Page 45 of Amor Prohibido

It took half the usual time to reach her house. I broke every road rule and speed limit in my urgency to reach her as quick as humanly possible.

Skidding to a halt in her driveway, I cleared the porch steps in a single bound as the front door flew open. Jax catapulted into my arms, and I clung to her briefly but fiercely.

I sent to her to the truck while closing the house door, then sprinted back in time to open the passenger door and help her into the cab.

“I’m so worried,” she finally whispered after I jumped into the driver’s seat.

“You and me both, sweetheart. Everything will be okay, I promise.”

I squeezed the life out of the steering wheel while struggling to drive on the higher side of the speed limit without drivingtoofast.

“You shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep,” she mumbled back, looking out the side window and silently wiping her eyes on her sleeve.

Itskedto myself and shoved the “what ifs” as far down as they would go and focused on getting her to the hospital.

After minutes that felt like hours, I pulled into the emergency entrance loading zone. Jax slapped my hands away when I rushed to the passenger side and bent to carry her, stating she could walk the fifteen metres to the automatic doors.

I ushered her to the closest seat before striding to the reception desk where a male receptionist with a diamond ear stud tapped quickly at the keyboard.

“My fiancée is pregnant, and she’s bleeding,” I blurted without exchanging pleasantries. My mother would have been appalled, but this was no time for howdy-doos.

“Bleeding where?” he asked in a surprisingly feminine voice, complete with a raised, condescending brow.

Was this guy for real? Seriously?

“From. Her. Vagina,” I growled through clenched teeth.

“All right, honey, stay calm. Get her to fill out this form, bring it back to me, then we’ll get her through.”

I all but snatched the clipboard from his fingers and was already filling in her details as I threw myself into the seat beside Jax. Without taking my eyes from the questions, I asked her how many weeks she was, then wrote eight point six in the space provided. Jax signed it before I stalked back to the receptionist, barely reining in my anger when told to take a seat again; we’d be seen shortly, apparently.

I didn’t want Jax to be seen shortly—she needed to be seenright fucking now.I gathered her into my arms, not caring that I had to turn uncomfortably in the hard plastic chair. I needed her body close to mine—I could protect her better that way.

She mumbled something into my bicep.

“Huh?”

Her voice was numb and void of all emotion. “Looks like you’re off the hook.”

A pang of worry shot through my chest. “What do you mean?”

“You might walk out of here a free man tonight. Bleeding during pregnancy isn’t a good sign. It’s possible I’m miscarrying.”

My heart plummeted and burned in my stomach as her words hit home. “The baby will be fine.Wewill be fine,” I stated vehemently, despite my voice cracking from the heartache.

Jax managed to break apart my insides with that one statement. So raw and honest. I wanted her to take it back—to say it wasn’t what she thought. But I knew in my heart that miscarriage was probable right now. And it fucking killed me.

She broke down in my arms and I fought for my own control as her large tear drops soaked my shirt. Why was it that you didn’t realise just how much you wanted something until it was under threat? A life hung in the balance, and with it, our future. If I was to lose this baby as well as J, I would be more than devastated. It would eat me up, consume me, then spit me out broken beyond repair.

“Jax Carmichael, please come through,” a nurse, around my age with dark auburn hair, called from the triage entrance.

She held the door open and smiled pleasantly as I ushered Jax through with a hand firmly on her lower back. It stayed there as she climbed onto the waiting bed.

“I’m Lil, your nurse tonight. We just need to run through a few questions before I take a look at you. To double check, your preferred name is Jax?”

J nodded.

Lil turned her large, hazel eyes to me, and I introduced myself. After covering J with a blanket, she started her questioning with, “Have you sustained any kind of trauma to your abdomen in the last forty-eight hours?”

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