Fortune's Cinderella by Karen Templeton Read Free Book Online Page A

had a rough time.”
    And yet, he mused as they reached the highway, where it became much smoother going except for the occasional jagged branch or chunk of somebody’s shed, not once during their ordeal had Christina complained. Even though she had to have been in pain.
    And frightened out of her wits.
    If anything happened to her…
    He stepped on the gas.
    Not surprisingly, the E.R. was borderline chaos, all the exam rooms filled, a pair of obviously harried nurses doing triage on the dozens of walking wounded flooding the waiting room.
    “Scott! Over here!”
    Emily was in a far corner, between a resigned-looking older man pressing a bloodstained towel to a gash in his head and a mother with worried eyes holding a sleeping toddler. His sister’s foot, wrapped in an ice pack, was elevated on a pillow on the glass table in front of her. Blake scanned the crowd. “Wow. Did San Antonio get hit, too?”
    Emily shook her head, her pinched brow the only clue she’d been through hell. “No, just Red Rock. This is overflow from the Medical Center. Look,” she said, nodding toward the TV mounted high on the opposite wall, where a camera panned parts of the town, showing the damage. Considering what might have been, though, things could have been much worse.
    For all of them.
    He turned back to his sister. “Where’s Mom and Dad?”
    “In treatment rooms. Mike’s been toggling between the two of them. I’d bug the desk for more information, except, one, I can’t exactly move and, two, I’m afraid of that nurse. Yeah, that one, in the pink scrubs. Don’t let the teddy bears fool you—she’s fierce.”
    The man with the bleeding head was called to see the doctor. With a heavy sigh, Victoria plopped into his vacated seat, laid her head on Emily’s shoulder. She smiled for her cousin, then said, “Eventually I’ll get into the inner sanctum and find out what’s going on, but…”
    She glanced across the room, then whispered, “It’s Javier I’m most worried about, if the look on Miguel’s face is anything to go by.”
    Scott twisted around to see Javier’s and Marcos’s brother, who’d come from New York for the wedding, sitting in a chair on the other side of the room, his head in his hands.
    “Go on, talk to him,” Blake said. “I’ll check on Mom and Dad.”
    Looking far more bedraggled than the rest of them, Miguel shakily stood at Scott’s approach. A small, tight smile strained his mouth. “Your family—is everybody okay?”
    “More or less. Miguel—for God’s sake, sit, you look like you’re about to keel over. How is he?”
    “It’s bad, man,” Miguel said, sinking onto the seat, strangling his still wet ball cap in his hands. “Real bad.” Terrified brown eyes lifted to Scott’s. “He’s…he’s unconscious, they don’t even know yet what needs fixing. His head, his legs…” The young man swallowed hard, obviously fighting for control.
    “Damn…” Scott felt as though someone had put a stake through his chest. “You need me to make any calls—?”
    “No, I already talked to Marcos. He’ll get in touch with everybody else.” He looked at Scott, obviously fighting tears. “I found him, right after the twister hit. I could tell he was in bad shape, but there wasn’t a damn thing I could do—couldn’t call 911 because the cell service was down, couldn’t go get help because the roads were trashed. Best I could do was keep the worst of the rain off him, but…” Shaking his head, he looked away, a tear tracking down his filthy, stubbled cheek.
    “Hey…” Scott laid his hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “It’s going to be okay. He made it through the night. That’s got to count for something—”
    “I can’t stop thinking,” Miguel went on, his left leg bouncing, clearly not hearing any voices except the nasty ones in his own head, “what if he didn’t get help in time—?”
    “And you’re only going to make yourself crazy, worrying like that,”