Page 36 of Healing Home
When the dizziness passed, he cracked his eyes open to look around. There was a group of women moving toward the group, but none of the kids. Several of his platoon had been injured and were coming off the plane the same way he was, so the big brass had suggested this was a spouses only meet.
In spite of himself he looked across the group of women, looking for light brown curls and a smiling face. And a dress. Then he cursed himself when she wasn’t there. The contract was over with. BB had no business, no desire, to be here.
One of the wives stopped beside his cot, resting a hand on his wrist. “Welcome home, Lincoln.”
Yeah, whatever.
He closed his eyes and hoped the ambulance crashed on the way to the hospital.
* * *
BB was about to scream.No matter how much she cajoled or wheedled, the woman would not let her through the doors. She had called Mary twice but Black’s wife wasn’t answering, and she didn’t have the numbers to any of the other women. BB was left to pace the waiting room of the medical center and hope that someone called her back.
If she was a wife or a fiancé it would be no big deal, but a ‘friend’ just didn’t cut it. Pacing down the hallway, she stepped outside to get a breath of fresh air and looked inside the window just in time to see a woman walk up to the receptionist, looking frazzled. The receptionist smiled tightly, like she was aggravated, and began packing up her personal items.
Ah. Maybe she’d been grumpy because her relief was late. BB watched the woman who had told her no leave, and the second woman settle into the chair. She didn’t think they’d talked enough for the second woman to be aware of BB trying to get in, so, taking a deep breath, she marched in through the front doors of the emergency wing.
“BB Jones to see Lincoln Bezel. I was told he was brought in about two hours ago.”
The young woman smiled and looked at her computer, tapping quickly on the keyboard. “Yes, ma’am. He’s in bay three. I’ll let you through.”
BB opened her mouth to say yes, she was related, then realized that the woman hadn’t even asked. Well, hell. She proceeded through the doors and into the super-bright emergency department. Trying to stay out of everyone’s way, she headed down the central hallway, past a bustling nurse’s station. It was obvious that they’d suddenly gotten a lot of wounded and were scrambling to care for them all.
The curtains didn’t have numbers on them so she had to peer inside each one to see if she could see Lincoln’s dark hair. Finally, she found him way down at the end of the corridor, face down on a gurney. His back was draped with a light sheet and his eyes were closed, but he seemed to sense her looking at him because his bright, electric eyes flicked open. Something vulnerable flickered across his face. She thought it was disbelief, and he closed his eyes again, frowning. When he opened them again she’d moved closer.
“BB. What are you doing here?” He whispered, voice rough like he’d been screaming.
She smiled for him. “I had to come.” She leaned forward and pressed a kiss to the corner of his mouth. “Is it okay that I’m here?”
He stared at her for a long moment, then took a long blink. “I don’t know. Did Mary hire you again?”
She shook her head, kneeling on the hard tile floor. “No, Mary did not hire me. She did let me know you were here, though.”
BB waited. Lincoln seemed to be under the influence of some type of sedative, because he kept drifting off, then rousing again. At one point he moved his right arm and winced, but didn’t stop until his hand was within reach of hers. BB met his touch, enfolding his fingers in hers. Pulling a chair up close she sat down and just held his hand. If this was all she could do for him she would do it.
She rubbed his fingers with her thumb, then traced a finger dawn his lean cheek, which was still dirty from wherever he’d been. He didn’t rouse.
BB sat with Lincoln for almost an hour before a nurse rushed in and began doing things. She seemed startled to see BB with him, but she smiled and nodded as she went about logging vitals. Then she circled the bed to BB. “He’s doing good,” she said. “I’ll have the doctor come in and talk to you about when you can expect him to wake.”
“He was already awake.”
The nurse frowned and looked at Lincoln, shaking her head. “He shouldn’t have been. He’s on enough sedative to keep an elephant in Lala land.”
“He was awake and talking to me,” BB reiterated.
The nurse left soon after that, then returned about ten minutes later with a syringe in hand. She injected it into the IV. “We’re going to make sure he stays down for a while. When he rouses these wounds are going to be extremely painful and we want to get a bit of a head start on the healing.”
Smiling brightly, she left through the curtain.
Half an hour later a uniformed doctor came through the curtain. His name tag said Coffey. He smiled at BB when he saw her, but it seemed tired. “Ma’am. I hear Mr. Bezel has been talking.”
BB gave him the gist of the conversation and he basically told her exactly what the nurse had. They were going to be keeping an eye on Lincoln and keeping him sedated, because the wounds he’d received were extremely painful. One piece of shrapnel had been incredibly close to puncturing a lung and another had been just to the side of his spine. And just as Mary had said, the doctor told her about a secondary infection they were dealing with.
“Not sure yet what that’s from, but we’re going to be loading his system with antibiotics to combat it, and whatever might have been on the metal in the grenade.”
BB thanked the doctor, feeling a little faint. She moved to the chair and sank down. It hit her that there was a very real possibility she could have lost Lincoln. They’d had so little time together but somehow she knew if he had been killed, it would have wrecked her.
Her gaze drifted down his forehead to his closed eyes. His ridiculously long lashes rested on his cheeks, still. She assumed that when they got him to a room they would bathe him and get some of the grime from him. If there was a bathroom here she would wipe off his face herself, but she didn’t really see anything to help do that. She dug around in her purse. Yup, baby wipes. Very gently she cleaned his face of dust and blood. If she thought she wouldn’t get yelled at she would go further. Maybe when they got him into a room they’d be able to clean him up.