by Cindy Dees
“Anna!” he cried, dropping to his knees to peer inside the car. He ripped away the driver’s side air bag from the door frame and spotted her.
She was crumpled in a pile, lying on the roof of the car, her legs still strapped into the seat, inside the partially crumpled car. The steering column poked down to the roof between her belly and her face, and she was curled around it. Lucky it hadn’t crushed her.
She had a cut on her forehead and there was plenty of blood on her face from that, but his combat-experienced eyes spotted no major pools of blood to indicate life-threatening bleeding.
Limbs lying at natural angles. Thank God. Breathing shallow and rapid. But that was to be expected. She was white as a sheet. Also to be expected.
He reached across her to release her lap belt, but the combination of her body weight hanging from the strap and damage to the car made the latch completely inoperable. He reached into his boot for his KA-BAR field knife and commenced sawing at the nylon lap belt. The nylon was tough, but his blade was razor sharp and made quick work of it.
Anna let out a faint grunt as her legs flopped down to the roof.
He ordered loudly, “Talk to me, Anna. Open your eyes!”
She moaned faintly, a sound of protest, and went limp and silent again.
“Wake. Up!” he yelled at her.
Her eyelids fluttered.
“C’mon. I can’t move you until you tell me where you hurt. We need to get you to a hospital. You have to wake up and talk to me,” he shouted.
“So...loud...” she whispered. “Shh.”
Seriously? She was shushing him for shouting? He didn’t know whether to laugh or shout some more at her.
“Can you feel your hands and feet?” he tried in a more temperate voice.
“Um.” A pause. “Yeah.”
Thank God. If her spinal cord was intact, her chances of survival had just gone up tenfold.
“Does anything hurt?” he asked next.
“Everything.”
“I got that. Does anything hurt more than everything else? A sharp, stabbing pain anywhere? Some injury that’s rising above the background noise of pain?”
“My left arm.”
“Where?”
“Wrist.”
“Open your eyes. Are you seeing double, or is my face in sharp focus?”
Gradually, she opened her eyes and both lids rose at the same time and in equal amounts. Was it possible she’d managed to avoid serious injury in this terrible crash?
“Only one you. Pretty,” she sighed.
Okay, so maybe she’d taken a harder hit on her head than he’d realized. If she was thinking about how he looked at a time like this, she must have at least a concussion.
“Does your head hurt?”
“Neck.”
“You must have wrenched it pretty hard. I’m going to wrap my sweatshirt around your neck to immobilize it, okay? Just a precaution.” He bloody well hoped it was just a precaution. Shrugging out of his sweatshirt, he rolled it from the bottom hem up to the collar, creating a long roll.
“Don’t move. Let me do all the work. Your job is just to relax and not tense anything. Got it?”
“Bossy,” she sighed.
“Damn straight I’m the boss,” he retorted humorously. “Do what I say, okay? I’ve got some first aid training and a whole bunch of combat experience, and I need your help to make sure I don’t hurt you when I move you.”
“’Kay.” She sounded like she was getting sleepy. She mustn’t slip into shock.
“Stay with me, Anna. Don’t go to sleep, okay?” Very carefully, he slipped the fleece tube under her neck, doing his level best not to move her head or neck at all.
“Cold,” she murmured.
“As soon as I get you out of there, I’ll wrap you up and get you warm. Sound good?” He had to keep getting responses out of her. Keep her engaged with him, if not alert, at least talking.
“Uh-huh.”
He used the sleeves to tie the fleece roll around her neck. “How does that feel? Any pain? Numbness in your hands or feet?”
“‘S’okay.”
He looked around on the ground for something to use as a splint. Nothing. It was all rocks and gravel. He peered in the back of her car and spied several manila folders. Magazine clippings and pictures were scattered all over the back. At a glance, they appeared to be decorating and architecture related.
He had to lie down on his belly to reach into the back, but he snagged three manila folders and stacked them on top of one another. He didn’t have anything to tie them on with, so he shrugged out of his T-shirt and used his knife to make a tear at the bottom of it. Cold air hit his skin and he shivered as goose bumps rose on his skin. Anna wasn’t wrong. They had to get her out of here before hypothermia complicated her injuries even more. Working fast, he ripped off a long strip of cotton from the bottom of his T-shirt.
He knocked out the remaining bits of glass around the passenger window frame and then, lying on his belly, crawled partway into the tiny space with Anna to reach her injured wrist.
Claustrophobia surged through him, and certainty that the car was closing in on him, crushing him, made breathing nearly impossible. He had to roll on his side to use both hands, which squeezed his shoulder so tightly against the roof of the car that he could barely move. Oh, God.
“You okay?” Anna mumbled.
He glanced at her, all of twelve inches away from him. “Yup. You?”
“You look...pale.”
“Yeah, well, you scared the hell out of me. When I saw that truck slam into you...” He closed his eyes for a second, forced down his panic, and finished, “...I died a little inside.”
“But I’m alive,” she protested weakly.
“And let’s keep you that way,” he said with false cheer as he wrapped the manila folders around her wrist and tied them tightly in place with the strip of T-shirt fabric. Neck: stabilized. Check. Wrist: splinted. Check.
“Any other injuries you can feel?” he asked her.
Her mint-green eyes were starting to turn a rather dull shade of gray as she mumbled, “Don’t...think...so.”
Crap. She was trying hard to go into shock on him. “Okay then, Anna. Let’s get you out of here. Let me do all the work, okay?”
“’Kay.”
“You just stay limp. Got that?”
“Noodle,” she sighed.
Cripes. Even on the verge of unconsciousness, she still had a sense of humor. The woman had spunk all right.
“Tell me immediately if you feel any new hurts,” he told her. Working on his knees outside the car, he reached for her armpits, hooking his wrists under them. He pulled slowly, easing her through the window as gently as he possibly could.
She groaned, and he stopped instantly. “What hurts?”
“Everything. Keep going.”
Apparently, the pain had woken her up a little. That was good, at least. His pulling landed him on his butt with Anna’s torso in his lap, her legs the only part of her still left inside the vehicle. He ran his hands down each of her arms, across her collarbones and down her ribs. “Any bones feel broken?” he asked her. “You’d feel a sharp pain when I put pressure on them.”
“No.” She wriggled a little, burrowing her head into the bend of his thigh and hip.
“Don’t you go to sleep on me,” he blurted, alarmed. He slid out from under her, ignoring her sound of protest. He lifted her as gently as he could across his back in a fireman’s carry, her right arm draped forward over his left shoulder, her legs draped over his right shoulder. Her head hung down beside his left arm. Hanging on to her grimly, he began the long climb back up to his truck.
His lungs burned and his legs screamed in protest long before he got there, but he kept going, one dogged step after the next. No way in hell w
as he failing Anna today.
Maybe it was the altitude making him light-headed, or maybe he was just a head case, but the Montana mountain kept turning into a hillside in Afghanistan. The gray scree around him became dust and darkness, Anna’s body draped over his shoulders became one of his men. Except none of his men had survived the ambush. Only he had walked out. But in his hallucination, he was saving them. They made it out. He had been able to help them after all.
Without warning, his truck popped into sight. He’d reached the road. He opened the back door of his crew cab and deposited Anna on the backseat as gently as he could. He spread a wool horse blanket from the storage box in the back of his truck across her. It smelled of hay and horse sweat, but it would keep her warm.
He climbed into the front seat, turned the heat on as high as it would go and headed down the mountain. Hillsdale was only a few miles ahead of him and had an urgent care clinic. It wasn’t a full-blown hospital emergency room, but it was the closest medical care to be had.
He called ahead to the clinic on his cell phone to let the staff know he was coming in with Anna, who might be seriously injured, and then he called his cousin, Joe Westlake.
“Sheriff’s Office,” a male voice answered.
“Joe, thank God it’s you. This is Brett Morgan.”
“What’s going on, Brett?” Joe asked tersely. He was a military veteran himself and must have recognized the tension in Brett’s voice.
“Anna Larkin was just run off the road by a heavy-duty pickup truck on the McMinn Pass road. East side of the pass, about a quarter of the way down. Her car slid and rolled a couple hundred feet down an embankment. I’ve pulled her out of the car and am taking her to the clinic in Hillsdale. She doesn’t seem seriously injured at a glance. But I need you to check out her car. See if you can find any evidence of who specifically ran her off the road.”
“I’m on it.” Joe’s breathing accelerated as he obviously left his office at a run and headed for his SUV. “How do you know she was run off the road and didn’t just slide off?”
“I saw it.”
“What?” An engine started in the background. “Tell me exactly what you saw.”
“I was a ways back from her. It was snowing lightly, and I only had her taillights in sight. A big silver truck with a trailer-hauling package—dual rear wheels, cutout tailgate—blew past me in a no-passing zone. He ran right up on Anna’s tail, and when she was taking a left-hand curve, pulled up on her left side and bumped her twice. She lost control and went off the road and down a long embankment.”
“Did you get a license plate?”
Brett answered in chagrin, “No. Tailgate was down and I couldn’t see it. Not that I would have known to memorize it, anyway.”
“Continue,” Joe ordered.
“When I got to where she went off the road, I saw there was no guardrail installed. Bastard must have known there wouldn’t be anything there to stop her.”
“You’re talking about attempted murder, Brett.”
“That would be why I’m calling you, Mr. Law Enforcement.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can and will check it out. Maybe I can get a paint sample from where he hit her. Let me know what the doc says about her.”
“Will do.” Brett threw down the cell phone on the seat beside him and accelerated as another panic attack threatened to overwhelm him. Mustn’t have a flashback now. He was driving, for God’s sake. Clenching the wheel until his hands hurt, he forced himself to stay here in the present. With Anna. She needed him. Flashes of driving a badly damaged Humvee frantically back to base in search of help kept intruding upon the Montana road.
He hung on to reality, but by a thread.
He reached Hillsdale and drove the last few blocks to the urgent care clinic in a cold sweat that had nothing to do with being shirtless. He parked in front and saw a nurse and a doctor waiting in the doorway with a rolling gurney. They transferred Anna to the bed and then the pair whisked her away, abruptly leaving him standing alone in the snow and cold.
And that was when his knees started to shake. He staggered into the waiting room and fell into a chair, shaking from head to foot. He’d done it. He’d held it together long enough to save Anna. But he was wrung out, both physically and emotionally, from the effort. It had to be enough. Anna had to be okay. She had to.
“Here’s a blanket,” a young woman said.
He looked up at the receptionist and took the blanket as she stepped back hastily from him. Just how bad did he look? He glanced over at an aquarium full of brightly colored tropical fish and saw his dim reflection in the glass. He looked like a crazy man, covered in dust, his hair sticking up in all directions and his eyes wild.
Ah. It was his eyes that had scared the receptionist. Funny, but he never seemed to scare Anna. And she’d seen him nearly kill people. Twice. Which begged the question of whether she was brave as hell or just too foolish for words.
He wrapped the blanket around his shoulders and realized his right knee was bouncing up and down in a rapid-fire staccato that he couldn’t seem to stop. She has to be okay. She has to be okay. The rhythm burned into his brain, a litany that was the only thing anchoring him to sanity.
Time passed, and his hold on reality slipped more and more until he was clinging to the present, to a facade of calm, by the slimmest of margins. With each minute, his imagination ran away with him, envisioning Anna having terrible internal injuries he hadn’t spotted. Had he been too freaked out to do a proper safety check before moving her? He replayed every second on the mountain in his head frantically. What had he missed?
At least a hundred years passed before the doctor came out into the waiting room. He was a tall, athletic man with coffee-colored skin. “Mr. Morgan? I’m Benjamin Cooper.”
Brett surged to his feet, the blanket falling to the floor behind him. “Is she all right?”
“Yes. She fractured her wrist and has a grade two concussion. She’s asking for you, and I need you to go to her. See if you can calm her down. She’s agitated and talking a lot about someone named Eddie.”
“Her ex-husband.”
“Do you have his number? I’ll call him—”
Brett cut the doctor off. “He’s dead. I’m with her now.”
The doctor shrugged. “Works for me. If you come this way, I’ll take you to her.”
Brett followed the doctor down the hall to a room full of machines and monitors. Thankfully, Anna wasn’t hooked to many of them. Just a blood pressure monitor. She looked pale and small in the hospital bed, and when he paused in the doorway, the prettiest smile he’d ever seen broke across her face. It lit up the whole damned room and felt like a burst of sunshine in his chest.
He rushed to her side, and gently took her uninjured right hand that she held up to him. The smile on his face was so big it hurt, but it wasn’t half the size of the smile in his heart. Her left hand lay on top of the blankets in a molded plastic splint held on by wide bands of Velcro. “How are you feeling?” he murmured.
“Like I got run off the road by a truck and rolled down a giant hill. Well, I slid most of the way. The car only rolled at the end.”
Which probably explained how she’d lived through that crash.
She couldn’t be dying if she was making jokes. Right? He glanced over at Dr. Cooper. “What’s the prognosis, Doc?”
“Like I said before, she has fractured her wrist. It’s not a serious break, and she should wear that splint twenty-four/seven for the next four weeks. I’ll re-x-ray the wrist then to see if she can lose the splint. She can take the splint off to bathe, but she may not do anything at all with that hand while it’s out of the cast. That includes washing your hair or yourself, Anna,” he added sternly.
She nodded meekly.
“As for her concussion, she may feel dizziness, nausea and loss of balance for the next few da
ys. I want someone with her around the clock. If her speech begins to slur, or she experiences memory loss or disorientation, I want her back here ASAP.”
“I don’t have anyone to stay with me—”
Brett cut her off. “I’ll stay with her.”
“But—”
“No buts.” He shot her a quelling glance. “And no arguments.”
She subsided, looking uncertain. Not used to being taken care of, was she? Well, they would have to correct that.
While the nurse helped Anna get dressed, Brett stepped out to the front counter and filled out paperwork. The matter of payment came up, and he charged the cost of today’s visit to his credit card. Not only did he receive annual income from the ranch in a substantial trust fund, but he’d drawn combat pay on top of his regular military pay for years without spending hardly a dime of it. There was nowhere to spend US dollars in miles-from-nowhere war zones, as it turned out. And he couldn’t think of a better way to blow a few thousand bucks than to ensure Anna’s health and well-being.
At length, she was bundled into his truck’s front seat, and he pointed the truck toward Sunny Creek. On the assumption that she didn’t need to drive right past the scene of her near death again today, he took the long route around the McMinn Range to Sunny Creek. Not to mention, he wasn’t sure his nerves could take it. Going the long way turned their half-hour drive into over an hour, but she dozed on and off the whole ride back.
When they got back to her place, he asked her, “Should I call someone to come over to stay with you?”
“No!” Anna exclaimed. She winced in pain and repeated in a whisper, “No.”
“That was quite the emphatic answer. You don’t have any friends in town?”