He was floundering, trying to find the strength he’d always had to look the worst in the eye and just move along; but for some reason, when he needed it most, it had abandoned him. And now all he was left with was this infuriating female acting as though all he needed were a crash course in Lamaze and he’d somehow be able to give birth to the control and focus he needed.

“Jackson!”

She hit him. Not so Landon could see, but a covert knee just shy of his crotch, forcing aeons of male instinct to jerk back protectively and suck in a much-needed breath.

The wash of oxygen flooded his blood and his brain, even as he grabbed hold of Marissa and crashed her back into the door, the tinny sound of blinds crackling giving away just how old this place was that it still had aluminum blinds. That small detail crystallizing in a maelstrom of grief seemed to anchor him. Not permanently. Not even strongly. Just enough to keep him from throttling a gorgeous redheaded doctor who always smelled too delicious for her own damn good and always seemed one step smarter than he was at any given moment. Jackson let go of her long before Landon could swoop in and play jarhead protector. He took another breath as he stared at her composed features, resenting her for how much more centered each draw for oxygen was making him feel.

“Low blow, Doc,” he said in a dark voice paced to keep his emotions in check. “I doubt they taught you that in touchy-feely doctor school.” He leaned in just a touch, the muscle at his jaw twitching as he gritted his teeth. “How about you take me to identify my sister’s body and we’ll call it even?”

CHAPTER THREE

Docia would’ve woken up with a gasp, but the tube jammed down her windpipe had other ideas. She gagged, wanted to vomit, flailed about weakly, looking for a way to grab for breath. She also had an overwhelming need to pee.

“Docia!”

There was the sound of something wet splashing on the floor and then suddenly she was looking into Jackson’s face, his pallor far too pale and the stress on his features instantly apparent. She couldn’t focus on those details too much, however, because she was suffocating to death.

There was a quick swarm of people over her, nurses and a doctor by the look of their clothes, the reassuring things they said, and the hurried explanations meant to calm her. But the only thing she could find of comfort in the room was Jackson’s familiar face. They had tried to shove him into the corridor, but he had fought to remain, and apparently he was the least of their worries, so they ignored him in order to focus on her.

Finally that horrific tube was yanked out of her throat, leaving her to gag and gasp for breath, the act of coughing sending furious fire burning through her sorely abused lungs. Some moron kept telling her to breathe, as if that were some kind of option. As if the idea had never occurred to her.

She heard Jackson laugh in a burst of incredulity and then realized she’d managed to choke out something like “Go f**k yourself” to the nurse or whoever kept yammering at her.

Though it was surprisingly satisfying, she shocked herself, saying it aloud like that instead of keeping it in her head as she usually did. If not for the need for air, she might have slapped a hand over her mouth in dire feminine despair. But Jackson’s amusement and the desired result of shutting the nurse up stayed her from having too much of a guilty conscience.

Finally she was breathing rather than gagging for every breath. Apparently satisfactorily enough to allow the medical personnel to back off. Then Jackson was on her like white on rice, hugging her as gingerly and as tightly as he could all at once.

“Oh, my God, Sissy, you just about aged me fifty years,” he rasped against her ear as if he were sharing the most horrible of secrets. His desperation was clear and cold, his relief warm and touching. If she’d had any doubt about her brother’s love for her, it was forever erased in that single instant of touch and tragedy. “They told me you were dead. For three hours and twenty-seven minutes I thought you were dead and it was the worst three and a half hours of my life.”

Tears lifted into Docia’s eyes as she felt her brother’s agony, remembered dropping into the water and thinking about him. Hoping he wouldn’t find her body on one of the shores of his patrols. A strange knowing told her he’d been spared that. But still, he’d suffered the loss of her in spite of her having somehow survived the seemingly unsurvivable.

“I’m here,” she whispered to him, unsure if her abused lungs and throat could work but determined to give him the reassurance nonetheless.

“Goddamn right you are,” he said gruffly, pulling back to hold her face in his hands, giving her a little shake. “We Waverlys are made of stern stuff. You kicked that river’s ass.”

“It kicked mine first,” she croaked.

“Details,” he said with a smirk and a shrug. “You can kick a Waverly down, but we’ll always get back up again.”

She nodded in agreement. “But right now, this Waverly has to pee really bad. And can you shut the curtains? That sunlight hurts my head like crazy.”

Jackson glanced down at the side of the bed as he stood up to do her bidding. “You have a catheter,” he told her, moving so she could see the bag partially full of urine and pulling the drapes to seal out the sunlight.

“Eww! Tell them to take it out!”

“That knock on the head has made you very bossy,” he observed dryly.

“I’ve always been bossy,” she argued.

“Have not.”

“Have, too! Now go get the nurse!”

Jackson grinned and moved away from her, although very slowly, as if afraid to let her out of his sight. He inched out the door but finally committed to it and left to do as she asked. That was when Docia realized there was a cop in full uniform standing outside her door. Jackson had been in plain clothes, making her wonder how long she’d been out and what exactly had been going on.

Then she remembered powerful hands slamming into her, shoving her off the rail of the bridge. She remembered with chilling clarity sparks flying as the truck had tried to grind her against the stone.

“What the hell is happening?” she demanded of her brother the instant he returned. “What happened? Why?”

“All good questions,” he said grimly, knowing immediately what she was referring to, it seemed. “What do you remember?”

She told him, surprised at all the details she could recall. At least, she told him about everything before hitting the water. The crazy near death experience she’d had she kept to herself. It was all probably some brain-damage-induced hallucination anyway. Besides, the nurse came in to give her back control of her bladder and she shooed Jackson out. Under normal circumstances, she would have jumped on the opportunity to needle her brother’s squeamish side when it came to the brother/sister wall of privacy he insisted on … such as what bits of her landscaping she liked to keep trimmed or waxed. But they’d both been through a little too much to fall back on old routines so quickly.

Kicked out of the room and left to cool his heels in the hallway, Jackson was dwelling far less on the medical needs of his sister’s body. He wouldn’t care if he had to wipe her butt himself while she was healing. He’d do anything required, as long as it meant she was alive and getting well.

But his focus was on the sicko who had made sport of her, getting a thrill out of running her off the road and then, when it wasn’t enough, pushing her off the bridge. While traffic cams had shown a complete lack of both license plates, the detectives had assured him a truck with that kind of side damage would be easy to find. Now that Docia was awake and firmly on the road to recovery, he was going to make damn sure no one tried to push her off that road again.

“Tolly.”

“Mmm?” The uniformed cop had been assigned to watch over Docia, since technically this had been an attempted murder. The detectives thought it was some kind of sick prank, but just in case it was otherwise, and because Docia was like a sister to half the SPD, they were keeping a careful eye on her.

“I’m going to leave in a few,” Jackson said.

“Don’t worry. She’ll never leave my sight.”

“You better take a whiz now if you need to,” Jackson said sternly, eyeing the coffee in the man’s hand.

Tolly gave him a patient smile, but he put his cup down and headed for the bathroom.

Docia took a breath of the cold, crisp air. A winter storm was moving in, and she could feel it all around her. It had been only three days since she’d awoken in intensive care; Jackson had barely let her out of his sight for all three days, and when he had, he’d sicced Officer Tolliver on her ass like some kind of rabid pit bull. The man would sit in the hallway and she could swear he never blinked. He didn’t so much as flip through a magazine to pass the time. He’d just sit there on high alert, eyeballing everyone who came down the hallway.

It was a little creepy.

Yet comforting.

Earlier today, much to everyone’s surprise, she was discharged and Jackson had brought her home. Tolliver was back at his regular beat and Jackson was trying his best to babysit her. But she didn’t want sitting. It had taken a thirty-minute argument to get him to leave her long enough to get some groceries for her neglected fridge. She welcomed the time alone, seeking normalcy. And fresh air. And walking. Even though her car sat happily repaired in the driveway, she wanted to walk. Even though it was nighttime and the storm was obscuring the clean black sky and all of its sparkly little stars, she wanted to be out in the midst of it. She stood on the sidewalk, staring back at her porch … her safer porch … and made a good show of turning up her nose at it. Safer schmafer. She wasn’t going to let a couple of deviant sadists destroy her love of the town she had grown up in.

But she couldn’t make her feet move away from the front of her tiny little cottage house and that very safe little porch only a driveway’s distance away.

Enough of this! You are strong. You are capable! Enough!

Ever since the accident, she’d found herself lecturing herself in this strident, confident voice. It was more confident and willful than she thought she was, but she appreciated its energetic stubbornness. It gave her a steadiness to her backbone just when she needed it most.

It allowed her to put one foot ahead of the other, to begin a walk along the familiar sidewalks of her block. She kept turning her face up to the sky, as though the sun might be there and she could drink in the heat and light. Except there was no sun. It was a beautiful darkness and a crispy coldness, and she was waiting for those deep black-and-gray clouds to start spitting cold flakes at her. Docia took an extraordinary amount of pleasure in the walk, each and every step, and she realized it was because, for all intents and purposes, she shouldn’t even be there. Every doctor, every nurse … every person who had come into contact with her couldn’t understand how she had survived. They couldn’t help being amazed at the way she’d healed from an inch or two past death to this … this walking, breathing person with another chance at life. Knowing that made every nuance of her walk touch her in sharp, beautiful ways. The rasp of cement beneath her sneakers, the distant barking of someone’s dog and the way it sounded more goofy than threatening … the rustle of her puffy winter coat, which was such a poor replacement for the one she’d rediscovered at the beginning of the season, which she’d been told had been cut away, destroyed, and discarded by EMTs with no interest in preserving her hard-won fashions. They’d preferred to attempt to preserve her hard-won life, and she was okay with that.

Docia could almost feel the frost as it grew on every blade of grass around her. The cold made her recently abused body ache, but again she accepted it as happy signs that she was alive. She had no argument against it. Not today, anyway. Perhaps, over time, she would once again take all these nuances of life for granted, she would fall away into complaints and grumbling about cold or wet days; but then again, perhaps she wouldn’t. Or at least, she hoped not. She hoped she would never take even the simple ability to breathe in for granted ever again.

And perhaps this new attentiveness to everything around her was what enabled her to sense that someone was shadowing her. At first she shrugged it off when the smattering of streetlamps showed nothing to support her paranoia, but only minutes later she felt overwhelmed by the sensation that prickled up and down the back of her neck, forcing her to pay attention to her instincts.

She supposed she ought to have been less obvious about it, been smoother and slick, like some gorgeous heroine in a spy movie who always managed to look perfectly coiffed and stylishly dressed as she made a mysterious drop to an equally mysterious and stylish hero. But she was still battered and bruised and, as earlier noted, had been forced to wear a puffy jacket that had gone out of fashion two years earlier, so suave and cool really were a waste of her time. She craned her neck around, searching for whatever or whoever was giving her this sense of hyperawareness. Maybe there was no one. Maybe her paranoid brother was rubbing off on her. Or maybe those random assholes who thought shoving innocent girls off bridges made for good fun had come to find her and wanted to drag her to the nearest bridge and try again.