Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 78760 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 394(@200wpm)___ 315(@250wpm)___ 263(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78760 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 394(@200wpm)___ 315(@250wpm)___ 263(@300wpm)
The moment I reached into the playpen and pulled the wheezing child into my arms, my heart began hammering in my chest.
Hurt and sick children were my weakness.
I could deal with a woman who was beaten to a bloody pulp, though I was angry afterward. I could deal with a fifty-year-old male with half his arm missing because he decided to shove his hand inside of a wood chipper.
I could even deal with the ninety-nine-year-old woman stroking out.
What I couldn’t deal with were sick kids.
And the one currently in my arms was a very sick kid.
At least right then.
She was wheezing and whimpering and breaking my heart all at once.
“Here,” Tally gasped, shoving something into my hand.
I instinctively took it, placed it over Tallulah’s face, and depressed the canister.
The medicine shot out of the inhaler and straight into the spacer that was held tightly over Tallulah’s face.
My chest tightened as adrenaline rushed through me, and I watched helplessly as the little girl tried in vain to take a deep breath.
Which thankfully she did just moments later, and her tiny chest filling was the sweetest sound I’d ever heard.
Her breathing became even and deep instead of short and choppy, and I sat her up to allow her to see her mother.
It was nearly instantaneous.
One second she was wheezing and the next she was quiet.
Taking the spacer off of her mouth, I sat down hard on the couch and inspected the small body in my hands.
“Her ribs look good, no retractions,” I said, running my rough, tanned hands over Tallulah’s baby soft skin. “Skin color is good. Eyes are aware. She sounds clear.”
Tally bit her lip.
“You caught it in time,” she whispered.
I looked up at the woman hovering over her child, which in turn caused her to hover over me, and I nodded.
“She’s going to be okay,” I promised.
The baby in my arms whimpered and dropped her face to my bare chest, her tears mixing with my chest hair as she rubbed her cheeks against me.
“Fuck.”
The couch depressed beside me.
“Thank God for rescue inhalers.” Tally breathed deeply as she buried her face into her hands.
I could tell she was trying not to cry. With Tallulah still in my arms, looking around wildly as she came down from her earlier peak, Tally wouldn’t show weakness.
Later, though, with Tallulah sleeping soundly by the side of my bed in the Pack-n-Play, she broke.
Her small body wracked with sobs as she buried her face into the pillow to stifle her sobs.
I sat down beside her, and ran my hand up and down her back.
“Shhh,” I whispered, dropping a kiss onto her head. “She’s okay.”
She got up onto her knees in the bed and then threw herself at me.
I caught her, falling back into the bed as she came down on top of me.
I rolled so she was partially underneath me, and she let me, holding onto me tighter.
“That could have been really bad.”
I squeezed her tighter.
“We wouldn’t have been able to get to the hospital in time,” she murmured. “The rain might’ve stopped, but the water is still there and it’s still rising.”
I didn’t disagree with her. We’d watched the news reports advising viewers that we may have a break in the rain—for now—but that the river would continue to rise and crest, and subsequently flood the area, for about two more days.
She was right.
With the water still there, it would’ve been extremely difficult to get her to the hospital in time.
We couldn’t even call for an ambulance because they’d have problems getting to us, and it was unlikely that they’d get here in time anyway.
So yes, Tallulah really was lucky tonight.
“I know. But she’s okay. She’s sleeping soundly right beside the bed,” I told her. “You can even hear her snoring.”
Tally’s muted sob as she tried to laugh at the same time as she cried warmed my heart.
“She snores like her mama, I’m sorry to admit,” Tally informed me. “Unlucky for you.”
I loosened my hold on her, and of course, my body chose that moment to react to her closeness.
An instinctive reaction, one that I likely wouldn’t have ever acted on had I not been coming down from an extreme adrenaline high, had me pushing her all the way to her back and coming fully over her.
She gasped, her eyes as wide as saucers as she stared up at me in surprise.
What made me continue down this path, though, was the way she parted her thighs to make room for me as she latched onto my biceps with such a tight grasp that it felt like she’d never let me go.
“What are you doing?” she gasped.
I stared at her lips.
Only the slightest bit of light from the bottom of the closed bathroom door filtered into the room around us, but it was just enough to allow me to see everything I wanted to see.