Faith (Rescue Me, A Contemporary Romance) by Elizabeth Nelson Read Free Book Online Page B

lift with thick, black bands. He looked so strange lying there unmoving. She’d never seen Mac so still. He was always a blur of energy. This stillness scared her more than anything.
    “Is he okay?” she called, fighting her way out of her friend’s tight embrace and rushing toward the door, following them as they carried Mac to the waiting ambulance.
    “Is my husband going to be okay?” She screamed. Why would no one look at her?
    She tried to get into the ambulance with him, but the attendant gently blocked her path.
    “We need you to follow us to St. John’s in your car ma’am. We’re doing everything we can, but we need room to move around.”
    Her neighbor Lisa, Bill’s wife appeared at her side.
    “C’mon Faith. Bill and I are driving you and Liam. We’ll be right behind them the whole time. C’mon honey.”
    She let herself be pulled away from the ambulance toward Lisa’s car. Inside she could see the medical team hovering over the stretcher. Watched them attaching tubes and IV’s and starting some kind of pumping action.
    She wanted to be inside that car with him. Mac would never have left her. Would never have let anyone tell him he couldn’t be with her or Liam if they were in trouble.
    “I’m sorry Mac,” she whispered to the departing ambulance. “I love you. Don’t leave me.”

CHAPTER 8
     
    At the hospital she sat huddled with Liam and a distraught Lisa and Bill on the hard, plastic chairs in the ICU waiting room. It was a depressing place with sick colored walls and flickering fluorescent lights casting a deathly pall over everyone.
    Why must hospital waiting rooms look like the most depressing places on earth, Faith thought as she stared numbly at the same dark, dirty crack in the tiled floor in front of her. Of all the places where a cheery décor could actually do some good, she couldn’t think of anyplace more deserving than the waiting room. The worst thing about the waiting room was the sheer literal truth of the name. Waiting. Room. All you could do was wait. It was the most hopeless feeling in all the world.
    “Who were those people?” Bill wondered out loud…not for the first time since they’d arrived.
    The police had been there, asking the same question, “why?”
    In fact, they were probably still there somewhere, waiting to see if Mac woke up from the coma. Just waiting, like everyone else.
    Faith merely shook her head. Liam didn’t move a muscle beside her. She had already explained what she knew when they’d arrived and found out that Mac was in a coma. He was being tended to in an ICU unit. There was nothing she could do for him but wait.
    The police had questioned her and Liam extensively about the attack. She told them about the accident.  It was all she knew. Their fender bender seemed like it had happened a million years ago, but had actually just been hours earlier. She told them about Emily and how the psycho had called himself “Mr. Asher” when he’d been terrorizing her behind the closed door of Liam’s bedroom. She didn’t have anything else to tell them. Couldn’t believe it herself. Liam just shook his head speechlessly when they’d turned to him for answers and clung to her hand like he hadn’t since he’d been a little boy.
    “We’ll find them ma’am,” the police had told her, but the blank look in their eyes told her they wouldn’t.
    Alaska was a big, empty space. It was a place that criminals and innocent people alike came to hide. It was a state meant for escaping, and with no other clues to go on the town’s small police force would never find the father and daughter . Not a police force that was used to breaking up bar fights and arresting drunken drivers. They didn’t have much call to do anything more serious, there wasn’t a lot of serious crime in Ketchikan. Until there was.
    A sharp pain in her womb made her gasp and clutch her hands to her stomach. Lisa, Bill’s wife, sat up alert.
    “Are you okay Faith? Is the baby