by Drew Jordan
Table of Contents
Title Page
COPYRIGHT
PART ONE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
PART TWO
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
PART THREE
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Special Excerpt: HIDE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CRASH
By
Drew Jordan
COPYRIGHT
Crash, Copyright © 2015 by Erin McCarthy, writing as Drew Jordan
Cover by Elle J Rossi
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher of this book, excepting brief quotations used in reviews. Purchase only authorized editions.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, businesses or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
You’d think that the greatest love stories would start with something tender, but they don’t.
They start with blood.
Like Romeo and Juliet’s.
Marc Anthony and Cleopatra’s.
Lancelot and Guinevere’s.
And mine.
I smelled it first. The tinny, sharp tangy odor of fresh blood. And I felt it. Warm, sticky. It forced my eyes open, dragged me back from oblivion, where I had landed on impact. The first thing I saw was not the pilot or the floor or my leg wedged under the seat, but him.
A stranger, in black nylon, hair and beard dusted in snow, knit hat on his head, a strip of fabric in his hands, smeared red with my blood as he wrapped it around my arm. Confusion gave way to pain; raging, angry, snorting, bull-charging-through-crowds pain that made me cry out. His head turned at the sound and what I saw there had me instinctively pulling back, away from him. His eyes were the palest blue I had ever seen, like a filter had been put on the sky, draining the color. They weren’t warm or compassionate or sympathetic. They were intense. Efficient. Passionate. The kind of eyes that make you instantly uncomfortable, like their owner could reach inside your body and swipe your soul.
Or maybe that was just the pain.
The trauma.
The fear.
All causing me to think strange, random thoughts.
I was a hundred percent certain I wasn’t unconscious. The pain was too overbearing, too rich. Invasive. It throbbed and prodded, owning my leg, my arm, my chest. I tried to move, to shift away from him, but he held my aching arm still and my leg was stuck, trapped under something. My head throbbed, but I swallowed the bile that rose and spoke, my breath coming out in a visible mist in front of me.
“Why is it so quiet?” I asked. “Where are the others?” The pilot and the other passenger on the plane with me. Had they been injured or was I the only one? Either way, the air around me felt too still.
The silence was brittle, overwhelming. All I could hear was the wind outside and the rustling of the fabric as he wound it around my arm, over and over. Why was it taking so long to wrap? It was a thousand rotations, a million miles of fabric. Something was dripping, a monotonous plink on metal. There was nothing but pain and blood and the absence of explanations.
It took only a heartbeat for him to answer but that second felt endless, a tremulous wave of uncertainty, and in that brief span, the guttural knowledge that this was bad rushed over me.
“They’re dead.”
His tone was flat. His words matter-of-fact. I blinked, stunned. Then I panicked.
I didn’t know the pilot or the passenger. I had just met them in Fairbanks when I climbed on the plane. But that was only an hour ago, or at least an hour of flight time. I had no idea how long I’d been unconscious. And now they were dead? No longer breathing, never wake up, fully one hundred percent not alive? It freaked me the fuck out and I heard my cry, a weird, low keening cry that morphed into gulping sobs.
“You’re fine,” he said, his voice low and smooth. “Just a sprained ankle and a laceration. Most likely a concussion. Maybe a bruised rib.”
Did he think I was crying for me? No. I was crying for them. For the two men- Jack and Al, who had introduced themselves cheerfully and shook my hand. Jack was a trapper returning home after the summer tour months and Al was a twenty-year bush pilot. That’s what I knew. All I knew. And now they were dead.
When I started to shove at the man with the bullish eyes with my free hand for a reason even I didn’t understand, hysteria crawling up my throat and threatening to cut off my air supply, he stared at me, calmly. “Stop it.”
“No!” I didn’t even know what I was protesting. Not him. Just… everything.
“I can’t carry you out of here if you don’t stop.”
In my frantic flailing my hand hit his face. His head snapped back and he went still, eyes narrowing. I stopped instantly. Out of fear, though I wasn’t sure why. Then behind the stranger as he shifted, I caught sight of the pilot slumped over the dash. I saw his eyes, open. Blank. The dripping was the wound from his head. Drip, drip, drip as it landed on the floor. A beautiful rich puddle of blood was oozing toward my leg. I started to yank my trapped foot. No, no, no. That river of death couldn’t touch me. It couldn’t. I looked at the stranger, unable to speak, desperate for help, tugging so hard it felt like my hip dislocated from the socket. I swore I heard a pop.
The stranger’s bloody hand came over my face, pinching my nose, covering my mouth. I fought, hard, turning my head. Right. Left.
Then nothing.
When I woke up again, it was because of the bouncing. It was like dropping into potholes in a truck without shocks, at a speed of fifty miles an hour. Bam. Bam. Bam. With each slam of my body, my leg screamed in pain, my teeth rattled. Prying my eyes open I saw nothing but black and white. There was black right next to my face and beyond that, the blinding sparkling white of snow. I was being carried and the dizziness proved I was upside down. I was on the stranger’s back, strapped to him like a caribou carcass. Fear of falling instantly rushed over me and I tried to grab his leg to steady myself, but I realized my hands were tied to his leg already. There was no way for me to wrap my palms around his calf. My feet were strapped down too when I tried to wiggle them.
The jarring I felt was every step he took through the heavy snow. I’d been told on the plane it was the first snowfall of the season and likely to melt, but right now it was causing the stranger to lift his knees higher than normal, bouncing me heavily. He was saving my life. I was aware of that on some level. Yet at the same time, the idea of being carried on his back, like a kill he’d landed after hours of patient stalking, unnerved me. My stomach protested the movement, the pain, the panic. I started to heave, coughing and choking as I splashed vomit across the snow in a wide arch. It went up my nose and burned and a second round came up, the heat of the bile hitting the cool air in a steamy, stinky mess.
The stranger eased down onto his knees, so that I rested closer to the ground. I sucked in a breath, determined not to repeat that a third time. My eyes were watering, a single tear dropping down onto the snow and disappearing
.
“You okay?” he asked.
I couldn’t really even see his legs or feet anymore. They were tucked under me. It was the strangest sensation, being upside down and blind to everything but the snow and the trail behind us of his footsteps.
Was I okay? No. No, I wasn’t. But that wasn’t going to fix or help the situation and not only was I in pain, I was cold. My fingers were burning and my nose felt like sharp needles were being shoved into it. I couldn’t feel my ears. Even though it felt like I’d been wrapped in a blanket before being tied to him, it wasn’t providing much protection. The less I said, the sooner he could carry me to safety and I could raise my head, right my world. Process what had happened.
“Yes,” I managed, my voice raspy and foreign. “Thank you.” It was an inane thing to say, but it felt necessary.
He just grunted in return and rose to his feet again. That was no small task, lifting my dead weight. The stranger was strong. As he walked and I bounced, I thought about the pain. I thought about the pilot and the passenger. I thought about Michael, waiting for me to arrive at the airstrip, wondering why I was so late. Had the plane radioed for help? The last minutes before the crash had been normal, nothing alarming. Then suddenly we were dropping and I was bracing my body and eating my heart in my throat. And then there was nothing.
Until the pain. And the blood. And him.
He had knocked me unconscious when I’d fought him. He had pinched my nose and covered my mouth so I would pass out. So he could help me. So he could tie me to him.
It was a disturbing thought and I wasn’t sure why. He was saving my life. If he hadn’t come along, I would have died of exposure in the wreckage before anyone found me. I was sure of that. We were in the middle of the Yukon. On the way to nothing, passing over even more of nothing. No roads. No towns. Just isolated homes by those willing to attempt survival in Alaska.
Really, it was damn near a miracle this man had found me, though a plane crash must make a lot of noise. It must have been terrible, a howling, screaming collision of metal and earth, machinery and trees. I shuddered, glad I didn’t remember it. But in the background now, I could hear something. Barking. Or more like a careening howl of multiple animals. Wolves? Fear made me clench up from shoulders to thighs.
“Are those wolves?” I asked.
But he didn’t hear me. The landscape snatched my words on the wind and flung them off in a swirl of blowing snow. Or that’s what I assumed. Maybe he was ignoring me. Either way, his stride didn’t change as the barking got louder and I started to think maybe it was dogs, not wolves. My head was pounding and the barking was increasing and the jarring was aching and the world was spinning.
I closed my eyes and prayed for oblivion.
It didn’t come and by the time the man was climbing steps, the wood creaking beneath our mutual weight, I was afraid I was going to throw up again. My teeth were chattering and my body was shaking from the cold. The fevered pitch of the barking dogs made it clear they were only feet away and this man was their owner. They were excited to see him. The clink of chains cut through the cacophony but he ignored them and opened a door with a shove. When he stepped inside and shut it behind us, turning me about ninety degrees, I panted, trying to regain my breath, trying to quell the nausea in my stomach. Warm air rushed over me, prompting another shiver. The door closing muffled the wild symphony of the dogs barking.
My hands were untied. The rope belt he wore around us both was loosened quickly and I was sliding up and over his shoulder, down the length of his chest. The blood rushed to my head and my vision went spotty and black. I reached out and tried to grab his coat to hold myself up but my fingers were numb, ineffectual. The blanket caught under my feet and I would have crumpled to the floor if his strong arms hadn’t grabbed me by the armpits and held me up.
“Don’t put any weight on your foot,” he ordered.
I learned that a second too late. Pain lapped at my leg, radiating from my foot to my knee, protesting loudly when I tried to stand on it. The dancing spots receded and I focused on the zipper of the nylon coat in front of me. There was snow and ice on it. For a reason I couldn’t explain, I stuck my tongue out and flicked it over the ice, maybe to taste that it was real. This was real. But my warm tongue stuck to his cold metal zipper and I let out a cry.
His grip shifted to my hair. My head jerked back from his less than gentle touch as he wrenched my tongue free. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” I shifted my gaze to stare up at him. Those blue eyes met my gaze, coolly. Emotionless.
That’s when I started to cry. Great, powerful sobs that wracked my chest and produced snot instantly, which seemed to freeze in a glazed streak above my lip on my still icy cold skin. It was an ugly cry, the humiliating guttural sound of a woman totally losing her shit. Oh, God, oh, God. I was hysterical and I was bleeding and I was puking and I really, really needed to pull myself together.
“I’m picking you up. Don’t fight me.”
I had no intention of fighting. There was no fight in me.
He lifted me off the ground and carried me a few feet. There he deposited me on a bed and the soft sink of fabric beneath my ass felt like a marshmallow. It was a down comforter. And warm. The puffy white cloud of fabric rose on either side of my thighs as I descended into its depths. My teeth chattered and for a wild minute when he started to peel the blanket off, I felt fear. Deep, intense, powerful fear. Instinctively I jerked back, wanting space, but as he yanked the blanket out from under me, I forced myself to still. To take stock. To try to calm down.
Bending over so he was eye to eye with me, he said in a low voice, “You need warm and dry clothes. I’m going to cut these off of you.”
“Cut them off?” I asked, stupidly parroting him. Why couldn’t we just take them off? “Why?”
“Your leg is too swollen and I don’t want to unwrap your arm. I could peel your clothes off but it would hurt like hell.”
That scared me more than losing a pair of jeans and a cable knit sweater. “It hurts enough already.”
“Then cutting it is.” He stood up and yanked a hunting knife out of his boot.
Now that he was standing, I had an even greater sense of how muscular and commanding he was. He filled the space in front of me, and shrank the confines of the small cabin. That he was holding a knife was equally as intimidating. He was still wearing all his outdoor gear, so I didn’t have a clear view of his build or his features, but he wasn’t above thirty and he was neither skinny nor overweight. He looked fit and healthy and raw. Masculine.
His hands skimmed off my boot on my injured foot more gently than I would have imagined, but it still made me grimace in pain. “I’ll get you some aspirin in a minute,” he said. “First we need to warm you up. Your fingers are frozen.”
He was right. A glance down showed they were a curious white color, like all the blood had been vacuumed out of them. “Do I have frostbite?”
“Just the beginning stage. Frostnip.”
That unexplainably made me giggle. But it was a silly word. It just burbled out of me.
He glanced up at me, the knife in his hand, and the laughter died on my lips. My God, his eyes were so intense. He looked like he could raise the knife and slit my throat. After giving me an orgasm.
The thoughts were so contradictory, so strange, I felt my cheeks flush. “Where are we?” I asked.
“My house.” He bent his head again and inserted the knife into my jeans and sliced.
I winced at the tear of the denim, though I wasn’t sure why. It just sounded… harsh. “But where?”
“Yukon river. Forty miles from the nearest town.” Once the jeans were cut open on my bad leg, he peeled my sock off gently. Then he stood up and went to the other side of the room and rummaged around in a drawer. When he came back, he bound my ankle tightly with a bandage and slipped a warm wool sock on over my bare foot. “We’ll elevate it in a minute.”
He repeated
the process of cutting my jeans on the other leg and replacing my damp, bloody sock with the other half of the wool pair. It felt odd to have a man I’d never met sliding socks onto my feet. It was intimate, a caregiver’s role. A mother to child. Nurse to patient. A lover to a lover. But I felt a palpable relief when each sock was in place, my eyes focusing on the top of his head. The snow on his hat was melting a little and I felt sleepy, disconnected from my body.
“Lay down,” he commanded me, moving up from the squat position he’d been in.
Suddenly it felt sexual, invasive, which was ridiculous. But I still asked, “Why?”
“So I can take your pants off.” He stared at me, waiting.
I stared back, anxious.
“I’m not going to hurt you.” His voice was low, rumbling, yet somehow smooth. He touched my knee. “Lie down, Laney.”
A shiver crawled across my skin. “How do you know my name?” I whispered.
“Your purse was next to you on the floor. I looked inside to see who you are.”
“Oh.” It seemed logical and I lay back on the bed, sighing in relief to be on the soft mattress. The ceiling was exposed wood beams running across in a standard grid. Very Alaskan. Not that I knew Alaska. Not really. Only what Michael had told me and what I’d read online and in one sad travel guide. From the slew of TV shows on the Discovery Channel featuring it. Alaska was a ratings boost these days for whatever reason.
The pain in my ankle was a sharp throb, and my fingers were starting to itch and burn. It hit me again that I had almost died. That two other people had and yet here I was. Alive. It seemed surreal and yet so real it was agonizing and terrifying. I was four months past my twenty-fourth birthday. I wasn’t supposed to die this young. Apparently fate had agreed and I was rattled, but really fucking grateful.
I wondered how long it would take my stepfather to worry, to figure out what had happened. To inform my mother where she sat in federal prison for tax evasion that I’d been in a plane crash. My eight year old sister would be scared. I’d have to ask… the stranger if I could borrow a phone.