A Beautiful Lie (Playing with Fire #1)(124)

He refused to let go of her hand and snapped at someone next to him who tried to move him out of the way. Medical personnel decided it was best not to argue with him and did their best to work around him. They ripped her torn shirt the rest of the way from her body, applied bandages to her wound, started an IV, and placed an oxygen mask over her face.

Parker watched what was happening with detachment like it was happening to someone else and not her. She watched Garrett argue with someone next to him without taking his eyes off of her. Numbness flowed through her veins and through every inch of her body, and she knew she was given some kind of pain medicine that she was immediately grateful for. The need to scream in agony diminished with each part of her that grew immune to the pain. Her body was jostled and placed onto a wooden board before being lifted onto a gurney. Garrett was pushed out of the way, and within seconds, she could no longer see his eyes. She was staring up at strangers who carried her through the corridors of the palace. These people didn’t love her; they didn’t know her. She felt cold and alone and wanted the warmth of Garrett’s arms back. She closed her eyes and let the darkness swallow her, hoping she’d find Garrett on the other side.





Chapter 26



The last clear memory Parker had was staring up at water-filled blue eyes and wishing she had the energy to talk and tell Garrett she would be fine and not to worry so much about her.

She didn’t remember the frantic ambulance ride to the hospital where they had to perform CPR and then jump start her heart because she had lost over forty percent of her blood and went into shock. She didn’t remember being in surgery for six hours to repair the hole in her side and the damage to her small intestine. She didn’t remember Garrett knocking a doctor out cold when he was told he couldn’t go into her room, and she didn’t remember the four days she had spent in a medically induced coma.

One minute her world went black and the next her eyes were blinking rapidly from the bright florescent lights that hung above her hospital bed as she arched her back in pain and terror because it felt like she was choking. Her body jerked as she tried to swallow and her arms wouldn’t move to clutch her throat no matter how hard she tried. She coughed and gagged in an attempt to swallow, the effort causing her eyes to water. Parker could hear loud beeping from a machine close to her bed and within seconds two nurses rushed to her bedside.

“Calm down, Annabelle. It’s okay. There’s a tube down your throat that’s been helping you breathe,” one of the nurses informed her as she placed her hands on Parker’s shoulders and held her still. “I know it feels like you’re choking but we need you to try and stay calm. We’re going to call the respiratory therapist so he can run a few tests and then hopefully pull that tube out.”

Parker could feel tears sliding down her cheeks and she tried bringing a hand up to swipe them away but she still couldn’t move them.

“Your arms are restrained so you wouldn’t pull the tube out,” the second nurse told her gently when she saw her tugging against the bindings. She pulled a cordless phone out of the pocket of her lab coat and dialed the therapist.

Parker tried to do as they asked, but her mind was still fuzzy from being unconscious for so long. Her body’s natural reaction was to fight the thing that was causing her discomfort.

Although it seemed like hours that she lay in bed, being held down by a nurse, it was only minutes before a man dressed in blue hospital scrubs walked into the room pushing a giant machine in front of him.

“Good morning, Parker, it’s good to see you're awake,” he told her as he wheeled the machine next to her respirator and began hooking up wires and plugs. He had her perform a bunch of breathing exercises while he monitored the two machines. After twenty minutes, he told her to take a deep breath and blow out all the air as hard as she could while he pulled the tube out of her throat.

After giving Parker several minutes to cough, they attached an oxygen mask to her face and told her to rest, injecting something into her IV that made her eyes droop closed.

Before she succumbed to sleep, she realized that the one person she needed the most wasn’t in the room when she first woke up.



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Garrett paced angrily back and forth in the small conference room of the Navy SEAL command center. After four days of sitting by Parker’s bed side willing her to wake up, he’d been forcibly removed by three Navy masters-at-arms at oh-two-hundred hours that morning. He knew it was his own fault for not getting in contact with Captain Risner after he left Garrett repeated voicemails. He knew the debriefing from this mission should have been top priority, but nothing could tear him away from Parker’s side.

Three fully armed, United States military police officers proved him wrong. If he didn’t go with them calmly and quietly back to the states, they would take him by force. Garrett knew if that happened, he’d be thrown into the Brig, the military’s version of prison, for directly disobeying orders, being AWOL, and a long list of other offenses he didn’t care about at the moment.

Garrett was climbing the walls and felt like tearing all of his hair out. As soon as he deplaned, he was relieved of his military-issued firearm, his military identification, his cell phone, and driven to the command center and put into a conference room without any explanation. Garrett knew he should have never left Parker’s side. All he could think about was something going wrong and not being there to do something. He hadn’t done much of anything the past few days aside from hold her hand and talk to her, but at least it felt like something. Right now he felt useless.