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Feeling as though she was moving in slow motion, she roused herself and stomped on the brake pedal for all she was worth. Tires squealed against asphalt. The smell of burnt rubber would have choked her if she’d been able to breathe. The engine of the vehicle behind her revved even louder, and with another jolt, she was hurtled into oncoming traffic. What was this nut’s problem?
Anger seared through Carrinne’s panic. Maggie’s face flashed before her eyes. No way was it going to end like this, with some hick turning her into roadkill when she finally had a legitimate shot at getting her second chance.
Remembering the emergency brake at the last minute, she pulled the lever at her elbow, wincing as the car spun sideways. She watched in horror at the sight of a red pickup barreling down Crabapple, headed straight toward the intersection and her passenger door. She braced for impact, lifting her arms to protect her face.
The roar of metal shredding metal drowned out her cry. Then everything blessedly faded to black.
ERIC CHECKED the wall clock again. Ten minutes after three.
He pushed back from his desk and the stack of paperwork he’d been mulling over since noon. Reaching for his coffee mug, he found it empty and growled. He’d already filled the thing twice. When was the jarring brew going to clear his head?
Normally he’d be anywhere but the office on a Saturday afternoon. Since winning his bid for sheriff a little over a year ago, he’d fought tooth and nail to keep his weekends free. His appearance this morning had been so rare, you’d have thought from the looks on the faces of the officers he’d passed that they’d seen a ghost.
Maybe they had. This was exactly where his father had spent every single Saturday. And Eric had sworn he’d do it differently. That he’d have a life outside this place.
He shouldn’t have come in.
Where he should be was home in bed, since focusing on anything for longer than five minutes was impossible. But his attempts to sleep after finally leaving Carrinne in Tony’s capable hands last night had met with one dead end after another. First by his neighbor’s dog, which had barked all night. Then a telemarketer had called just after nine, offering him the opportunity of a lifetime to buy into a fabulous Gulf Shore timeshare. And each time he’d drifted off, his thoughts had returned to Carrinne and all the reasons he should leave her alone as she’d asked—regardless of his need to help. So he’d thrown on jeans and a T-shirt and headed in.
Staring with disgust at the overdue reports his chief deputy, Angie Carter, had been after him for days to complete, he shoved himself out of his chair and headed for the coffee machine in the break room.
A few more years of this, he reminded himself. Just a few more years. He’d make sure Tony was settled, that he could handle himself on the force, then Eric was out of this town. Just like he’d always wanted to be. He’d stuck it out, had been there for his little brother every day of the last seventeen years. He’d used his dad’s contacts in the department to secure training and a spot on the force, and he’d done his best to become a good cop. And maybe, just maybe, he’d done right by Tony along the way.
He’d even run for the position of sheriff so he could keep a closer eye on his kid brother. Plus the salary increase was putting a sizable dent in what was left of their mortgage. But nothing could erase his need to feel a motorcycle between his legs again. The need to put a few hundred miles between himself and everything this town could never be for him. He just wasn’t cut out for small-town community and friendships. He was better off alone.
“Worked it all out of your system?” Tony asked, catching up to Eric at the break room. He was dressed in wrinkled jeans and a T-shirt—one of Eric’s favorite T-shirts, as a matter of fact.
“You’re not on ’til five.” Eric poured his brother a cup of coffee after refilling his own.
“You’re not on at all.” Tony looked into the mug Eric held out and pulled a face. He shook his head to pass.
“Didn’t you know living in this place was one of the perks of being the top dog?” Eric sipped a burning mouthful of, hands-down, the worst coffee ever brewed in the town of Oakwood.
“Angie caught me on my way to the batting cages. Said you were holed up in your office, pretending to get your paperwork done. It’s so out of character, you’ve got her worried you’re going postal or something.”
Eric trudged out of the break room. “This town is so small, it’s a wonder I can take a piss without someone phoning you about it.”
“I told her you were just cranky ’cause you have the hots for an old girlfriend who’s giving you the cold shoulder.”
Eric turned back, swallowing his curse. Anyone in the station could pass them in the hall, so he nixed the instinct to vent his sleepless night right then and there. He headed for his office, motioning for Tony to follow. Once inside, Eric slammed the door and rounded on his brother. “Why the hell would you say something like that?”
Tony held up his hands in mock surrender. “Hey, I just call them like I see them. You were in rare form last night. One minute you were a jealous hound dog because a woman you haven’t seen since high school was smiling at me, the next you were hunting me down to drive the very lovely but elusive Ms. Wilmington back to her car.”
“If you said one word about Carrinne and me to Angie, the ass-whipping I gave you when you kept skipping school in sixth grade will seem like a tickle. Carrinne’s got enough trouble without having to deal with rumors flying all over town about—”
“Relax.” Tony sat in a guest chair, his grin now ear-to-ear. “I didn’t say a thing. I wouldn’t do that to Carrinne. Now you, on the other hand…”
“You can still be a brat, you know that?” Resisting the urge to paddle his kid brother, just to see if he still could, Eric settled in his own chair. Coffee spilled over the edge of his mug and burned his hand. “Damn.”
“You should get some sleep.”
“I tried that.” He sipped coffee from his thumb. “Cuddles had different ideas.”
Tony chuckled. “I’m glad that rat lives next to your bedroom window and not mine. Who knew a miniature poodle could make so much noise?”
“Clearly, Mrs. Davis chose the pick of the litter.”
They sat silently while Eric contemplated throwing his weight around at the pound and having Cuddles picked up for disturbing the peace.
“So.” Tony slouched deeper into the chair Eric was pretty sure predated their father’s term as sheriff. “Are you having her tailed?”
“Mrs. Davis?”
A stare was Tony’s only response.
“No, I’m not having Carrinne Wilmington tailed. Why would I?” Eric pushed the coffee aside and tried to focus on the report in front of him. “Brimsley’s agreed not to press charges, so there’s no reason for the department to be involved.”
“Unless, of course, you didn’t buy her story and wanted to help out an old friend before she got herself into even more trouble.”
“Carrinne and I haven’t been friends for a long time.” And that hurt more than it should. “Not since I told her to get out of my life and she obliged.”
“If memory serves, she’s the only female you ever stuck with for longer than two months at a clip. That’s got to count for something.”
Eric dropped the report to the desk. “I offered to help last night. She declined. She’s determined to handle whatever she’s come back to do on her own.”
“And that’s okay with you?”
No, it definitely wasn’t okay.
When had his brother grown up and become so good at reading people? It used to be that the only things Tony paid any attention to were motorcycles and pretty girls. Time was, that was all Eric had cared about, too.
“Hey, Eric?” Angie said over the intercom. “Didn’t you take the call out to the Wilmington place last night?”
“Yeah,” was his monotone reply. He glowered at his brother. Didn’t anyone have anything better to talk about?
“Thought you might like to know. Dispatch got a call. Your break-in suspect just did a three-sixty into oncoming traffic in front of the hospital.”
CHAPTER FOUR
“WILL SHE BE all right?”
“…mild concussion.”
“Why isn’t she waking up?”
“…running some blood tests…under observation until her condition improves…should be coming out of it by now…”
The voices kept pulling at Carrinne, disturbing the peaceful numbness she had no desire to come back from. One of the voices, the deeper one, sounded so familiar. It floated in and out of the disjointed dream playing in her mind.
It had been so long since she’d let herself dream…
The man’s voice belonged to a rugged teenager who had melting brown eyes and could drive a motorcycle like an avenging angel. She was sitting behind him as he raced his Harley down a country highway. Her arms wrapped around his muscled body, she leaned close and let the wind and the rush of danger take her. She was sixteen again, and with him she was wanted and safe. Closing her eyes and resting her cheek against his leather-covered back, she whispered words of love into the wind, knowing he’d never want to hear them, but yearning to say them anyway. He needed her, when no one had ever needed her. And though he didn’t know it yet, he’d given her the most precious gift of all.
They were going to love each other always.
“Carrinne?” He called to her from somewhere that wasn’t the dream. “Carrinne, it’s time to wake up. Can you hear me, darlin’? Wake up for me.”
He wanted her to wake up. And what he wanted became what she wanted, too, just as it had when she was sixteen. Swimming up from her dream, she looked back one last time, down that endless country road. But he was already driving away, the motorcycle just a speck on the horizon.
A sickening throb behind her eyes kept her from running after him. Grounded more firmly in the present with each passing second, she realized she hadn’t really been dreaming at all. Instead, she’d been remembering her first taste of how cruel dreams could be when they crashed head-first into reality.
Pain hit her full-out, yanking her away from the memory of the last ride she and Eric had taken on his motorcycle. The ride on which she’d planned to tell him she was pregnant. But before she could, he’d destroyed everything. He couldn’t deal with having a kid like her in his life anymore, he’d said. He wanted her to stay away from him. Then he’d driven away, taking everything that she’d cared about with him. Everything except Maggie.
Through her closed eyelids, an overhead light shot daggers into her skull. She tried to shade her eyes with her hand.
“Open your eyes, Carrinne.” The voice really did belong to Eric. A very grown-up Eric. “Doctor, I think she’s coming to.”
“What’s going on?” She struggled to make sense of the confusing signals her brain couldn’t seem to process.
A hand pressed her down as she tried to sit up. “You’ve been in an accident. Hold still until the doctor can take another look.”
Blinking, groaning as nausea rolled in her stomach, she’d barely managed to focus on Eric before a man in a white coat appeared.
“I’m Dr. Burns.” He shined a blast of light into each of her eyes. “Can you tell me your name?”
“Carrinne.” She winced. “Carrinne Wilmington.”
“And the day?”
“It’s…um…it’s July…thirteenth or fourteenth.”
“Uh-huh.” He checked her pulse while he studied the display on the machine attached to the pressure cuff on her arm. “Good. Now can you tell me what you remember from this morning?”
Her gaze strayed to Eric. He was dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans rather than his sheriff’s uniform. What had happened? What on earth was he doing here?
His reassuring smile was as unexpected as the touch of his hand, the slight squeeze he gave her fingers.
“Um,” she stuttered, her mind still too full of the past to focus on the doctor’s questions. “This morning…”
“What’s the last thing you remember?” Eric prompted. He soothed the inside of her palm with his thumb, something he’d done when they were teenagers.
“I…” Pulling her hand away was nearly impossible, but she managed it. She focused on the doctor. “I was visiting my grandfather… Then I rode the elevator down to the parking deck.”
“And after that?” the doctor asked.
“Nothing…I…I don’t know what happened next.” Concentrating made the throbbing in her head worse. “I was driving out of the deck, and… Someone said something about an accident?”
“At the light turning onto Crabapple.” Eric’s expression darkened. “You ran it and pulled in front of a pickup truck.”
“I…” She rubbed her temple. “I remember a red truck… But that’s not right… There was a van, or a bigger truck behind me…” Why couldn’t she remember? “Was anyone hurt?”
The doctor jotted notes onto a chart. “I hear your car and the truck that hit you are both a mess, but the other driver was unharmed, and you seem to have suffered only a mild concussion—”
“What do you mean a bigger truck?” Eric asked over the doctor. When she only stared, her thoughts still a jumble of mixed images, he took her hand again. “You said there was a van or a bigger truck involved in the accident.”
“I don’t know… I don’t remember…”
“Short-term memory loss is very common with a concussed brain,” the doctor offered.
“It’s just that I know there’s something more.” She hated the way she was clinging to Eric’s hand, but her fingers had a mind of their own and had no interest in letting go. “I wouldn’t have run that light. I know how busy Crabapple is this time of day. And there was—”
She coughed, her breath catching on a light-headed feeling she knew all too well.
“There was a van behind me, or a dark truck—” Another series of coughs worked to clear her lungs as her mind filled with the image of a large vehicle barreling up behind her rental car. “I think someone hit me from behind when I stopped at the light.”
“This other vehicle—” Both of Eric’s hands held hers now. His grip was firm. “What exactly did it look like?”
She tried to answer, if only to ease the awful expression on Eric’s face. But the tightness in her chest had other ideas. Another coughing fit stripped her breath away.
“Excuse me, Sheriff.” The doctor stepped between them to listen to her chest through his stethoscope. Eric dropped her hands and moved away.
“Tell me, Ms. Wilmington,” the doctor said. “Have you been fighting off a flu bug or some other kind of infection?”
“No. Why?” Having a good idea why, she glanced at Eric. His scowl deepened as the doctor started probing the lymph nodes behind her ears.
“Because you’re running a midgrade fever, and your pulse and blood pressure are unusually low,” the doctor replied. “Your lungs are clear, but that cough’s concerning me. Your body’s under some kind of stress that may or may not be connected with the accident.”
She raised a hand to the ache at her temple, fingering the bandage she found there. The nightmare she’d stumbled into last night kept getting worse and worse. “Can I have a word with you alone, Doctor?”
Dr. Burns hesitated for only a second before turning to face a looming Eric.
“Will you excuse us, Sheriff?” He nodded toward the partially closed curtain that separated Carrinne’s alcove from the rest of the ER floor.
“I need more information about the accident,” Eric countered. “If another car was involved—”
“I understand, Sheriff. But that can wait.”
“Not if—”
“The longer we stand here—” the doctor’s hands found the pockets of his lab coat “—the longer it’ll be before we both find the answers we need.”
“Eric, please,” she added. No way could he be here for the conversation she knew was coming.
Eric pinned the doctor with an unblinking, bad-boy stare. To Dr. Burns’s credit, he didn’t budge. With a worried look at Carrinne, Eric turned and left.
Closing the curtain, Dr. Burns returned to the bed. “Better?”
“Yes, thank you.” She continued to toy with the edge of the bandage, the list of disasters playing havoc with her plans growing by second. “I’m only visiting Oakwood. No one but my grandfather knows about my condition, and I’d like to keep it that way.”
“It’s important that I know what we’re dealing with, if I’m going to help you.”
Glancing at the curtain, she sighed. “I was diagnosed with primary sclerosing cholangitis about six months ago. That may be what’s causing some of the symptoms you mentioned.”
“I see.” After a slight pause and a professional nod, he scribbled even more notes onto the chart. “Have you had a liver biopsy?”
“A few months ago. I’m in the very early stages, so my symptoms have been mild so far. The doctors wouldn’t have diagnosed it this early if it weren’t for the battery of blood tests they ran at my yearly physical. I’d felt run-down for a few months. At first, they thought it was just stress.”
“Okay. We’ll do some additional lab work to test your enzyme levels. I’ll need your doctor’s name and number so we can compare them to his baseline.” Dr. Burns looked up from the chart. “Have there been any recurring symptoms?”
“The fever you mentioned, and I tire more easily than I used to. The cough only happens every now and then, when I can’t catch my breath.”
“Any weight loss?”
“A little, but I’m working with a nutritionist to design a better diet. I’ve skipped several meals lately, so I’m not exactly where I should be.”
“You must be aware that with your condition, your system absorbs fat less efficiently. Your abnormally low blood pressure and heart rate are symptoms that your body’s not getting the energy it needs. Even though you’re in the early stages of the disease, your stamina will deteriorate without regular meals and rest. The fever’s probably a sign of infection, and the more run-down your body is, the less able it will be to fight off illness.”
“I understand. It’s just been a difficult few days.”
“I’m going to prescribe some antibiotics for the infection.” More notes on the chart. “Are you taking vitamins?”
“Yes. Every morning.”
“Good. Leave the nurse a list. Maybe there’s something more we can suggest to help.” He set the chart aside. Crossing his arms across his chest, he gave her the kind of look doctors always give you when they’re about to say something they know you don’t want to hear. “I’m recommending several days of bed rest until we have the infection cleared up.”
“Here?”
“No. We’ll release you as soon as you’re cleared for the concussion. But I want you doing as little as possible once you’re home. You need to rebuild your strength before things go from bad to worse.”
“But I’m only in town for a few days, and there’s something critical I need to be doing.”
“Then I’d suggest you find someone who can help you with whatever it is. Keep going at the pace you are, and you’ll wind up right back here.”
Carrinne knew he was right. If she pushed her body, she’d only get sicker. But she couldn’t stop looking for her father. Even with Oliver’s help, she might never find the diary, and then her search would only become harder. And the only other person in town she knew well enough to ask for help was—
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