Page 74 of Deny Me
A gentle hand rested against her cheek. Elliot’s voice reached her, low and concerned instead of smug and sure. “It’s all right, Charlotte. King’s right here. You’re both going to be okay.”
Why were they both going to be okay? What was wrong with King?
She tried to ask, tried to get her tongue to work, but nothing came out except King’s name. She called for him once, twice, before even that was lost to her and the blackness finally took over.
Chapter Thirty-Three
King woke in a rush, his muscles tense, ready to face any threat that waited. But there was no threat, only a wide white room with a row of beds just like his and scratchy white sheets tangled around his body.
He tried to sit up.
“Uh uh uh.” A busty nurse in blue scrubs with dancing butterflies in colors so bright they hurt his eyes hurried over, her hand out to stop him from moving. “You’re not quite ready for getting up, young man. Just a little bit longer.”
Young man?The woman looked to be in her fifties, but still,young man?
Maybe she’d at least give him some answers. “Where am I? What happened?”
“You’ve just come out of surgery, but everything’s fine,” she said, patting his hand that didn’t have an IV. “Just fine. Give yourself a few more minutes and we’ll be moving you to a room.”
Surgery.He’d been shot. King closed his eyes, willing himself to remember, to figure out what the something was that nagged at him, pulling him awake… Was it a what? A who?
Charlotte.
His eyes flew open, and he gripped the rail of the bed, grunting as he made a second attempt to pull himself up to sitting. The nurse fussed and flailed, but he ignored her, determined to find Charlotte and make sure she was okay. Except he couldn’t get the rail to release and his body refused to stay upright. He’d dragged himself up twice more before a dark-haired figure appeared at the end of the aisle, striding toward him.
“Dain!”
The word was choked out, and Dain shook his Mohawked head as he bore down on King’s bed. The nurse gave a little squeak and hurried somewhere out of King’s line of sight.
“Lay down, you stubborn dick,” his team lead said gruffly. “You’re stressing the staff out, and they haven’t done anything but save your life.”
It seemed more like Dain had intimidated Ms. Butterfly Scrubs, but King found it impossible to argue with the pain rocketing through him. He let the weight of his body pull him back down to the thin, hard mattress. “Charlotte. Where is she? What—”
Dain held up his hand likeslow your roll, dude, leaving King impatient while Dain gave the jumpy nurse a quiet thank-you and took the chair she’d brought him before sitting down. His smile brought a blush to her cheeks before she scurried away again. Only then did he turn back to King. “Charlotte’s fine. She’s already out of surgery. Pretty straightforward for her, actually,” he said with infuriating calm, “just a through-and-through.”
Just?King thought about getting out of this bed to kick Dain’s ass for minimizing Charlotte’s pain, but since he’d probably fall on his face instead, he made a mental note to follow up on that later.
“Bullet made much more of a mess when it hit you,” Dain was saying. “Charlotte slowed it down for you.”
“Are you trying to piss me off?”
“Of course I am. Anything to distract you from trying to crawl out of that bed and flash me your naked ass when you hit the floor.” He gave King a grim smile.
King scoffed, then groaned as pain shot through his side. “So,” he groused, “is ‘made more of a mess’ the medical term for why my side hurts like hell?”
Dain leaned forward, planting his elbows on the bed rail. “I’m sure the doc will give you all the medical jargon you can stand. What I do know is the bullet bounced around for a bit before stopping in your spleen. But you’ve still got all your major organs intact and you’re going to heal fine. That’s all that matters.”
Maybe so. He’d decide when he wasn’t half drugged and hurting like a son of a bitch. “And Charlotte?”
“She’ll heal too.”
“She passed out.” King remembered that. Remembered the sheer panic that had steamrolled him when she went down. The sight would haunt him for the rest of his life, he had no doubt.
Dain nodded, not unsympathetically. “Shock and blood loss, mostly. She’s already in a room and her parents have been in to see her.”
King let himself breathe for a moment, absorb the fact that Charlotte had been shot but had come out the other side okay. God, if she hadn’t… “When can I see her?”
“We’re seeing what we can arrange.”
