Page 82 of Rebels and Roses

Glancing to his side, he could see Tate doing the same for Erica. Cooper leaned down and placed his forehead againstJane’s, calling her name a few times. His heart hurt as he waited for a response. Any response.

Her lids fluttered, and she finally opened her eyes, but they didn’t seem focused. He could hear sirens in the distance, but he couldn’t move from her side. He was afraid that if he didn’t sit right here and watch her, she might stop breathing at all. He was keeping her alive by his sheer force of will.

It could have been seconds, minutes, or hours when the ambulance arrived. In reality, it hadn’t been long. The emergency workers nudged him aside, although he didn’t move willingly. When they loaded her and Erica into the back of the ambulance, he jumped in after her. If they didn’t want him, they were going to have to toss him out on his ass.

Fear still stabbing at his heart, Cooper held her hand as they raced to the Winslow University Hospital. The adrenaline that had pushed him before was now slowly ebbing from his veins. The nasty realization of what had happened was hitting him with the full force of an eighteen-wheeler going a hundred miles an hour. Fiona had tried to kill Jane and Erica.

It was a good thing she’d run when she saw him, because if she was there with him right now? He’d kill her with his bare fucking hands. If he had to, he’d hunt her down and drag her to jail himself. That she’d dared to touch a hair on Jane’s head…

If she tried again, he’d be standing in her way. No one and nothing would ever harm Jane again. If he had his way, she’d never feel a moment of pain for the rest of her life. Without her, there wasn’t anything else.

All she had to do was wake up so he could make her happy every single day. She just had to stay alive.

“I’m fine,”Jane said with a sigh, lying back on the sofa, a stack of pillows behind her, and a cup of hot tea on the coffee table. “You don’t have to fuss.”

Jane, Cooper, Lucy, Zack, and Tate were all in Cooper’s apartment, and every single one of them were driving her crazy. She’d barely been allowed to lift a finger for the last twenty-four hours. She wasn’t an invalid, and she hadn’t died.

Not from lack of trying on Fiona’s part, though.

After Fiona had put the car in drive and jumped from the vehicle, running into the woods to escape, Finn had run after her. He’d easily caught up, handcuffing her and taking her to the station while everyone else had gone to the hospital.

A few blood tests later, and the results were in. Erica and Jane had been drugged via the coffee that Fiona had made. She’d laced the drink with a heavy dose of sleeping pills. Since they had taken a few minutes to kick in, that gave her time to get the two women out to the car on their own steam.

Erica and the baby were going to be fine. The young woman’s parents had shown up this morning, demanding that Fiona be arrested for attempted murder. Finn, however, had already done that. He’d witnessed the scene with his own eyes at the lake.

“I like taking care of you,” Cooper said. “Just relax and let me.”

The others were openly chuckling at his mother hen behavior. He’d gone from the county’s most eligible bachelor to a doting partner in a short amount of time.

“I appreciate it,” Jane said. “I really do. But I’m okay. I’m feeling good.”

“You almost drowned,” Cooper pointed out. “And you were drugged, as well.”

“But I didn’t drown. Because you saved me. And Tate saved Erica. We’re okay because you’re stubborn as a mule and don’t take no for an answer.”

“Thank goodness for that,” Tate laughed. “Otherwise, Finn wouldn’t have looked up the phone records, and we wouldn’t have gone to the inn to talk to Fiona.”

“Speaking of Fiona,” Lucy said, her brows raised in question. “What’s the latest on her? Did her attorney ever show up, Zack?”

Fiona’s first phone call after she was arrested was to her parents, who had said that she needed to keep her mouth shut until her lawyer arrived. He was catching a charter flight and would be there in a few hours.

“He did,” Zack confirmed. Since Cooper was busy at the hospital with Jane, and then this morning bringing her back to his apartment and taking care of her, Zack and Tate had been keeping in touch with Finn regarding the case. “But apparently, Fiona didn’t like being told to keep quiet by her parents. Finn’s a decent interrogator, and it didn’t take long for him to get the story out of her. Especially, as she feels what she did was ‘justified’ or something like that. I’m sure there are details she didn’t reveal, but the whole story is a nightmare from beginning to end. The deputy helping make the recording of her statement called it rich people’s problems. I can’t say that I disagree.”

Cooper shook his head as he sat down at the end of the couch, lifting Jane’s feet so they were resting in his lap.

“Should we ask what she said? I’m curious and terrified all at the same time.”

“Tom was being followed,” Tate confirmed. “Fiona hired someone to do that. She hired several people to mess with him. She wanted to make him paranoid enough that Erica might leave him for being crazy.”

That didn’t make any sense to Jane. What had Erica ever done to Fiona?

“Why would she want to do that?” Jane asked. “What would she gain by that?”

“Millions of dollars,” Zack replied. “It seems that the Kemp grandparents were tired of Fiona and Tom partying and not adulting. About three years ago, they decided to set up some incentive for the kids to settle down. Ten million incentives, in fact. Whoever got married and had the first great-grandchild would get ten million dollars. Every great-grandchild after that would get five million.”

“What could possibly go wrong?” Cooper said, his tone dripping with cynicism. “I take it the race was on to have the first grandchild.”

“It was,” Tate confirmed. “And Fiona said in her statement that it would be over her dead body that her partying, whoring, drug-addicted brother was going to be first to get that money. When she saw how serious Tom was getting with Erica, she was determined to break them up. Of course, she didn’t know that Erica was already pregnant, and she didn’t have a clue about Cassie.”

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