Finally, desperate to change the exhausting rhythm, he dropped his arms and let the big man land a hit to his chest. The move had the desired effect. His assailant was surprised into letting the pattern drop, and the extra heartbeat of time was all Donovan needed to gain some control.
He stepped back, then lifted his foot in a sharp jab. His boot landed on the other man’s shin and sent him down to one knee. Donovan followed the initial kick with a second one, this time to the stomach. He started to issue a third, but the man beneath him reached up a meaty fist, gripped his ankle, then twisted it and brought him to the ground.
Donovan landed with a grunt, then rolled out of the way as the other man pushed to his feet and stalked toward him. As he moved, the sound of tires on gravel filled his ears.
He lifted his head and saw the sedan inching down the alley.
Jordynn.
Relief filled him as he realized she’d decided to get the car going and stood an excellent chance of escape.
As the car sped up, he turned his attention back to saving his own rear end. Though the other man had paused for a second to observe the car’s movement, too, he’d already turned his attention back to Donovan.
“Looks like your girlfriend’s leaving without you,” he said with a smirk.
“Suits me just fine.”
His attacker lunged. Donovan sidestepped. He crouched and readied his fists.
The vehicle had passed them now, and was almost at the end of the alley.
Thank God.
But then it came to a full stop.
What the hell?
The car kicked into Reverse and tore backward instead. It came in wildly, picking up speed, its back end bumping and turning with the acceleration.
“Guess she changed her mind,” the other man said, then lunged again, seeking to take advantage of Donovan’s temporary stillness.
It was a mistake. At the exact moment that he moved, the car’s random path took on a purpose. It angled toward the big man. Then kept going, straight and steady. It slammed into him, knocking him aside with a thud.
Donovan stared at the man’s crumpled form for a moment, then brought his gaze up. From the driver’s seat Jordynn stared back at him, her face a mask of pale, pale shock. Like she couldn’t believe what she’d just done. Then she blinked, and her mouth moved.
Get in, she was saying.
It only took him a second to comply. He darted to the other side of the car, flipped open the door and jumped in.
“Thank you,” he said.
Jordynn licked her lips nervously. “Did I kill him?”
“No, honey.”
“You’re sure?”
“He was twitching just fine.”
“Okay.” She turned her attention out the front windshield.
“We should go,” Donovan said gently. “Before the rest of them figure out what’s going on.”
“I know.”
She didn’t move, and he tried again. “If you want me to drive—”
“I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Jordynn...”
She exhaled. “Let’s just...not talk right this second.”
She took her bound hands and slipped the car from Reverse into Drive, then placed them on top of the steering wheel.
He obeyed her need for silence, but Donovan could only stare at her delicate wrists for a moment before taking action. He fumbled through the untidy stack of objects in the center console until he found a box cutter. He promptly snapped it up and flicked it to the narrow wire that held Jordynn. She didn’t quite flinch as his fingers dug between her wrists and worked in a sawing motion to set her free.
“Thank you,” she said softly.
Donovan issued a short nod, then leaned away again as she guided the car to the end of the alley, this time slowly, then into the street. He fought the urge to ask again if she was all right.
Dumb question. No matter what she says about being fine, it doesn’t make it true.
She was tied up. Had just found out her long-dead boyfriend was actually alive. Had been held at gunpoint, and had her life turned upside down. So far from fine it wasn’t even funny. All because of him.
So he let her drive in silence, not asking where she was headed, not telling her where he thought they should go. Instead, he stared out the window, watching the streets pass by. From what he could see, the town hadn’t changed much. Not in this area, anyway. The same grocery store on the same corner. The same elementary school across from the same high school.
Donovan had a hard time believing that at one point in his life, he’d never been farther than the town limits. Even harder to wrap his head around the idea that he’d never wanted to.
Of course, it had never been Ellisberg itself that’d held him.
His eyes slid back to Jordynn.
Twelve years old.
That was his age when he first realized he’d fallen in love with her. He’d wooed her patiently through their teen years, waiting for her to clue in that it was a forever kind of deal. The easy stuff came first. Movies and stolen kisses and handholding. Then there’d been the complicated stuff. Lovemaking and naming babies they hadn’t had. And the serious stuff. Saving the money from his paper route, then from pumping gas at the local station, until he finally had enough to pay for the promise ring he gave her on her sixteenth birthday.
Donovan had never cared when people called them crazy, or said they were too young. He’d known what he’d wanted and that it would never change.
“Until it did.”
He didn’t realize he’d spoken aloud until she answered him. “What?”
“Nothing, honey,” he said quickly. “Just thinking aloud.”
She glanced his way, then back out the front again, then spoke in a shaky voice. “Did you really come back for my mom’s funeral?”
He closed his eyes for a second before answering. “I needed to know that you were okay.”
“Didn’t you know already that I wasn’t? That I hadn’t been for eight years already?” The quaver had become a slightly angry one.
“I hoped you’d be healing,” he told her. “But I just...”
“What?”
“I kept thinking about when your mom was first diagnosed, and how you told me losing her would break you. I had to come.”
She inhaled a breath that somehow echoed through the car. “And what would’ve happened if you’d found me and I wasn’t dealing with it well?”
He stared out the windshield, then shook his head. “I honestly don’t know.”
She went silent for a moment, then said, “If I ask you something else, will you be honest about that, too?”
“I can try.”
She sighed, said a near-silent, “I guess that will have to do,” then she swallowed.
“These men who are after you—after us, I guess—is it because you did something wrong?”
He felt himself hesitate, bogged down by years of guilt. A decade of questioning every move he’d made since that night. And on the night itself. Wondering so often if his moral code had let him down. If it had been skewed by emotion. Hell. He’d woken up countless nights in a cold sweat, haunted by the decision he’d been forced to make all that time ago.
Had he done something wrong? Maybe. Probably more than one thing.
But not the way she means, he told himself.
And he sure as hell wouldn’t go back and change any of it.
“Dono?”
Her concern-tinged voice drew him back to the present. Jordynn’s safety had been—and remained—the most important thing to him. He loosened his balled-up hands and placed them flat on his thighs.
“Nothing is black-and-white
,” he said gruffly. “But the reason they’re after me has nothing to do with anything I did.”
“Not something you did?”
“Nothing I did,” he said, changing the emphasis just enough to change the meaning, too.
She wasn’t buying it. “Either way, I don’t think you really answered my question.”
He winced. She’d never been anything but smart and intuitive. It made her excellent at reading him. One of the reasons Donovan loved her, and one of the reasons he hadn’t been able to stay.
“Did you do something wrong?” Jordynn asked again.
He couldn’t quite make the word no come out. At his silence, hurt flashed across her face.
“Do you know why I was okay, after my mom died?” she said.
Donovan didn’t want to hear the answer; he was sure he knew already. “Honey.”
“It was because the worst thing had already happened,” she told him. “Because you were dead, and there was nothing left to break.”
Guilt—white-hot and furious—stabbed at Donovan. Forcefully, he reminded himself that he’d done what he’s done for her sake. For her safety and her life.
“Honey—” he said again.
But she cut him off with a cool glare. “Don’t. Please.”
He nodded and turned to stare out the windshield instead, watching the bright horizon. He didn’t realize until that moment that they’d left the old neighborhood behind—the winding, house-thick streets weren’t even visible anymore, which meant they’d crested the top of the natural basin that held the familiar residential area. It also meant they weren’t headed in the right direction. Donovan’s eyes flicked to the side and found the nearing mountain—full of hiking trails and bubbling streams and not a single place to hide a stolen sedan—and his nerves tightened ever further. They needed the highway. The city and its anonymity. Not the wilderness.
“We need to turn around,” he said. “At the very least make our way to Salem.”
Jordynn didn’t look at him, and she didn’t acknowledge the urgency in his voice. “Do you know where we are?”
Donovan lifted his ball cap and ran his fingers over his mess of hair, then tugged his ear. “Yeah. Not where we should be.”
“Look again.”
Frustrated by the hint of stubbornness in her suggestion, but knowing from experience that arguing with her would do no good anyway, he gave the exterior scenery another glance.
Narrowing road.
Increased tree cover.
A few birds overhead.
No way out!
He shoved down the internal shout and made himself focus. To see whatever it was Jordynn wanted him to see.
And there it was. A sign that proclaimed You Are Now Approaching Greyside Mountain Park. And just beyond that—flashing between the thick foliage—a familiar gray structure that made Donovan’s stomach plummet to his knees.
Chapter 5
Jordynn heard Dono’s sharp inhale as she eased the car to the shoulder of the road, then turned and took the nearly invisible turnoff that dipped down beside the bridge. Her own breath rushed through her in a noisy whoosh, and her pulse was thrumming in the tips of her fingers and toes, too. She stared out the windshield and reminded herself that she’d driven to this spot on purpose. Never mind that she hadn’t been able to make herself come here even once since the memorial plaque went up. Some compulsion made her need to see it now. To show it to Donovan.
She let her eyes slide over the bridge.
No one in his or her right mind would call it a romantic piece of architecture. Dull reinforced concrete. It even blocked any view of the sparkling water below. It screamed utilitarian. Safety. All things practical and unpretty. But Jordynn knew better.
On the other side of all that solidity had sat a secret. A narrow ledge, lined with a wrought iron railing. And that railing was set into what was left of a much older bridge, built long before the road had been widened to accommodate the increasing tourist traffic coming through to explore the trails. And the remnants of that bridge were utterly synonymous with romance, at least in Jordynn’s mind.
They’d found it as teenagers when, in search of a little excitement, they’d climbed past the warning sign that forbade them from entering.
She closed her eyes, remembering it.
Of course, it had started out as Dono’s idea. Because he’d been that kind of boy. Always wanting to push the limits, always looking for another way to rebel. Projecting a tough exterior. Jordynn knew, even then, that it was a natural result of losing his mother at such an early age and being left to be raised by his strict, by-the-book policeman dad. But she’d actually liked that about him, because even though she’d had a similar upbringing—deceased father whom she’d never known, and a mother who would’ve preferred to keep her close—Jordynn had gone the other way. Cautious and predictable. A temper she kept under lock and key.
And once he’d dragged her over the concrete structure to the second, hidden one beneath, Jordynn had embraced it full force. Not just because the two of them had spent hours there, fingers entwined, legs dangling dangerously over the edge. And also not just because they’d spent those hours talking about life and dreams, the past and the future. But because it had given her the chance to get to know the softer, more vulnerable side of Dono. A glimpse of the man he would become. The rose on top of the thorns. Fierce, yes. But gentle, too.
So for Jordynn, the ugly structure held every warm memory.
It marked their first kiss. The first time Donovan told her he loved her. The place they’d come to celebrate her sixteenth birthday, when he gave her the promise ring, assuring her he’d be able to afford a real engagement ring sometime soon.
It was the place she’d discovered that she didn’t want to live without him.
And it was the exact spot she’d lost him.
Just hours after a rare argument, Dono’s car—the rickety old hatchback he’d fixed up and lovingly nicknamed “the Beast”—had barreled past that warning sign, plummeted to the rocks and rapids below, then shattered. The local news crews had been in awe of the way the metal crumpled and split, of how the river carried so many pieces so far so fast.
Like Humpty Dumpty, one astute reporter had claimed.
In fact, five years after the accident, a hiker had found the crank handle for one of the Beast’s windows more than fifty miles south at the Ten Falls Canyon.
A crash no one could’ve survived, was the consensus.
And though they’d combed the wild creek and the rivers it fed into, though they were eventually forced to declare him dead officially, they’d never recovered Dono’s body, making all of it seem much more surreal. Of course, now Jordynn knew why.
A breeze ruffled her hair then, and when she opened her eyes in response, she realized Dono had somehow snuck out without her noticing. The car door hung open, and he stood beside the bridge, his eyes on the words of his own memorial.
With the intention of joining him, Jordynn swung the door open and lifted her legs, but as she moved, she was reminded that her feet were still bound together. So she settled for studying his face from a few yards away instead.
What’s he thinking?
She couldn’t imagine. She had a half a dozen conflicting emotions running through her own body. She felt so many things. Relief. Confusion. Anger. And something that bordered on love. She closed her eyes again, fighting it all.
Because it wasn’t fair for him to turn up on her doorstep like this after so many years of buried heartache. Jordynn doubted that she’d ever be able to reconcile the tumble of feelings, even if she got an explanation from him. Which seemed less and less likely as the seconds ticked by.
She lifted her lids and examined the curl of Dono’s lip and the twitch of his brow as he lifted his fingers to run the
m over the plaque.
“Who had this made?” he said over his shoulder.
“Your dad.”
“With just my birthday?”
“He said there was no way to be sure what day you’d actually died on.”
Donovan dropped his hand, then turned her way. “What about you?”
“What are you really asking me, Dono? If I secretly believed you were alive? If I was holding out hope?”
He had the decency to look taken aback. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Good. Because I really thought you were dead. I mean really, truly.”
“Honey—”
Her temper flared. “Don’t honey me.”
“Jordynn.” He said her name firmly, and it was almost worse.
“I knew you were dead,” she told him. “Because if you weren’t, you would’ve come back for me. You would’ve crawled out of the river with a hundred broken bones. And you didn’t. So you couldn’t possibly have been alive.”
Jordynn pulled her hands from the steering wheel and—momentarily forgetting yet again that her feet were still bound—tried to stand. And before she could compensate, she lost her footing and tumbled roughly to the ground.
The sting of stone against flesh made Jordynn cry out, and a heartbeat later, warm hands landed on her elbows and pulled her back to her feet. Dono steadied her, then propped her against the car and met her eyes. For a second, she wondered why he didn’t undo her right away. But then she knew. He had other things on his mind.
As that hazel gaze of his searched her face, a surge of electricity flew from his palms, zapped through Jordynn’s arms, then up to her chest. The sensation—maybe with a little help from the location, too—sent the past ten years spiraling away. And suddenly, it was just the two of them. No bad guys after them for God knew what reason, no phony death and no devastation. Nothing but his hands on her like they used to be every day. His mouth inches away from hers, the way she still dreamed of far more often than she cared to admit. And the heat between them, building just as it always had.
Last Chance Hero Page 6