Page 74 of Wicked Devotions: Part 2

All I want to do is get the woman in my arms tucked safely back in bed. If he did anything to her, raped her, I’ll never forgive myself. I’ll spend the rest of my life making it up to her. I should have insisted on giving her more self-defense lessons. One of us should have stayed back at the house this morning. There are so many things we could have done differently to stop this, but we didn’t. We were too relaxed after our trip and then too reliant on a false sense of security from being home.

Her skin is ice cold as we fly across the open water of the bay. Banks strips off his hoodie and tucks it around her. Emerson sits down, his side pressed against mine and he pulls her bare feet up, wrapping his hands around them to share body heat. They’re bloody and filthy, but he doesn’t care. None of us do.

“Should we be worried that she isn’t waking up?” I ask Emerson as quietly as I can, so I don’t scare the other two guys.

“I don’t know for sure, but I’m not going to worry about that until she’s back in her own bed and a doctor has evaluated her.”

I can’t tell if he’s being honest or lying to keep me calm, but either way I’m taking his words at face value. We only have a few more minutes until we’ll be at their dock. For as fast as Declan is driving the boat, we might as well be crawling through quicksand. I’ve never felt like a boat ride took so long as this one.

Annabelle is standing on the dock wrapped in a blanket with Felix right beside her keeping a vigilant eye on the surroundings. Banks jumps out and takes Harper from me, basically sprinting into the house with Annabelle right behind him. Emerson and I tie up the boat while Declan turns everything off.

The three of us sprint up the path together, one place on our mind. By the time we get inside, Annabelle and Banks have Harper in bed, and Annabelle is using alcohol wipes to clean off her forehead. Emerson lifts the blanket to start cleaning her feet, one of which has a nasty cut right across the top.

I toss him some of the alcohol wipes, and he gets to work. Ten minutes after they each get her somewhat cleaned up, Felix walks the doctor in. He asks us all to leave except for Annabelle.

Emerson has to push Declan out of the room. He growls in frustration and walks down the hallway with his hands in his hair. Banks keeps a close eye on him, but it isn’t in an untrusting way, it’s only in concern. I stay by the door hoping to hear what’s being said but so far no such luck.

Chapter

Thirty

HARPER

My eyes fly open as the scent of ammonia fills my nostrils. I jolt upright from the mattress beneath me. The bright light assaults my senses and makes my head pound.

Wait.

Mattress and bright lights?

I look around and immediately begin to weep when I see Mom sitting on the bed beside me. My bed. In her house. They found me.

A fuzzy memory of hard hands on my body and then the greenest eyes on the planet floats around inside my brain. An unfamiliar man looks down at me with a frown as he looks at my forehead.

“Harper, this is Dr. Meier. He’s here to check you out and make sure we don’t need to take you to the hospital.”

“I don’t need a hospital.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” he says, not unkindly.

He goes through the usual concussion checks. Unsurprisingly I have one. He checks my ribs and suspects that in the best case I have bruised ribs, in the worst I have fractured some of them. The rest of me is basically fine, just cuts and bruises. He sets up an IV to run a bag of fluids for dehydration and gives me a liquid painkiller and antibiotic through that for the time being.

“I’m sending a few pain and antibiotic prescriptions to the twenty-four-hour pharmacy. Make sure she eats with them. Otherwise, she’s probably okay and won’t need the hospital.” He looks over me. “I have to ask this, though, do you need a rape kit?”

Mom sucks air through her teeth and then presses her lips together. I watch as her eyes gloss over and then shake my head.

“I don’t. Had the guys been ten minutes later, I would have needed one, though.”

Relief rushes through me at the realization that I’m safe. That nightmare is over, but I don’t know what happened to the guy who took me, or who he was going to sell me to. We watch as the doctor packs up his medical bag and leaves with instructions to call him if anything changes or the drugs don’t work.

As soon as he closes the door behind him, Mom slides onto the bed and wraps her arms around me. “I’m so glad you’re okay. I was so scared.” She kisses my temple, the one not cut.

“I’m sorry for pushing you into the water.”

She goes still. “So that was on purpose.”

“Yeah. I knew you’d be able to make it to shore, but it’d be too much trouble for him to go back and get you.”

“And you stabbed him in the eye with the shell?”

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