Page 134 of Branded
An arm behind my knees, another wrapping around my shoulders.
A warm chest against my side as I was hefted into the air. “I’ve got her,” Raph said, his rasping voice gliding over me.
“Can you bring her this way, sir?” the nurse said. “And then I’ll have you step back out into the waiting room.”
“I’m her boyfriend.”
A pause.
Probably, the nurse was studying Raph’s face, trying to decipher that for the lie it was, but he was big and serious, and I knew he could give a brooding look like no other. I’d felt that burn more often than not.
Which was probably why the nurse just murmured, “Follow me.”
Then we were moving.
Me. Him. My brain sloshing around my skull and making it very difficult to focus on anything. My eyes staying closed, hoping that when I opened them again the room would be steady and the worry wouldn’t be gnawing at me and that this would all just be a lesson in being extra vigilant for naught.
He turned sideways and I knew he was shuffling me through one door then another. Then the lights behind my lids grew brighter, the low hum of noise in the background got louder.
A whoosh.
A soft, “In here.”
Then Raph was setting me on a bed.
I took a breath, released it slowly, and opened my eyes.
The nurse was there.
Raph was gone.
Right.
“Oh, my God,” Pru exclaimed, moving into the room, her ponytail swinging behind her. “Beth, honey, are you all right?”
Beth.
Not the babies.
That settled somewhere deep in my heart, soothed an ache that only Hazel and Pru could.
They’d been there.
They knew me more deeply than anyone else on the planet.
Of course, that still meant they didn’t really know me at all.
I had a whole castle’s worth of doors and floors, most of them slammed and locked closed, barred with chains and furniture, and the heavy ones, the ones with the strongest and heaviest chains, the biggest armoires blocking access, were deep in the basement.
No one entered those rooms.
Not me.
Not my friends.
Not any man I’d ever been with.
But Pru’s concern settled on the main floor, leaving the demons and darkness untouched in the basement of my mental castle.
