“Not that I’ve found.” Swiping at her face with her sleeve, Drennan motioned to him. “Thanks for the assistance. My hair appreciates you keeping it vomit free.”
“Anytime.” The word had slipped out naturally, and Harvey instantly regretted the offer. He’d made it clear he’d support their child financially. Getting involved any further opened him up to a world of mistakes he wasn’t looking to repeat. Ever.
Silence cut between them as Drennan seemed to weigh the slip. A good man who’d gotten a woman pregnant would want to know every symptom, every change she was going through to ensure her and the baby’s health. He’d go out of his way to make things easier for her and go the extra mile to meet those midnight cravings. But Harvey wasn’t a good man. He’d been corrupted the moment his dad’s fist had first met his face, and he’d do whatever it took to protect Drennan and this baby from that future.
A horn blared from behind him. A car had rolled up a few feet short of the van, waiting for them to get out of the way.
Drennan practically jumped out of her skin, and reality rushed to meet them all over again. She hiked a thumb over her shoulder, stepping backward toward the driver’s side door, and that sick feeling charged through him. “I better get going. Heat tends to speed up decomposition. Could alter the time of death readings and compromise any evidence.”
He needed to let her go. To go home and ice his damn knee and recover enough for him to hike those trails all over again tomorrow. Except he was stepping into her all over again. “Give me your phone.”
“What?” Those already wide eyes of hers grew impossibly brighter.
“Come on!” The car horn blasted a second time.
Harvey turned, holding up a single finger for them to wait. “Your phone.”
Slipping the device free of her back pocket, she handed it off with shaky fingers. “I think they want my parking spot.”
“I don’t really give a damn what they want. You’re more important than a parking spot.” He made quick work of tapping the phones together. “Now you have my number. Message me when you get the bills from the doctor’s office or if there’s an emergency.”
“Okay.” She took her phone back—still shaking—and made it one more step toward the driver’s seat. “How about now?”
His instincts fired in warning. Harvey countered her retreat. “Drennan?”
“I don’t feel so good.” She reached for him. Just before her eyes rolled back. She swayed on her feet as she had at the edge of the upper emerald pool.
Harvey caught her a split second before she hit the side of the van. Pain flared up his leg from her added weight. He couldn’tstop the strength from giving out. His knee slammed into the asphalt, and they fell together. “Drennan.”
“I’m okay.” Her voice had gone breathy, barely audible over the grumble of the waiting car’s engine, but she’d yet to open her eyes. “Just dizzy. I think… I think I need to lie down.”
A car door slammed. Movement registered in his peripheral vision. The driver waiting for the damn parking spot. “Hey, man. Is she okay?”
“Help me get her in the passenger seat.” Harvey did his best to get to his feet, but his knee had reached its limit. It took everything he had to trust the driver with the woman in his arms. A ridiculous notion considering he and Drennan weren’t anything more than acquaintances, but possessiveness strangled him all the same. Together, he and the driver maneuvered Drennan into the van, but the vice around his rib cage refused to release until he’d climbed behind the wheel and tore out of the visitor’s center parking lot.
Screw the body in the back. Something was wrong. Pregnant women didn’t just pass out for no reason. He might not want to be part of this baby’s life, but he’d sure as hell step up when it came to its well-being. He owed Drennan that much.
Pulling in front of the small Springdale emergency clinic, Harvey left the van running with air-conditioning to counter the heat collecting around the body in the back and rounded the hood to Drennan’s side. His knee threatened to give out a second time, but he bit through the shredding discomfort, lifting her against his chest with an unfamiliar panic building behind his sternum. “Almost there.”
The glass doors parted as he pushed himself to his limits. Two nurses caught sight of him and rushed to meet him halfway with a stretcher. Harvey laid her out, every sense he owned screaming to get her back in his arms. “She passed out about ten minutes ago after throwing up. She’s pregnant, about eight weeks.”
“We’ll get her checked out as soon as we can.” The nurse strapped a blood pressure cuff around Drennan’s arm and pressed a stethoscope to her chest as the stretcher headed for the back rooms. Then cut her attention to Harvey. “Sir, you have to let go of her hand. Unless you’re family, you’re not permitted back here. Are you the father of the child?”
He hadn’t realized he’d intertwined his hand with Drennan’s and released his hold. Instant cold flooded through him at the loss of her warm skin pressed against his, but Harvey had survived this loss two months ago when he’d let her drive away. He’d do it again. For Drennan and the baby. “No. I’m not the father.”
Chapter Five
Ugh. She hated that sound.
Drennan could feel the tug of the IV in the back of her hand. The slight cold burn of fluids eased through her veins before warming up in her forearm. Every sense she owned felt intensified, from the overly loud pulse of the heart rate monitor to her left and the shuffling and voices outside the curtain surrounding her bed to the air-conditioning blowing straight down on her.
A hospital. The unconscious haze cleared with deeper inhales. Familiar calls on the muted PA and scuffed tennis shoes hit that aching place inside of her that missed her former life. An ER—even on slow shifts—had never been boring.
The stained cream-colored curtain ripped to one side on metallic shower hooks, putting a thin dark-haired woman with a clipboard clutched to her chest swallowed by her white coat in Drennan’s personal space. Rich brown eyes locked on her with a hardness that had no business on the doctor’s face. “You don’t call. You don’t write. The first I hear about you taking that job with the ME is by your ass landing in my ER.”
Drennan attempted to sit up, only to be humbled by the overwhelming sting in her hand from the IV line. Hospital. Throwing up. Passing out. Her heart rate double-timing as panic took hold. “The baby—”
“Perfectly healthy. No issues that we could see.” Dr. Cassidy Duffy navigated around to the side of Drennan’s bed, checking her IV bag and the stats the machines picked up every fewseconds. The woman exemplified the girl next door, with long brown hair, a soft smile that reached her eyes and an openness that calmed patients under her care into a coma. Her accent—straight from the streets of Boston—could do wonders in a crisis. “Seems you got a touch of dehydration, and by a touch, I mean you could’ve died out there. You’re smarter than this, D. What the hell were you thinking?”
