Page 17 of Engulfing Emma

Chapter Six

Emma

I quickly remove myself from his arms, remembering why he’s here. “Can you help him?”

“Let’s take a look.”

Brett goes into action, taking Carter’s blood pressure and pulse before swiftly laying out all the supplies and then hooking Carter up to the blood. He hands me the bag. “Hook this over that shelf please.”

“Then what?”

“Then we wait and hope we did this in time.”

I look at the other bags of blood. “How many will he need?”

“We’ll take it one at a time and see how he does.” He nods to the unit of blood I hung up. “Squeeze that gently for me. We need it to infuse quickly. I’ll watch him closely for the first fifteen minutes or so to make sure he doesn’t have an allergic reaction.”

“As in, he could be allergic to the blood?”

“It’s possible,” Brett says. “We’re giving him O-neg. It’s the universal blood type. He shouldn’t have a reaction, but you never know.”

“Do you think he’s going to be okay?”

He looks at Carter’s leg and all the blood staining the floor. “I hope so.”

Brett gives nothing away as he assesses our situation. He seems calm and collected—two things that are barely in my vocabulary at this point. I’m trying to read his face, but I can’t tell if he thinks Carter will live or die.

“What are we going to do? I mean, assuming he gets better and that maniac doesn’t kill us, what are we going to do?”

“As soon as he’s stable, I’ll get on the phone with the police, and we’ll come up with something. But for now, let’s concentrate on what we can control, which is helping Carter.”

I pull a chair over and sit down while I continue to squeeze the bag of blood.

Brett keeps his fingers on Carter’s wrist. He looks at me. “Have we met before? You look familiar.”

“I don’t think so.”

“How is it you have a twelve-year-old?” he asks. “You barely look twenty-five.”

“I’m twenty-seven. And it’s a long story. But it starts with a slutty fifteen-year-old and a foreign exchange student.”

His eyebrows shoot up. “That sounds interesting. And we’ve got nothing but time right now, Emma.”

We may be hostages in a robbery gone bad, but oh, how I like the way he says my name. “You really want to hear about it?”

“If you’re willing to tell me.”

“Okay, well, as you know, I lost my dad. I was eight when he died. The therapist my mom took me to when I got pregnant would tell you that because I lacked a father figure in my formative years, I craved attention from boys and used any means to get it.”

“I think I would have liked you when I was in high school,” he jokes with a wink.

I snicker. “Yeah, but nobody seemed to like me for very long. As soon as they got what they wanted, they moved on to the ones who were girlfriend material.”

“You didn’t fit in that category?” he asks.

“I wanted to, but I went about it the wrong way. When I was a sophomore, I met Stefan in my pre-calculus class. He was from Germany. He was a year older than me. Like most girls, I was enamored with his accent. He was the first boy who wanted to keep me around longer than a week or two. But then I got careless and ended up pregnant. He bolted soon after I told him. He went home to Germany for Christmas and never came back, even though he was supposed to go to school here for the entire year.”

Brett looks upset. “And he hasn’t contacted you since?”

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