Total pages in book: 115
Estimated words: 108173 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 541(@200wpm)___ 433(@250wpm)___ 361(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 108173 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 541(@200wpm)___ 433(@250wpm)___ 361(@300wpm)
“I don’t know,” she sounded pretty panicked, and she was starting to wheeze a little. Ben knew she had asthma and had seen her handle a few mild attacks, so he wasn’t particularly concerned. “I think maybe ten? There are only five of us first year girls.”
“Stay in the bathroom if you can,” he commanded her, waving his assistant over, and muffling the phone against his chest as he explained to her that he was stepping out for a while. He instructed her to have his occasional close protection officer—Jackson—meet him round front in one of the company cars.
“I’ll try but my bag is in the other room, one of the guys took it from me and said I wouldn’t need it if I was just going to pee. Luckily, my phone was in my jeans pocket. But Ben… my inhaler is in the bag and I don’t feel so great.”
Ben was becoming more and more alarmed.
“Try not to panic, okay? Jackson and I are on our way. We’ll be there in under ten minutes.”
He heard loud knocking and a muffled male voice and Lilah’s quavering response: “Yes. I-I’ll be right out. Ben… please hurry.”
She hung up before he could tell her not to and his stomach knotted in anxiety as he climbed into the car and succinctly explained the situation to a grim-faced Jackson.
He’d promised her under ten minutes, but traffic turned it into nearly twenty. He tried calling her, but it went straight to voice mail and Ben felt utterly helpless—picturing every worst-case scenario under the sun.
What he found—when he and Jackson slammed into the large house in an affluent neighborhood—was so much worse than anything he could have imagined. The four girls—Lilah’s friends, he vaguely recognized them from the few times she’d invited them around to family events—huddled around an unresponsive Lilah.
Twelve big bruisers—rugby players by the looks of them—towered over the women intimidatingly. Their body language was aggressive, threatening, and the girls looked absolutely terrified.
But Ben had eyes only for Lilah, who was on the floor, looking tiny and broken.
A few of the guys tried to block his progress as he made his way toward them, but he barely paid them any heed, punching and shoving any bastard who got in his way, while Jackson deftly dispensed with any others who tried to interfere. The rest—wisely—chose to disappear.
“What happened?”
“She had an asthma attack—well, she’s having one still, I think,” the cute, curvy dark-skinned girl with her hair in short bouncy twists told him tearfully. “Her inhaler didn’t help. She lost consciousness just a minute before you arrived. We begged them to call for an ambulance… but…”
“Is she breathing?” Ben could barely get the question out, going to his knees beside the too-still Lilah.
“Only barely,” one of the other girls—the intense Asian one maybe, he couldn’t be bothered to look, afraid to take his eyes off Lilah.
“We’re so sorry. We thought this was a real party,” another girl said, tears in her voice. “It was going to be our first big campus party but they were the only ones here. I don’t know how this happened. They were awful, Lilah was fighting for every breath, it was so scary and they wouldn’t let us help her at first. They thought she was faking it.”
Ben clenched his teeth and bit back a growl, wanting to pummel those fuckers all over again, but Lilah needed him, he couldn’t do that.
“I’ve called an ambulance,” Jackson said. “But the closest hospital is just five minutes away. It may be faster to just drive her. You take the car and I’ll stay with them and make sure they all get home safely.”
Ben nodded, scooping Lilah up into his arms and ignoring the heated protests from the other young women, who all demanded to be taken to the hospital as well, so that they could be there for Lilah. Jackson could sort that out, Lilah was his priority. Lilah, who was drifting in and out of consciousness, whose chest was barely moving, whose lips were turning blue. Jesus, she looked dead and that petrified him.
It was hard to focus on driving when he wanted to pull over every five seconds to check her breathing, but the logical part of his brain told him that getting her to the hospital as fast as possible was her only chance of surviving this.
It was tough letting her go when the trauma team took over. He had to be physically “encouraged” by two men—security officers who were much smaller than he—to step aside and let the doctors work. They escorted him to a waiting room, where he found a beleaguered Jackson waiting with Lilah’s friends.
“They were adamant about being by her side,” the big guy told him, looking decidedly harassed.
Well, Ben could hardly argue with that, not after his own reluctance to leave her in the care of strangers.