with the messy roads, the world for Lacey kept swinging round and round as she careened toward the unknown.
She gripped the wheel with one hand as she downshifted. Her headlights came back around to show a drop-off into a black void that would most likely send her down some ravine to be lost until spring.
Maybe never found at all.
Go left. The familiar voice of her brother came from the recesses of her mind. After years of his training with go-carts when she was ten years old, and cars at sixteen, she knew exactly what he would say.
One hard crank of her wheel pulled the car out of the spin and sent her back around, but unfortunately, it sent her in a skid in the opposite direction, straight at the thick, impenetrable tree line she’d been searching through before. The one with no opening, as far as she had been able to tell—and the thick tree trunks with their tentacles of bared branches coming at her said things hadn’t changed. But her headlights showed something was different than before.
Where there was no sign of life before, now a dog ran straight for her, emerging from the forest.
A quick glance behind it and she caught sight of the driveway she’d been looking for. The sharp angle of Captain Wade Spencer’s property was invisible to passersby, but his golden-red Labrador retriever had revealed its opening to her now as her car took aim to gun it down.
Her brake pedal plastered to the floor. The tires’ skid locked their direction on their target. Lacey could do nothing but cry out to God to intervene and save the dog barreling forward.
As if by command, the animal abruptly came to a stop and sat—directly in the car’s path.
“No!” Lacey shouted. That was not what she meant by intervening! At least if the dog was still running, there was a chance of it moving out of the way before impact. Now things could not get worse.
Tears blurred Lacey’s vision, and wails of protest erupted from her lips. She did not want to kill this dog.
Then things got worse.
In addition to the sitting dog, a man now raced out from behind the trees, straight for the canine.
Lacey screamed louder than ever. The skid moved as if in slow motion. The whole incident couldn’t have taken more than a minute from the first bump to this final skid, but in that minute she saw the devastation her impulsiveness was about to cause. If only she had thought this trip through. If only she had been more like the wise Adelaide Phillips.
If only.
Lacey closed her eyes, unable to watch the outcome to her choices, a prayer of forgiveness on her lips and regret in her heart.
* * *
Head. Check.
Feet. Check.
Arms. Check.
Wade Spencer lay in a cold, snow-filled ditch between the trees where he’d landed when he saved his dog from the out-of-control driver. All was negative with his self-exam, a routine that four tours overseas had formed into a habit. His next exam consisted of judging the well-being of Promise, his faithful dog.
Wade lifted his hand to look her over. He burrowed his fingers through her snow-covered fur for injuries. She jumped to all four paws without any problem and shook off the white flakes with little effort. His battle buddy would live to serve another day.
Now, as for the driver, he should be serving, too.
Time.
Wade gained his feet and trudged through the knee-deep snow of the ditch. He stomped up onto the road where the car spun out and came to a halt—right where Promise had been sitting under his command.
If Wade had known a car had been aiming for her, he would have commanded Promise to run, not sit. Out of the hundred and fifty commands the dog knew, any of them would have been better.
At the top of the driveway, he’d heard the car spinning out. His mind had gone to one of the many dark places of his tours where mishaps had been deadly. His feet had responsively set out to be of help in this mishap. Promise had kept up at her place beside him, but she must have thought they were playing, because she’d quickly raced ahead of him. All Wade could do was yell for her to sit. Being the good service dog she was, she did—right in front of the car.
Wade faced the hood of the heap of rust now and heard the words, “You have arrived at your destination” coming from the mechanical voice of the driver’s GPS. The message nearly knocked him over again.
The driver meant to stay?
“I don’t think so.” Wade approached the driver’s side. “This is not your destination. You can keep right on driving.”
A woman in her late twenties sat stock-still behind the wheel, her window blown out from the tree branch she’d collided with. She wore a jean coat and a knitted cap, and her long hair, smooth as liquid chocolate, spilled out from beneath it. The GPS repeated its words again, but all Wade focused on was the terror in the woman’s saucer-size eyes.
Wade pulled the car handle and swung the door wide; the tinkling of falling glass fizzled his tension a bit. The cabin light illuminated the fear in the woman’s face, a pair of brown eyes shimmered and a tear spilled down her blanched cheek. He let the rest of his anger go on a grunt. “Are you hurt?”
She shook her head, but her lips trembled in silence. She squeaked out, “Are you? Or the dog? Did I k-kill the dog?”
Wade gave two sharp whistles, and Promise sidled up beside him with her tail wagging, her bushy eyebrows bouncing up and down as was her typical inquisitive way. “See for yourself.”
A wail escaped the woman’s lips, followed by a bucket of tears.
Wade sighed and reached for her hand to pull her out.
“I’m so sorry,” she cried. “I didn’t see... The car was in a skid.”
“Your South Carolina plates give away your knowledge of the winters up here in New Hampshire, so I’ll cut you some slack, but—”
“And someone was following me. They nearly killed me when they banged into me.”
“Banged into you?” Wade searched up and down the empty street. He dropped her hand to step to the back end of the car. The dent proved her statement. “Which way did they go?”
“I don’t know,” she cried. “I was too busy staying on the road and not going over the ledge.”
“Ledge?” Wade snapped his attention from the dark road to the very ledge that had brought the endless tunnel of darkness to his whole life. An image of another woman, his mother, dead, her neck twisted, flashed in his mind. Just one of the many images of dead people his mind remembered on a daily basis. His breathing picked up.
“Yes, the ledge. I thought I was going over it for sure.” She pointed to it then grabbed her head, pulling the cap off in her anxiety. “I can still see it coming closer and closer.”
Wade nearly grabbed his own head, knowing firsthand the terror she spoke of.
Except,
