Page 86 of A Baby for the Firefighter
“Uh… a few hours ago while I was making breakfast for the kids. It was early. Around eight?”
“Eight…” I sighed. Griff must have left here earlier than that. “That means he’s been gone for almost five hours. If he left right after the fight, anyway.” But something told me that he had. It was the kind of thing he would do. If he’d taken the time to calm down first, he would have woken me, or waited until I woke up by myself. No, this had been a spur-of-the-moment decision brought on by his argument with his mom.
“Five hours? Where did he go?”
“I don’t know. He took his camera, but not his phone.” And wherever he’d gone, he wasn’t coming back. Anxiously, I stared at the front door, but nothing happened. Wherewashe?
“Sounds like he needed to blow off some steam,” Eli said, but I could tell that he was starting to worry as well. The two of them were close, and Eli had to know this wasn’t normal behavior for his little brother.
“I figure he’s probably gone into the woods,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s possible. You want to go have a look? See if we can find him?”
I exhaled. “Yes. I’m gonna go. I’m tired of waiting.”
We decided on where to meet up and ended the call. As soon as I was done talking to Eli, I headed out the house, bent on finding the man I loved and bringing him home.
37
Griffin
Iwas absolutely fucked. Like, seriously. Trying not to let the rising panic in my gut swallow me whole, I stared up the walls of the ravine I’d tumbled down. It was still every bit as steep as it had been for the past hour. At least IthoughtI’d been stuck down here for at least an hour. Since, idiot that I was, I hadn’t brought my phone, I had no real way of telling. I liked to fool myself into thinking that I could tell the passage of time by the way the sun moved in the sky overhead, but in all honesty, I had no idea. I’d never been a Boy Scout or anything. I was just a photographer who liked to take a few pretty shots of wildlife.
And I couldn’t even dothatnow because the fall had scratched up my camera lens. God, that was going to be expensive to replace.
If I ever got out of here.
I swallowed. People were going to come looking for me, right? Even if I didn’t have my phone.
Normally, I would have been able to climb back up where I’d fallen, but I did something to my hand when I tumbled to the ground, and I could hardly move it now without tears stinging my eyes. Ithurt,even when I was holding it still. I must have broken my wrist or something, and of course, I’d also twisted my ankle because I was just that freaking unlucky.
So climbing was out of the question.
On the other side of the insurmountable ravine, I was faced with a creek. Dean and I had come here as teens sometimes. It was off the beaten path. A good hang-out spot, if you were a teen and all your limbs had full functionality. Now it was just a spot that I could neither swim nor climb out of.
Originally, I’d wanted to come here to think. I hadnotplanned on going down into the ravine—I’d misstepped. At least now it seemed I had all the time in the world to think.
Lucky me.
It could be worse, though. It was still early in the day, which meant I had a couple hours of sunlight left. Time to think of a way to get out of here before it grew dark because I really, really did not want to spend the night here.
Just the thought alone made me shudder as the wind dragged some colored leaves into the ravine and blew them into my face.
At least it wasn’t winter yet. The weather had cooled down a bit over the past few days, but we hadn’t yet reached freezing temperatures. The night would be cold, though.
You’re going to get out of here before then.
Right, I just had to keep believing that.
Taking another look around, I had no ideahowI was going to be gone by nightfall, though.
I didn’t want to admit it, but I really needed a knight in shining armor to get me out of here.
Why, oh why, had I forgotten to take my cell phone? All those times Eli had bitched at me over it and I’d shrugged him off. I should have listened.
That realization came a bit late, of course. I would do better next time, but there was nothing I could do about the situation now.
Even without the phone, though, people would notice that I was gone, right?
