In Love With Stark-The Billionaire

Isabella? Oh God. Talk to me, Isabella."

Stark dropped to her side and carefully lifted the side board that had tipped onto her when she'd clipped it failing down the steps.

She didn't move.

Yanking out his cell phone, he placed an emergency call. The connection phased in and out because of the storm, making it difficult got him to relay the necessary information. It soon became clear that it would be impossible to send in a Life Flight helicopter given the current whether condition.

During the endless minutes that followed, she didn't stir.

More frightened than he could ever remember being, he checked for a pulse. When he found it, he could have bawled like a baby.

He spared his half sister, Jennifer, a deadly glare. "Get out," he ordered.

He didn't bother watching to see if she had obeyed, instead returning to the call. Demanding. Pleading. Swearing.

The next half hour, as he waited for EMT to arrive, proved the longest of his life, driving him to very brink of despair. If Claire hadn't been there, her steady, reassuring voice a comforting balm, he'd have totally lost it.

He crouched above Isabella, more helpless than he'd ever been before in his life. The great Jack Stark couldn't buy or bargain or bribe his ways out of this disaster. There was only one thing he could do, something he didn't remember ever having tried before.

He prayed.

Once the emergency personnel arrived, they stabilized Isabella before whisking her out to the ambulance. He lost count of the number of times he told them she was pregnant. Or how many times he told that they were supposed to marry in less than seventy-two hours.

He offered everything he could think of in exchange for their help in saving her. None of it did any good. The event if that night leaked through his fingers on a course all their own, beyond his ability to direct or control.

It wasn't until the paramedics had loaded Isabella into the ambulance that he faced a truth he'd been dodging for weeks. He loved her. He loved her more than life itself. How could he have not recognized it sooner?

Maybe because he'd never experienced such depth of emotion before, not that it mattered now.

During the endless ride to the hospital, he made up for that lapses. He didn't know whether she heard. He could only hope that somehow, someway, his words skipped through to that realm of oblivion where she hid from him.

He'd been blind not to have recognized his feelings sooner, to have believed that what he felt for her could be anything less than love. The first chance he got, he'd correct that oversight. He just needed one more chance.

That was all. Just one.