Be a pulse. Another thump beneath his finger. Yes. She was alive.

  It was awkward checking her over for injuries because of a pair of steel poles between them, but he managed. Her limbs seemed intact. The floor beneath her felt dry. No bad bleeding, then. Carefully, he ran his hand down her spine, checking for any bends or bumps that shouldn’t be there. It felt all right.

  It was a risk to move her, but did he dare leave her under here, where the pile could shift and crush her at any time? And what about the baby? What if it was in distress?

  That decided it for him. He maneuvered around to the left, positioning himself above Silver’s head. Sitting on his behind, he leaned forward, hooked her armpits and eased her toward him. As petite as she was, he was only able to move her a few inches at a time, lest her clothing snagged on something and brought the house of cards tumbling down upon them both.

  Finally, she was lying mostly in his lap. He scooted backward, pulling her along with him. He didn’t come out the way he’d come in, for he’d spotted a clearer route out the back of the pile. It still took him several minutes to work his way to the edge of the mess.

  As he neared the light now shining down on the stage, he heard male voices shouting. “Austin, Silver, can you hear us?”

  “We’re here!” he called back. “I’ve got her. She’s alive but unconscious. Get an ambulance!”

  “One’s already here,” somebody called back. “Wave your hand if you can. I think I’ve spotted you.”

  He lifted his hand through a small gap overhead and waved it back and forth.

  “Gotcha. Sit still. There’s an unstable area between us and you. We’re shoring it up now.”

  He acknowledged the instruction and used the pause to catch his breath and to stroke the tangled hair off of Silver’s face. She looked surprisingly peaceful and unscathed. “Wake up, honey,” he murmured. “You’re scaring me. I need to know how you are. If anything hurts.”

  Maybe it was a trick of the flashlights playing across the pile from behind him, but he could swear her eyelids fluttered. He called her name more urgently, but she didn’t respond.

  In a matter of minutes, a big guy in a canvas jacket and fireman’s hard hat put a hand on his shoulder from behind. “Lemme carry her out, buddy. You crawl behind me.”

  Austin didn’t want to give her up, but the fireman was best qualified to evacuate Silver from this mess. Reluctantly, he laid down on his back and dragged her up and over his body to the fireman behind him.

  In moments, he was free of the hellish nightmare of the pile. Silver was just being laid on a gurney by a pair of medics. Austin leaped to his feet and rushed over to her.

  “I’m coming with you,” he announced to the EMT.

  “Are you family?”

  “Yes,” he lied. “Her fiancé and father of her baby.” He registered gasps of surprise around him but ignored them. They could split hairs with him about his relationship status with Silver later.

  “C’mon,” the paramedic said without ceremony.

  Austin sprinted down the hall beside the racing gurney and climbed into the back of the ambulance outside. It was a fast, noisy ride to the hospital and another sprint into the emergency room, which was filling up fast with frantic Rothchilds. The bad news was Silver was still unconscious. The good news was the medic had found a heartbeat on the baby using the sonogram in the ambulance.

  Anna and Harold closed in on him to grill him about the baby, but he put them off by telling them to ask her when she woke up.

  Austin was not allowed to accompany her into the trauma unit, however, and was relegated to the waiting room to pace impatiently. It was the longest half hour of his life. And then a nurse came out. “Mr. Dearing?”

  He whirled quickly. “That’s me. How is she?”

  “Come with me.”

  The nurse smiled. That was good news, right? She wouldn’t smile if something terrible had happened, would she? He all but ran the poor woman down as they headed down the hall.

  He turned into a room full of electronics and monitors and skidded to a halt. Silver was sitting up in the bed…smiling at him. Swear to God, he went light-headed. His knees went weak and he felt crazy hot all of a sudden. He grabbed the door frame to steady himself until his vision cleared and he could breathe again.

  “Hey, beautiful,” he managed to murmur.

  “Hey, you,” Silver murmured back. “I hear you saved my life.”

  He shrugged and moved over to the bed, almost not daring to believe that she was okay. “Nah, I just dragged you out from under the lighting scaffold.” He took her hand gently. “How’re you feeling?”

  “Woozy.”

  “Woozy? What the hell is that? Weak? Sick? Or is that some kind of pregnancy thing?”

  She laughed and then winced. “It means I’m a little nauseous and my head’s swimming a little. And I have a headache, too.”

  “And the baby? Junior’s fine?” he asked in concern.

  Silver glanced over at the doctor, and Austin’s heart skipped a beat. Oh, God. Not the baby…

  “Her baby’s fine, Mr. Dearing,” the doctor said soothingly.

  He about fainted again. Big, tough him, who faced down assassins without blinking and leaped in front of bullets for fun. This business of being in love was hard on a guy. Being in…

  Son of a gun.

  Sure enough, he was slam-dunk, out-for-the-count, no-doubt-about-it, in love with Silver Rothchild. His heart did a flip.

  “Sir,” the doctor said firmly, “where is that blood on your collar coming from?”

  Blood? What blood? He cranked his chin down and noticed a bright red stain along his left shoulder seam and running down the front of his shirt. “No idea. I’m fine.”

  “Sit down on this stool and let me have a look.”

  He sat. The doctor did a quick examination of his head and
neck but stopped abruptly after he stuck a light in Austin’s ear and elicited a sharp yelp from his patient.

  “Nurse, call in Dr. Whitney.” To Austin, the doctor said, “He’s the best ear, nose and throat guy we’ve got around here.”

  Austin frowned. And then comprehension dawned. Oh no. His bum eardrum. Had he busted it again? It had bled the last time he ruptured it, too. This could delay his return to the field for weeks or even months, dammit. Although, on the upside, it would give him more time to spend with Silver and convince her to marry him.

  Marry…

  Damn! His brain had to quit throwing these heart-stopping thoughts at him like this!

  Marriage? To Silver?

  Oh, yeah.

  No doubt about it.

  Now to do a better job of convincing her to go along with his plan than Mark Sampson had…

  Another doctor interrupted his strategy planning, whisking him out of the room over Silver’s protests and taking him upstairs to an office full of more equipment, most of it designed to poke him in the ear and cause as much excruciating pain as possible.

  After about fifteen minutes, the doctor quit poking and took a seat on a stool in front of Austin. The guy had just opened his mouth to speak when a knock sounded on the door. A nurse stuck her head in.

  “I tried to keep her downstairs, but the E.R. doc said we’d better let her come up here or she was going to cause a riot. She insists on seeing Mr. Dearing right away.”

  The woman stepped aside, and Silver barged into the room, her eyes blazing and her arms akimbo. She looked like a minor tornado.

  Austin came up off the table. “What’s wrong?” he bit out.

  “Nothing. I just want to be with you and make sure you’re okay. And those tyrants downstairs told me I had to wait there for you. It’s been forever, and I got worried—”

  He laid his fingertips on her mouth, gently cutting off her babbling. “Dr. Whitney was just about to give me the verdict.”

  She turned to the doctor. “How bad is it? Can he still be a bodyguard? He’s a Special Forces soldier, you know. A captain. He has a team of men and does all kinds of cool things…” She trailed off, glancing over at him, abashed.

  Surprised, Austin asked, “How do you know all that about me?”

  “I read up about Delta Force on the Internet. You guys do some amazing stuff. It scares me to death to think of you doing it, but if that’s what you want to do, I guess I can live with it.”

  Dr. Whitney cleared his throat, and Silver and Austin turned simultaneously to face him.

  “I don’t think that’s going to be an issue for Captain Dearing, young lady. You see, his eardrum’s basically shredded. Best case, I’m estimating that by the time it heals, we’re looking at a fifty percent hearing loss. Worst case, it could run up to eighty percent hearing loss in the left ear. I’ve done some work with the military doctors over at the air force base across town, and my understanding is that this will disqualify Captain Dearing for combat.”

  Austin heard the words with his good ear. But they failed to register. No more combat? “Ever?” he asked in disbelief.

  “I’m sorry, son.”

  Silver gasped beside him and her hand came to rest comfortingly on his shoulder.

  Well, hell.

  This was certainly not how he’d envisioned ending his career. He’d always thought to go out in a blaze of glory. To do something wildly heroic and go down in the annals of the Delta Force as one of the great ones.

  Although, saving the life of the woman he loved wasn’t too bad a way to go out.

  “Oh, Austin. I’m so sorry. I know how much your job means to you.” He heard tears in Silver’s voice and looked up in surprise.

  “I thought you hated what I do.”

  “I do. But it makes you happy. Made you happy. I’d never wish for you to lose something that you love.”

  He gathered her close and buried his face in his hair. “I almost lost the thing I truly love tonight when those lights came down on you.”

  She froze in his arms. Small hands pushed at his shoulders, backing him up until she could look at him. They were almost eye-to-eye with him sitting on the table like this. She whispered, “What did you say?”

  “I said I love you.”

  “Seriously?” she asked.

  He gave her a withering look. “Do you take me for the kind of guy who’d joke around about something like that?”

  “Well, no. But…really?”

  “Yes, really, you silly vixen. I love you. I love your music. I love your temper. Your smart mouth. Your giant heart. Your laughter. All of you.”

  “All of me? Including the fact that I’m pregnant?” she replied hesitantly.

  “Speaking of that.” He winced. “Back at the theater, when you were unconscious, I might have let it slip that you’re expecting.”

  Alarm made her jolt. “Who heard you?”

  “Uh, I imagine pretty much everyone in the place. I sort of bellowed it at the top of my lungs.”

  She groaned. “You didn’t.”

  “’Fraid so. The cat’s out of the proverbial bag.”

  She laughed ruefully. “Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. At least I got the first show under my belt before that bombshell exploded in my face.”

  “Uh, Silver?”

  “Hmm?”

  “I, uh, also sort of let it out that I’m, uh, your…” he trailed off.

  She frowned down at him. “If I didn’t know you better, I’d swear you look a little afraid. What in the world did you say?”

  He closed his eyes. Opened them. Took a deep breath. “I claimed to be the, uh, father of your baby.”

  Her jaw dropped. She stared at him, speechless for several long seconds.

  “I swear, honey, I’m not pulling a Sampson on you. I’ll recant the statement if you want me to. But I would love to be the father of your baby. I was thinking maybe I could adopt Junior if you’d agree to it…”

  Even to his good ear, that sounded too lame for words.

  She frowned at him, clearly perplexed. “But to adopt the baby, you and I would have to be married.”

  “Well, of course we would—” he burst out before stopping abruptly. “Whoops. Got ahead of myself. You do that to me, you know.”

  He slid off the table, landing on one knee on the floor in front of her. “Silver, would you make the happiest man alive and marry me? I’m hopelessly, helplessly in love with you and can’t think of anything I’d rather do than spend the rest of my life with you. And that includes my career.” Now he was the one babbling, but he didn’t care. “Frankly, I’m glad my eardrum is shot. That way you can’t send me back into the field when I drive you crazy. Because I’m sure I will, now and then. I apologize in advance, but I’m just so crazy about you. I want to wrap you up and keep you safe and never see that haunted look in your eyes again. The one you get when you’re scared—”

  He broke off. “Lord, woman, you make a blubbering idiot out of me. Put me out of my misery and agree to marry me. Please!”

  A tinkling sound, like little silver bells ringing, intruded upon his senses. Was it another one of Dr. Whitney’s hearing tests?

  And then it hit him. It was Silver. Laughing. And crying. And falling to her knees in front of him and flinging her arms around his neck.

  “Is that a yes?” he mumbled into her hair.

  “Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes!”

  It hit him like a ton of bricks. A wave of joy so damned big and powerful it blasted him plumb off his rocker.

  “Hot damn!” he yelled as he jumped up, dragging her with him and spinning her around in joy. He staggered to a halt, dizzy.

  Dr. Whitney intruded dryly, “You might want to go easy on the spinning, there, fella. Your sense of balance won’t return to normal for a few weeks.”

  Austin grinned widely. “Doc, with this woman for my wife, I’m not ever gonna regain my balance.”

  “Hey!” Silver protested, laughing.


  He grinned down at her. “Don’t get me wrong, honey. I think balance is highly overrated. Marriage to you is going to be more fun than ought to be legal.”

  She grinned back up at him. “Right back at ya, big guy.”

  Another nurse poked her head into the now-crowded office. “Miss Rothchild, a man named Saul sent me up here to let you know that, and I quote, ‘The entire Rothchild clan is waiting for you downstairs, and there’s going to be a revolt if they don’t see for themselves pretty soon that you’re all right.’ I might add that about fifty reporters are also down there. They’re asking for a statement regarding rumors of your pregnancy and the identity of the father of your baby.”

  Silver glanced over at Austin. “You’re sure about this?”

  He nodded firmly and looped his arm around her shoulders. “Positive. It’s you and me, darlin’, from now on. You’ll never have to face your family, or the press, alone again.”

  She leaned into him and said softly, “I love the sound of that.”

  “I love you, Silver.”

  “Mmm. I love the sound of that, even more. I may even have to write a song about it. A whole bunch of songs.” She smiled tenderly at him. “By the way, I love you, too.”

  He bent down to kiss her sweetly, savoring everything about her as he did so. They hadn’t done too bad together, the two of them. They’d survived Mark Sampson, revived her music career, found each other and were on their way to a family of their own. Sure, Candace’s killer was still out there, and whoever had written those threatening letters. But together, he and Silver could face anything life threw at him. Endings didn’t get too much happier than that.

  He asked doubtfully, “Are sappy love ballads allowed to have happy endings?”

  She laughed and hooked her arm around his waist. “All that matters to me is that our song has a happy ending.”

  There was only one answer to that. “Amen, honey. Amen.

  Epilogue

  Silver sighed in contentment and enjoyed the view of Austin’s broad shoulders and athletic grace as he strode out of her father’s house. He came over to the pool and handed her a tall glass of iced orange juice. She never got tired of looking at him. He claimed the same thing about her, and she was going to hold him to it when she grew to the size of a house over the next few months. She couldn’t wait. She thought she’d spied a little swelling in her abdomen this morning when she was getting dressed. Her hand drifted to her belly as she smiled up at him.