The guys helped her load the truck, stowing the suitcases in the back and locking the camper shell. They did another walk-around check, and then stood back to let her leave. She waved goodbye. Blew them each a kiss. Rolled off down the street. They were still watching when she sank below their line of sight.
She hoped Ivan remembered to set the security alarm.
Annie felt a little pang. They still had so much to work out. Complicated lives, routines, and all the nuances of everyday living, so much to explore. They wanted to move in. They wanted her every day. They wanted. Well, so did she. But she wanted it solid and comfortable for all three, and of course, there was the little boy. She had seen his photo. He was adorable. He raised up all those maternal urges that she had buried when she had embraced her single life.
She would miss them. Terribly. She did not want them to know that. It would have been another stake in their arguments, like they needed any help.
Annie pushed that thought away. She had a drive to make. A conference to attend. People to meet. Plots to concoct.
She also intended to catch up on her sleep. A long hot soaking bath was on her agenda. A soak in the hot tub was as well. She had packed a bathing suit that would cover her. She never even considered trying to sneak in a bikini. No, she needed soothing rest and “me” time.
And time to consider how she should break her news.
Chapter Twenty-Four
On her way home, conference over, Annie steered her truck around the curves on the two-lane road, watching her speed, watching for reckless drivers coming at her, watching for dark spots that could become slippery. Another lane was occasionally added on a hill so faster traffic could pass the slower traffic on the upgrade climbs. She appreciated those lanes when they were in her favor, but knew they could be dangerous when the oncoming driver misjudged how many feet were needed to pass a lumbering RV.
Tell-tale signs. A flicker of light. Focused on anything that signaled traffic coming, she stayed relatively alert, her eyes and brain almost on autopilot.
She was thinking about all the things she needed to get back to, all the decisions, all the ideas in her notebooks.
Annie had missed the guys terribly, something that had surprised her. Three days without seeing them, touching them, playing sex strumpet with them. Not that they did that every day. Sometimes they cuddled up and watched a movie, pure distraction from a hard day at work. The sleeper sofa was open more than it was closed. Which was comfortable. What an interesting word.
They had learned they could talk about their day, that she wouldn’t push, that she wouldn’t pry when they were not ready to share, that she had respect for their profession. She was still learning about them. Their hobbies, their off-duty activities. They were still learning her interests. It took time to open up and share one’s life, dreams, and ambitions with someone.
She was feeling deprived of that sharing, felt the interruption in the evolution of their relationships. She was also hot, bothered, sex starved. It wasn’t just the sex. It was quiet times, watching movies, discussing their days—at least what they could discuss. The serious arguments over news stories, crimes, politics. Talking. She missed talking to them. She missed feeling protected.
Okay. You miss cuddling.
Annie had become addicted to having them in her life just that fast. Having them in her life was like having air. Too dependent? No. She wasn’t dependent. If anything, she was too independent. But that was probably good for them.
She enjoyed them. She enjoyed being part of their world. She loved having them in hers.
But really, the retreat had been good for her. Refocused her on her writing. Her career. Because she needed her career. Writing was like breathing, something that had surprised her when she had first discovered it. She had to do it to survive. It was in her blood. Look how many story ideas, how many pages of her handy plot collection notebooks had she filled? Scribbled. Hoped she could decipher. Look how much she had learned? It never stopped. The publishing business changed every day. It was still shaking out. Indie publishing was going mainstream.
She needed writing almost as much as she needed Ivan and Troy. Something she had come to understand while she was so far away from them. Or far enough that they couldn’t arrive even if she called.
God, girl, you got it bad.
Annie had been given access to other cops for ride alongs, had been introduced as a friend of a friend, had been driven around during a shift by a few cops. She had picked up pieces of lives and story ideas. Essential research for her books. She had interviewed each one. Sometimes using similar questions. Sometimes using other questions. Most of her contacts were quite willing to answer questions.
She had even interviewed her twins, although they had insisted that they all be nude for that. Took three sessions to finish. Somehow they always got sidetracked.
She had gone off to the retreat with notes and come home with outlined stories. It felt good.
She was also coming home to resolve the eight hundred pound gorilla in the room. The little boy, Troy’s son, who looked like Troy in miniature. A new house. And meeting the parental units.
They were waiting to introduce Troy Junior to Annie, because that meant confronting the parental units with the lifestyle they had chosen. That was the bigger problem.
How did the parents not know about them? Silly question. Boys were very secretive creatures. She’d bet their mother knew. Mothers always knew. She wondered if she’d like their mother. Probably. She sounded like a pretty good mom, and now a pretty good grandmother. It also sounded like she was very involved with the boy.
Annie thought about that. It was a problem that needed a good resolution, that was settled to everyone’s satisfaction, including the grandparents’ and the boy’s.
Solvable, she thought. Definitely.
Troy was not flirting at work. It had been noticed. He shrugged it off and said he was copying his older brother.
There was a big police picnic coming up. It would run through three shifts. They were still discussing introducing her around. They hadn’t worked out how.
Some guys knew they had played with the two and one sexual romps. Some of the other guys had tried similar adventures. Others knew about the double-dating games of switching partners. One didn’t need to be a twin for that.
If she showed up on Ivan’s arm, what would their cop family think? What would that do to Troy?
Bobby had just moved back into his apartment. They reported that Troy Junior thought that was great. Now he got to visit that park and use the swing set. She had been right. The child wanted his routine. Children could survive most anything if a parent held the line on their routine. It grounded them.
When she had said she’d be gone for the weekend at a writer’s retreat, three whole days. Ivan and Troy had complained. It shattered their routine.
She smirked. Men were, no matter what, little boys.
They questioned everything. Got out maps. “Show us where you are driving.”
Studied the road conditions. “They haven’t repaved that road. It’s too narrow.”
The weather. “What if it rains?”
Argued that one of them should drive her back and forth.
Checked out her truck. “When was the last lube and oil?” Then they’d checked her tire pressure.
Knowing how persistent they were, especially Ivan, she had stood on her head and then crawled on her hands and knees around her truck to be sure she couldn’t spot a GPS tracker. Ivan had been warned. She had said no. And she meant them to understand the word no, even if she hardly ever used it.
She had stood her ground, and was careful not to break down laughing in their presence.
Annie needed some independence. They needed to understand that.
This was her chosen career. She did the tech writing and some freelancing. She ran a blog. She wrote her books.
Their jobs were not nine to five. They were twenty-four seven. Those would often be
a writer’s work schedule as well.
Ivan had capitulated first. “Just make sure there aren’t any guys up there smart enough to know how sexy you are.”
She had just laughed. “I’m there to meet other writers, learn new crafts, get work done, and compare notes on different issues of the trade.”
It took her two weeks after her announcement about attending the retreat to calm the guys down. No phone calls were allowed while she was away. They didn’t like that. They pointed out that phone sex was better than no sex. She was adamant. She won. Sort-of.
Her phone was somewhere in the back of the truck, inside her suitcase, where it had remained ever since she drove out of the driveway. She had meant to get the phone out and into her purse, but she actually hated the damn thing. She hated all phones. They represented interruptions.
She hated interruptions.
Well. Certain interruptions.
Annie had warned the boys not to call the resort where the retreat was being held. They might disturb something if they did.
Like a plot bunny. Plot bunnies tended to scatter when spooked. They were just figuring out what she meant about plot bunnies catching onto her ADHD that ended up with her working on four stories at once and starting new ones before older ones were finished. At least starting enough that she could pick up and continue when she circled back. It was hard to explain just what a hyper mind did.
The road before her began to narrow and became curvy. She needed to climb over these low hills to get down to the coast. The drive was becoming a little dangerous and commanded her full attention.
“Stop thinking about the guys. You will be seeing them soon enough.” She killed the radio since it was descending into static. Flexed her hands. Had a slug of cold espresso.
She refocused on the wheel. Two hands, when she wasn’t sipping coffee. The road started sharply climbing in altitude, developing into a lot of blind corners. Lots of them. In the daylight, it was a fun drive. In the near twilight, not so much. She downshifted and held the truck steady at the reduced speed limit.
Long, curvy, the road stretched for miles through brush and young forest. She actually loved driving through these wilderness areas where the road were bordered by trees, sunshine, and shadows. Road signs that had leaping deer on them, usually modified by some twit to sport a red reflector in its nose. Rudolph. The more ominous road signs were the tumbling rocks. So far, she’d never seen anything more than a few loose stones on the road.
The side of these roads was often a steep drop. Guardrails were sparse. She gripped the wheel in both hands. Kept her speed near or under the limit. Was careful coming up on the blind curves. She actually enjoyed this kind of driving. She found it relaxing.
No rain. No ice. Good all-terrain tires. Four-wheel drive assist on her truck.
Music on the radio. Peaceful.
She was one of those people who thought a long drive was a relaxing escape.
She slowed a bit for the blind curve up ahead.
So far, so good.
Chapter Twenty-Five
It was sudden.
Without warning.
A pothole the size of a small sinkhole dropped open just as Annie made it around the curve.
She was going in.
Pulling on the wheel would do nothing as her front tires had already hit air.
Her truck fell sharply forward. Her right front tire slammed down, twisting the truck cockeyed in relation to the road as it dove nose first into the hole. Her head hit the window sidewall. No time to protect it.
The truck’s backend flew into the air, landing in an end-over-end bouncing roll. It crashed on its side and flipped over the guardrail to land on its wheels. Its weight, its speed, and the soft forest floor it landed on did nothing to stop it. The truck skidded in the leaf and pine needle mulch and began moving in a downhill slide.
The engine had stalled out. Brakes were useless and without power, non-existent. So was steering.
Annie didn’t know what direction she went tumbling in, but when the air bag exploded, she had a cushioned ride. She grabbed her neck. Braced it. She had hit her head slightly on the side window, not enough to knock her out.
During the roll, she was only aware that she had no control over what the truck was doing, was going to do, or where she would end up. Glimpses of trees, shrubs, sky, dirt, flew by in a blur accompanied with the sounds of metal tearing, that ugly screech of metal on metal, and the crash of metal on nature. All these images and sounds raced past. Scrambled. Eggbeater rollover. Washing machine window view. She had slammed into the seatbelt restraint. Been shaken like a rag doll.
Time dilation. Happened during accidents.
She knew this was it. She was remarkably calm. There was nothing else to be.
Annie knew she was falling lower than the road. That meant she had gone over the steep edge. The edge dropped some four thousand feet in places. She wasn’t certain, but this had to be one of those places where she could look over the edge and not see the bottom. That was why there had been a section of guardrail. A silent sentinel.
She still held her head, keeping it from hitting the side window again. As an older model truck, there was no side air bag. For this crash, she thought a helmet and a race driver’s seatbelt wouldn’t have made a difference. She’d flown in an aerobat aircraft, a small plane that her instructor would put through barrel rolls and loops at the end of her class. It had a military seat belt. Even that would not have helped.
The truck finally stopped skidding, screeching and creaking ceasing. It was propped on a tree, battered nose in the air and resting halfway up the trunk. She assumed she’d gone ass over teakettle. She estimated a forty-five degree tilt on this landing. She looked to the driver’s side. Hill.
She had landed on the hill. The road was somewhere above her. God knew what was below. Her mind raced to integrate all the signals, all the stimuli, and her chest tried to recover some degree of normalcy in breathing.
The tree was not big enough to hold this weight for long.
That fact was blatant in her thought process. The Tacoma was a one ton hunk of metal.
She sat still. Controlled her breathing. Tried not to do any more screaming than she already had done. The airbag was not deflating.
Problem number one. She slid, actually scrabbled her right hand to the center console, lifted the lid enough to reach in and fumble for the paring knife. She got it in a two-fingered grip. Thank heavens the handle had been sticking up. Could have been worse.
She stabbed the air bag. First thing to do. Get free.
Pulling her arm back, she stabbed it again and again. Fast and quick, because she was feeling stabby and needed to let off some of the fear.
As the bag deflated, she pushed it away from her face. There were the sounds of the slow splintering of wood. She forced herself to concentrate.
She felt the steering wheel. She was pressed up against it, but she could breathe. Certainly better then before. Damn bags were death traps!
Problem number two. No GPS on the truck or the phone. Of course not. Hadn’t she fought and fought not to have that? If she got out of this, they would never let her live it down. She could almost hear them. She wanted desperately to hear them. She’d let them spank her. Maybe. Actually, she had promised to spank them. She forced herself to focus. This was something she couldn’t fix.
Problem number three. The cell phone was back in the camper shell, and from the angle she was in, the camper shell door was what the truck was sitting on. Alternatively, the camper door could be already ripped off, and the suitcase could be anywhere. She would not be able to get to it even if she spotted it. Climbing downhill was not her intension.
Problem number four. More serious. She was bleeding from a head injury. Her neck would start hurting because it had signaled that it would. However slight the bump, muscles were jarred. She’d need to wrap her neck in something to stabilize it.
Annie took note again of what was beside her. T
he view out the passenger window was treetops.
A steep drop off. If the tree gave way, and given that an unloaded Tacoma was still a two thousand pound truck—a full ton—the tree could snap and the truck continue its downhill slide. She needed to get out. Now.
She punched the seatbelt release. No joy. It had become jammed. Of course. Murphy’s law.
The knife was as dull as yesterday’s razor. It was all she had. She started sawing on the seatbelt, cursing all the while since it was a new one. She occasionally replaced them, safety-conscious as she was. Irrational, she knew, but she let herself bitch. It was a release to vent.
The ground was steep on the driver’s side, stretching almost vertically up. There was a gentler slope surrounding the driver’s door that reached up to the sheer wall. Good. She could get out. She just needed to get the damn door open and the belt to sever.
She had no way to climb all the way up to the road. Ropes would be required.
Getting out of the truck was paramount. If the truck fell now, she’d be in her tomb, and, thanks to her efforts, without a seatbelt.
The tree shifted, creaking, and she could hear the snap of wood splintering. When enough of the trunk of the sapling had broken, the rest would fail. By the time she had the belt cut, her vision started to go in and out.
She reached carefully down to retrieve the bottle of diet Gatorade, which had bounced around and landed in the driver’s side foot well. Reached around and found two of the water bottles she kept in the truck. They had been thrown pell-mell and also were in the foot well.
She hooked her purse. It was zipped shut. Thank heavens.
There was a tote bag with a seat cushion and a large candy bar from the meeting. The first aid kit was not to be tried for. It was in the glove compartment. The big one was in the camper shell. Or not. She shoved all loose pieces into the tote.
Annie strapped everything she had retrieved around her neck and tried the door. At first she panicked. It wouldn’t open. Then she noticed that the latch was down. This was an older truck. She could manually lift the lock if it hadn’t jammed like the seat belt. After that, there was the question of the door itself opening. Were the hinges damaged? Was the door blocked by debris?
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