The Unknown Daughter

No, it definitely wasn’t okay.

When had his brother grown up and become so good at reading people? It used to be that the only things Tony paid any attention to were motorcycles and pretty girls. Time was, that was all Eric had cared about, too.

“Hey, Eric?” Angie said over the intercom. “Didn’t you take the call out to the Wilmington place last night?”

“Yeah,” was his monotone reply. He glowered at his brother. Didn’t anyone have anything better to talk about?

“Thought you might like to know. Dispatch got a call. Your break-in suspect just did a three-sixty into oncoming traffic in front of the hospital.”

CHAPTER FOUR

“WILL SHE BE all right?”

“…mild concussion.”

“Why isn’t she waking up?”

“…running some blood tests…under observation until her condition improves…should be coming out of it by now…”

The voices kept pulling at Carrinne, disturbing the peaceful numbness she had no desire to come back from. One of the voices, the deeper one, sounded so familiar. It floated in and out of the disjointed dream playing in her mind.

It had been so long since she’d let herself dream…

The man’s voice belonged to a rugged teenager who had melting brown eyes and could drive a motorcycle like an avenging angel. She was sitting behind him as he raced his Harley down a country highway. Her arms wrapped around his muscled body, she leaned close and let the wind and the rush of danger take her. She was sixteen again, and with him she was wanted and safe. Closing her eyes and resting her cheek against his leather-covered back, she whispered words of love into the wind, knowing he’d never want to hear them, but yearning to say them anyway. He needed her, when no one had ever needed her. And though he didn’t know it yet, he’d given her the most precious gift of all.

They were going to love each other always.

“Carrinne?” He called to her from somewhere that wasn’t the dream. “Carrinne, it’s time to wake up. Can you hear me, darlin’? Wake up for me.”

He wanted her to wake up. And what he wanted became what she wanted, too, just as it had when she was sixteen. Swimming up from her dream, she looked back one last time, down that endless country road. But he was already driving away, the motorcycle just a speck on the horizon.

A sickening throb behind her eyes kept her from running after him. Grounded more firmly in the present with each passing second, she realized she hadn’t really been dreaming at all. Instead, she’d been remembering her first taste of how cruel dreams could be when they crashed head-first into reality.

Pain hit her full-out, yanking her away from the memory of the last ride she and Eric had taken on his motorcycle. The ride on which she’d planned to tell him she was pregnant. But before she could, he’d destroyed everything. He couldn’t deal with having a kid like her in his life anymore, he’d said. He wanted her to stay away from him. Then he’d driven away, taking everything that she’d cared about with him. Everything except Maggie.

Through her closed eyelids, an overhead light shot daggers into her skull. She tried to shade her eyes with her hand.

“Open your eyes, Carrinne.” The voice really did belong to Eric. A very grown-up Eric. “Doctor, I think she’s coming to.”

“What’s going on?” She struggled to make sense of the confusing signals her brain couldn’t seem to process.

A hand pressed her down as she tried to sit up. “You’ve been in an accident. Hold still until the doctor can take another look.”

Blinking, groaning as nausea rolled in her stomach, she’d barely managed to focus on Eric before a man in a white coat appeared.

“I’m Dr. Burns.” He shined a blast of light into each of her eyes. “Can you tell me your name?”

“Carrinne.” She winced. “Carrinne Wilmington.”

“And the day?”

“It’s…um…it’s July…thirteenth or fourteenth.”

“Uh-huh.” He checked her pulse while he studied the display on the machine attached to the pressure cuff on her arm. “Good. Now can you tell me what you remember from this morning?”

Her gaze strayed to Eric. He was dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans rather than his sheriff’s uniform. What had happened? What on earth was he doing here?

His reassuring smile was as unexpected as the touch of his hand, the slight squeeze he gave her fingers.

“Um,” she stuttered, her mind still too full of the past to focus on the doctor’s questions. “This morning…”

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Eric prompted. He soothed the inside of her palm with his thumb, something he’d done when they were teenagers.

“I…” Pulling her hand away was nearly impossible, but she managed it. She focused on the doctor. “I was visiting my grandfather… Then I rode the elevator down to the parking deck.”

“And after that?” the doctor asked.

“Nothing…I…I don’t know what happened next.” Concentrating made the throbbing in her head worse. “I was driving out of the deck, and… Someone said something about an accident?”

“At the light turning onto Crabapple.” Eric’s expression darkened. “You ran it and pulled in front of a pickup truck.”

“I…” She rubbed her temple. “I remember a red truck… But that’s not right… There was a van, or a bigger truck behind me…” Why couldn’t she remember? “Was anyone hurt?”

The doctor jotted notes onto a chart. “I hear your car and the truck that hit you are both a mess, but the other driver was unharmed, and you seem to have suffered only a mild concussion—”

“What do you mean a bigger truck?” Eric asked over the doctor. When she only stared, her thoughts still a jumble of mixed images, he took her hand again. “You said there was a van or a bigger truck involved in the accident.”

“I don’t know… I don’t remember…”

“Short-term memory loss is very common with a concussed brain,” the doctor offered.

“It’s just that I know there’s something more.” She hated the way she was clinging to Eric’s hand, but her fingers had a mind of their own and had no interest in letting go. “I wouldn’t have run that light. I know how busy Crabapple is this time of day. And there was—”

She coughed, her breath catching on a light-headed feeling she knew all too well.

“There was a van behind me, or a dark truck—” Another series of coughs worked to clear her lungs as her mind filled with the image of a large vehicle barreling up behind her rental car. “I think someone hit me from behind when I stopped at the light.”

“This other vehicle—” Both of Eric’s hands held hers now. His grip was firm. “What exactly did it look like?”

She tried to answer, if only to ease the awful expression on Eric’s face. But the tightness in her chest had other ideas. Another coughing fit stripped her breath away.

“Excuse me, Sheriff.” The doctor stepped between them to listen to her chest through his stethoscope. Eric dropped her hands and moved away.

“Tell me, Ms. Wilmington,” the doctor said. “Have you been fighting off a flu bug or some other kind of infection?”

“No. Why?” Having a good idea why, she glanced at Eric. His scowl deepened as the doctor started probing the lymph nodes behind her ears.

“Because you’re running a midgrade fever, and your pulse and blood pressure are unusually low,” the doctor replied. “Your lungs are clear, but that cough’s concerning me. Your body’s under some kind of stress that may or may not be connected with the accident.”