by Nicole Helm
She hit Play, then berated herself. She wasn’t going to listen. She was not going to listen or get dragged into helping him with things that weren’t any good for him.
“Gracie.”
Oh hell, she had to listen.
“I need your help.” Said in a breathless, gritty voice, as if he was straining against something. Some horrible screeching noise went on in the background, so loud she could barely hear his voice over it.
“Laurel,” she yelled, already on her feet, already heading for the door. “Who’s on duty at county?”
* * *
WILL THOUGHT HE heard sirens. Which was weird. He couldn’t hear sirens in his cabin. He couldn’t hear anything except bird song, and the occasional rumble of an engine on Fridays.
Gracie. Always Gracie.
It registered, vague and faint, somewhere in the recesses of his brain, that he was cold. And uncomfortable.
No, not uncomfortable, on fire. Painful fire, frigid cold. It didn’t make any sense and he couldn’t seem to open his eyes.
Well, this was bad.
Something like panic fluttered in his chest, but everything in his body was throbbing with pain. He wasn’t at home in his cabin. He wasn’t on his mountain. He was somewhere... Somewhere.
He couldn’t open his eyes, and he couldn’t move without a fiery agony spreading through his body. Things were digging into him and one arm was at an uncomfortable angle tangled up in something hard.
He could still hear sirens, but it was all so far off he wondered if it had anything to do with him or if it was just all in his head.
Then they stopped. Just stopped.
He was going to die, wasn’t he? Something had gone wrong with his car. He didn’t quite remember what, but everything had gone wrong and he’d crashed and he was going to die.
Just like Paula. Exactly like it.
“Will? Will!”
He must be hallucinating. There’d be no reason Gracie would be out this way. Certainly no reason she’d be his saving grace. Gracie. Grace. He might have laughed if he didn’t think his head would roll right off.
“Will? Oh my—I found him!” she shouted, and he could almost hear her or someone or something next to his ear.
“Will. Oh God. Will. Please.” When she touched him he groaned, because everything hurt, even Gracie’s very welcome touch.
“You’re alive. You’re alive.” She whispered it over and over, her hand still on his chest. He felt the gentle brush of her fingertips across his forehead. Finally a part of his body that didn’t hurt.
“Say something, Will. If you’re awake. If you can hear me. Say something. Please.”
He heard footsteps and a murmur of someone else, but Gracie was talking to him and her fingers were on his face. She sounded desperate and afraid, and he didn’t want that for her. No.
He tried to open his eyes again, and this time they went a little. Everything was dark though there was some kind of light, but he couldn’t see right. He could tell that. Nothing was right.
His Jeep had malfunctioned. He’d crashed. And he couldn’t believe that was an accident.
His vision cleared a little, and he could just barely make out Gracie’s face hovering above him. The world around them was dark but some light swathed her face, and he could see every feature.
He had the oddest urge to reach out and touch her face. Touch her hair. Anything to assure himself she was real and here, and that all that worry and fear on her face was for him. Him.
I care about you, Will.
Turns out even half-dead after a car accident those words could still haunt and chill him.
“Will, an ambulance is on the way. Don’t try to move. But, can you talk? Say something?” She leaned closer, the wisps of her hair sliding across his cheek, which felt like it had been ripped off.
“Say something to me, please,” she whispered, and he thought he saw a few tears slide down her cheeks.
Say something. He had to say something. Make all this stop. She could cry when he was full dead instead of just half.
“Believe me now?” he rasped.
A pained expression crossed her face and she looked up, her face turning into a flashing red light.
“The ambulance is here,” she said quietly. “I’m going to go flag them down. Don’t—”
But he gripped her arm with the one hand that was functioning and didn’t feel like it was being stabbed by a machete. “Don’t go.” He had the panicked thought that if she left he would die, and he found he wasn’t quite interested in that prospect.
“I’ll get them.”
Will didn’t know whose voice that was. He only knew it was male and Will didn’t particularly care for it. Had she been on a date?
But he didn’t have time to dwell on that uncomfortable thought as footsteps and voices surrounded them. Then he was being touched and prodded and moved, and he tried to bite back groans of pain, but he couldn’t manage it.
Then he was on a stretcher, being moved and jerked into an ambulance.
“Gracie.”
“I’m here,” she said, and though he couldn’t see her with the paramedics looming over him, a slim, cool hand slid into his.
More voices, more movement, a door slam. And through it all, Gracie’s hand held his. Like she’d been doing for the past two years. The only person he’d come to rely on.
“What happened?” she asked gently as a paramedic shined a light into one eye and then the other.
“The brakes and steering went out.”
The paramedic worked on him, but Will couldn’t seem to force himself to let go of Gracie’s hand.
“It wasn’t any accident, Gracie. It wasn’t.”
She didn’t say anything to that so he attempted to squeeze her hand, even though it hurt like hell.
“Gracie?”
“Deputy Mosely is looking at your car. There’ll be an investigation.”
Will snorted, then swallowed down a gasp of pain. “Yeah, I know how those go.” He could feel her sigh of a breath against his temple. She moved so he could look at her while the paramedic did something awful to his arm that wasn’t holding on to Gracie.
Her big brown eyes were filled with tears and worry, and he wanted to look away from that kind of emotion, but God, it hurt too bad to even close his eyes.
She touched his forehead again, a gentle glide of her fingertips. “Rest. Let’s get you better, and then we’ll figure out what’s going on.”
“You don’t believe me,” he said flatly.
“I don’t know what to believe,” she returned on a pained whisper.
But it wasn’t him. Never him.
Chapter Four
“There’s evidence of tampering.”
Gracie looked up at Laurel, who stood in the waiting room at the hospital, dressed in her detective khakis and county sheriff’s department polo, looking serious and stern.
Believe me now? Will’s words kept looping around in her head whether she was dozing or awake while she waited to hear the extent of Will’s injuries. Which they wouldn’t tell her because she was no one to Will.
“Can you find out how he’s doing?”
Laurel smiled thinly. “You know I can’t. They’re not going to tell you anything, either. Why don’t you go home? Get some rest. Come back later.”
Gracie shook her head, linking her hands in an effort to keep her composure. If she dug her fingernails into the tops of her hands she could focus on the pinch instead of the guilt swamping her.
She’d been this close to deleting his message unheard, and she just... He would have died. He would have died. He’d be dead if she had done that. “What kind of tampering was it?”
“You know I can’t tell you that, either.” Laurel was firm, but apologetic. If Gracie didn’t know Laurel as
well as she did she might have tried to beg, wheedle or manipulate, but Laurel wouldn’t budge. She took her badge more seriously than she took just about everything.
“He’s in danger,” Gracie said flatly.
“I think that’s a safe assumption.”
Gracie met Laurel’s gaze. “You know what this means.”
Laurel sighed. “Not necessarily. If it has something to do with Paula Cooper’s crash... It’s been years. There was no tampering done to her car back then. There’s no evidence this connects at all.”
“Yet.”
Laurel sighed again and slid into the seat next to Gracie. “I’m going to look into it. If I find a link, I’ll investigate it, but you both need to understand this is for the police to figure out.”
Gracie knew Laurel was right, but she also knew Will had come to Rightful Claim, told her he’d figured out a pattern and then his car had been tampered with. Those couldn’t be coincidences.
Laurel would be thorough, Gracie had no doubt. Even if Laurel wasn’t getting married to a Carson, Gracie knew her cousin too well to ever think she’d not follow a lead just because the deceased was a Carson. If there was some connection, Laurel would find it.
Eventually. But Will was in a hospital room with who knew what kind of injuries and Gracie knew she didn’t have time for eventually.
“Gracie.” Laurel’s voice took on a sterner tone. “Promise me you two will let the police handle this.”
Gracie didn’t want to lie to her cousin, but she also didn’t know how she could possibly agree.
“Ms. Delaney?”
Both her and Laurel turned to the nurse, who smiled kindly. Melina knew both of them because their work often brought them to the hospital and since Melina had been Gracie’s babysitter once upon a time. “Not you, Deputy. Gracie, Mr. Cooper is able to see visitors now, and he’s asked for you, if you’d like to go back.”
Gracie hopped to her feet, but so did Laurel.
“I’ll need to speak with Mr. Cooper.”
Melina nodded. “That’ll be fine, but he specifically asked for Gracie. Room 203.”
Laurel started striding that way, but Gracie hurried in front of her. “Laurel, listen, I need you to do me a favor.”
“I’m here in a professional capacity.”
“Please, let me go alone.”
“Gracie.”
“Please, just... Just give me a few minutes alone. I’m not asking you not to question him, I’m just asking that you let me... Look...” She swallowed at the emotion clogging her throat. “Maybe you don’t understand why, but I feel responsible. At least partially. If I’d handled this even remotely differently—”
“You don’t know what would have happened.”
“Maybe not, but... As my best friend and my cousin and just the best human being I know, please give me five minutes alone with him. Personal minutes.”
Laurel sighed heavily. “Five minutes. And I’m right outside the door.”
Gracie gave Laurel an impulsive hug. “Thank you.” Five minutes wasn’t enough really. She’d probably cry when she saw him again. After all, she’d cried in that ambulance. Hopefully Will didn’t remember that.
Still, she’d need those few minutes to try to work through all this...stuff. Guilt. Worry. The desperate need to fix what she’d almost irreparably broken.
She and Laurel walked silently to the room number Melina had given them. Laurel gave a little nod and leaned against the wall next to the door. She glanced at her watch meaningfully.
Five minutes. Gracie blew out a breath and knocked on the door before pushing the door open. It was a small room, but the blinds were open to the bright sunshine outside.
Will sat in his bed and slowly turned to look at her as she closed the door behind her. One arm was in a cast, and his face was a maze of bandages. There was a hospital sheet over the bottom half of his body so she couldn’t see what kind of damage had been done down there.
He was beat-up and clearly a mess, and still he loomed too large in that bed. Like it didn’t matter he’d been pulverized by metal and concrete, he could take it. She almost believed it when he simply sat there and stared at her.
“Hi,” she offered from where she stood rooted by the door.
“Hey,” he returned, and his voice didn’t sound like him at all. She couldn’t read his expression, either. Maybe it was just pain.
She walked haltingly to his bedside knowing she had to say whatever it was she was going to say before her five minutes were up and Laurel came in to question him.
He frowned at her as she came to stand beside his bed. “You... You’ve been here the whole time?”
It was then she realized what he was looking so quizzically at. The dried blood on her sleeve she’d gotten from touching him out there on that frigid roadside.
When she looked back at his face, he was staring hard at hers.
“You haven’t slept,” he said, as though that were some great surprise.
“I was waiting to hear... I didn’t know how bad off you were. You passed out in the ambulance.”
“I don’t... I don’t remember that. The ambulance.”
“What do you remember?”
“Your voice.”
Gracie inhaled and then forgot to exhale. It didn’t mean anything that she was the thing he remembered. It didn’t mean he cared or this mattered, and as guilty as she felt about almost letting him die, she couldn’t let herself get wrapped up in thinking there was some change here. He was still Will, and she was just...his supplier.
“Gracie.” His non-cast arm moved and before she realized what he was doing, he’d taken her hand in his. There was a bandage on top of his hand, and still he gripped her tight. She stared at it.
“Gracie, look at me.”
She forced herself to take her gaze off his much bigger, and far more battered, hand squeezing hers.
His blue gaze was earnest and desperate. A look she recognized, and one that made her heart pinch. Because before last night she would have felt sorry for him, wondered if he needed therapy.
Today, she knew that desperation wasn’t out of place, and that maybe, just maybe, Will’s obsession with the case wasn’t wrong or sad or an attempt not to deal with the complicated feelings about his wife’s infidelity or death.
“You have to get me out of here,” he said, his gaze never leaving hers. “As soon as possible.”
* * *
WILL HURT JUST about everywhere and he knew pretty soon a nurse would come in and pump him full of all sorts of crap.
He preferred the pain. The pain kept him centered, and it reminded him of one simple truth.
He’d been right. All along, he’d been right. Whoever Paula had been having an affair with—whether they’d been involved in her death or not—needed to keep it a secret. He didn’t know how someone had figured out Will had a clue, but clearly someone had.
Still, Gracie wasn’t saying anything. Her hand was limp in his, but she leaned closer. She was a mess. Maybe not physically abused like he currently was, but exhaustion was etched across her sweet face. She had his blood on her shirt and a rip in her jeans. He wondered if it had come from kneeling next to him on the rough asphalt.
He didn’t remember much of anything. Not the crash itself, not the ambulance ride, but he remembered those few seconds of in between where he’d been lying there on fire and freezing at the same time and Gracie suddenly being next to him.
“Will,” she whispered. “Laurel is right outside.”
He blinked. Then nodded. “We’ll discuss it later then.”
“There isn’t anything to discuss. You have to stay in the hospital till a doctor clears you.”
But she still whispered, as if she was afraid her cop cousin was listening. It gave him some hope he could convince her, but it’d have to
wait. He was just afraid he didn’t have much time.
He was hurt, which meant he couldn’t fight anyone off. He probably shouldn’t drive with his arm in a cast, and hell, he didn’t have a car anymore anyway. He’d decided his only chance of survival had been to jump out of the car.
Had he jumped out? He couldn’t actually remember it. But they hadn’t found him in his car, so he had to have done it.
He lifted his nonbroken arm and pressed fingers to his temple, trying to concentrate on the here and now instead of all the fuzziness around the accident.
Here. Now. He needed help, and Gracie was the only one he could trust. He looked up at her. “You do believe me now, don’t you?”
She finally wrapped her fingers around his, just a slight pressure. “Of course I do. How could I not?” She swallowed, and she lifted her free hand as if to touch him.
He found himself intensely wishing she would, but instead she dropped the hand. “I’m sorry.”
“About what?”
“You don’t know how close I was to not listening to your message,” she said, her voice still a whisper though he didn’t think it was about not being heard this time. She looked miserable and devastated. “I was going to delete it. I was cutting you off and it haunts me. If I’d deleted it—”
He hated that look of anguish and guilt on her face. He’d never understood why she’d taken so much of him on her shoulders, and he’d never spent much time trying to figure it out. But she’d been helping him for two years, the only actual person who’d stayed a part of his life after Paula’s death. She shouldn’t feel guilty about anything when she’d been the only one who’d stuck. This girl who had no connection to him prior to telling him his wife had died.
“You would have been right to delete it,” Will said firmly. He didn’t need her guilt. He needed her help. “I get lost in it all and I don’t see beyond it, but you do. You have a life and people who care about you and I know I sound crazy half the time. How could you be as invested in it as me? She wasn’t your wife or even anyone you knew.”