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“Thank you for coming.” My breathing is ragged, my muscles burning in protest and exhaustion.
“Yeah. I was out this way, meeting with a family, when he called me. Figured I’d come see if you needed help.”
Reaching up, I flip on the cab light over the backseat. It illuminates her features in a soft, orange glow. Carefully, I move strands of dark hair out of her face. That bruising on the side of her face and the cut on her lip seem to be the only visible injuries.
As Garrison races toward the hospital, though, I take time to quickly look over the rest of her. For the first time since pulling her out of the water, I realize she’s wearing scrubs. They’re brightly colored, her top adorned with red cardinals against a splash of white and green.
A nurse?
Was she on her way home from work when she slid off the road?
I lean down to study the bruising better when I note what looks like a circular pattern around the side of her throat.
The kind of bruising you’d get from a hand around your throat.
Which means that my initial instincts were right and the damage to her face was not a result of the accident.
“What are you thinking, Tank?” Garrison asks as he speeds through the storm.
“I’m not sure.” I meet his gaze in the rearview mirror. “She has quite a bit of bruising around the back of her neck.”
“Back of the neck seems an odd place for accident-related bruising.”
“Exactly.” Anger burns in my gut, igniting an all-too-familiar desire to destroy.
Garrison meets my gaze in the rearview mirror once again, and I know he’s wondering the same thing I am: was she running from someone and ended up in the water? Now that she’s alive, is she still in danger? How much more is there to this story?
Chapter 3
Dahlia
The world comes crashing back to me, ripping me out of the darkness. I try to sit up, but pain in my body keeps me on my back. Somewhere in the distance, an alarm screeches.
“Easy,” a deep voice says.
“Where am I?” I choke out as I blink rapidly to clear my blurry vision.
Except…it doesn’t clear.
“I’ll get the doctor,” a woman says.
What happened? Where am I?
“What happened?” There’s not an inch of my body that doesn’t ache, and even as I struggle to see, the room is nothing but a blur without my glasses. “I need my glasses. I can’t see.”
“Here.” The gruff voice is back, and he presses something against my hand. “They were tangled in your hair when I pulled you out.”
Tangled in my hair? Pulled me out?
Out of where?
I slide the glasses onto my face and blink rapidly as another light is turned on over a sink to the right of where I am.
The room comes into focus.
A single bed with rails, crisp, white walls, the overwhelming stench of industrial cleaner. A hospital. Why am I in a hospital? Before the panic can even fully set in, though, my gaze lands on him, and I lose focus on everything else.
The guy towers in the room. There’s literally no other way to explain the sheer force of his presence. A black t-shirt is stretched over broad shoulders, and tapers down to a trim waist. Dark jeans hug the bottom half of his body before meeting a pair of black motorcycle boots.
