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Didn’t care where she was or who the pushy woman who was now touching her shoulder was.
Hospital?
She was injured?
She felt the warmth of the blackness surround her and though she didn’t understand why, she was grateful for the cloak of unknowing, of just letting go and forgetting. Sleep that had been so elusive to her for so long enfolded her in its dreamless and empty fog.
And then again.
How much time had passed she couldn’t guess, didn’t want to.
But unbidden, bits and pieces of the accident swirled through her mind, cutting through the fog, like spinning shards of glass, memories cut deep into her brain, first in one place, then the other. Painful little pictures causing her to wince.
She’d been driving.
Oh, God, had she been drinking?
A huge truck had been racing toward her vehicle, a roaring monster with glowing headlights, bearing down on her. On them.
Crap! Someone had been with her.
Jonas!Yes, yes, hiding in the back seat! Popping up like a gruesome doll in a jack-in-the-box.
And then spinning—wildly rotating over the edge of the cliff.
Screaming!
Twisting, shrieking metal!
Glass splintering. Raining on her.
Thick branches crashing through the windshield!
Her heart raced as she remembered.
Or had it all been a dream? Oh, God, she hoped beyond hope that it was a dream, thatthis—the hospital—it was all a bad, bad nightmare.
She blinked. Eyed her surroundings. Trying to clear her head, to think rationally, to come to grips with where she was.
The room—small, dimly lit but sterile—two women hovering over the bed, the quiet, steady beat of some kind of monitor.
Kara’s heart sank. It was real.
“She’s coming to again,” the woman, a nurse most likely, was saying. “Ms. McIntyre? Kara, how’re you feeling?”
“My head,” she whispered.
“You were in an accident,” the younger nurse said. Kara blinked, saw the nameDANI RUTGERS, RNpinned to the nurse’s scrubs. She was definitely in a hospital room, and there were two nurses nearby. An older woman, brown hair starting to silver, was eyeing the monitors, while a petite woman in her twenties with short dark hair and oversize red glasses—Dani Rutgers—was talking to her. “You’ve got a few cuts and scratches, a major bruise from your seat belt and a head injury.”
“A head . . . ?” Then she remembered the slamming of a tree branch through the broken windshield.
“That’s the concussion,” the older nurse said. Kara reached up, winced a little as she felt some pain in her shoulder, then tenderly touched her forehead, where a bandage was taped. “Six stitches.” The older nurse was curt.
Nurse Rutgers added, “But your CT scan didn’t show any sign of skull fracture.”
“If you’re lucky, you might not even need plastic surgery,” the older nurse observed with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes.
At the moment, plastic surgery was the last thing on Kara’s mind. She was shaking off the cobwebs, starting to feel more alert.
