even amid her distress at finding her store burglarized. Seeing her like this—scared and injured, like a frightened child—was heartrending.
She seemed to drift off again and he knew it was important that he keep her conscious and alert.
“Claire. Claire!”
Her eyes fluttered open with obvious reluctance.
“Tell me about String Fever.”
“My store.”
“I know. I saw it today, remember? I never expected you to be running a bead store. I thought you were going to be a teacher, like my mother. Isn’t that what you went to college to do?”
She nodded a little. “I taught for a few years. Third grade. When…Macy…was little.”
“So how did you go from that to running a bead store?” He didn’t really care—okay, he found everything about her unexpectedly fascinating—but he mostly just needed to keep her talking.
The tactic seemed to be working. He saw a little more clarity in her eyes and maybe even a hint of pride. “Worked for Katherine Thorne before…the divorce. Not for the money, just for fun. After…Jeff left…she asked if…wanted to buy it.”
He pictured Katherine Thorne, sixty-six years old and a five-foot, ninety-eight-pound dynamo. Although tiny in stature and deceptively fragile in appearance, she packed a powerful force of will. Had Katherine really wanted to sell the store or had she only offered it to Claire to give a newly divorced, struggling mom something solid to hang on to? Knowing Katherine’s generosity, he wouldn’t be surprised.
He also hadn’t missed Claire’s phrasing. After Jeff left, she had said. He had assumed her divorce had been a mutual decision. He didn’t know why he’d jumped to that conclusion, but Claire’s subconscious at least didn’t view the end of her marriage that way.
Although he was completely focused on Claire’s precarious situation, some tiny corner of his brain couldn’t believe any man could be such a moron that he would walk away from someone like Claire for a twentysomething bimbo.
Right now, it was a toss-up whether he was more furious with Jeff Bradford or the stupid little prick who caused the accident.
Her eyes flickered closed again and he cursed to himself. Where the hell were the paramedics?
“How do you like being a businesswoman?”
“Wh…what?”
“Your store. Do you like running it?”
“My store was robbed.”
He didn’t like how disoriented she sounded. “I know. The good news is, I think it’s safe to say we found the bad guys.”
He would have preferred a thousand unsolved crimes in his first month on the job to this outcome and he was kicking himself all over again for his handling of the pursuit when the flash of red lights finally heralded the arrival of paramedics on the scene.
Through the hazy filter of snow, Riley watched impatiently while the paramedics conferred on the bank of the reservoir before they finally returned to the ambulance for the gurney.
He spoke nonsense words to Claire while he waited for them. He couldn’t have told anyone what he said. Something about how his mom and his sister were both going to kill him for making Claire stay out here in the cold water this long and about the house he was renting down the street from hers and about the trip he wanted to take somewhere hot—maybe down to the bowels of the earth at the bottom of the Grand Canyon—when this was all over.
Finally, just when he could feel her slipping back into unconsciousness and he was pretty sure he could no longer feel his legs, a couple of paramedics in wet-suits waded through the frigid water toward them.
“It’s about damn time,” he growled. “You stopped for coffee first?”
“Sorry, Chief.” The first paramedic to reach him was some kid who looked barely old enough to drink, with blond streaked surfer hair and the raccoonlike goggle tan of a die-hard skier or snowboarder didn’t look thrilled to be reamed by the new police chief.
“Took us a while to make it around the other accident scene,” the older one, dark with a bushy dark mustache, explained. “What have we got here?”
Riley put away his irritation to focus on Claire. “Female, age thirty-six, possible head, arm and leg injuries. Definitely in shock. I’m concerned about hypothermia, obviously, and also the head injury. She’s been in and out of consciousness for the last ten minutes. Because I couldn’t get a proper assessment of her injuries, I didn’t want to move her without a stretcher, but if you guys had taken much longer, I would have figured something out on my own.”
“We’re here now.” The older paramedic looked inside and Riley saw his eyes widen.
“Hey, there, Claire.”
She opened her eyes slightly and then Riley realized why the guy looked familiar. It was a cousin of hers, Doug Van Duran, a couple years behind him in school.
“Hey, Dougie.”
“You’re in a real mess, Claire.”
“I know.” Her eyes were wide with confusion and panic as the paramedics’ powerful flashlights shone into the vehicle. “My kids?”
“They’re okay,” Riley told her again. “Remember, I told you we got them to shore. Just relax and let the guys here take care of you.”
He had to admit, despite their late arrival at the party, the paramedics seemed competent. He stood by and watched while they assessed her condition, stabilized her neck and back and then prepared to carefully remove her from the vehicle and transfer her to the gurney.
“We’ve got this under control, Chief, if you need to head down the mountain to the other scene,” Van Duran said after a moment.
“I’ll stay until Claire and the kids are in the bus before I check out the situation down there.”
In the gleam of the other kid’s flashlight, he didn’t miss the careful look Doug aimed at him. “You sure about that? I mean, Claire’s got some pretty bad injuries but they seem to be fairly straightforward and her kids are just banged up, from what I understand.”
“Yeah. So?”
“I’m just saying, that’s an ugly scene down there. One DOA and two serious injuries. While we were there, the sheriff was calling in Medivac.”
Fatality. Damn it. He closed his eyes. How many kids had been inside that pickup truck? Yeah, they were robbery suspects and had stupidly chosen to run instead of facing the consequences, but nobody deserved to die because of a chain of idiotic choices.
“We can certainly use another man getting her out of the water, but we can make do without you if you need to head down to the other scene.”
He should be on the scene of a fatal accident in his jurisdiction, especially one he’d been involved with, however inadvertent, but he couldn’t leave Claire. Not yet.
“No,
