Page 25 of Forced Proximity
I reached down and took her pulse anyway, though, just in case.
She was dead.
But the little crying whimper sounded again for a second time, and I gasped.
The woman’s hoodie wasn’t a hoodie at all, but one of those wrap things.
And the woman had the baby strapped to her chest.
The baby was most definitely alive, however, and I slowly untied it from the woman, almost terrified of what I’d find.
“Oh, aren’t you precious,” I breathed when I saw the little one.
He couldn’t be more than ten days old, max.
He was tiny.
Tiny, tiny.
No wonder the woman had him strapped to her.
I cursed anything and everything as I took the baby out and placed her on his dead mother’s chest for a short moment as I unwrapped the wrap from her body.
My hands hit something hard when I did, and I gasped when I saw the bottle tucked in the wrap where the baby had once been.
A full bottle.
Thank god.
I carefully removed the wrap from the dead woman, then did the unthinkable, and I checked her pockets.
I didn’t find a phone, but I did find a small iPad that had somehow stayed with her despite the devastation around her.
After wrapping up the baby in the wrap, stuffing the bottle and the iPad in with him, I looked over at Finnian on the other side and said, “You’re going to have to do all the work. This baby is too small to get wet, or he’ll get really cold really fast.”
He nodded. “I won’t let you go.”
And he didn’t.
With the baby held up high over my head, he pulled me back to him.
I did no work at all, and Finnian looked like he could do this all day, every day.
When my feet reached the shore, he moved to take the child from my arms and said, “Holy fuck. He’s fresh.”
“Very,” I said. “There’s a single bottle, and an iPad.”
His eyes lit up. “An iPad?”
“An iPad,” I confirmed. “You want to wrap that around you so you can carry the baby?”
“You…” He paused. “You’re too wet. Are you cold?”
I was freezing.
Absolutely freezing.
Yet, I didn’t tell him that.
