Chapter 16
Seven heavy layers were pressing down on her. Smothering her. Seven layers of hot, searing pain, determined to keep her submerged in a hazy, oppressive, formless world.
Bridget struggled, desperately trying to surface.
Her eyelids felt as if they each weighed a ton apiece. Maybe more. They refused to open.
She refused to give up.
Eventually, an eternity later, she won.
But when she finally opened her eyes, she didn’t recognize her surroundings. Only that she’d never been here before.
This wasn’t her bed, or her room. And who was that with his head down on the bland blanket that covered the bed and her?
Slowly, the answers came into focus.
This was a hospital room. And her side hurt like hell. Moreover, something must have clearly crawled into her mouth and died there because not only was there a terrible taste inside her mouth, but her lips felt as if they’d been glued together. It hurt to pull them apart.
She did it anyway.
Trying to speak, Bridget wound up moaning instead. Her eyes closed again.
Josh jerked his head up, alert the second he heard the sound. His neck protested the sudden motion, aching because of the position he’d unintentionally assumed when he’d finally fallen asleep. He’d been at her bedside for over two days now, keeping vigil over her. Waiting for Bridget to open her eyes and finally wake up.
“Bridget?” He whispered her name hesitantly, afraid he’d only thought he’d heard her. Or maybe he’d only dreamed it and his desire to make it true had propelled him into an awakened state.
Bridget dragged in a ragged breath. “Uh-huh,” she managed to push out. With supreme effort, she opened her eyes again.
He’d never seen anything half as beautiful as those blue eyes of hers.
“Oh thank God,” Josh cried, grasping her hand in both of his. “I was starting to think that you weren’t ever going to open your eyes.”
It was still a struggle to keep her eyelids up. And then, it was as if someone had opened a giant door in a cloud. Her memory of the last few minutes that she’d been conscious came flooding back to her. Surrounding her. Josh had found her. Rescued her.
Josh.
“How did you…”
Her energy ebbed away from her before she could finish the question. She tried again, determined to be heard. When she spoke, her voice was a little bit stronger. She peeled each word away from the roof of her mouth.
“How did you find me?”
Josh laughed shortly. As if he would have ever given up looking until he found her.
“Easy,” he quipped. “I just asked around for the biggest pain in the butt in the area. It was never any contest,” he told her, wanting to take her in his arms and just hold her.
But Bridget was in pain, despite the medication. He could see that and he knew if he followed through on his impulse, he would only be hurting her.
“No, seriously,” she pressed hoarsely. “How did you find me?” She had to know why she was so lucky when others hadn’t been. How he had tracked her when so many other women before her had fallen victim to the Lady Killer’s knife.
“Your earbud,” he told her. It was a miracle that it hadn’t gotten dislodged and fallen out when she’d been kidnapped. He wasn’t about to think what might have happened if she’d lost that tiny piece of electronic equipment.
Bridget blinked, confused. “What?”
“That transmitter you still had in your ear, it was on. I called in and had the lab tech locate the frequency in order to track it. That’s how I found you.”
He remembered that horrid pain in the pit of his gut when he’d realized that she must have been taken by their suspect. But it was nothing in comparison to the way he had felt when the van had abruptly stopped moving.
Praying she wasn’t dead, he’d run, his weapon drawn, to intercept the van. He’d torn opened the back door and had been just in time to keep her from receiving a fatal stab wound from the driver’s drawn knife. That was when he’d seen that there was already blood on it. And that there was blood all around Bridget’s prone body on the floor.
“Oh,” she managed to murmur, then said, “I dreamed you were yelling at me.” Each word was a little easier to utter than the last, but her mouth still felt as if she’d had sand for lunch. Sand that had trickled down her throat.
“That wasn’t a dream,” he told her simply. “I did.”
Her eyes drew together. “You yelled at me? But I was just stabbed,” she protested.
“And you were also an idiot,” he countered, anger suddenly surging through him when he thought of how close he had come to losing her. “That was why I was yelling at you.”
His tone was accusatory, masking the raw, vulnerable emotion just beneath. If something had happened to her, he wouldn’t have ever been able to live with himself.
“Who the hell told you to get into that van and try to take Green down single-handedly?” Josh angrily demanded.
“I didn’t get into the van,” she protested.
“Then how—”
Bridget wet her lips. They were sticking together again.
“He must have knocked me out and dragged me into the van.” She blinked, trying to remember the order in which everything had to have happened. “I saw him drive up while you and Kennedy were inside the office, taking to the manager. Green must have seen something that tipped him off. I saw him hurrying back to the van. I got out to talk to him. I knew I had to stall him until you came. Otherwise, he could just vanish on us again.”
Touching the back of her head, Bridget winced. The pain from that area was unexpected. “He must’ve hit me when I turned my head to look at something.” She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to distance herself from what she remembered. “When I came to, my wrists were duct taped together and I was in the back of the van, on the floor. I knew if I didn’t do something, he was going to kill me.” As she took another ragged breath, her lungs ached in protest. She would feel like hell for a while, Bridget thought, resigning herself to the fact. “How long have I been out?”
“Three days,” he told her.
She’d expected to hear that she’d been unconscious for a few hours, not days. The latter was scary. And then something else occurred to her. She looked at him. The man definitely appeared worn out. “And you’ve been here the whole time?” she asked in disbelief.
Josh shrugged, trying to make light of it. “Didn’t seem to be much of a point to be anywhere else.” Because that focused too closely on his own vulnerable state, he changed the subject. “A lot of your family’s been by. New and old,” he added. “When they heard you’d been hurt, they almost took over the whole damn hospital. They’re an impressive group of people,” he admitted. He saw a weak smile curving her mouth and found it immensely heartening. “Oh, by the way, I finally got to meet your Uncle Adam. He’s a really nice guy. How come you never brought him around?” he asked.
She was going to shrug, but that, it turned out, hurt too so she stopped midmotion. “It never occurred to me. Why? Did you want to make a confession?”
He was still holding her hand, he realized. But he didn’t let go. His eyes met hers. “Not to him.”
Her sense of protectiveness rose to the fore. “What’s wrong with my uncle?”
“Nothing,” he answered simply. “But if I was going to confess something, it would be to—” And then he shrugged again. He wanted to pick his time, and this wasn’t it. “Never mind.”
Pressing the control button beside her, Bridget managed to elevate the back of her bed so that she was in more of a sitting position. “You know I hate it when you do that, start saying something and don’t finish it.”
Well, if they were going to compare dislikes, his trumped hers, he thought. “And I hate you acting like some superheroine who thinks she’s bulletproof.”
Where did he get off taking her to task for anything? “You’ve got a lousy bedsi
de manner, Youngblood, you know that?”
Sometimes she could get him so mad, he could shake her. Did she know what she meant to him? That she was more than just his partner, although that was a pretty big deal in itself. And did she even realize that what she’d done could have cost her her life?
“Maybe that’s because I don’t want to be standing at a hospital bedside.” His expression softened. “I’d rather be standing next to the bed in your apartment—as long as you were in it.”
She opened her mouth twice, but retorts didn’t come. A third attempt had her saying, “Okay, fair enough.” She looked around on either side of her on the bed. “Where’s the call button?”
“Why do you want the call button for?” He was on his feet beside her. “Do you need the doctor? Are you in pain?”
“To get the nurse. Not necessarily. And yeah, pretty much,” she said, answering all three of his questions in order.
His suspicions raised, Josh eyed her closely as he asked, “Why do you want the nurse?”
Her mouth curved. “To help me get dressed and out of here so I can get back to my apartment and have you stand next to my bed,” she told him, her eyes saying a good deal more. “Weren’t you paying attention to what you just said?”
Much as he wanted her to himself right now, her place was here until the doctors thought she was strong enough to go home. “You’re not going anywhere,” he informed her sternly.
Bridget raised her chin, ready for a fight. “You can’t boss me around.”
“I saved your life,” he pointed out. “Technically, it now belongs to me, so yeah, I can boss you around if I want to.”
She eyed him for a moment and just when he thought she was going to put up a fight, she quietly asked, “And what do you plan on doing with this extra life you’ve got on your hands?”
He said the first thing that popped into his head. “What I’d like to do is shove it into a closet to keep it safe.”
She laughed softly, relaxing. Suddenly very glad to be alive. And that he had been there to save her. “There are laws against that, you know.”
“Yeah, I know. I guess the only other way to keep watch over you and make sure you don’t do something else to get yourself killed is to marry you.”
After what had just happened in the last few days, she would have thought that she was prepared for anything. Apparently, she wasn’t.
Her mouth dropped open and she stared at Josh for a long moment before finally deciding that she was hallucinating again. She had to be. There was no way her carefree, footloose partner had just voluntarily offered to give up his no-strings-attached bachelorhood by proposing to her.
With that thought racing through her head, she felt her eyelids getting heavy again. Before she knew it, she’d nodded off.
“Talk about being cool,” Josh murmured, adjusting her blanket. “She falls asleep in the middle of my marriage proposal.”
* * *
When she opened her eyes again, there was no light shining in through the hospital window.
It was nighttime, she realized.
Her eyelids didn’t feel heavy this time, but her eyes did feel gritty. And then, as before, she saw that she wasn’t alone.
Seeing him made her smile from the inside out.
“You’re still here,” she said to Josh in a voice that sounded both surprised and pleased.
Sitting beside her bed, he brightened. He would never tire of seeing her open her eyes, Josh thought. Each time he saw her do it, it felt like he was experiencing a minor miracle after that awful scare he’d endured.
“Still waiting for an answer,” he told her mildly.
She tried to center her thoughts. “What was the question again?”
He phrased it formally now. If there had been any jitters associated with this, they had long since left him. “Bridget Cavelli-Cavanaugh, will you marry me?”
She drew out the moment before answering him. “Aren’t you supposed to say something like, ‘I love you,’ before you ask something like that?”
She was stalling. Why? “You already know I love you.”
“No, I don’t,” she protested. “I’m not a mind reader.”
He grinned wickedly. Bridget was back, he thought, loving every second of this. “That wasn’t my mind you were staring at the other night.”
“Don’t try to distract me.” She took another deep breath. Mercifully, this one hurt a little less. “I’m waiting.”
“I love you,” he told her very seriously, then impishly grinned as he asked, “Now will you say yes?”
“You really want to do this?” she asked incredulously. Part of her still believed that there was a punch line somewhere in the offing.
“Yeah,” he told her, gently brushing her hair away from her face. “I really want to do this. I know I can’t talk you into playing it a little safer and not charging in without thinking it through, but I at least want to be able to fill every moment of my life with you whenever I can for as long as I can.”
“Then I better not say no,” she concluded.
This had gone easier than he’d anticipated. Bridget could be very perverse at times. “If you do, I’ll just have to keep asking you until you finally break down and say yes.”
“Then this’ll save us both a lot of time,” she concluded, tongue in check.
“Saving time. I’m all for that,” he agreed
Her eyes told him just how much she loved him. “As long as you’re for me, nothing else matters,” she whispered.
“Always,” he promised.
Bridget cocked her head slightly as she regarded him. “Are you going to keep talking, or are you going to kiss me?”
Josh didn’t answer, at least not verbally. Lovingly framing her face with his hands, he went with door number two.
* * * * *
ISBN: 9781459226272
Copyright © 2012 by Marie Rydzynski-Ferrarella
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