The Wrong Man (Alpha Men 3)

He helped her to her feet and wiped her face before urging her to rinse her mouth. She complied weakly and leaned heavily on him as he led her back into the living room and to the sofa. She felt like a furnace, and her high temperature scared him. How could she get this sick so quickly?

He left her sitting on the sofa and rushed to the kitchen and grabbed his cell phone to call Daff. He didn’t have her number programmed on his phone and had to consult the list on the fridge. He was shaking so much he misdialed twice.

“Hello?” she answered on the third ring, and Sam swallowed as he tried to find his voice.

“Daff. It’s Sam. We have to get Lia to a doctor. Something’s wrong. She seemed fine when she got here, just said she had a headache. But she’s been here about an hour. She napped on the sofa while I was cooking. She’s fucking burning up. She threw up.” He heard his voice rising in increments and wondered if he sounded as completely terrified to Daff as he did to himself. “Please. I-I’m not sure what to do.”

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d admitted to not knowing how to resolve a situation. Sam always knew how to fix things. How to make it better. How to save lives. And maybe—if it had been anyone other than Lia—he would have known what to do this time as well. But all he had to do was look at her curled up on the sofa, so small and vulnerable, and all rational thought fled.

“You’re at the cabin?” Daff asked in her no-nonsense voice.

“Yeah.”

“We’ll be right there.”

“Hurry.”

They took her to the emergency room, and as Sam sat waiting with her family, he vaguely registered that he was wearing track pants without a top and socks but no shoes. He didn’t care—all he could think about was the paramedics putting a respiratory mask on Lia’s face as they transported her into the back of the ambulance. Daff had climbed into the back with her, Sam had gone with Spencer and Charlie, and they had all met Dr. and Mrs. McGregor at the hospital.

Daff had joined them about an hour after their arrival, saying that the doctor was with Lia. Sam had wanted to drill her about Lia’s condition, but everybody else was already asking all the questions he wanted to, so he sat quietly and listened. She was fine, no worse, doctor seemed relaxed, with no sense of urgency about him, which Daff seemed to think was a good thing. But the information only made Sam want to hunt the doctor down and shake some urgency into him.

“Brand?” Sam stared dazedly up at Spencer, not sure how long the man had been standing in front of him or what he had asked.

“Do you want some coffee?”

Sam nervously rubbed his hands together and shook his head. “No.” He paused before belatedly tacking on, “Thank you.” He averted his eyes as he comprehended just how much Lia’s sweet, polite manners were starting to affect his own behavior. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that and right now he didn’t care. All he wanted was to see Lia and to know that she was safe.

As if in answer to his desperate thought, the waiting room doors opened and an older man in a white coat looked around the room.

“McGregor?” Everybody surged to their feet and surrounded him, and the man held up his palms in surrender. He was grinning, which made Sam breathe a bit easier.

“Your girl has a touch of the flu. A particularly nasty strain of H1N1. It’s been going around and she tells me she works at a preschool, so that’s probably where she caught it. I’ve had a few little ones in here over the last week. She had some difficulty breathing, but nothing to be alarmed about. We’ll keep her for a couple of hours before discharging her, just to monitor her. But with proper care, medication, and a lot of rest, I have no doubt she’ll make a full recovery. I take it you’ve all been exposed to it? She would probably have become contagious yesterday.”

“We haven’t seen her in a couple of days,” Mrs. McGregor said.

“Same here,” Daff said. “Well, I suppose the ride in the ambulance with her counts, but I’ve had my flu shot.”

“It’s transmitted through sneezing or coughing. But if you’ve had the shot, you’re probably okay. If you don’t show any symptoms over the next two or three days you should be fine.”

All heads turned to Sam, and he stared back at them awkwardly, trying very hard to avoid Lia’s parents’ eyes.

“Suffice it to say I’ve been pretty thoroughly exposed,” he said, his voice ironic as he comprehended the unintentional double meaning to his words.