The Southern Comfort Prequel Trilogy Box Set

by Lisa Clark O'Neill

  Ignoring the discomfort, he jerked his head around to look at Ainsley.

  She slumped to the side, held in place by her seatbelt. Her seat was still pushed back even further than his, from where they’d tried to accommodate her need to elevate her ankle. Jesus. The airbag might not have prevented her from banging her head.

  “Ainsley. Ainsley.” With a trembling hand, Cal grabbed her shoulder. He didn’t want to shake her in case she’d injured her neck. “Ainsley!”

  Undoing his seatbelt, Cal reached forward to push her hair from her face, and then set his fingers against her carotid artery. Her pulse was steady. Thank God.

  “Ainsley.” He tried squeezing her shoulder, rubbing her cheek, swearing viciously when his fingers came away bloody. He lifted another lock of her hair, saw the gash at the edge of the hairline behind her temple. It didn’t look too bad, but the fact that she was bleeding confirmed that she’d hit her head at least hard enough to break the skin.

  “Ainsley.”

  She mumbled.

  Cal’s breath rushed out on a whoosh. “It’s okay. You’re okay,” he said when her eyelids started to flutter. At least he hoped to God that was the case. “Take it slow.”

  She squinted and lifted her head, which brought on an immediate wince.

  “Take it slow,” Cal repeated. “You banged your head.”

  “No kidding.”

  The fact that she was with it enough to sass him made him smile, even if her voice sounded faint.

  And then he heard a whimper from somewhere near her feet.

  Shit. “Beaumont.” Please God, let him not have killed his mother’s dog. Or almost killed.

  He batted the deflated airbag out of the way and, careful not to jar Ainsley, located the small bundle of fur huddled on the floorboard. He’d probably been thrown forward when Ainsley hit her head, rendering herself momentarily unconscious. If she’d been sitting closer, the airbag might very well have killed Beaumont given the force with which it inflated.

  Cal bent over, ignoring a twinge in his ribs and the way his head wanted to swim, and gathered the little dog into his arms. Beau shook like the leaves that continued to fall in front of his headlights, but at least he was conscious and breathing. And – if Cal was lucky – he wouldn’t have any broken bones or internal injuries.

  Thank God they’d hit the tree. It seemed an odd thing to be thankful for, but if the tree hadn’t stopped them they almost certainly would have rolled. If they’d rolled, he doubted Beau would have made it.

  Not to mention him and Ainsley.

  Cal gave the dog an extra pat and then shifted his attention back to his passenger, snapped his fingers in front of her face. “Stay with me here, sweetheart.”

  She grunted, but reopened her eyes.

  Cal shifted Beau enough that he could grab his cell phone, which thankfully was still locked down in the holder attached to the dash. Whoever invented that little contraption was getting a Christmas card from him.

  He turned on the flashlight app, shone it in Ainsley’s eyes.

  “Stop,” she insisted, trying to avoid the light.

  “Don’t move your head,” he said. “I need to see your pupils.”

  She squinted, but didn’t give him further grief. Her pupils seemed to react normally to the light, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have a concussion. He didn’t like the fact that she’d obviously hit her head hard enough to get knocked out. “What’s your name?”

  “What?”

  “Your name.”

  “Why?”

  He tamped down his irritation. “Because I’m trying to gage how hard you hit your head on the window, but on second thought, it might be the window that got the worst of it, given that your head’s like a rock. Your name.”

  “Ainsley Tidwell.” She frowned. “Your nose is bleeding.”

  Shit. Cal swiped his hand beneath it. “The airbag,” was all he said.

  “I should probably be asking if you know your name.”

  “Inigo Montoya,” he told her. “Just be glad you don’t have six fingers on your right hand. I’m going to call nine-one-one, get some help here as soon as possible.”

  “I’m okay,” Ainsley said.

  “Be that as it may, I’d like to wait and hear that from a professional. Stay put.”

  Feeling more than a little shaky himself, Callum deposited a trembling Beaumont on the seat before opening the driver’s side door. The cool evening air hit his face, and Cal allowed himself a moment or two to simply breathe it in. Dizziness wanted to keep him sitting right there, maybe even lay his head against the seat, but he squeezed his eyes shut and tried to force his body to cooperate.

  He’d been through worse. And there could be worse coming their way yet.

  Galvanized by the thought, Cal climbed to his feet, his boots fighting for purchase on the gravelly soil of the slope. They’d come to rest at an angle, and gravity wanted to push the driver’s side door back into him. With a grunt, he shoved it back, and then as surreptitiously as possible, he extracted the handgun from beneath his seat.

  The other truck was nowhere in sight, but he wasn’t going to trust that they’d gone about their merry business after running them into a tree. Someone who risked that sort of maneuver on this sort of road was either crazy or determined.

  Both of which possibilities meant that Cal felt it was best not to rule out the possibility of them coming back.

  He leaned into the truck again and switched off the headlights. The light was killing his night vision and he didn’t want to miss it if someone approached.

  Cal then started to call nine-one-one by rote, but shifted mental gears, called Ben’s number instead. Ainsley’s cousin was close by, and there were some things Cal needed to tell him.

  Cal put his back to the truck and slid down until he was squatting. The dizziness, he discovered, hadn’t gone away just because he wanted it to. Absently, he noted the broken red glass – probably from his taillight – scattered at his feet. The light from his phone made it shine like confetti, bringing to mind the broken glass back in the old store. They had to be on to something. He couldn’t think of any other reason for someone to come after them like that.

  When Ben answered, Cal didn’t bother with pleasantries.

  “Someone ran us off the road. We’re okay, mostly. Ainsley banged her head, but her pupils look normal. But we could use an ambulance.”

  Ben swore even more viciously than Cal had. “Where?”

  “Maybe four, five miles from where we left you. Ah. There’s a road.” He pushed back up until he could see over the hood. There was just enough light to make out the sign. Cal squinted, and then told Ben the name. “We’re off the road on the left hand side, against a tree,” he said.

  “I’ll call for an ambulance. And I’ll be right there. Hang tight.”

  “Ben,” Cal said before the other man hung up. “You should know that I’m armed. I don’t want you to be startled.”

  And shoot me went unsaid.

  “Hang tight,” Ben said again after a pause. Then the line went dead, and Cal shoved the phone into the pocket of his jeans before going back to inspect the damage to his truck.

  Shit. Just shit.

  The bed, with its custom liner, looked like some badly folded metal origami. And yeah, it was just a thing, but it was his thing. And something that he used regularly to haul completed pieces from his shop to the gallery, not to mention hauling supplies for renovating the house. And whatever the hell else he felt like hauling, because he was a guy, and it was what guys did.

  He loved his truck, damn it.

  He drew his foot back and kicked the tire.

  Regret set in immediately, as both his neck and his ribs protested the activity. Cal pulled up his shirt. It wasn’t full-blown yet, but it looked like he was going to have a doozy of a bruise from the seatbelt.

  “Cal?”

  Cal dropped the shirt and glanced up. Ainsley had been watching his little tantrum t
hrough the back window. Holding the pistol against his thigh with one hand, Cal braced the other against the door and leaned in so that he could see her better. “You okay? Ben will be here in a few minutes.”

  “I heard.” She’d unbuckled her seatbelt, and cradled Beaumont on her lap. She glanced toward his gun. “Is it loaded?”

  Cal started to say of course it’s loaded, but he realized why she’d asked. His shotgun hadn’t been loaded earlier – he’d been carrying it more for show, as he hadn’t really expected whoever’d broken into his shed to still be loitering around. And Ainsley had recently experienced how he reacted to the sound of gunfire.

  Or what he thought was gunfire, at any rate.

  So maybe she thought he regularly carried around unloaded firearms because he didn’t trust himself not to freak out.

  “Yes,” he told her. “If I expect it, I’m fine. I’m not going to lose it again.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” she said, her tone slightly defensive. Although now that he considered it, his tone had been a little defensive as well. Maybe more than a little. “I just wanted to… do you think they’re coming back here? The person who hit us?”

  So okay, maybe he’d misunderstood the reason behind her question. Maybe she only wanted to know that he could shoot if he had to.

  “I think if they were, they would have by now. I’ve already called the police. I’m sure whoever was driving that truck is long gone by now.”

  She seemed to consider that. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “Your truck. You. This poor little dog.” She gently cuddled Beaumont closer.

  “It’s not your fault. Especially not when it might be me they were after.”

  Her gaze jerked up to his. “Why you?”

  “I found those journals, remember? So maybe I read them before I called Sabrina.”

  “We can’t assume that the two things are connected. And anyway, you didn’t.”

  “No, I didn’t.” Anger swelled within him, a tidal wave that lashed at his already tenuous control. “But whoever took them doesn’t know that.”

  And the thought that whoever took them had been after him, and that Ainsley was simply collateral damage, nearly caused that control to snap.

  But he’d learned to manage his anger. More than the flashbacks or nightmares, the occasional bout with depression, it was the latent fury that bubbled within him, a volcano waiting to blow, that caused the greatest concern. A couple of years ago it had nearly gotten the best of him, but he’d come a long way since then.

  Employing some of the same grounding techniques that Ainsley had used earlier, Cal focused on his senses, his breathing. He would have liked to smash his fist through the windshield, but – kicking the tire notwithstanding – he’d learned the hard way that violence was a counterproductive method of venting his wrath. He just ended up with busted knuckles and holes in his wall and black eyes if he happened to hit something that hit back.

  By the time he’d counted out ten breaths, the red haze had cleared from his vision. Ainsley was staring at him, concern in her eyes, and he realized that his free hand was clenching and unclenching in a fist.

  He purposefully relaxed it.

  “Are you okay?” she asked softly.

  “Yeah.” Lights cut through the trees, and Cal jerked his attention toward the road. The red and blue strobes alerted him that it was Ben even before the vehicle rounded the corner.

  The flashing lights made Cal feel dizzy again, but at least Ben hadn’t turned on his siren. Cal thought his head might break into a million pieces if he had.

  Cal straightened, turning his firearm around and extending it butt first when Ben practically exploded from his SUV.

  “I assume you’re going to want to hang on to this for a while,” Cal said, and Ben glanced at the gun before taking it.

  “Thanks.” And then he ducked his head into the opening to peer at Ainsley. “Are you okay?”

  “I think so.”

  Ben frowned. “The EMTs are on their way.” Then he straightened, looking at the crumpled mess of Cal’s truck bed before meeting his gaze. “Now,” he said, his tone dangerously even. “How about you tell me exactly how the hell this happened?”

  BEN stood off to the side with Cal while the tow truck operator hooked Cal’s pickup to his truck. Ainsley sat in the back of the ambulance, Cal’s ridiculous little dog on her lap, while one of the EMTs put her through the standard paces. Ben agreed with Cal’s initial assessment that she was mostly shaken up. The gash on her head wasn’t deep, and probably wouldn’t even require stitches, just a couple of butterfly bandages to keep it together. She’d been lucid, coherent in conversation. Her eyes responded normally to his penlight – one that he usually used to conduct field sobriety tests, not look for signs of brain injury and concussion.

  But he wanted her checked out thoroughly just in case.

  His chest tightened as he looked at the damage to the bed of the truck and considered how differently things might have turned out if Cal hadn’t thought quickly enough to use the side road to both slow his momentum and get out of the path of the idiot who’d hit them.

  Repeatedly.

  He turned his attention to Cal. “You’re sure you couldn’t make out any identifying features of the other vehicle?”

  “As sure as I was the last three times you asked.”

  “Sometimes people recall details that they’d overlooked initially.”

  The look Cal gave him was weary, but he tipped his head back and closed his eyes in an effort to remember something new. But then he shook his head.

  “He had his headlights set to bright, and I was paying more attention to the road in front of me than what was visible in the rearview mirror. And we were in the process of crashing into the tree when they went past. All I got was taillights and the general shape of a truck bed. Dark-colored. Either a deep blue or black.”

  They would test the paint that had transferred to Cal’s tailgate in order to determine which one. “What shape were the taillights?”

  Cal opened his mouth and then frowned. “I started to say round. But that doesn’t sound right. Most pickups have the long, vertical lights on either side of the tailgate.”

  “Depends on the year it was manufactured,” Ben said. “And don’t confuse what you expect to see with what you actually remember. Your first instinct is usually the right one.”

  “If my first instinct is the right one, why the hell do you keep asking me to repeat myself?”

  “I didn’t ask you about the shape of the taillights before, now did I?”

  Because Cal knew very well that Ben hadn’t, he scowled in response. Then his expression grew even blacker as he watched his pickup’s rear end lift off the ground in response to the tow truck’s chain.

  “Bastard,” he muttered under his breath.

  “You have any altercations with anyone recently?”

  Cal’s head snapped to the side so quickly that Ben was surprised it didn’t pop right off his neck.

  “What the hell,” he said “is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that I have to consider every possibility for why someone may have wanted to run you off the road. And it’s not exactly out of left field, Elias.”

  The other man’s jaw tightened, but then he visibly relaxed it. “No,” he finally said. “And while we’re on the topic, how about if we dispense with the innuendoes. I had a real problem a couple years ago. Rage, violent outbursts. A whole series of fistfights.”

  “A knock for assault.”

  “Yeah,” Cal agreed, frost forming on the word. “That, too.”

  Ben had read the police report. Hell, he’d spoken with the arresting officer. He knew that the altercation in question was a bar fight, and that Cal’s attorney had managed to get a felony charge dropped down to a misdemeanor, with a sentence of community service and a fine rather than jail time. He’d also been ordered into therapy.

  All of this
was before he’d moved back to Dahlonega, and Ben could admit that the other man had given him no trouble whatsoever since his return.

  But he would be remiss if he didn’t examine this from every angle.

  “You can’t really believe this has anything to do with me,” he said. “Or at least not with me in the context of my past. Someone broke into my shed, Sheriff. They stole journals that had belonged to your sister. Your murdered sister. Whose murder has never been solved. Your other sister is missing. Your cousin and I found evidence of where Sabrina had been prior to her disappearance, and then we’re subsequently run off the road. How big of a grudge do you still bear in order for you to overlook all of that and try to make this about me?”

  “Any grudge I might bear you has nothing to do with my question,” Ben said, fighting to keep a lid on his own temper.

  “Then what does?”

  Ben was tempted to tell him about Joe Cooper’s apparent suicide, about the photo of Sabrina, but he couldn’t. Wouldn’t. Not yet. Not until he’d figured out if Joe Cooper had been the man with Sabrina in that store – because Ben felt sure there’d been a man with her. And if Cooper was somehow responsible for her disappearance – a lover’s spat? An accident that he’d tried to cover up?

  Ben’s stomach wanted to lurch, but he tried to set aside his emotions and think rationally. If Cooper was responsible for Sabrina’s disappearance, for whatever reason, and he was now dead by his own hand, then why would someone else try to run Cal and Ainsley off the road?

  Who? And what the hell did this have to do with the missing diaries, if anything?

  “There are some things that I can’t talk about,” Ben told him. “Not yet. But let’s just say that things aren’t as clear cut as you’ve laid them out.”

  Cal considered that, and finally nodded. “Okay. I get that you can’t share all the details of an ongoing investigation. But the fact remains that someone did run us off the road tonight. Me and Ainsley. Now maybe it was just a drunk, or a crazy person. Maybe I have a secret enemy that I was previously unaware of, and they chose this time to strike. I don’t know about you, but that sure sounds like a whole hell of a lot of coincidence.”