The time surprised her. She’d slept deeply and dreamlessly but, actually, not that long. As dark as it was, she had expected it to be much later. The low clouds enwrapping the mountaintop had created a premature and eerie darkness.
The ground was now covered with an opaque layer of sleet. It continued to fall, intermingled with freezing rain and what meteorologists call snow grains, tiny chips that look more menacing than their lacy cousins. Tree branches were already encased in tubes of ice, which were growing discernibly thicker. A strong wind buffeted the windowpanes.
It had been careless of her to fall asleep. That mistake was going to cost her a harrowing trip down the mountain road. Even after she reached Cleary, weather would probably factor into her long drive back to Atlanta. Having dispatched her business here, she was anxious to get home, return to her routine, get on with her life. Her office would be a bog of backed-up paperwork, e-mail, and projects, all demanding her immediate attention. But rather than dread her return, she looked forward to tackling the tasks waiting on her.
Besides being homesick for her work, she was ready to leave Dutch’s hometown. She adored Cleary’s ambience and the beautiful, mountainous terrain surrounding it. But the people here had known Dutch and his family for generations. As long as she was his wife, she’d been warmly received and accepted. Now that she had divorced him, townsfolk had turned noticeably cool toward her.
Considering how hostile he’d been when he left the cabin, it was past time for her to leave his territory.
Acting hastily, she carried her suitcase into the front room and set it beside the door. Then she gave the cabin one final, rapid inspection, checking to
see that everything had been turned off and that nothing belonging to her or Dutch had been overlooked.
Satisfied that all was in order, she put on her coat and gloves and opened the front door. The wind struck her with a force that stole her breath. As soon as she stepped onto the porch, ice pellets stung her face. She needed to shield her eyes against them, but it was too dark to put on sunglasses. Squinting against the sleet, she carried her suitcase to the car and placed it in the backseat.
Back inside the cabin, she quickly used her inhaler. Breathing cold air could bring on an asthma attack. The inhaler would help prevent that. Then, taking no time for even one last, nostalgic look around, she pulled the door closed and locked the dead bolt with her key.
The interior of her car was as cold as a refrigerator. She started the motor but had to wait for the defroster to warm before she could go anywhere; the windshield was completely iced over. Pulling her coat more closely around her, she buried her nose and mouth in the collar and concentrated on breathing evenly. Her teeth were chattering, and she couldn’t control her shivers.
Finally the air from the car’s defroster became warm enough to melt the ice on the windshield into a slush, which her windshield wipers were able to sweep away. They couldn’t, however, keep up with the volume of freezing precipitation. Her visibility was sorely limited, but it wasn’t going to improve until she reached lower elevations. She had no choice but to start down the winding Mountain Laurel Road.
It was familiar to her, but she’d never driven it when it was icy. She leaned forward over the steering wheel, peering through the frosted windshield, straining to see beyond the hood ornament.
On the switchbacks, she hugged the right shoulder and rocky embankment, knowing that on the opposite side of the road were steep drop-offs. She caught herself holding her breath through the hairpin curves.
Inside her gloves, her fingertips were so cold they were numb, but her palms were sweaty as she gripped the steering wheel. Tension made the muscles of her shoulders and neck burn. Her anxious breathing grew more uneven.
Hoping to improve her visibility, she rubbed her coat sleeve across the windshield, but all that accomplished was to give her a clearer view of the dizzy swirl of sleet.
And then, suddenly, a human figure leaped from the wooded embankment onto the road directly in her path.
Reflexively she stamped on her brake pedal, remembering too late that braking abruptly was the wrong thing to do on an icy road. The car went into a skid. The figure in her headlights jumped back, trying to get out of the way. Wheels locked, the car slid past him, the back end fishtailing wildly. Lilly felt a bump against her rear fender. With a sinking sensation in her stomach, she realized he’d been struck.
That was her last sickening thought before the car crashed into a tree.
CHAPTER
3
HER AIR BAG DEPLOYED, SMACKING HER IN the face and releasing a choking cloud of powder, which filled the car’s interior. Instinctively she held her breath to avoid breathing it. The seat belt caught her hard across her chest.
In a distant part of her mind, the violence of the impact amazed her. This had been a relatively mild collision, but it left her stunned. She took a mental inventory of body parts and determined that she wasn’t in pain anywhere, only shaken. But the person she’d hit . . . “My God!”
Batting the deflated air bag out of the way, she released her seat belt and shoved open the door. As she scrambled out, she lost her footing and pitched forward. The heels of her hands struck the icy pavement hard, as did her right knee. It hurt like hell.
Using the side of the car for support, she limped around to the rear. Shielding her eyes against the wind with her hand, she spotted the motionless figure lying faceup, head and trunk on the road’s narrow shoulder, legs extending into the road. She could tell by the size of his hiking boots that the victim was male.
As though skating across the glassy pavement, she made her way to him and crouched down. A watch cap was pulled low over his ears and eyebrows. His eyes were closed. She detected no movement of his chest to indicate breathing. She dug beneath the wool scarf around his neck, beneath the collar of his coat, beneath the turtleneck sweater, and searched for a pulse.
Feeling one, she whispered, “Thank God, thank God.”
But then she noticed the spreading dark stain on the rock beneath his head. She was about to lift his head and search for the source of the bleeding when she remembered that an individual with a head wound shouldn’t be moved. Wasn’t that a strict rule of emergency aid? There could be a spinal injury, which moving could exacerbate or even make fatal.
She had no way of determining the extent of his head injury. And that was a visible injury. What injuries might he have sustained that she couldn’t see? Internal bleeding, a rib-punctured lung, a ruptured organ, broken bones. And she didn’t like the look of the awkward angle at which he was lying, as though his back was bowed upward.
She must get help. Immediately. She stood up and turned back toward her car. She could use her cell phone to call 911. Cell service wasn’t always reliable in the mountains, but maybe—
His groan halted her. She turned so quickly her feet almost went out from under her. She knelt beside him again. His eyes fluttered open, and he looked up at her. She’d seen eyes like that only once before. “Tierney?”