Page 31 of Amelia and Her Prince Charming
I squinted my eyes closed tighter when a bright light hit my eyelids. Something cool touched my face.
“Hudson. Hey, I’m Marshall with Search and Rescue.” I forced my eyes open and immediately regretted it when met with the shining flashlight aimed right at me. I groaned, and the light disappeared for a blessed moment, then reappeared. Someone else had my wrist, and something warm was placed over me. “Get me some water,” he barked over his shoulder.
“Amelia,” I croaked past my thick tongue.
“She’s okay. She’s on the beach with the rest of my team, getting taken care of.” He wrapped something around my arm, and it squeezed. I knew what it was, but the words were escaping me. He spoke to someone over my head. “Call the team and tell them we found Hudson. Let Amelia know he’s talking.”
“She’s still here?”
“Refused to leave until we found you,” he said with a wry smile. “She has a strong will.”
She did. I missed her. She’d become an essential part of me the last couple of days.
“I’m going to sit you up.” He put his arm behind me and when he went to move me, I started gasping for air. The pain, at least, jarred me more awake. Marshall stopped, his eyebrows low with concern. Someone brought the water over, and he held it to my mouth as I took small sips of it. I’d never tasted water so good in my life.
“Bring the stretcher over,” he ordered. “And call in a helicopter from Ketchikan.”
“On it,” a woman said, and I heard the beeping of a walkie-talkie as she went outside.
“No,” I said. “I can walk.”
“With all due respect, Hudson, you can’t even sit up.”
The events of the last—how much time had passed? Twenty-four hours? More?—went through my mind like an old-fashioned movie reel. Most felt like an impossible dream. Especially the part where Amelia and I kissed. But what was hallucination and what was reality? It felt like a foggy dream, with small portions of reality thrown in—the subtle brush of a hand, the taste of salt and mint, the delicious pressure against my lips. But all of it existed in wiggly lines and wavy clouds of space within my brain.
“You’re real, right?” I asked him.
Marshall laughed. “I am very real.”
“How?”
“Well, my mom and dad were really in love, as hard as that may be to believe now.” He was motioning for someone, and I felt the coolness of something wet on my arm, and then the prick of a needle. “And I was the result.”
“No. How did Amelia …?” I knew what he was doing. Trying to play it cool. Distract me from all the people buzzing around the cabin, setting up a stretcher and getting an IV ready.
“She waved us down from the beach. She must have been there for hours.”
I imagined her out on that beach, as injured as she was, desperately trying to get someone to come to help me. “She has a cut on her foot,” I told them. “Her lungs. She almost drowned.” It was getting harder and harder to speak as my head spun with the dizziness of watching everyone move.
The woman came back into the cabin and heard the end of what I said. “I’ll let the team know. Amelia is refusing to leave until she sees him.”
“Of course she is,” Marshall said. Someone tossed him a sling and he put it around my head and slipped my arm into it. “We’re going to lift you onto the stretcher and take you out of here.”
I closed my eyes against the pain as I was jostled around and placed on the stretcher.
“Did he pass out?” one of the men asked quietly.
“No,” I said.
“He just wishes he did,” Marshall said, sounding way too happy. It made me wonder what he’d been expecting to find. What kinds of things he’d seen in his line of work. Perhaps finding an injured, but alive, person holed up in a cabin was a best-case-scenario situation.I’m lucky I can feel pain.
That conversation hadn’t been a dream.
The walk out to the beach was slow and bumpy, and I focused on taking deep, steady breaths. Marshall continued to carry on a steady monologue as he held the stretcher near my head. “You two are extremely lucky. Your parents’ dinghy washed up on shore of the island across the way, and the owner happened to be in residence. He called us, and we tracked down your parents with the serial number. Your parents were worried, but we all hoped you’d made it to the island and did a poor job of tying the dinghy to the dock.”
“My parents, do they know …?”
Marshall nodded. “My guys let them know you were found safely and that we’re transporting you to the hospital.”
