scared to turn around and look.
Dear Lord, help me! Guide me! Keep me safe!
Her breath burned in her chest, threatening to give out for good. She ran for what seemed like forever, but what was probably only thirty to forty minutes. She was in a neighborhood she didn’t recognize, but she was too afraid to slow down. The ground beneath her feet abruptly sloped downward. She missed a step. Her ankle twisted sharply under her weight. Pain knifed up her leg. She gasped and fell hard.
The world somersaulted as she rolled down the steep hill, momentum carrying her faster and faster until she smacked bottom. Her skull met the concrete sidewalk with a hard crack. Fireworks of pain exploded in her head.
A velvet shroud of darkness surrounded her.
* * *
“Alyssa? Are you there? Pick up the phone!” Gage Drummond scowled as he paused, then added in a calmer tone, “Alyssa, please, please call me as soon as you get this message.” He flipped the phone shut, hating the feeling of helplessness.
Where was she? The hospital had called him to pick up Mallory because they couldn’t reach Alyssa. One of Alyssa’s coworkers had assumed he and Alyssa were still engaged and instead of correcting her, he’d agreed to come and get Mallory, hoping to get back into Alyssa’s good graces.
Unfortunately, his good deed backfired, because he couldn’t get in touch with Alyssa, either. He slipped his phone into his pocket and propped one shoulder against the dingy waiting room wall of Trinity Medical Center’s emergency department.
Exhaustion weighed his eyelids. He considered borrowing a cup of the E.D.’s special coma coffee reserved for the graveyard shift. Strong enough to bring you out of a coma, or so Alyssa had claimed.
The memory hurt. He dug his thumbs into his eye sockets in an attempt to ease the pain. Bitter failure coated his tongue. He knew it was his fault she’d left him. But he didn’t know how to fix their broken relationship.
Heaving a deep sigh, he opened his eyes and glanced around the waiting room. Surprisingly quiet for a Friday night, or rather early Saturday morning. A homeless man rocked in the corner, keeping a tight hold on his paper sack. One kid within a group of three—all looking like candidates for a Milwaukee gang with spiked hair dyed garish colors and rows of heavy silver chains encircling their necks—held a bloody bandage over his arm. An elderly woman coughed into a tissue and huddled in her seat, as far from the gang wannabes as she could get.
Gage ground his teeth together, detesting the idea of Alyssa working in this place every day. Shortly after she’d agreed to marry him, a junkie strung out on drugs had swung at her, knocking her to the ground and nearly breaking her jaw. He’d been appalled and angry—but even then, she’d refused to quit. Despite some serious arm-twisting on his part. He’d wanted her to stay home, to be safe. Or at the very least, to find a different type of nursing job. What was wrong with working in a nice clinic somewhere? His construction company was doing well enough that he could support both of them, but she wouldn’t even discuss the possibility. She’d claimed she liked her job, even the part that required her to care for patients who threatened to harm her.
Gage willed the painful memories away. He was here because he needed to find a way to win Alyssa back. Getting up at two-thirty in the morning and picking up Mallory after her accident should win him some extra credit points, right?
“Gage?” Jennifer, the nurse who’d thought he and Alyssa were still engaged, poked her head into the waiting room. “You can see Mallory now.”
Relieved to put the depressing sight of the waiting room behind him, he straightened and followed Jennifer into the arena, an open area surrounded by cubicles. His steel-toed construction boots clunked loudly against the shiny linoleum floor. A sweeping glance at the various employees clustered around the center workstation made him wonder if any of them knew where Alyssa might be. He frowned. He’d dialed her town house at least twenty times since the hospital called. Why hadn’t she answered?
Another man? Gage stumbled, managing to catch himself even though his gut twisted painfully. Logically, he knew Alyssa’s personal life wasn’t any of his business, since she’d broken off their engagement two months ago. A spear of pain stabbed his heart. When she’d given him the ring back, Alyssa’s reasons were that he was too overprotective and that he didn’t have a close relationship with God. He couldn’t figure out what she’d meant. After all, he’d done everything she’d asked of him.
He went to church with her, hadn’t he? And he’d joined her Bible study group. It wasn’t his fault that he had to work late, missing most of the sessions. He owned his own business and couldn’t just switch shifts to get off work the way she did.
After she’d walked out, he’d wondered if maybe the basic truth was simply that Alyssa hadn’t loved him. A possibility that had hurt, more than he’d ever imagined it could.
He scowled, pushing the pain aside, and walked into the doorway of the small cubicle. His gaze rested on his ex-fiancée’s twin sister. He didn’t particularly care for Mallory. She was so completely different from Alyssa. But since she was Alyssa’s sister, he made an effort.
“Hey, Mallory,” he greeted her with forced politeness. “What happened? How are you feeling?”
She opened her eyes and turned her head toward him. A square white bandage partially covered a large abrasion on her forehead. Gage sucked in a quick breath; the physical resemblance shouldn’t have caught him off guard, but it did. Mallory’s blond hair was shoulder length and wavy, whereas Alyssa wore hers much longer and straight. Blue eyes, identical to Alyssa’s, stared suspiciously into his.
He’d subtly avoided his fiancée’s twin because he hadn’t appreciated the way Mallory had flirted with him before they’d gotten engaged. Alyssa had brushed it off as Mallory’s way of protecting her twin, making sure he would be true to Alyssa, but he didn’t buy that theory. He suspected Mallory either wanted to get rid of him, because she was jealous of his relationship with Alyssa, or that she’d wanted to steal him away for herself.
He could have saved her the trouble, because despite their broken engagement, his heart belonged to Alyssa.
Mallory was completely different from Alyssa in too many ways to count. Alyssa upheld her Christian beliefs in everything she said and did, including her stubborn dedication to her career as a trauma nurse. Mallory, on the other hand, was outgoing, known to be the life of the party and an outrageous flirt.
Both women were beautiful on the outside, but in his opinion, only Alyssa had the same beauty deep within. Mallory’s personality held a hard edge, whereas Alyssa’s was softly inviting.
He missed Alyssa. Desperately. He tried not to dwell on the past, but it wasn’t easy. Mallory wordlessly glared at him with distinct annoyance. The corner of her hospital gown slipped off to the side, providing him a distasteful glimpse of the rose and dagger tattoo she wore just below her collarbone.
He quickly averted his gaze, wishing he could just leave. But his job was to get Mallory home. Surely he could manage something so simple.
“Are you ready?” he asked with forced brightness. “I think you’re about to be released, so let’s bust out of here.” There was no sign of the nurse, Jennifer. Where had she gone? To get the discharge paperwork, he hoped. Reluctantly, he tucked his hands in the back pockets of his jeans as he slowly approached Mallory’s bedside.
She bolted
