Raintree: Inferno Read online

  EIGHTEEN

  Somehow Dante had pulled her shoulder free of the seat belt’s shoulder strap, but the lap belt tightened with a jerk. Something grazed the right side of her head and hit her right shoulder so hard and fast it slammed her backward, and she ended up facedown, with her upper body lying across the console and twisted between the bucket seats. All the horrible screeching noises of tires and crushed metal had stopped, and a strange silence filled the car. Lorna opened her eyes, but her vision was blurred, so she closed them again.

  She’d never been in a car accident before. The sheer speed and violence of it stunned her. She didn’t feel hurt, just…numb, as if a giant had picked her up and body-slammed her to the ground. The hurting part would probably arrive soon enough, she thought fuzzily. The impact had been so ferocious that she was vaguely surprised she was alive.

  Dante! What about Dante?

  Spurred by that urgent thought, she opened her eyes again, but the blurriness persisted and she couldn’t see him. Nothing looked familiar. There was no steering wheel, no dashboard….

  She blinked and slowly realized that she was staring at the back seat. And the blurriness was…fog? No—smoke. She heaved upward in abrupt panic, or tried to, but she couldn’t seem to get any leverage.

  “Lorna?”

  His voice was strained and harsh, as if he were having difficulty speaking, but it was Dante. It came from somewhere behind and above her, which made no sense.

  “Fire,” she managed to say, trying to kick her legs. For some reason she could move only her feet, which was reassuring anyway since they were the farthest away; if they could move, everything between there and her spine must be okay.

  “Not fire—air bags. Are you hurt?”

  If anyone would know whether or not there was a fire, Dante was that person. Lorna took a deep breath, relaxing a little. “I don’t think so. You?”

  “I’m okay.”

  She was in such an awkward position that pain was shooting through her back muscles. Squirming, she managed to work her left arm from beneath her and push with her hand against the back floorboard, trying to lift herself up and around so she could slide back into her seat. “Wait,” Dante said, grabbing her arm. “There’s glass everywhere. You’ll cut yourself to shreds.”

  “I have to move. This position is murder on my back.” But she stopped, because the mental image of what sliding across broken glass would do to her skin wasn’t a good one.

  There were shouts from outside, coming nearer, as passersby stopped and ran to their aid. Someone beat on Dante’s window. “Hey, man! You okay?”

  “Yeah.” Dante raised his voice so he could be heard. She felt his hand against her side as he tried to release his seat belt. The latch was jammed; he gave a lurid curse, then tried once more. On the third try, it popped open. Freed from its restraint, he shifted around, and she felt his hands running down her legs. “Your right foot’s tangled in the air bag. Can you move…” His hand closed over her ankle. “Move your knee toward me and your foot toward your window.”

  Easier said than done, she thought, because she could scarcely maneuver at all. She managed to shift her right knee just a little.

  The man outside Dante’s window grabbed the door handle and tried to pull it open, shaking the car, but the door was jammed. “Try the other side!” she heard Dante yell.

  “This window’s busted out,” said another man, leaning in the front passenger window—or where it had been—and asking urgently, “Are you guys hurt?”

  “We’re okay,” Dante said, leaning over her and pushing on her right ankle while he turned her foot.

  The trap holding her foot relaxed a little, which let her move her knee a bit more. “This proves one thing,” she said, panting from the effort of that small shift.

  “Point your toes like a ballerina. What does it prove?”

  “I’m definitely—ouch!—not precognitive. I didn’t see this coming.”

  “I think it’s safe to say neither of us is a precog.” He grunted, then said, “Here you go.” With one last tug, her foot was free. To the man leaning in the window he said, “Can you find a blanket or something to throw over this glass so you can pull her out?”

  “I don’t need pulling,” Lorna grumbled. “If I can shift around, I’ll be able to climb out.”

  “Just be patient,” Dante said, turning so he could slide his right arm under her chest and shoulders and support her weight a little to give her muscles some rest.

  They could hear sirens blasting through the dry air, but still some distance away.

  A new face, red and perspiring, and belonging to a burly guy wearing a Caterpillar cap, appeared in the broken window. “Had a blanket in my sleeper,” he said, leaning in to arrange the fabric over the seat, then folding the excess into a thick pad to cover the shards of glass still stuck in the broken window.

  “Thank you,” Lorna said fervently as Dante began levering her upright into the seat. Her muscles were screaming from the strain, and the relief of being in a more natural position was so intense that she almost groaned.

  “Here you go,” said the truck driver, reaching through once more and grasping her under the arms, hauling her out through the broken window before she could do it under her own steam.

  She thanked him and everyone else who had reached out to help, then turned and got her first look at the car as Dante came out with the lithe grace of a race car driver, as if exiting through a window was something he did every day.

  But as cool and sexy as he made his exit look, what stunned her to silence was the car.

  The elegant Jaguar was nothing but crumpled and torn sheet metal. It had skidded almost halfway around, the front end crushed against the concrete barrier, the driver’s side almost at a T to the oncoming traffic. If another car had plowed into them after they hit the barrier, Dante would be dead. She didn’t know why no other vehicle had smashed into them; traffic had been heavy enough that it was nothing short of a miracle. She looked at the snarled pileup of cars and trucks and SUVs stopped at all angles, as if people had been locking down their brakes and skidding. There was a three-car fender bender in the right lane, about fifty yards down, but the people were out of their vehicles examining the damage, so they were okay.

  She wasn’t okay. The bottom had dropped out of her stomach, and her heart felt as if someone had punched her in the chest. She had a very clear memory of Dante spinning the steering wheel, sending the Jaguar into a controlled skid—turning the passenger side away from the spew of bullets and his side toward the oncoming traffic.

  She was going to kill him.

  He had no right to take that sort of risk for her. None. They weren’t lovers. They’d met less than forty-eight hours before, under really terrible circumstances, and for most of that time she would gladly have pushed him into traffic herself.

  How dare he be a hero? She didn’t want him to be a hero. She wanted him to be someone whose absence wouldn’t hurt her. She wanted to be able to walk away from him, whole and content unto herself. She didn’t want to think about him afterward. She didn’t want to dream about him.

  Her father hadn’t cared enough to stick around, assuming he’d even known about her. She had no real idea who he was—and neither had her mother. Her mother certainly wouldn’t have risked a nail, much less her life, to save Lorna from anything. So what was this…this stranger doing, putting his own life in danger to protect her? She hated him for doing this to her, for making himself someone whose footprint would always be on her heart.

  What was she supposed to do now?

  She turned her head, searching for him. He was only a few feet away, which she supposed made sense, because if he’d moved any farther away than that she would have been compelled to follow him. He wouldn’t lift that damned mind control he used to shackle her, but he’d risk his life for her—the jerk.

  He normally kept his longish black hair brushed back, but now it was falling around his face. There was a thin