Page 109 of Silver-Tongued Devil
For Dakota, it was a very long night.
First, there was all the confusion as the paramedics loaded Logan Mansfield, a security guard who was surely due for another raise, onto a stretcher. Logan was groaning, and that was so much better than the motionless figure she and Blake had dragged away from the building. Dakota could breathe a little as she tried to explain what had happened to the sheriff, no doubt making a disjointed mess of it.
Jerry Richards, bully and coward, had his own ambulance. She’d hurt him, but Eric had just about destroyed him. Three hundred pounds of Eric, tackling Jerry onto blacktop. That would’ve hurt. And Dakota wasn’t one bit sorry. That was what excessive use of force looked like if you were on the receiving end, she guessed. And karma was a bitch.
There weren’t any ambulances left, so she and Blake sat on the sidewalk on one side of a makeshift barrier and waited as the firefighters worked to put out the blaze and the spectators talked and exclaimed, taking in their second spectacular show of the night.
Her arm hurt. It hurt a lot. But Blake’s knee hurt worse. His face was taut with pain, his teeth gritted tight, and he had his hand around his knee like he’d hold it together by force. That is, until a paramedic finally slapped a mask on his face.
Dakota watched Blake’s face relax, his eyes go fuzzy, and took his hand with her good one. “Hey,” she said, “you’re all good.”
His eyes shifted above the mask, and she said, “Yeah. We both made it. How about that? I wrecked my shoes, though. I expect…” She had to breathe a few times herself. “Replacements.”
Finally, they made it to the hospital, where a doctor set her arm, which was no fun, and she sat in a waiting room for hours along with Russell, Evan, and Blake’s parents, which was worse. It was a long time later when she was finally sitting beside Blake’s bed in a curtained cubicle and holding his hand as he emerged from yet another knee surgery.
His eyes were still fuzzy, and his voice was a croak. “Your arm,” was the first thing he said. “Cast.”
“Yep.”
“Going to have to… what about… your glass.”
She laughed. “Oh, Blake. Yeah, that’s a delay. But I think you’re worth it.”
“Jerry. He had a… hammer.”
“He sure did.”
“Security. The guy. Uh… Logan.”
“He’s badly concussed, but he’s going to be all right. You got there in time.” She lifted his hand to her mouth and kissed it. “Good job.”
“He was coming after me. Jerry. Going to hit me in the… head. I remember lying there. I remember the… hammer. What happened?”
“Well, could be I took Jerry out. It could be.”
“You?”
“Yes. Me. I was assaulted once. It wasn’t going to happen again if I could help it. I’ve been taking self-defense courses for a long time. Turns out they’re Blake-defense courses too. Good thing, huh?”
“Going to have to… keep you.” His words were slurring now. “So… fierce. So… strong.”
“Yep.” She put her good arm gently around him and laid her cheek against his. “I am. You see… I’m Lakota.”
Blake hung around Wild Horse longer than he’d planned.
In the end, he just hired a few nurses to come in around the clock. Anything else was inefficient when you had three patients.
There was him and his knee, but he was used to rehabbing his knee. There was Dakota’s arm, too, though, and she wasn’t the best patient. She kept getting frustrated. But at least she was staying at his house, which meant she was able to go for long walks around the lake and dream up enough pieces to fulfill her commitment to the gallery. “If only I coulddothem,” she kept saying, as she worked on her physical therapy with renewed determination.
Blake just smiled and took her occasional grouchy mood in stride. He’d been there, and he knew what it was like to long to do the one thing that mattered most and not to be able to do it. He also knew that once she got back to it, she’d be throwing her whole self into it, and that it would all be good.
Then there was Russell. He had it the worst after his complicated, impossibly delicate back surgery, and he complained the least. But he got better, and then better still. It was a slow rehab, but he took it, as he said, “One day at a time.”
Blake now had a criminal record, too. Yes, he did, though it could have been worse. The prosecutor had talked about “aggravated battery” for that punch in the nose. It had actually knocked Sawyer out, which Blake was pretty proud of, especially after it developed that Sawyer had held him up on purpose. He found that out because Sawyer and Jerry Richards couldn’t wait to rat each other out.
Unfortunately, Sawyer couldn’t be nailed down hard enough. Blake had always had trouble imagining the man risking his entire reputation and livelihood to destroy the resort just because Blake had fired his painting team and asked questions about Russell’s accident. It hadn’t made sense for such a self-involved guy. Which was why Sawyer had limited his efforts to encouraging Jerry and offering a helping hand here and there. Unfortunately, that meant that the max anybody could have pinned on Sawyer was driving the boat while Richards dumped the crib frame over the side, and as his cousin the sheriff said, “That’s not even littering. Just aiding and abetting littering.”
On the night in question, his “aiding and abetting” had amounted to getting in the way of anybody important leaving the fireworks display before Richards had a chance to set off his “accidental” firework on the other side of the resort. The fact that it had been Blake who’d been leaving had just made Sawyer a little more zealous in carrying out his part.
