that was supposed to lead her to a better place. Or was that just a lie, a myth like unconditional parental love?
She thought she heard a male voice.
St. Peter?
Lucifer?
Batman?
Her mind jumped around from topic to topic like a frog attempting to reach safe ground using lily pads that kept sinking beneath his weight.
The male voice spoke again. This time she heard real words. A question. “How are you feeling?”
Was he talking to her?
With one last massive effort, London concentrated on pushing her lids open. This time she succeeded and saw—a man.
Not Batman, Superman, she amended. No cape, no blue tights that showed off rows of muscles, but definitely Superman. Right down to the chiseled chin and blue-black hair falling into brilliant blue eyes.
She swallowed. Her throat felt like rawhide. He’d asked her something. What? London searched the vacant caverns that comprised her mind and finally found the words, then laced them together.
Feelings, he’d asked something about feelings. No, wait, he’d asked her how was she feeling, yes, that was it.
It was a damn stupid question. How did she look? If she looked half as bad as she felt, Superman had his answer without her saying a word.
“How are you feeling?” Reese repeated for the third time.
He bent over close to her so she could hear him. He had been in twice before, only to find her still sleeping. This time, as he’d checked her chart, he saw her eyes flutter slightly. She was trying to come to.
London took a breath before answering. It felt like someone had shot an arrow into her ribs. “Like…I’ve been…run over…by…a…truck.”
Was that breathy, scratchy voice coming out of her? It didn’t sound like her, London thought. She tried to read Superman’s face and see his reaction to the pitiful noise. Was he recoiling in horror?
No, his eyes were kind. They were smiling.
She liked that. Smiling eyes.
“Not quite a truck,” Reese told her. “They tell me a pole did this.”
The single word brought with it a scene from somewhere within her brain. She and her parents, sitting at a long, white table, watching blond girls in native costumes with wide skirts, black corsets, red boots and wreaths of flowers in their hair, dancing.
Poland, her parents and she had been in Poland.
Poland, the last place her mother had been before she couldn’t be anyplace at all.
“Pole?” she echoed. She didn’t remember hitting a Polish national.
Reese saw the confusion in her face and wondered if she was suffering a bout of amnesia. Her airbag had failed to deploy and she’d hit her head against the steering wheel. Amnesia wasn’t unheard of.
“The one you tried to transplant by running into,” he told her gently, taking her pulse. The rhythm was strong. She had a good constitution. Lucky for her. “The paramedic almost wept over your Jaguar.”
The words were filtering into her brain without encountering matching images. Her jaguar. A pet cat? No, car, her car. The man was talking about her car.
Oh God, now she remembered. It all came rushing back at her as fast as she had raced her car to get away from Wallace.
She’d lost control and totaled her beautiful car.
London groaned, the loss hitting her between the eyes—the only spot on her body that didn’t hurt.
She raised her eyes to look at him as he released her wrist. “Is it totaled?”
“Like an accordion.”
The paramedic, Jaime, was still shaking his head and talking about the colossal waste of metal to anyone within earshot. He drove a small, secondhand foreign car whose odometer had gone full circle twice, and he looked upon the other vehicle as if it was a gift bestowed by the gods. He periodically drooled over Reese’s Corvette.
Reese studied London’s pale complexion for a moment. There was a bandage on her forehead where flesh had met wheel, but apart from that, she was a gorgeous woman, possibly the most perfect specimen he had ever seen. She could have been forever disfigured. Why had she risked losing all that in the blink of an eye?
“What were you trying to prove?”
“Nothing,” she answered quietly. She would have turned her head away if the effort hadn’t hurt so much. So she just looked at him steadily, meeting his probing gaze. “Just looking for space.”
He laughed shortly under his breath. The woman had intelligent eyes, and she certainly didn’t look stupid, but then, looks could be deceiving.
“You very nearly got it. Six feet by six by six,” Reese told her, pausing to write a notation in her chart. “A final space in the family plot.”
Beside her mother, she couldn’t help thinking. Maybe it would be peaceful there and she could finally find out who she was.
A flicker of rebellion rose from some faraway quarter that hadn’t been banged around relentlessly, and London looked at her intrusive surgeon with as much defiance as she could muster.
“A lecture? Save your…breath, doctor…I’ve heard…it all.”
She’d certainly heard more than her share. From her father, from Wallace, although she preferred the latter because at least Wallace was her friend. Her father, well, she didn’t really know what Ambassador Mason Merriweather was or how he figured into her life, other than to impose restrictions on her for as long as she could remember. Even Wallace and the other two bodyguards, Kelly and Andrews were part of her life because of him.
“Not a lecture, a fact,” Reese told her mildly. He slipped her chart back into its slot at the foot of her bed.
She was tired, very tired and there was this wide, soft, inviting region just waiting for her to slip into it. Its pull was becoming irresistible, but London struggled to ask one more question.
“Did you do it?”
The question caught him off guard. Reese looked at her. She appeared to be drifting off again. In another moment she’d be asleep, and the keeper at the gate would have to continue to wait before he would have the opportunity to talk with her.
“Do what?” Reese asked.
Every word was a struggle. Her mind was shutting down again. “Save…my…life.”
What he had done was utilize his training, his education and his instincts, not to mention the up-to-date technology that a hospital like Blair Memorial had to offer. There was no doubt in his mind that twenty years ago she would already have been dead. But even now, with all this at his disposal, there remained at bottom the x-factor. That tiny bit
