Bear frowned up the tree. “Her words are slurred. That’s not a good sign.”
Ghost had picked up on that as well. He started towards the branch, but Lucky stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. “You’re hurt,” his VP reminded him. “Let one of us go.”
But Ghost pushed off the hand. “She’s my wife. No one is getting her out of this fucking tree, but me.”
Becks wasn’t that far up, maybe fifteen feet, but that was still fifteen feet she could fall and further injure herself.
Ghost got up on the lowest branch. It pissed him off to see blood smeared along the bark. From her feet or her hands? In the end, it didn’t matter. A single drop of her blood was too much in his opinion.
“Becks, baby, I need you to stop climbing. Will you look down? I’m right here.”
She reached for the next branch. “Ghost!” She no longer kept her voice low, legitimately screaming his name now. “Ghost, he’s coming! Help me!”
Fuck, she thinks I’m the fucking man she’s running from, Ghost thought frantically as he climbed up onto the next branch. He needed to stop her from going up, because the branches just above her head were significantly thinner than the ones that were currently supporting both Ghost’s and Becks’ weights.
“Becks! It’s me! I’m the one below you. Just stop and look!”
“Depending on how hard she was hit, she might be suffering from auditory hallucinations and not recognizing your voice!” Bear’s voice called up to him.
Which was no help whatsoever. Fucking hell! “Rebel, baby, it’s me. The first time we met, you fell over the blanket at my feet. You kneed me in the balls and then elbowed me in the eye. And you want to know what? I married you anyway. I married you, because the second I saw you sitting on top of me, I knew youwere mine. I have not doubted that act for a single moment. Not even as you climb away from me now.”
Becks slowed, her head tipped like she was trying to decipher if his voice was coming from above her or below her. Then she turned on the branch, and Ghost’s heart left his body as she lost her balance and fell backwards. She screamed in terror, her arms flailing but unable to regain her balance. He lunged forward, flattening himself on his branch. Her arm, wet and slippery with blood and rain, slid through his grip, until his hand tightened and held on her wrist.
Becks kept falling, gravity pulling her further down. Ghost’s shoulder screamed, but he did not let go. His body scraped along the rough, jagged bark as his grip on the tree and sheer determination not to drop her stopped her fall.
He heard scrambling on the ground as Becks dangled dangerously below him. She looked up at him, frantic and scared—and he saw it then. Her right pupil was blown. That fucking bastard! No wonder she hadn’t been thinking straight. Ghost wanted to rage and cry, not knowing what this meant for Becks—but it only tightened his hold on her. He didn’t care what challenges this presented their future.
They would face it together.
“Drop her!” he heard from below. “We got her, Ghost! Drop her!”
It went against every instinct he had, but Ghost released his hold and watched his wife fall to the ground, trusting his club to catch her.
Givenwhere they were and how long it would take medical assistance to reach them, Ghost called in a favor from a localSARS team and got an air ambulance up to the campground. Thankfully, the team arrived quickly. All former military, they didn’t blink an eye at the one dead body, the two prisoners on their knees with their hands bound behind their back, or the amount of motorcycles strewn about the place. Their sole attention was on Becks. When Ghost informed them that he was riding with them, even if it meant one of their team was left behind, the captain asked, “Who is she to you?”
Ghost looked him dead in the eye and said, “She’s my everything.”
That seemed good enough for him. Thankfully, there was room in the medevac for two cots as well as the four-man team, so Ghost was able to climb in without a fuss. Like Bear, their main concern was Becks’ obvious signs of concussion and possible brain trauma. Time was of the essence, and they were back up in the air within minutes of landing.
In the medevac, one of the medics turned to Ghost and shouted, “You look like shit.” The badge on his vest said his name was Crow.
Frankly, Ghost felt like shit, but he wanted all their attention on Becks. She hadn’t passed out, but she didn’t seem fully there either. “She could be pregnant,” he informed Crow in place of a response.
The man’s eyes jumped back and forth between Becks and Ghost, like he was debating on arguing. He smartly turned his attention back to Becks and helped his partner stabilize her. It sounded like they were speaking in code as they worked on her, and Ghost was growing increasingly frustrated that he hadn’t dragged Bear with him so he could translate medical-ese for him.
“Is she going to be okay?” he finally demanded. He was shocked to feel Becks’ fingers tighten around his when he spoke.
Crow turned back to him just as the helicopter banked, and they all braced themselves for the turn. “Her airway is clear and she’s breathing steady. We’re concerned about her high blood pressure.” They’d already hooked her up to an IV and had a mask over her face. Her neck was in a C-collar and they were working on bandaging up all her wounds on her feet, hands, and arms. They’d also tipped her upright on the bed rather than having her lay flat. “The fact that she’s conscious is both good and bad, because stress can also increase the pressure.”
“She was hallucinating in the woods, we think,” he reminded him. Bear had already told the team that when they’d arrived, giving a much more accurate assessment of her injuries than Ghost could.
Once again, Becks squeezed his fingers, but when he looked down at her, she was staring blindly off to the other side.
“We’re three minutes out from a hospital with one of the best neurosurgeons on the east coast,” Crow’s partner said loudly to him. “If anyone can help her, it’ll be them.”
Ghost squeezed Becks’ hand, offering her all the strength he had left in him to help her. Leaning over, he kissed her temple as gently as he could. In the woods, once he’d gotten down from the tree, he’d wanted to take her into his arms and kiss her within an inch of her life. But she’d been too hurt, and he refused to add to her injuries just to appease his need to feel her in his arms again.
Her hair was damp from the rain, but he didn’t care. For the remaining three minutes of the helicopter ride, Ghost kept his face pressed into the pillow next to her head and simply breathed her in.
