Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 69794 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69794 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
I tensed.
“She’s autistic,” I said. “You touching her is causing her distress. She hates when people touch her that she doesn’t know. And she even has trouble with me sometimes.”
I felt Beau’s hand clench on to my hip, and I had to force myself not to reach for her again.
“Officer,” Beau said quietly. “You’re scaring her. She’s terrified, look.”
The officer looked but didn’t seem to care.
“And I’m not sure what your partner there is hoping to accomplish by placing his hand on that gun, but if he decided to shoot, there are hundreds of innocent bystanders that are in the line of fire, even if he does hit what he’s aiming at.”
“Give her back!” The crowd closed in. “That’s her child!”
Hell, even my old team was joining in.
Vanessa, the goalie who’d been crying earlier, was holding up her phone. “Look. That’s her and Iris when Iris was eighteen months. This is for real her child.”
“We’ve been told that the child was kidnapped at birth.”
I snorted. “Absolutely not.”
But inside, I was panicking.
“We have her birth certificate,” Beau stated stiffly. “We can get you any proof that you need.”
“You can get it to us, but we’re still going to the hospital and getting a DNA test,” the cop declared.
Again, that panic decided to rise inside of me.
“She has one,” Beau said, sliding his phone into his pocket that I hadn’t been aware of until now. “It’s all been sent via email to your office. Now, give her back to us, right now.”
The officers shifted on their feet.
Iris clawed and scratched the man holding her, going right for his eyes.
Unfortunately for the officer, Iris had a spork in her hand from her snow cone that was dropped at some point during her getting yanked toward the man.
She raked it down the man’s face and carved out deep grooves across his face, and I know that she got his eye, too.
He all but threw her to the ground, and the entire crowd gasped.
Iris screamed in pain, and I looked at her tiny arm to see that it was not looking right.
I picked her up before any of the other officers could reach for her, pulling her protectively into my arms.
“That’s enough!” Beau bellowed, blocking the officers from getting through without violence. “We can follow you anywhere you want us to go.”
The officer who’d snatched my girl had his hand covering his eye.
And oh, my god. His eyeball was hanging out of the socket and blood was pouring down his face.
Holy fuck.
“Arrest them!” one of them said.
“For what, exactly?” Boone asked. “They haven’t done anything wrong.”
“That child is dangerous…”
“Oh, get the fuck out.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Can anyone tell me whether the ‘skulls of your enemy’ are dishwasher safe?
—Beau to Magnolia
BEAU
“Oh, get the fuck out.” I snorted. “She was protecting herself with what she had readily available. We also informed you that she was scared and autistic. Two not-so-good combinations.”
The crowd was getting antsy, and I held up my hands and said, “We will follow you anywhere you need to go. But we need medical attention. You broke her arm when you threw her down.”
None of the officers looked upset.
The assholes.
The trainer of the Cowgirls said, “Bring her here. We can get it looked at.”
An hour and forty-five minutes later we were in a hospital and Iris was getting a cast that matched her mom’s. Iris was finally calmed, having only done so once she’d been administered some drugs that would calm her.
Oh, and she’d gotten her blood drawn via a court order to ascertain whether or not she was Magnolia’s child.
“What now?” Magnolia whispered.
“Apollo is on it,” I promised.
Apollo had flown home sometime last night, so he was able to get here before we had even arrived.
He also was armed with his laptop and a sheriff’s deputy of his own.
He was talking to him quietly, showing him the footage on his laptop of these so-called small-town cops that’d injured a child and caused such a stink that their faces were now plastered over every news station in America.
What they were thinking, coming into a professional soccer game with so many news crews around, I didn’t know.
Even worse, they’d harmed a child in the process. The child they were supposedly “protecting” from Magnolia.
“Is it…”
“Shh,” I urged. “Not here.”
She nodded, her face a mask of terror.
I pulled her into my arms and pressed a kiss to her forehead.
“It’ll be okay,” I whispered directly into her ear.
She clung to me, as Iris had done a couple of hours ago when I’d picked her up after she’d been hurt.
“All right, Mom,” the doctor said. “She’s good to go. I’m going to get the nurses working on the discharge…”
“She’s not going anywhere,” one of the cops that hadn’t left the room snapped.
The doctor ignored him and kept going, explaining what needed to happen for the first forty-eight hours.