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Holding her, Hudson froze.
Jessie?
What the hell was Becca saying? Hudson nearly missed the fact that her legs had given way, but he caught her as she collapsed. A dead weight that he had to grab hard or she would fall to the ground.
What the hell? Why had she cried out Jessie’s name? He held her tightly, half dragging, half carrying her away from the smothering smoke and the ear-deadening rush of water and engines.
“Becca,” he whispered, tamping down his alarm as she had turned pale as death. He should have never let her come to the scene. He should have stopped her somehow. Forced her to stay home. Never called her.
But he’d wanted to see her again. From the first second he’d spied her in Blue Note two weeks earlier, he was right back to those days in high school when thoughts of her had consumed him, when he’d felt the guilt of wanting her company more than his own girlfriend’s, when he’d wanted to hold her to him, press himself into her, make love until they were both senseless and sated with passion. He wanted to be with Becca. Wanted to breathe in her scent and bury himself inside her. He’d always wanted to.
“She okay?” Scott asked from thirty feet away, but his face was turned toward the disaster of the fire.
Hudson didn’t answer. Becca was breathing. Breathing hard, actually, as if she were running. He could feel the rapid pounding of her heart against his own. It was like she was in some kind of trance, but it was an active one. She was no passive participant in whatever was going on.
“Becca?”
He was holding her close, but he’d tilted her head back so it was resting in his hand. Her lips quivered and she tried to speak. There was rapid eye movement behind her lids. He was both scared and energized. Vaguely he remembered something from the past-some distant rumor about Becca Ryan fainting and speaking gibberish. He could recall tight knots of high school girls looking at her and snickering. Not Jessie, who, though she’d been jealous of Becca, had not treated her like an outsider. But then Jessie had felt like one, too, sometimes. And not Tamara, who was Becca’s friend, and he didn’t think Renee was part of it. But Evangeline…? Maybe it was just his own feelings about her, but he felt certain she’d been an instigator, one of the finger-pointers eager to slur someone else because her own self-image was so fragile and weak.
“Jessie…” Becca murmured again, and the hairs on the back of Hudson’s neck rose.
Slowly her eyes blinked open and she gazed at him dully for several seconds. Then she jerked in his arms as if pulled by a string.
“I’ve got you,” he said. “It’s all right. It’s okay.”
“I…I went out…” She wrapped her fingers in the lapels of his coat, clinging to him. Her eyes squeezed shut as if she were in pain.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.” She swallowed hard, several times. “This…happens to me.”
“I know.”
She squinted an eye at him, her breath catching. “You know…that I had…a vision?”
“Vision, dream…loss of consciousness,” he said, relieved that she was coherent, her color returning. “You sure you’re okay?”
“Yes. But I saw something.”
“Jessie?”
She ripped herself from his grasp and stared at him. Then she looked around as if slowly remembering where she was and what was going on. “Jessie? No. I-why did you think so?”
“You said her name.”
“I spoke aloud?” That seemed to startle her and she suddenly looked pale enough to faint again.
“Let me drive you home.”
He thought she was going to argue with him, but she jerkily nodded, then lifted her hand to her forehead. “I get headaches,” she said.
“Where’s your car?”
“Uh-in a lot. Willamette Bank and Trust or something like that,” she said, trying to focus.
“I know where it is.”
He helped her to her car and then ensconced her in the passenger seat. She gave him her keys and he, after adjusting the seat away from the steering wheel, pulled out of the parking lot. “What about your truck?” she asked, her head resting on the passenger window. She still looked wan.
