by Gina Ardito
On a screech, the car veered off the sidewalk and barreled past her, spraying dirt and pebbles into her face as it drove off. She lay on the ground, too stunned to move, until a groan from behind her forced her to turn her head.
She blinked, and a man’s prostrate body, draped across the narrow strip of grass that bordered the sidewalk, came into focus. He was dressed head-to-toe in white, eyes closed, hand outstretched to touch her.
What the—?
The stranger from the dance club. He’d saved her life by pushing her out of the way of the speeding car. And he’d taken the brunt of the injuries for his good deed. Slowly, she sat up, touched fingers to her temples. Yup. Her head was still intact. Thanks to the stranger who’d played superhero. Who on earth was he? Where did he come from? And how had he known to come to her aid?
“Sir?” No response. “Are you all right?”
The man groaned again, but never moved. How badly was he hurt? Even at this proximity she saw no blood, but did that indicate no injuries? Could he have internal bleeding? His chest rose and fell in a slow but steady rhythm.
He’s alive, that’s for sure. Dead men don’t breathe. Unless they were both dead, and they’d landed in some parallel universe.
“Sir?” she repeated. “Can you hear me? If you can hear me, please move something—a hand, a finger, anything.”
His long blond hair, falling forward over his cheek from the impact, obscured his face. Despite the pain that skittered through her body like water on a hot griddle, she skooched closer to reach out two fingers to push the mane away.
Zoinks. He had the profile of an angel, perfectly sculpted in golden color. High cheekbones, thick lashes she couldn’t obtain with an entire tube of mascara, and a sleek, aquiline nose above full, ruby lips. She touched his cheek, and an eyelid fluttered, but never opened.
“Sir?” she said again. “I’m going to call an ambulance. Just hold on. Don’t move. Okay?”
Not that he looked ready to hop up and start doing jumping jacks.
Scanning the ground, she spotted her purse in the grass, its contents strewn all over the sidewalk. As each movement ratcheted up her pain past eleven on the one-to-ten scale, she dragged her aching body toward the litter of makeup, wallet, keys, date book, and cell phone. Her fingers gripped the edge of the phone and pulled it closer. Great. A jagged crack ran the length of the screen. What were the odds it still worked? Especially since this day had gone so fantastically well so far.
But when she touched the call button, the screen lit up. Oh, thank God! San Andreas Fault ran through the wallpaper of a sunny vineyard, but at least she had a dial tone. With trembling fingers, she punched in 911.
On a loud painful-sounding groan, the man on the ground reached out to her. While she cradled the phone on her shoulder, she clasped his hand. So cold! Colder than a cadaver.
Oh, God, please don’t let him die. Not like Terry.
She couldn’t go through that again. Couldn’t bear to watch another man’s life ebb away while she waited for help to arrive. Help that came too late.
“911. What is your emergency?” A woman’s brusque, nasal voice came on the line.
“I…” Blood filled her mouth, and she spat on the ground before starting again. “I need an ambulance. A man and I have been hit by a car.”
“What’s your name, please?” the operator asked.
“Adar-a.” The last syllable came out on another gob of blood, so she coughed and tried again. “Adara Berros.”
“Okay, Adara. Can you tell me where you are right now?”
Could she? Lifting her gaze, she spotted the street sign at the corner about fifty yards away. Her vision blurry, she narrowed her eyes to make out the names. “We’re near the corner of Broadway and Sixth Street in Pinewood.”
“Great, Adara. Just hang on now. I’m going to alert the police and an ambulance, but I want you to stay on the line with me until they show up, okay?”
“O-okay.” Sweat drenched her palms. Her heartbeat accelerated, pounding against her ribcage like the drums in a punk rock song.
“Tell me about the man you hit—”
“I didn’t hit him. Someone else hit us both.”
“Okay. Tell me about the other victim. Is he conscious?”
“I-I’m not sure. His eyes aren’t open. He groaned a few times, but he hasn’t really moved at all.” She glanced at the beautiful man, lying in the same position since she’d first spotted him near the sidewalk. “He’s on his stomach. I’m afraid to roll him over.”
“Don’t move him,” the woman on the other end ordered. “Just wait for the EMTs. They’ll be there soon. Does he have any visible injuries?”
“There’s no blood. I don’t see a scratch on him. His chest is rising and falling nice and even. He looks so peaceful, almost like he’s sleeping. God, that probably sounds stupid.”
“It doesn’t sound stupid, Adara. You’re doing just fine. How about your injuries?”
“I banged my head on the windshield and fell off the hood. I ache everywhere.”
“Any dizziness?” the operator asked. “Or nausea? Did you lose consciousness at all?”
“No, no. Nothing like that.” A dull ache bloomed in her skull. The man’s fingers tightened on her hand. “The man is in a lot worse shape than I am. I mean, I’m a little shaky, but otherwise, I think I’m okay.”
“Well, considering you’re shaky, you’re doing great. Where’s the car that hit you? Any injuries to the driver?”
“No…” She stopped, looked around. The street was completely deserted. “I mean, I don’t know. The car is gone.”
“Gone?”
“It drove away. I didn’t even see what kind of car. Just the headlights.”
“The ambulance just passed First Street, so you should see them any minute now.” As if the woman’s words had magical powers, a screaming siren cut the late night silence.
“I hear them.”
“Terrific, Adara. Don’t hang up yet. Stay on the line with me until they get to the scene, okay?”
The wails grew louder, and flashing lights came into view. Red, white, and blue illuminated the trees and sidewalk in crazy swirls.
“I see them now.” A static hiss pierced her eardrum.
Then the operator said, “They see you, too, so I’m gonna disconnect. Good luck, Adara.”
“Thanks.” She slid the cell phone closed and leaned to whisper to the fallen man. “The ambulance is here. Everything’s going to be all right now.”
His eyelids fluttered, and a long exhalation of breath left his lips. “Adara.” Both hands clutched hers, icy fingers squeezing hard enough to crush bone. “Stay with me. Please.”
The blare of sirens intensified. A dark sedan, emergency signal whirring from a mount on the dashboard, pulled up at the curb.
Out stepped the man of her dreams. Figuratively speaking, of course. Tall, drop-dead gorgeous, with the self-assured gait of someone who knew he could have any woman he wanted with the snap of his fingers. He waved for the ambulance to pull up alongside his car.
While the medical technicians climbed from the other emergency vehicle, the man knelt beside her. Stonewashed denim eyes studied her carefully. “Miss, I’m Detective Griffin, Suffolk County P.D. Are you the lady who called in the accident?”
Did he say Griffin? Like the creatures in the ancient myths her grandmother used to tell?
As a child, Adara would lie in her bed, covers to her chin, while Gigia spun tales about the gods and goddesses from her homeland. Griffins were fierce protectors, the guardians of hidden treasures. In Greek mythology, the griffin served Nemesis, goddess of retribution. Classical artists depicted the beast with the head, wings, and claws of eagles attached to the body of a lion. But this griffin was one hundred percent human animal, with the profile of a god and the body of a warrior.
“Miss?”
His prompt broke the visions of vengeful goddesses and winged beasts. “Huh? Yes.” Shaking her
head to clear the fog, she turned her full attention to Detective Griffin.
But the stranger in white spoke again. “No, Adara. Please, do not leave me.”
The detective tilted his dark head, leveling those stunning eyes on her, washing her in Pacific blue. “You know him, miss?”
“Not really. He must have followed me out of the Silk Club.” She indicated their clasped hands. “He’s kinda latched onto me.”
When Detective Griffin leaned closer, his face blurred. Clouds floated in the air between them. She raised her hands to break the misty vapors, but her fingers drifted through, grabbing nothing tangible. Where had the world gone?
“Miss?” His eyes narrowed, brow pleating in neat wrinkles. “You okay? Talk to me, honey. What’s your name?”
He called her honey. The compliment lifted her aloft more thoroughly than a hot air balloon. “Adara.”
She barely spoke the name before excruciating pain burned a trail from her chest to her knees. Her toes prickled above a fire licking up from the street. The edges of her vision grew fuzzy, and a high-pitched buzz filled her ears. The earth tipped, and she wavered as if she sat atop a sapling in a windstorm.
From far away, she heard a voice say, “Gotcha!” Then a strong arm wrapped around her waist.
Struck blind, she collapsed against her hero, feeding off his strength. His hold tightened, drawing her close to a rock-hard chest.
Talons clawed her lungs. She gasped and swallowed, seeking enough precious oxygen to fill her chest. Nothing. Her ribs constricted, and sweat popped out on her forehead.
“Adara, sweetheart? You with me?”
She forced her mouth open, but could elicit no sound.
“Oh, shit. She’s hyperventilating. Adara! Can you hear me? Breathe, honey. Come on. In and out. With me. Like this.”
Her eyes filled with desperate, frustrated tears. Terror swirled inside her. No matter how hard she struggled, her lungs refused to inhale.
“Come on, Adara. You can do it. Breathe. Take a nice, deep breath.”
At last, a whisper wafted in. But that piddly amount of air couldn’t sustain her. She choked and coughed, scraping her throat raw. To no avail.
“No, Adara.” His voice came from the end of a tunnel she couldn’t see. “Exhale first. You have to breathe out before you can breathe in again. Come on. You can do it.”
A two-ton weight crushed her chest, and the tilted world began to spin—slowly at first, and then faster and faster until nothing existed but smears of color. The voice called again, but from deeper in the tunnel now, cylindrical walls muffling the words to gibberish.
As her knees buckled, Adara stared up at the twin patches of sky in the griffin’s face and murmured, “I can’t die today. Today’s my birthday.”
Chapter Two
Detective Shane Griffin stared at the woman lying on the gurney. The thick plastic oxygen mask over her nose and mouth didn’t mar her pretty face. Pale blond hair surrounded her head like a platinum cloud. Tissue-thin lids veiled her eyes, but he recalled their color with no prodding. Golden, glossy brown. Like honey. With the help of the mask, she inhaled in a normal rhythm now.
She’d scared the hell out of him when she fainted against him like some damsel in his nephew’s fairy tale book. Damnedest thing he’d ever seen. With such extensive injuries, he wondered how she’d managed to stay seated upright as long as she had. According to the EMT’s quick exam, she had a couple of fractured ribs, a broken ankle, and a collapsed lung.
Shane frowned. The man on the sidewalk, the supposed second victim of this accident, looked perfectly fine. No bleeding, no broken bones, not even a bruise. With the help of the EMTs, he managed to get to his feet and now hovered beside the woman named Adara, as if terrified to let her out of his sight.
What the hell had really happened here? Because he sure as shit didn’t buy the ludicrous hit-and-run excuse she’d given the 911 operator.
Strange how she’d sounded coherent when the operator asked if she was injured. She said she’d bumped her head. She was fine, but shaky. Yeah, right. And I’m President of the United States. She oughta be a helluva lot worse than shaky after surviving the battering she’d apparently endured.
“Hey, Detective.” Sergeant Andrew O’Reilly stepped out of his black and white and approached, notebook in hand.
“How’s it going, Andy?”
“Same crap, smaller shovel. What are you doing here? Slumming?”
“Nah, I just happened to be near the Silk Club when the first call came in about some guy hassling a female customer. Heard about this when I got back in the car and put the two together. Figured I’d give it a look-see. Make sure you guys used proper procedure.”
“Bull.” O’Reilly’s baby face and chipmunk cheeks softened the severity of his frown. “You have a nose for this stuff. You smelled a rat—even over the radio.”
Shane raised a brow, but truth overcame professional courtesy, and he shrugged off the disrespect.
The patrolman jerked his head at the ambulance. “What do you think of this one?”
With a calculating eye, he took in the woman struggling to breathe. Black eyes on her swollen face, arms striped with red welts, bruises on her legs. Meanwhile, the man seemed perfectly fine, coherent, without a scratch on him. Both vics resembled the description the bartender had provided of the male and female from the Silk Club incident. “I think it stinks.”
“Figured you might,” Andy said with a grimace.
Adara and Pretty Boy probably had a fight sometime yesterday, no doubt because she planned an evening out with her girlfriends, without him. Later in the evening, jealousy already spiking his temper, he caught up with her at the Silk Club. Trying to avoid a fight, she hid in the club’s storage room. But when the guy started calling her cell, she must have figured she’d be better off hightailing it outta there altogether. Unfortunately, when she left the club, he followed her out. They got into a heated debate on the street, he started knocking her around. She hit back. Not as strong as Pretty Boy, she took the brunt of the abuse. But she must have hit him hard enough to knock him out. Then, panicked at what she’d done, Adara called in the details as a hit-and-run accident.
Shane sighed again. Even his scenario didn’t sit right in his gut. He wished she’d killed the bastard. She wouldn’t be the first abused woman to take the law into her own hands. Hell, he wished Cassia had done that. At least she’d be alive now.
“Did you get a whiff of the guy?” Andy’s question shook him out of his crime scene reconstruction.
“No.” But he could hazard a guess what the young cop suspected. “Alcohol?”
The sergeant nodded. “The smell’s oozing out of his pores, but not on his breath.”
“So he likes to get drunk before he beats her up,” Shane concluded.
“Either that, or she started nagging him while he was nursing the mother of all hangovers. You know how these things go.” Andy clapped his thumbs against his fingertips, forming the illusion of birds’ beaks. “Yakkity-yak-yak all the time. Finally, after one too many comments like, ‘You’re drunk again,’ and ‘Who were you out with this time?’ our friend over here couldn’t take anymore and hauled off and—”
“Beat her within an inch of her life,” Shane finished in a clipped tone.
Andy dropped his hands to his sides, and his face colored a dozen shades of red before he looked away. “Sorry, Detective. I shouldn’t have gone on like that.”
He stole another glance at Adara Berros strapped to a gurney, oxygen mask literally breathing life into her. “Why not? You’re probably right.” Straightening, he swerved his attention back to Andy. “Any witnesses?”
The sergeant shrugged. “Not a one. Does that surprise you?”
“Not really.” People rarely wanted to get involved in domestic disputes, no matter how ugly.
Time evaporated, and Adara’s ashen face transformed into that of his sister, Cassia, as he’d last seen her—lying on a similar s
tretcher, both eyes swollen shut, blood crusted around a split lip, and the dark stain seeping from the hole in her chest.
Order of protection, my ass. A goddamn useless piece of bureaucratic red tape.
Shane shook his head violently, hoping to erase the visions of Cassia the way his nephew would erase a drawing on his Etch-a-Sketch.
The EMTs lifted Adara into the back of the ambulance. “We’re outta here,” one said as he closed the double doors. “Anything else you want from her, you’ll have to visit College Hospital to get.”
“Yeah, okay.” Shane’s focus remained glued to the small window cut into the ambulance’s right rear door. Nothing met his gaze except plastic IV tubing, white boxes labeled with red crosses and blue lettering, packages of latex gloves marked Large, and medical supplies he didn’t recognize. “Thanks.”
He and Andy stepped toward the curb while the EMTs climbed into the vehicle. Sirens blaring, the ambulance drove off. Once the ear-splitting wail faded to a screech in the distance, Shane turned to Andy. “Let’s get the bastard’s statement.”
He turned to question the man left behind.
But the man was gone.
~~~~
At College Hospital, Shane headed straight for the emergency room. Bypassing the waiting area where dozens of people already sat like wounded sheep, he strode toward the front desk. One dark-haired nurse, white scrubs decorated with dancing images of Pooh and Tigger, sat beneath the glaring white lights, gaze focused on a computer monitor. He stopped there and laid his badge on the gray-speckled counter. “I’m looking for the woman who came in about a half hour ago. Alleged hit and run?”
The nurse looked up, her penciled brows forming apostrophes over her neon blue-shadowed eyes. “I’m fine. Thanks for asking, Shane.”
Damn. He hadn’t recognized her with her hair tied up. Heather Lansky, space kitten extraordinaire, was just a file clerk. Thank God. He wouldn’t trust Heather to care for a houseplant. But her presence now wouldn’t make his current task any easier. “Come on, Heather,” he said. “Cut me some slack. I’m not a morning person.”