Children of the Sea 02 - Sea Fever

Over and over and over again, until her arms had no strength, until the body under hers jerked and was still.
     
    With a sob, Regina collapsed, slumping over Donna’s back, her hands sticky with Donna’s blood. So much blood. Trembling violently, she dragged herself off the doctor’s body and curled into a ball a few feet away, her arms crossed protectively over her cramping stomach.
     
    “Regina?”
     
    Dylan’s voice, she thought dreamily. Dylan’s quick, sure footsteps coming down the hall. He’d come. She knew he would.
     
    She managed to unglue her eyelids in time to see the door open and his feet enter the room. “My God, Regina!”
     
    She tried to raise herself off the floor and on to one elbow. Struggled to summon a smile.
     
    But when he dropped to his knees beside her, cradling her body in his arms as if she were something infinitely fragile and precious, she could only turn her face into his chest and cry.
     
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Twenty
     
    “I HATE HOSPITALS,” CALEB SAID.
     
    Sitting in the waiting room at Special Care, Dylan lifted his head from his hands, roused by his brother’s voice. He’d never felt so scared in his life. So anguished. Helpless. Human. So aware that a life could end and snuff out the light of his world.
     
    When he’d walked into that clinic and seen Regina, small and still, bleeding on the floor . . .
     
    Caleb eased into the chair beside him and stretched out his injured leg with a grunt. “How’s she doing?”
     
    Dylan scrubbed his face with his hand, dredging words from the blackness inside him, bits of information he held like talismans against the dark. “Stable. Her blood pressure’s good.”
     
    “Have you seen her yet?”
     
    “No.”
     
    The memory of her ashen face, her pale lips, burned in his brain like a ghost. A brave and beautiful ghost.
     
    Regina had been rushed from the helo pad to the Emergency Room, whisked from the Emergency Room to Special Care. The last time he’d seen her, she’d been strapped into a stretcher, hooked to two different IVs. Just before she was loaded onto the LifeFlight with Donna Tomah, her gaze had found Dylan standing outside the ring of professionals laboring over her. She’d tried to smile, raising two fingers in an islander’s wave.
     
    And shattered his heart.
     
    He rubbed the heel of his palm over his chest. “Her mother and Nick are with her now.”
     
    “They let the boy in?”
     
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    “He needed to see her. And she needed to see him. Anyway, it’s just for five minutes.”
     
    Regina was allowed visitors for five minutes, once an hour. Dylan could see her in an hour.
     
    Hold her for five minutes.
     
    Tell her . . . What could he possibly say to her that would make up for all she had been through? He would have done anything to help her, suffered anything to save her. But he’d come too late.
     
    “The baby?” Caleb asked quietly.
     
    Dylan took a deep breath. “We don’t know. Antonia said they were going to do an ultrasound, take some blood.”
     
    More blood. He closed his eyes, but he could not shut out the memory of her bone-white face, the blood-streaked floor.
     
    “I’m sorry,” Caleb said. “I know the prophecy—”
     
    Dylan opened his eyes to glare at his brother. “I don’t give a fuck about the prophecy. She shouldn’t have to lose this baby.”
     
    Not after she’d fought so hard, so valiantly to keep it.
     
    While he did nothing. Could do nothing.
     
    Caleb watched him carefully. “Does she know yet that you love her?”
     
    The question struck like a harpoon. Straight through the chest.
    Dylan’s mouth dropped open. He managed to shut it. Opened it to snarl, “You think I should have said something while she was bleeding on the floor? Or maybe in front of the paramedics while they were shoving tubes in her veins?”
     
    Caleb rubbed his jaw. “Seems to me you had opportunities before tonight.”
     
    He did. Of course he did.
     
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    Dylan thought of Regina braced on the deck of his boat, her chin lifted bravely and her heart in her eyes. “I’m not going to hide or lie about how I feel because you might be threatened by it.”
     
    What the hell had he been scared of? Why the hell hadn’t he said something then?
     
    “What good would telling her have done? It wouldn’t have kept her safe. I didn’t keep her safe,” Dylan amended bitterly.
     
    “You rescued her son.”
     
    “But I didn’t protect her. She’s not safe.