Page 59 of Rescued By the Mountain Man

I’d heard myself flatline.

The shrill shriek of whatever machine keeping me alive let out one long sound, and everything I’d ever known vanished. I didn’t feel anything, saw nothing, I had no body, I did not exist…

Then there was nothing except lying motionless while that infernal beeping told the world that Warrick Donovan was—except I wasn’t.

Next to my bed, someone was crying. A woman. My mother? No. She never cried when things were bad. The wife of a rancher and mother, tough to the core, Nessie Donovan did not shed tears. It was not a girlfriend either; I had no lover.

Beeeeeeeppppppp…

I was dying.

Bright, hot fire blasted through my body, streaking along every nerve ending and setting me aflame. My body bowed off the bed, my legs jerked, down to my fingertips burned. Pain seared through my chest and shot up into my brain.

The machines suddenly stopped their long scream and started a rhythm of soft bips overlapping and pulsing like a living heart.

Bip…

Bip, bip, bip…

“What the f—?” I jarred out of my nightmare, half-memory. I slammed back to the cold plastic chair in the waiting room of the hospital in Helena. The air around the almost empty room was cold and dry; it grated my lungs.

Rubbing my face, I sat forward, remembering why I hated hospitals. The nose-burning smell of bleach and disinfectant, the somber air of fear and death. I checked my watch, grimacing. It was 12:47 am. The accident had been at 8:16 pm. We’d gotten to Helena at 8:32.

Staring down at the grout, I swallowed over my bitter fear. Four hours ago, we’d been happy and smiling—until that damned bull had lost its head. I remembered racing down the steps before I even knew my feet were moving; blood soaked Santos’s shirt and jeans, staining the dirt below him.

“Stop moving!” I’d yelled as I ran up, sprinting along with the EMTs. “Hold still, Santos.” I barked to the EMTs who followed with a backboard, “Get him on.”

They carefully transferred him to the board, strapped him to it, and stood, walking quickly across the dirt ring toward where they’d left the gurney.

The EMTs were shouting for medicine, morphine, drips, bandages, and a scalpel—I ignored them as I jogged alongside the gurney, trying to gauge the severity of the wound, when a hand closed on mine.

My gaze flew to Santos’s face; it was bloodless, and sweat stood out on his forehead, but he grinned at me. “I’ll be all right.”

I wanted to say "you were fucking stupid"—but I couldn’t. I couldn’t push my fear onto him. As we got to the ambulance, I told the EMTs, “I’ll ride along to the hospital.”

Now, as I stared at the sterling white tiles, I felt Zoe press a hot cup of coffee into my hand, and I looked up. She crouched at my side, her eyes worried. “How are you?”

“I feel like shit,” I said, staring into the dark depths of the drink. I blinked around me. “Where are the rest of the guys?”

“I sent them home,” she said. “Frankie was getting agitated, and poor Isaac had his college credits to take care of. Connie and Marie came to get them, and they should be home by now. I assured them that we would stay and look out for Santos.”

Sipping the bitter coffee, I confessed, “I have to admit, seeing him fly off the bull like that brought back some of the worst memories of my life. I don’t want to see any of my guys going through the same hell I did.”

She sat near me and held my hand. “Do you know why the bull suddenly went so mad? I mean, he was already a mean bastard at the beginning, but it felt as if he went ten times madder in a second.”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Anything could have set it off, a wrong grip, a flashing light from a cellphone, a bright color, who knows.”

“Mr. Donovan for Santos Sullivan.” A doctor called while entering the room, and I damn near spilled the coffee in my haste to get up.

“Yes?”

“My nurse has told me you were a bull-rider yourself, so I know you understand how some of these injuries go, which is why you must know Mr. Sullivan is extremely lucky. He came in with a?—”

The doctor began spouting off a long line of medical terms that went right over my head. I stopped him. “English, doctor, please.”

“He got a small injury to his small intestine and left kidney,” the doctor said. “Minimal surgery was done to fix the perforation. He has a hemothorax, which is an accumulation of blood within the pleural cavity, that is, blood around his lung space, so we’re keeping him in to watch it.

"Maybe a few days, two or three, would let us see the trajectory. But for now, he is alive, and we expect he will make a full recovery. You can go home.”

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