Raeanne Thayne Hope's Crossings Series Volume One: Blackberry Summer. RaeAnne Thayne

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СКАЧАТЬ was right. Damn it, he was right. Dread lodged in his chest as he gazed after the sheriff, who returned to his vehicle for crime scene tape and the digital surveying equipment necessary to document the accident scene.

      Riley had made a few notifications in his career. Not many, but a few back when he was a beat cop. Nothing like this, though. Never in his worst nightmare had he envisioned this scenario, having to tell his sister that her daughter was dead, his mother that she had lost a grandchild.

      Numb to the bone, he climbed into the patrol car and turned over the engine. Air blasted him from the heater, prickling over his wet skin, but it did nothing to warm the icy ball in his gut.

      He thought of Claire and her children, frightened and cold and hurt, and then of the incalculable, inconceivable pain he was about to inflict on people he loved. Claire had been hurt—Layla was dead, for God’s sake—because of him, because for a few heedless moments, he had been focused on taking down a suspect at the exclusion of all else.

      The few whispers he’d heard around town since he’d been back seemed to ring in his head. Those who didn’t want him in Hope’s Crossing were right.

      He didn’t belong here. He never should have come home.

      A TERRIFYING SEA CREATURE clutched at her legs, yanking hard, tugging her down, down toward the inky, icy depths of Silver Strike Reservoir.

      Her children. She had to get to her children. She fought the creature with all her might, pitting all the strength of a mama bear protecting her cubs. The creature howled, clamping down hard on an arm and a leg and tangling seaweed in her nose, around her face. He could have her, but damn it, she would not let him have her children. Claire fought harder, struggling against the constriction around her arm, gasping for air, fighting for her children’s lives….

      A sudden clatter and a muttered imprecation pierced the nightmare and Claire blinked awake, her heart still pounding in her chest.

      She was disoriented for a moment and couldn’t figure out why she hurt everywhere. Her mouth felt as if she’d been chewing newsprint and she had the vague sense of something being terribly wrong. For a long moment, she couldn’t quite remember what.

      “Oh, good. You’re awake.”

      Her mother’s face suddenly loomed large in her field of vision and Claire instinctively drew in a sharp breath.

      For a moment, she couldn’t figure out what was so different and then it hit her. For the first time in Claire’s recent memory, her mother wasn’t wearing makeup—not even the lipstick she seemed to put on just for a trip to the bathroom. Ruth looked haggard, her eyes red-rimmed and shadowed.

      “The kids. Where…are they?” Her throat felt scraped raw and that tangle of seaweed tickled her nostrils again. A nasal canula, she realized dimly. She was in a hospital bed, hooked up to monitors and machines, on oxygen.

      “They’re fine,” her mother said calmly. “Owen has a broken arm and Macy needed a couple stitches in her forehead and has general aches and pains, but other than that, they’re just fine. Don’t you worry about them right now. They’ve been staying with Jeff and Holly since the accident.”

      The single word triggered a sharp burst of memory, that snowy night after the Spring Fling, headlights flashing straight toward them in the darkness, her panicked jerk of the wheel to avoid a head-on…

      And then, that terrible moment of sliding out of control, seeing the gap in the guardrail, knowing they were going over.

      “Owen has a cast on his arm but that’s all. Macy cut her forehead just a little, but Jeff doesn’t even think she’ll have a scar.”

      “Jordie?”

      “Wrenched a shoulder, that’s all. Nothing broken.”

      Claire sagged against the pillow. How much time had passed since the accident? A few hours? She glanced down and saw her left leg was in traction, a cast running from her toes to just below her knee. Her left arm sported a cast as well, a vivid purple against the white of the hospital sheets.

      “You definitely had the worst of it,” Ruth said. “Sheriff Grover figures your car landed on the front driver’s side when it hit the water and your body absorbed most of the impact. That’s how you came to be so banged up while the kids are okay, for the most part.”

      Claire closed her eyes, a little prayer of gratitude running through her head. All she remembered thinking in that split second that had seemed to drag on forever was that she’d killed her children.

      “They’ve been begging to come see you,” Ruth said, fussing with the wrinkled edge of the blanket. “But I think Jeff has convinced them to wait until tomorrow, at least until you’re not so disoriented from your surgeries.”

      “Surgeries?”

      “Technically only one, I guess, but they did two things at once. They had to put pins in your arm and your ankle. You really did a number on yourself.”

      Usually Ruth would have made that sort of statement in an accusing sort of voice, as if Claire had given herself a bad perm or pierced her eyebrow, but her mother’s quiet tone tipped Claire that something was off.

      In addition to the hollow look in her mother’s eyes, she was acting far more nurturing than normal. She hadn’t yet made one complaint about how her knees were bothering her or how inconsiderate the nurses had been or about the bad food they served in the cafeteria. What wasn’t Ruth telling her?

      Had she broken her back or something? She tried to wiggle her toes and was almost relieved when that tiny movement—plainly visible at the edge of the cast—sent pain scorching up her leg.

      “Ow.”

      “There, honey. Don’t try to move. Let me call the nurse. You need pain medication. Trust me on this.”

      Before Claire could argue, Ruth had pressed a button on the remote cabled to the bed. Almost instantly, the door opened and a young, fresh-faced nurse with a streaky blond A-line haircut and flowered hospital scrubs pushed open the door.

      I used to babysit Brooke Callahan, Claire thought with some dismay. Could the girl really be old enough to legally operate that stethoscope?

      “Hi, there.” Brooke smiled sweetly and Claire felt about a hundred and sixty years old. “Look at you, sitting up and everything. That’s so awesome! I can’t believe how much better you look tonight than you did this morning when you came out of surgery.”

      Right now she felt like she’d just combat-crawled through heavy artillery fire. How bad must she have looked this morning?

      “You’re a popular person. The phone out at the nurse’s station has been ringing off the hook all day with people who want to know if you can have visitors.”

      She didn’t want visitors. She didn’t want nurses or doctors or even her mother. She just wanted to lie here, close her eyes and go back to that moment when she’d been standing in line at Maura’s place for coffee, when her biggest worry had been whether to use the fire-polished or the cone crystals on Gen Beaumont’s wedding dress.

      “She’s nowhere near ready for visitors,” Ruth said firmly, and Claire knew a tiny СКАЧАТЬ