Sweet Affliction [Sweet Awakenings 4] (Siren Publishing Classic) (29 page)

All of the women raced toward the stairs. AJ felt a twinge of fear that Nick hadn’t come down to let them out with him. In mere seconds they were all upstairs and running through the kitchen to get to the living room where Rex was.

“Oh, God!” Tamara was the first to enter and was kneeling beside Jack. “Are you okay?”

Chelsea was next to race to Adam’s side. “I’m here with you.” She took his hand in hers.

Both men were awake but seemed to be weak. She didn’t see Nick anywhere and frantically looked around the room. There was a body of a man she didn’t recognize with a bullet wound to his face. Another man’s feet showed themselves by the front door, but nowhere did she see Nick.

She turned when she heard Rex shouting at Shelby to run to the basement to get ice. She was horrified by what she saw. Nick lay there on the dirty sofa in the far corner of the room. His face was white as a sheet. Even though his eyes were closed and appeared to be unconscious he was shaking violently and sweating.

“Nick!” She ran to him and touched his face, quickly pulling her hand away when she felt how hot he was.

“What’s wrong with him?” She turned to Rex. “He’s burning up!”

“Septic shock.”

“Oh God.” She turned her attention back to Nick and kissed his forehead. Tears stung her eyes when the heat of his skin felt like fire on her lips.

“How bad is it?” she asked, not entirely sure she could handle the answer. Even when his wound became infected at the bungalow he hadn’t looked this bad.

“I’m not going to lie to you, AJ. He’s in bad shape. He wasn’t fit for running this operation with us. Had I known, he would’ve been in an ER, to hell with the consequences.”

His last sentence knocked her in the gut. She should have insisted he let her tend to her wound or at least look at it. If she had, then maybe she would have known. If she had, then maybe she could have gotten him to the hospital. If she had…
Damn it, AJ!
What ifs didn’t do Nick a damn bit of good now. She chided herself silently.

“He’ll be okay though.” She waited for Rex to assure her, but he just gave her a sympathetic stare. “He will be okay, right? Rex, please. Tell me he’s going to be okay!” Her words came out pleading with desperation.

He placed his hands on her shoulders. “I’m sorry, AJ. I don’t know if he is.”

“No…” She looked back at Nick and held his hand. “He promised me.” She looked back up at Rex. “He did. He promised!”

Shelby ran back in the room with a bucket full of ice and handed it to Rex. He dug his hand in the bucket and started taking two and three ice cubes at a time and placing them on various parts of Nick’s body. She prayed the effort would cool him. His fever seemed dangerously high. She kissed his hand and told him she was there. Over and over again she talked to him.

Sirens sounded in the distance, but she refused to leave Nick’s side. Rex was shouting something at her, but she couldn’t take her attention off of Nick for a second. She’d let him down by not insisting he take better care of his wound.

“AJ, listen!” Rex shouted from behind her. She turned to see all three of the women staring at him and attentive.

“All right, listen… Here’s how this is going to go down. We have a shit load of dead bodies here and three critical. I’ve already called NCIS, but there’s a chance they won’t get here before the police do. They can and will detain all of us after they transport the three of them to the closest hospital.”

“I’m not leaving, Nick,” she blurted out.

“There is no time to argue about this, AJ. If the authorities say you’re staying, then you’re staying. As soon as NCIS gets here, we can get to the hospital. They’ll ride with us. We’ll technically be under their custody, but they won’t let us be detained here, not with these three being in surgery.”

She tried not to worry at the thought of Nick being put under for surgery when he was already so weak, so she focused her attention back to what Rex was telling them.

“The important thing to remember is,” Rex continued, “tell them anything they want to know. And I mean anything. That means local authorities or NCIS. We did nothing wrong, so whatever they want to know, give it to them. Is that clear?”

All of them nodded just as the first two paramedics came in the door. “Jesus, what the hell happened here?”

“No time. He’s the worst.” Rex pointed to Nick.

The paramedics shooed her out of the way as Shelby put a comforting arm around her. Her heart skipped at least three beats when she heard one of them say his fever was 104.7 degrees. She knew how dangerous fevers could be when they reached that high. If the person survived his infection, brain damage was a real possibility.

The second and third teams of paramedics showed up at the same time. All she could do was rub her arms over and over again. Despite the heat from outside she felt a chill. Tamara and Chelsea were talking to Jack and Adam, who were now being placed on gurneys. Both of them were awake, but according to the medics working on them, they’d lost a lot of blood and needed to get to surgery to remove the bullets and repair the damage.

Several sirens were now filling the distant air. She knew it was the police, and she prayed the naval investigators Rex called would get their soon. The thought of Nick going off to the hospital without her sent a terror through her. She didn’t want to leave him.

“Rex, are you sure you’re okay?” Shelby asked her husband, even though she hadn’t left her side.

It was then for the first time since leaving the basement that she had finally gotten a good look at him. His face was badly bruised, and blood seemed to be dried from where it poured from his mouth, and a fresh trail still appeared to be trickling from a head wound.

“I’m fine. The prick knocked me around a little, but Nick took him out before he had the chance to do any real damage.”

Nick. God, she loved him. In the crazy way things had unfolded over the past week she fell in love with him and now…now she may never get the chance to tell him.

Two officers came in the room with their weapons drawn. “Everybody get your hands up.”

Rex lifted his hands and told the ladies to follow his lead.

“Now get up against that wall.”

Maybe it was just her, but to AJ these two cops looked scared out of their minds, like it was their first scene with dead bodies.

“We’ll take it from here, boys. At ease, folks.”

She turned to see Rex shaking hands with someone who wore a baseball cap with a navy insignia on it. She breathed a sigh of relief as she heard Rex explaining things to two investigators who’d arrived on the scene. The paramedics were placing Nick on a gurney. His IV was in, and they’d just finished giving him a round of penicillin. Both things were good for a man in his condition. She knew this, but the look on the medics’ faces wasn’t encouraging.

“I’m going with him,” she informed them and waited while the two men treating him seemed to look to the naval investigators for confirmation that was all right. Once they nodded, no time was wasted as they made their way out to the ambulance. Tamara and Chelsea were close behind, hopping into the backs of the ambulances that held their husbands.

She could see Rex and Shelby talking to the investigators as they drove away. It was then that she got her first look at the carnage that lay out on the once front lawn of the property. She saw four bodies, bodies that were covered in blood and two of them whose eyes were locked in the final moments of their life.

“Your husband?” one of the paramedics asked her.

She almost answered no when she realized if she answered truthfully they might not let her in his room or give her any information of his condition.

“Yes.”

“We’re going to do everything we can, ma’am. We’ll be at the hospital in five minutes. He’s hanging on. He’s stronger than most I’ve seen in his condition.”

She wanted to thank him for his words of encouragement, but words escaped her. Instead she gave him a half smile and took Nick’s hand in hers. Kissing his palm softly she placed his hand on her cheek and allowed her tears to fall.

Whispering, she reminded him, “You promised me. You swore to me you would be okay. Please, Nick…come back to me.”

AJ paced the waiting room anxiously. Despite the naval investigators allowing her to come to the hospital she’d only been allowed to spend a short time with Nick in the emergency room while the doctors and nurses scattered about him frantically attaching electrodes to his body, leading wires to large medical equipment that beeped in unison with one another, telling her he was alive. It felt like such a small victory when she knew how bad his infection had become. She’d overheard one of the nurses telling another that whoever was to supposed to be tending his wound had shirked his responsibility. AJ had cringed with unexplainable horror when the nurse further told the other that it was as if Nick’s caregiver should be ashamed of himself for nearly causing the death of a Navy SEAL.

She knew they were right. He was a hero. Someone who volunteered to serve their country and spent years doing just that and her actions, or inactions, had nearly cost him his life.

It had been two hours since she was pulled from the ER with the gut-wrenching guilt that overwhelmed her. She was watching a nurse inject his IV with medication when the investigators approached her, explaining they needed a few minutes of her time to fill in the blanks.

A few minutes. She held in a bitter laugh that wanted to come out in frustration. They’d taken her to a small conference room on the opposite end of the hospital for that
short talk
.

They sat her down and offered her a cup of coffee, but all she wanted was to get the questions over with so she could return to Nick. At first she’d been patient with their questions. Explaining to them in great deal, and with complete honesty as Rex had made her promise, she explained how she had first met, or rather come across, Nick Slater. She went on to explain the following days. Pain wracked her already frazzled nerves as she recalled the day her father’s body finally gave in and succumbed to the cancer.

Once she finally had gone over everything with them she was relieved to have it out and anxious to get back to Nick, only they asked her to sit back down when she started to stand. Apparently, according to the shorter of the two men, she hadn’t sufficiently explained how she and her father had managed to convince the Department of Defense that one of their elite members of Naval Special Warfare was dead by simply placing his wallet in the pants of a man whose face had been shot beyond recognition.

It seemed unbelievable to her, too, but she couldn’t speak for the Department of Defense anymore than she could speak to Nick’s condition, which at the time was driving her insane with worry. She’d begged them to allow her to leave to check on him, but they’d expressed the importance of going through all the details then.

So she did.

Again. And again.

She went over the details so many times she was sure that she would be able to recite it in her sleep. Her patience began to wear thin, and her answers became shorter and more irritated with each passing minute. She cared little that they were the official investigators of the U.S. Navy. All she cared about was that Nick was barely hanging on somewhere and she wasn’t with him.

After the third time they’d ask her to explain things from the beginning she stood up defiantly and placed her palm up to them, motioning for them to stop before they even tried to object. She gave them both a verbal tongue-lashing unlike any she had ever delivered before.

She placed her hands on the table and stared at them and leveled a glare back and forth to each of them as she told them exactly what she thought of their incessant questioning when the man she loved was fighting for his life, after she’d just explained to them that her father died just days before, when it was
their
navy that allowed the son of a bitch who caused all of this out early for supposed
good behavior
. She threw her head back and laughed at them sarcastically as she explained the irony of that one.

Halfway through her rant she gave the pushier of the two a steely glare as he started to interrupt her. Surprising both himself and her, he closed his mouth before finishing his sentence.

Feeling powerful and in charge, she stood up tall and crossed her arms and looked down at them both and delivered what would be her final statement of the two hour interrogation.

“Now, I’m going to go back to the ER and check on Nick. If you have a problem with that, that’s too goddamn bad because I don’t care. I care about one thing and only one thing. Being there for Nick. I’ve been by his side since the moment he washed up on his shore. No one has kept me from him, and I’ll be damned if you’re going to change that now.”

With that she’d walked, no stormed, away from them with her head held high. Who the hell were they to tell her she couldn’t sit with him? She’d done absolutely nothing wrong. They could arrest her if she was breaking some stupid law, but she needed to be with Nick. There was no alternative.

When she finally returned to the emergency room and found his bed empty and his name wiped off of the white board on the wall, her stomach sank.