Page 72 of The Unknown Colton
Then she saw her dad leaning over her mother and her brothers and even Hetty and Mrs. Amos and a couple of the other Amos siblings.
Where was Troy?
She didn’t see him even though she looked around for him. He was tall; she should have been able to seehim over the others. But instead of asking for him, she forced a smile for all the worried faces staring back at her. “I thought there’s a limit on the number of visitors a person can have.”
She knew she was in the hospital. An IV line was taped into a vein in her arm, and she lay partially inclined in a bed with railings.
“There are too many of us Coltons and Amoses for them to hold us to that limit,” her father said with a grin, but his eyes were damp like her mom’s.
“I think we can break this one law,” Eli said, his voice gruff.
Lakin shook her head and flinched at a jolt of pain near the base of her skull. “No more law breaking,” she murmured. “I’m okay…”
Or she would be when she saw Troy. Where was he? Why wasn’t he with her?
“That’s all we wanted to know,” Mrs. Amos said, “that you would be all right, sweet girl.”
Lakin smiled at the beautiful woman she’d hoped would one day be her mother-in-law. But Troy wasn’t ready to make a commitment obviously. He wasn’t even here for her.
Although he’d been in the ambulance. Had something happened to him? She wanted to ask about him, but first she had to know…
“Did you catch Whitlaw?” she asked her brother.
Eli nodded.
“He killed my birth mother,” she said. “He told me so when he was chasing me. He would have killedme, too, back then if she hadn’t left me in that grocery store.”
“We knew you were loved before we loved you,” her adoptive mother said, tears shimmering in her blue eyes. “And now we know how much.”
Her birth mother had loved her.
“Eli and I need to talk to Whitlaw,” Kansas said and jerked her head toward the door. “We can go now that we know you’re all right.”
Lakin hugged them both goodbye. She was all right physically. Emotionally she was still a mess, especially because Troy wasn’t here.
But when Eli and Kansas opened the door, he was standing there out in the hall.
Had he just gotten here? Or had he been out there the whole time? Afraid to see her? Afraid that she might not want him here like he hadn’t wanted her at his bedside all those weeks ago?
Everybody else followed Eli and Kansas’s lead, hugging and kissing her before walking out into the hall.
While everyone else was walking out, Troy stepped inside the room. He was limping again, and a grimace crossed his face as he moved around the room until he was beside her bed. Finally the door shut behind her last visitor, leaving them alone together.
Lakin stared at Troy for a long while. She felt caught in his green-eyed gaze, her image reflectingback at her. She was bruised and scraped up with a bandage on the back of her head.
He was bruised and scraped up, too, his clothes torn.
“What happened to you?” she asked.
His breath caught for a second, then released in a ragged sigh. “I went into that ravine to find you.”
She wasn’t sure it was a ravine she’d fallen into or if she’d just gone off the side of the mountain. She’d accidentally gone over; he’d purposely risked his life for hers.
“You hurt your back again,” she said, tears rushing to her eyes for the pain he had to be feeling.
He shook his head. “Whacked my knee on a rock,” he said. “It’s bruised but not broken. They think my back will be fine.”
“Good,” she said. And then she had to ask, “Does that mean you’re going to go back to the oil rigs?”
