HIM—A Stepbrother Romance: With BONUS NOVELLA: PERSONAL by Stephanie Brother Page A

clue if he was going to be okay.
    I don’t know how much time passed. Every torturous minute felt like an hour when finally the door at the end of the hallway swung open and I wondered if I were seeing a ghost.
    “That bastard really thinks he’s something,” the officer muttered until he finally opened my cell. “Oh, thank God!” I ran immediately to Bradley’s cell to get a better look at him. He didn’t look good at all.
    “Would you look at him?
    “He looks awful.” He opened the door and I ran to Bradley and covered him in my jacket. He was cold as ice. I felt his pulse. It was slow, but still there. He moaned and I tried to get him to open his eyes. They rolled to the back of his head.
    “We need to get you two to a hospital, stat. Let me help you get him.”
    The big officer picked Bradley up as best as he could. “Follow me. Hurry. I’m not about to let a blizzard take two innocent people’s lives. It’s bad out there. Real bad. All of New York City is shut down. It’s like a ghost town. And I heard you screaming about Bradley, too. He had a bucket of water thrown on him. It wasn’t right. I had this nagging feeling all day. When I left to go home, I knew with the temperature dropping in the low 20s, no blankets, well, I may have barely graduated high school, but I do watch a lot of shows on The Discovery Channel. Hypothermia doesn’t just happen to people lost in the forest. I wouldn’t be a real American, a real officer, if I didn’t think of his life in danger. Which it is.”
    We finally made it to his police car and I couldn’t stop the tears from falling and the panic from flooding my chest.
    I rubbed my hands up and down his cold limbs but he just lay against me, barely moving. “Come on, Bradley. Come on.” I kissed his ice-cold skin over and over again.
    “The thermal conductivity of water is thirty-two times greater than air. The fact that he was slapped with that icy bucket water wasn’t right. It wasn’t just hazing. It was a death sentence. If I would have left you two over night, he could have died. Not to mention that excessive alcohol raises your risk of hypothermia. Did you know you could even get hypothermia in summer from your wet clothes? If you body heat drops too drastically and it’s windy. It happens.”
    My mind was racing as he droved slowly through the blizzard. I was listening, but it sounded like background music. I was scared to death I was losing Bradley. Just when I finally had him.
    “Maybe you should go into the medical field.”
    “Yeah. Maybe. Maybe I will with the hefty sum of ransom money. I mean, award money from Mr. Rainshaw once he comes to.”
    We finally pulled into Southampton Hospital.
    “He hasn’t eaten all day either, or all night. His body doesn’t have any nutrients to help him stay warm.”
    “Thank you for saving our lives. I’ll spare you in the upcoming media firestorm that you know is coming.”
    “Yeah, well, about that compensation.”
    “Of course. Of course.”
    “Promise he’ll remember me? He’s not coherent right now.”
    “I promise. Thank you.”
    As soon as we made our way through the doors with the help of Officer Jackson, we were assisted.
    With the blizzard and the special circumstances of practically the entire island being shut down, it was an eerie sight with the hospital being like a ghost town.
    Once Bradley and I were seen, Officer Jackson tapped his hat to us and I promised we would remember him and compensate him. I no doubt would have Bradley do so; he saved his life.
    The nurses and doctors immediately administered humidified oxygen via an air mask as they removed my jacket from him and he instantly shivered, naked. He was so weak. So tired. So incoherent. They immediately wrapped him in a special blanket before laying him down to administer an IV.
    “Is he going to be okay?”
    “He came at the right time.”
    “We need to check your vitals, as well. You don’t look so great.”
     
    I wasn’t