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Maisie Williams has a Texas driver’s license with an address in San Antonio. I was off an inch on her height but spot on for her weight — assuming the number on her license is accurate — and I note the organ donor symbol on the card.
Not on my watch, Maisie.
“Whoo-whee. She’s a looker,” Jedd whispers from behind me, and for some reason, it makes me want to pop him upside the head.
Idiot brother.
“You get the rig back to your shop?” I ask.
He nods. “Yeah. She did a number on the side paneling tipping into the ditch like that, the frame is all bent to shit. She blew out the two back tires and the front end is bashed from where it hit the embankment. Probably gonna be totaled out by her insurance.”
I nod, filing the information away for when she wakes up. I wonder if the popped tires were the reason for her driving off the road. Where was she going so late at night? The energy drink in her cup holder tells me she was probably tired and trying to make it to her destination instead of pulling over and sleeping for the night.
Which is just fucking stupid, if you ask me, especially since she had a baby in the back.
The horrors I’ve seen when it comes to highway accidents set my temper on fire when I think about drivers who let themselves be distracted, drive tired — or worse, can’t put their goddamn phones down when they’re behind the wheel.
Sure, this woman was lucky — really fucking lucky since her daughter is okay. But I’ve seen enough not lucky drivers to piss me off thinking that she put herself and her daughter in danger instead of just pulling over for the night.
Sliding back into professional mode, I note the nurses cleaned her up a bit before changing her into a gown. I get a better look at her and see the color in her cheeks is a little better. She looked like a corpse when we first rolled in here. The IV bag of fluids hanging next to her bed is almost empty. If she’s going to wake up, it’s probably going to be soon.
“What are you going to do with the kid?” Jedd asks from behind me.
“If she doesn’t wake up soon, I’ll call CPS. They’ll probably have us hang on to the kid while they send someone out.”
A sniffling cry from the car seat next to the bed drags my gaze away from the sleeping woman. I glance at my watch, noting that it’s six a.m. Kid’s probably hungry. “There any formula in that bag?”
“Nope. And I couldn’t find any in the camper either. Probably still nursing.”
“Go find a nurse, see if they don’t have some formula and a bottle we can use.”
“You hanging here till she wakes up?”
I run a hand through my hair, scratching at my scalp. I’m tired, but I shove the exhaustion back until I can focus. “Yeah. I’ll hang here until she wakes up, or a CPS rep gets here to take the baby.”
“I’ll call the guys, they can come help us take care of the baby until her mom wakes up.”
Jedd disappears through the door, and I look at the driver again. I have more questions than answers for her, and I hope she wakes the fuck up before I have to call the state out for the baby.
Chapter 3
Maisie
The sound of Audra’s giggles wakes me. Muscle memory has me shifting to get up and get her — the weight, soreness and tightness in my breasts tell me she hasn’t nursed in a minute — and the amount of aches that light up in my body confuses the shit out of me.
What the fuck happened?
In a blink, the memory of the deer in the road comes back and my eyes fly open. Breath gusting out of me in a gasp, I sit up in a rush, my ribs and back protesting at the sudden movement.
Where the fuck am I?
The slow and steady beep of the monitor to my right answers the question for me. The hospital. I’m in the hospital.
Where the fuck is my daughter?
“No, you dumbass, the Velcro pieces go on the bottom. You’ve got it backward.”
I twist to the right, toward the voices. There’s a curtain closed around my bed, but I can hear movement beyond it. I swing my legs off the bed, the movement pulls on my muscles, and I groan. I feel like I got hit by a fucking Mac truck and then left on the side of the road for dead.
