Latent Danger (On the Line #2)(51)

Pain shot through her and her eyes didn’t want to focus for a minute, but someplace deep in her mind, she knew they needed to move.

She tried to roll, but her legs were pinned. Zach lay across her, his body slumped, blood coming from a gash on the back of his head. All around him was the evidence of the cave in. Only, she realized, it must not have been the whole chimney that fell. There was only enough stone to account for a piece of it. She just prayed they could get out of there before the rest of it came down.

“Zach, Shauna!” Ronan’s voice came to her from the stairs and she heard steps coming toward them.

“Stop!” She didn’t try to turn to face them. “Don’t come closer. Part of the fireplace collapsed, but there’s a lot more of it that could come down.”

She heard Ronan’s response from the stairs. “What do you need?”

“Let’s start with something to stabilize his neck,” she said. “Then we can get him ready for transport and you guys can come in and do a grab and dash.”

She heard orders being given and footsteps going back up the steps. Shauna willed her heart to stop pounding as she tried to run her hands over Zach. He’d been thrown over her legs, but his head had come to rest on her stomach. She could reach the top of his head and his shoulders but not much else.

Carefully, she raised her head again, ignoring the pain and nausea that swirled through her. They would need to move the stones. Most had fallen to the sides when they’d come down on top of them, but a large one lay across his leg.

She hoped that leg wasn’t broken. “They might need a leg brace.” She called this over to Ronan who shouted the information up the staircase. She knew they’d be bringing a backboard. That went without saying.

Minutes later, Ronan crept carefully into the room and handed her a neck brace. Together, they got it onto Zach who still hadn’t so much as moaned or moved any one of those muscles she’d come to love so much.

Hell, there was a lot about this man she’d come to love. He was nothing like the Zach she’d known years before and this man, the one who lay so frighteningly still atop her, she wanted to know. She wanted him in her life. And how she felt about him had nothing to do with friendship.

“Okay,” Ronan called out. Within seconds, three other officers came forward. They removed the large piece of stone laying on Zach, then stepped back to let the EMTs in. Zach was braced, flipped, and strapped into the backboard and gone.

And Shauna was left with such emptiness, she wanted to cry out, to scream. She needed him to survive this. She needed him.





Chapter Forty-one





Zach was loaded into an ambulance and gone by the time Shauna made it out the front door strapped to a backboard of her own. She didn’t feel like she’d needed it, but Ronan had pinned her down when she tried to get up, barking that Zach would have his head if he let her move and she damaged something by doing so.

She closed her eyes and let herself float while she was put into her own ambulance and tried not to think about the blood that had soaked her shirt by the time they took Zach off her. Head wounds bleed a lot.

Her head knew that. The only problem was, her heart and her head weren’t in agreement. Her heart wanted to panic.

She felt wooden as she let the EMTs tend to her, answering their questions by rote. When she got to the hospital, she started asking her own questions, but wasn’t getting any answers. One nurse told her she thought he was being brought into surgery, and that kicked Shauna’s anxiety up into overdrive.

“Shaun!” Her mother’s voice was echoed quickly by her father and her brothers.

Shauna looked over to see her family squishing into the small room she’d been stuck in for the better part of an hour. She had already put her clothes back on and was sitting on top of the bed.

“I’m okay,” she said, her throat still scratchy.

“They said you were drugged and a house collapsed on you.” Her mother sat by her side, flanked by her father and brothers, all scowling at her like they might be able to look at her hard enough to get a prognosis to pop out of her at will.

“Whoever they is, they exaggerated,” she said.

Hutch walked in behind her family. “I heard it was two houses.”

Shauna snorted at that, then winced in pain. Her head was splitting. “It’s true I was drugged. A suspect gave me Rohypnol then shot me full of Ketamine twice, when I was too loopy to fight her off.” The Ketamine was what had caused the severe pain in her stomach when she’d first come to in the chimney room.

Her mother blanched and Shauna realized she shouldn’t be giving them details. The doctors had done a scan on her head and she was cleared to leave as soon as they finished her paperwork. She wanted out of the bed so she could find Zach.

“Hutch, they won’t tell me anything about Zach. Can you see if you can find out what’s going on with him.”

Zach’s deep voice answered her from the doorway. “You ready to get out of bed, woman? You’ve been laying around for over an hour.”

If he thought he was funny, he probably didn’t for long. Five O’Rourkes, four of them large angry men, slowly turned to face Zach.

The idiot grinned at them and moved through the crowd to reach her bed.

“Hey,” he said, taking her hand.