The Strength of the Pack (Suncoast Society #30)(70)

“I can have her at Proctor-Collins Med Center’s ER in four minutes. I timed it from here years ago, in case something ever happened. It’ll take an ambulance that long just to dispatch and find us and get here. Grab Nate. Have someone pack up his gear for him and have him give Landry his keys. We’ll take my SUV, it’s bigger.” She’d pulled up Eva’s underwear for her. “Bring me towels, too. Several.”

Marcia ran out to do it.

As Tilly was getting Eva out of the stall, Nate burst through the bathroom door. “What happened? What’s wrong?”

Tilly threw her keys at him and pushed past him and out the door with her arm around Eva. “You’re driving. My ride.” Marcia returned with towels, and now Cris and Landry followed them. Cris was still naked and hooded.

“What’s wrong?” Landry said.

“Get him dressed and follow us in Nate’s car with his gear. Proctor-Collins. I think she’s got pre-eclampsia, and probably placental abruption.”

Eva realized the dungeon, other than the music, had gone silent, watching. “Fucking move your asses!” Tilly screamed, forcing everyone into frantic action. “And bring my purse and going home clothes!” she yelled after Landry.

Another jolt of pain slammed into Eva as they were getting her into the SUV, laid in the back, the seat down. Tilly climbed in with her, pulling the back door shut behind her. “Drive it like you stole it, buddy, and don’t kill us. You know where we’re going?”

“Yeah.”

Tilly hit the cargo light. She yanked the bloody gloves off, inside out, and pulled a fresh set from the bag. Then she got out her BP cuff and stethoscope. Eva didn’t think it was just the dim light that made her friend’s face look so grim as she checked her vital signs.

“Tilly?”

“Shh, sweetie. Be a good girl for me. Just lay still. We’ll be at the hospital in a minute.”

But Eva was feeling progressively worse, the headache throbbing, hurting more than any she’d ever had. “I love you, Tilly.”

“Love you, too. Now shut your mouth and let me do my job.”

This was bad. Really, really bad. She knew what Tilly had said. They’d been things she’d obsessed over with Laurel’s pregnancy, every potential thing that could go wrong.

She’d barely thought about them with this baby. This pregnancy had been nearly textbook perfect.

The headache grew even worse, as did her vision, and the backache. She was afraid, terrified to ask how much she was bleeding.

Tilly braced herself with one of the oh shit handles as Nate rounded a turn. “Drive right up to the ER entrance,” Tilly said to him. “Hit the horn as soon as we pull in to get their asses in gear.” It felt like forever as Tilly stared down at her, checking her. “Hang in there,” she told Eva. “Be a good girl for me and hang the f*ck in there.”

The tires screeched nearly as loudly as the horn as Nate slid to a stop under the canopy in front of the ER door. He threw it into park, but Tilly was already out the back door and screaming for a gurney as Eva felt her vision fold into a tiny point before blackness took her…





Chapter Twenty-Five


Nate felt like his knees would give out when he saw all the blood in the car, on Eva, on Tilly’s clothes and arms as she climbed out of the SUV. She was barking orders and Eva’s vitals at a nurse and a security guard who’d run out to meet them with a gurney.

“Go park it and get back here,” Tilly ordered. “I’ll stay with her.” He also realized she was now barefoot, her heels in the SUV. “Go!”

He did, shattered as he watched them wheel Eva away, Tilly running alongside and once again talking to the nurse.

Numb, he got the vehicle parked without hitting any other cars. As he headed inside, he realized he hadn’t grabbed Eva’s purse from the car. He returned for it, knowing he’d need her ID and insurance cards, before heading inside again.

He started to run past the desk, following the sound of Tilly’s barking voice when the security guard stopped him. “Sir, you can’t go back there.”

“That’s my wife!”

“Sir, they need to work on her, and we need to get information on her.” He steered Nate to a chair at a desk where a grim-faced young woman in scrubs started taking Eva’s information.

He was about to beg, plead with them to let him go back when he heard a code blue being paged to a bed in the ER.

A few minutes later, Tilly slowly walked out. Her stethoscope was draped around her neck.

He stood, terrified. “Well?”

“They’re taking her to surgery right now. They have to deliver the baby and stop the bleeding.”

His knees collapsed as he heavily sat again, fortunately landing in the chair. “I heard a code—”

“That wasn’t her,” Tilly quickly said, “it was a guy next door to her. Cardiac arrest.”

She looked down at herself and turned to the clerk. “Um…” She held out her hands. She’d peeled off her gloves, but still had Eva’s blood smeared on her hands, arms, all over her clothes. “Any chance I can clean up and borrow some scrubs so I don’t scare the natives?”





Tilly left the scrubs on even after Landry and Cris arrived with her clothes, but she pulled on socks and purple Crocs from her bag. She also kept the stethoscope around her neck.