Jenny swiftly ducked under and deemed me good enough for moving forward. I tried to help her, but the nerves in my hip decided this was the perfect time to be damn uncooperative.
Adam gave a mighty roar and shoved the gummy bear station off me, and it crashed into the floor. The whole room shuddered again.
“I can’t get to her!” Jensen’s voice dented the fog in my brain.
Jenny hauled me free of the case as the scent of melting gummy bears and God knew what else lit the room.
“Lyric?” I asked as I tried to get off the floor.
“We’re on it. We’ll get her out.” Adam hauled me off the ground and onto the stretcher. “You’re a big fucker.” His voice was distorted from his face mask.
“Same to you, dude.” I slapped my hand over my eyes against the smoke and the water coming down. Against the pain crawling down my skull to my neck.
I couldn’t see straight with the migraine crashing down on me. All I could see was flames and the chaos of voices, and then there was nothing but clean air and blinding sun.
After the acrid smoke of the room, it was jarring enough for me to cover my eyes with my forearm. “Dahlia?”
“Here!”
EMTs and firefighters were all talking around me. Shouting orders and rolling me off the stretcher onto a gurney.
“Ma’am, you can’t get in here with him.”
“The hell I can’t.” Dahlia’s voice brooked no argument.
“Are you his wife?”
“Yep!” She didn’t even hesitate. I heard her climb on.
Someone slapped the side of the ambulance and then I felt Dahlia’s hand on my arm. I twisted my fingers around hers. “Wife, huh?”
“You damn well better be wifing me now, buddy.”
The EMT snorted but ignored the obvious lie. “Okay, I need to turn you to check that shoulder.”
Dahlia held my hand, and I kept my eyes slammed shut so I didn’t do something stupid like puke from the pain. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Some six-foot Nordic-looking blond woman sat on me and put oxygen on me.”
I laughed, then I hissed out a breath as the EMT cut my shirt away.
Her cool hand cupped my cheek. “You better be fine.”
“Pretty sure she’s working on it,” I said in a low voice.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m fine. Just banged up.”
“Liar. You have a migraine. Your freaking pupils are the size of dinner plates.”
“You have a headache?” the EMT asked.
“He gets migraines.”
She rolled me over and a light careened into my vision. “Fuck.”
“Sorry.” She typed something into a screen. “Okay, we’re about ten minutes out from the hospital. Just let me make sure you’re not going to bleed out on me, yeah?”
“That would be great,” Dahlia said dryly.
“Did you get Lyric out of the building?”
“I’m not sure. I’ll see if Brock can check in with the CCFD. Right now, we have to worry about you.”
The trip to the hospital was a bumpy one and I gritted my teeth against each pothole the damn ambulance seemed to find. My paramedic was quick and efficient with bandages and Dahlia held my hand the whole ride.
By the time we got to the ER, my migraine was full-blown. The lights in the room were little more than flashes. Dahlia explained that I got migraines and even rattled off the meds I took.
How she’d remembered that, I had no idea.
Before they took me back, I grabbed onto Dahlia’s arm. “Check on Lyric. And get checked out for me.”
“Nolan, just worry about you.”
“I’m wifing you up remember? I want to make sure you’re okay too.”
She laughed. “I will. Don’t worry.”
