Page 3 of Her Secret Wish

“Fire department’s on the way. They’ll get her out. Can you squeeze over a little?”

Dean did as he was asked but didn’t let release the pressure on her arm. Rachel’s eyes flicked to the paramedic, then back to his own as if she didn’t want to lose the connection. Dean didn’t want to either. Even as the medic asked her questions, she continued to look at Dean.

“Your eyes are amazing,” she sighed.

Dean gave her a brilliant smile. “Thank you. I have to say, yours are too. Like caramel that’s been left in the sun to melt.”

A cell phone chimed from inside the jumbled car and she choked out a laugh. “I can’t come to the phone right now…”

Dean laughed with her, trying to encourage the lightheartedness, in spite of the situation. “If it’s important they’ll call back.”

“Yeah,” she sighed, her eyes closing. “Maybe you can find it for me if I get out of here.”

“Whenyou get out of here, not if,” he corrected.

But she didn’t respond. “Rachel?”

Things began to move fast then. After he checked her vitals the paramedic working on her managed to fit a cervical collar around her neck and began bandaging her arm. The firemen arrived and it was quickly decided to use hydraulic extraction tools to get her out of the car. Dean told one of the guys what she’d said about her leg and he nodded, stepping up on top of the hood with the huge Jaws of Life machine.

Dean relinquished his hold on her arm to the paramedic and stepped away from the car to give the firemen room to work. But he watched Rachel through the mangled passenger door.

Nathan Killian, another DPD patrol cop and his best buddy, stopped beside him. “Did you see this happen, West?”

Dean nodded and quickly scanned the area. “Unfortunately. Where’s the truck?”

Killian shook his head, shrugging his shoulders. “It totally disappeared. We’ve got several units canvassing the area. If it was decked out like you said, he may not have even sustained any damage.”

Dean nodded, fuming. It was bad enough the woman got hit but the second vehicle leaving the scene of the crime was criminal, literally. “Let me know if you find him, would you? I’m going to stick with her for a while. I’ll tape a statement for you tomorrow morning when I’m back on duty.”

Killian nodded and returned to diagramming the scene.

Dean made sure to stay out of the way of the first-responders. He knew from experience that there was nothing more aggravating than trying to do your job around rubber-necking civilians. But when they finally pulled her from the car a half hour later, he waded over to the gurney heading to the ambulance. She had regained consciousness, her eyes fluttering in the sunlight. Leaning over her he blocked out the sun so that she could focus on him. “See, you made it out.”

“Yeah,” she sighed, eyes drooping closed.

Dean let them load her up, watching closely as they locked the gurney into the back of the vehicle, closed the rear doors and took off.

Chapter Two

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Stunning aquamarine eyeswith mile-long lashes plagued her dreams and as soon as she woke, she wished she could go right back to sleep. Doctors and nurses were poking and prodding her. Somebody walked into the room holding blue x-ray films and the group paused to huddle around it.

“What did I break?” she asked.

One of the young men in the circle turned to look at her. He grinned, looking a little clownish with big glasses perched on his skinny-ass nose.

“Ms. Searles, glad to see you awake. We’re just looking at your scans. Looks like you’ve been through some trauma before.”

She sighed, wishing she could turn the overhead lights off. She couldn’t even turn her head away from the light because of the cervical collar. “Yes. A bit,” she told him, totally tongue-in-cheek.

He turned back to the scan and even she could see the long metal rods in her spine, as well as the half a dozen fixators and twelve screws, showing white on the dark blue background. “Mid-back fracture, T4, 5 and 6 several years ago. Helicopter crash in Afghanistan,” She explained.

Her Doogie Howser doctor turned to look at her, eyes bugging behind his glasses. “Well, luckily for you there doesn’t seem to be any damage to the prior repairs, although I’ll forward these to an orthopedic surgeon to make sure.”

The ball of tension in her stomach eased but she wondered if she should even listen to the kid. He looked like he’d just graduated high school.

A second, more mature man stepped to the side of her bed, reaching to remove the collar. “I don’t think you need this anymore. I’m Dr. Carter. Can you tell us what happened?”

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