“Fucking hell,” I groaned as I shoved myself out of my seat, “time to go find D—.”
BA-DUM BA-DUM, DUM!
“Ah!”
The second I heard Brielle’s yelp, I took off like a bat out of hell. Six leaps and bounds were all it took for me to get to the stairs, and then I lunged my way up them. Three at a fucking time.
“Brielle!” I bellowed. “Are you okay!?”
“I’m fine!” she called out. “I’m fine. Just… just lost my balance!”
I careened down the hallway, making my way toward her door. “Stay still. Let me come in there and help you. What do you need?”
“I really am fine,” she said as I threw her bedroom door open.
I didn’t see her in the room, however. “Brielle, where the fuck are you?”
“Ah, shit,” she hissed.
My ears perked up as my gaze leveled off toward the bathroom. “Brielle?”
“What?”
“Do you need any help?” I asked, closing the bedroom door behind me.
She groaned. “No, Axton. I don’t need help taking a fucking shit.”
She punctuated her sentence with the slamming of the bathroom door. But it didn’t deter me.
“Are you sure?” I asked as I stood at the foot of her bed.
She snickered. “Yes, I’m sure that I don’t need a four-hundred-pound brute helping me on and off the toilet.”
“Three sixty, actually.”
“Whatever. You can go now.”
I didn’t want to, though. So, I simply sat down on the edge of the bed and waited.
“I don’t need company, either!” she called out.
A grin tugged its way across my face. She sure as hell was a fiery one. Full of life. Full of strength. Determination unlike anything I’d ever seen, except for in my men.
We were gonna catch hell for keeping her around.
The toilet flushed and the sink turned on. I heard her lumbering, favoring one side over the other as the bathroom door rushed open. She stared me down, eyeing me hotly with that intense glare of hers. But, when she took a step into the bedroom, her legs collapsed.
“Oh, no you don’t,” I grumbled, rushing to her side.
I wrapped my arms around her, catching her just before she tumbled to the carpet. Without another word spoken between us, I scooped her into my embrace and walked her back to her bed. I settled her in the small indentation her body had left behind on the mattress, then managed to pull the covers over her body before she snatched them from me.
“I’ve got it,” she murmured.
“I know you do,” I said as I sat back down on the edge of her bed.
“What are you doing?”
“Can I get you anything? Food? Water? More medicine?”
