Hearing how scared and upset she was, I tried to crawl faster, but every pull on the side of my body that had been hit had me clenching my teeth. It was like being hit with a baseball bat and stabbed at the same time. Finally - fucking finally - I rounded the couch and saw Jarrod holding her head against his chest, rocking her back and forth as he talked quietly to her. Seeing me, he nodded and unwrapped his arms once I was beside them, giving me space to lift her up and hold her tightly against me. Fuck the pain, fuck all of it. She was ok, she hadn’t been shot and killed. She was ok.
I hadn’t cried in years, not since I was a kid if I remembered correctly, but fuck me if I didn’t feel one traveling down my cheek as she cried like her heart was broken. Needing to see her eyes, I gently tilted her head back. “Why are you crying, my Rose?”
Like I had a magic power, she stopped mid sob, opening her eyes up and staring at me like she was looking at a freaking ghost. “How hard a hit to the head did she get, Garrett?” I called, a new reason for panicking taking over the longer she stared at me.
“She thought you’d died, man,” Jarrod answered, getting back up on his feet and walking out from behind the couch to where the others were. “She saw you get shot and then they started saying there was no pulse. Shit, for a second, I thought you were gone, too, but then I remembered what a stubborn asshole you were.”
There was so much I wanted to say, so many things I had to say, but instead I chose probably the worst time to tell her how I felt. “I fucking love you, Rose. And I’m totally buying your cat a gazelle or whatever lions eat.”
And then tears, snot, and all, she threw her head back and burst out laughing. With a strength I didn’t know she had, she pulled me down on top of her, kissing me hard, and definitely wet given how hard she’d been crying. I gave not one shit, I poured my heart and soul into that kiss, relieved that she was ok and that the threat of Chad Vernon was now gone.
Pulling back slightly, she whispered against my mouth, “I fucking love you, too.”Chapter TwentyRaoulThree months later…
Time flies when you’re having fun, and it really had flown. The night it had all gone down in Rose’s living room, Ellis had come bursting in through the door and almost lost his shit when he saw the bullet hole in the couch while they’d worked on Chad on the floor. He’d seen that she was ok when we stood up, and if the man wasn’t already dead, I think he would have made it happen with his own hands.
And he was dead - no matter how hard they tried to resuscitate him - Chad was DOA at the hospital in Piersville. The cause of death had been a heart attack, most likely brought on by his abuse of the anabolic steroids.
Rose no longer had to look over her shoulder and be watched twenty-four hours a day, and Tana was free to live her life the way she wanted to. I couldn’t say that justice had been served because to me the definition of that was him rotting inside a jail cell, but a form of justice had been. And the biggest irony, the autopsy findings proved he’d died as a result of his own stupidity with the substances we’d found in his house. Karma!
I’d been checked over by the doctors, and all they’d found was what Doctor Simpson had described as, “A fuck ton of fucking bad bruising.” He didn’t need to tell me that, I lived that shit for days afterward when the muscles and tissues screamed every time I even breathed. Fortunately, I had my own nurse who insisted on running around to look after me. I also had an influx of visitors, including Rissa and Hogan, who thanked me for saving their daughter’s life. In all honesty, I’d just moved the laser, it had been Rex and Ranger who’d saved her, but apparently no one else was in agreement with that.
Which brought me to now, facing Rissa and Hogan in their living room. It was my day off, and with Rose at work, I’d decided to get it out of the way so that I could move on.
Clearing my throat, I nervously fiddled with the handle on my cup. “I’ve loved your daughter for a long time,” I told them honestly. “I wanted to do this months ago, but then I thought about it and decided that waiting would be better for us and allow us to grow stronger,” I said around the lump in my throat that refused to budge. “But I was wrong, so now I’m here asking for your permission to marry her.”