As Jaxon approached he was sick with dread, terrified at what he might see when he got his first glimpse inside the car. Images of his mother’s lifeless body flashed through his mind like lightning, threatening to make his knees give out.
“No! Not this time,” Jaxon, muttered to himself. He would not be weak. He would not let another life be uselessly stamped out by a senseless accident. Not if he could help it.
“Hello!” Jaxon called, stumbling to a stop next to the Jeep. He tentatively peered into the driver’s side door, getting his first glimpse of blood smeared across the deflated airbags. Not good! He pushed past the bile rising in his throat. “Hello? Are you hurt?”
No response.
Jaxon looked into the Jeep’s mangled interior catching sight of its only occupant.
No! His heart nearly stopped when he locked eyes on a petite girl with tangled auburn hair. She was slumped in the driver’s seat, leaning at an awkward angle toward the stick shift. Blood trickled from a gash on her arm and forehead. Terror pierced Jaxon’s heart. He tore open the driver’s door, relief flooding him when he heard the girl whimper. She was still alive!
“It’s alright,” he murmured, tentatively touching her arm. “I’m gonna get you some help.”
Jaxon pulled out his phone and dialed 911, quickly rattling off their location and the severity of the accident. The dispatcher advised him to stay on the line, but Jaxon was itching to call his brother. Conner was on duty. He’d make sure this crime scene was preserved, unlike what happened with their accident.
“I need to call my brother,” Jaxon said into the phone.
“Sir, please stay on the line until EMS arrives.”
“But my brother—”
The girl in the car cried out and Jaxon nearly dropped the phone when he looked back at her. She’d come to and was squirming in her seat trying to move, and Jaxon saw why. Thick, dark smoke had started rising from under the crumpled hood.
“Shit!”
The girl shrieked again and Jaxon was at her side trying to help her out of the car while the 911 dispatcher chattered noisily in the background. Jaxon switched the phone to speaker and put it in his pocket.
“Sir? Sir, are you still there?”
“Yes!” Jaxon shouted as he tried to help the girl unbuckle her seatbelt. At least she’d been wearing it, but now the damn thing was stuck. “The car’s smoking. I’m trying to help the driver get out.”
“Sir, I don’t advise you to move the accident victim,” the dispatcher replied.
“I don’t really have much choice,” Jaxon yelled, continuing to wrestle with the seatbelt. Smoke was starting to billow in through the vents in the dashboard.
“Please don’t leave me,” the girl begged.
“I won’t.” Jaxon looked up at her, meeting her eyes for the first time. Recognition speared him. He went to school with this girl. “Lucy, right?”
She nodded.
“I’m Jaxon and I’m not going to leave you, okay?”
“Okay,” she quavered.
“Are you hurt?”
“I don’t know. My leg . . . I can’t move it.”
Shit. That wasn’t good. But Jaxon didn’t want Lucy to panic. “How ‘bout this. You work on the seatbelt and I’ll work on your leg, alright?”
She nodded. After a few minutes of fussing, Lucy yelled. “Got it!”
The seatbelt finally released her, but Jaxon was still nowhere closer to unpinning her leg. Her right foot was stuck somewhere under the smashed dashboard. Between the smoke, dark interior and confined space, it was impossible to see what she was caught on. Plus, when he pulled his hand back from her calf it was slick with blood. There was no telling how bad her injury was and he didn’t want to hurt her.
“Can you try to move your foot again?” he asked.
Lucy’s face tightened with pain as she tried without luck.
“Here,” Jaxon said wrapping his arms around her slim waist. “Put your arms around me. I’m gonna try to pull you.”
“No!” she shrieked.
“Lucy, I’ve gotta get you out of this car.” The smoke was growing with ferocity. Jaxon knew in a matter of moments he would see flames. “On the count of three, okay?”
She bit her lower lip, but nodded.
“One, two, three!”
Jaxon pulled and Lucy’s scream nearly gutted him, but she’d moved. It was only inches, but still, every inch counted at this point.
“One more time,” Jaxon said. But when his eyes met Lucy’s she looked woozy. Her gaze was unfocused and she was panting.
“Wait,” she whispered.
Jaxon gave her a moment, noticing that beneath the soot and blood, her sun kissed skin had paled about five shades. She looked like she was going to pass out. That was the last thing he needed. “Lucy, stay with me.”
“It hurts,” she murmured, barely coherent.
Shit! Jaxon was going to have to do this with or without her help. “We’re gonna try again, okay? One, two, three!”
Lucy shrieked to life when Jaxon pulled, but she moved a few more inches and Jaxon swore he heard something that sounded like material tearing. He reached down under the dash to her trapped leg. The pant leg of her jeans was completely saturated with blood now, but he could also feel a small tear in the fabric near her ankle. It was her jeans that were stuck! That, he could work with.
“Lucy,” he shouted shaking her slightly to keep her conscious. “Your pants are caught on something under the dash. You need to take them off.”
That got her attention. Lucy’s eyes swiveled to his, large and round with horror. “Are you seriously trying to get me out of my pants right now?”
“I’m trying to get you out of this car!” Jaxon yelled. “Now help me get these off,” he demanded reaching for the waistband of her jeans.
“I’m not taking my pants off in front of you! I’m wearing a thong!”
“Would you rather show me your underwear or die?” he shouted.
Anger pooled in Lucy’s round hazel eyes, but she batted his hand away and started undoing her jeans. She shimmied them down past her hips, but the progress stopped there. She still couldn’t move her leg enough to get the jeans off and it was obvious each tiny movement caused her intense pain. Lucy gritted her teeth and pulled her leg again without any luck.
“It’s not working,” she sobbed, letting her head fall back against the seat rest.
“It’s alright. I’m gonna pull you out,” Jaxon said, wrapping his arms around her tiny frame again.
“Wait,” she shrieked. “Let me catch my breath.”
But they were out of time and each smoke-filled breath they took only left them sputtering and weaker. “I’m sorry,” Jaxon said and without counting to three he gripped her waist and pulled with all his might.
Now that Jaxon knew he wasn’t tearing flesh and bone he didn’t hold back. He pulled mercilessly at Lucy, who’d gone limp after a blood-curtling scream ripped from her throat. She was barely conscious, but Jaxon didn’t stop pulling. Two more massive heaves and she was free! She tumbled out of the car on top of him and Jaxon didn’t waist a moment. He scooped her slight body into his arms and climbed a good thirty yards up the hill away from the car that had just caught fire.
Carefully, he set Lucy down, turning to look at the angry flames licking out from under the hood. Jaxon pulled his tee shirt up over his mouth so he could take a smoke-free breath and that’s when he noticed it . . . Lucy wasn’t breathing! Panic lanced through him like a blade made of ice and he began to shake as he checked her for a pulse. It was still there, but thready.
Jaxon’s CPR training came back to him and he checked Lucy’s airway and prepared to give her mouth to mouth. When his lips touched hers he closed off his mind and thought of nothing but forcing life back into her lungs. He didn’t think of how soft her lips were, or that they tasted of cherry chapstick. He ignored the way her mouth parted so willingly, matching to his like they’d been made to fit together
. But when she took her first gasping breath, all of those tiny details came rushing at him with the force of a freight train.
“You’re okay,” Jaxon crooned, hovering over Lucy. “You’re just fine. Take slow breaths.”
The muffled chatter of the dispatcher vibrated in his pocket and Jaxon tore himself away from Lucy for a moment to pick up the phone. “Hello?” Jaxon yelled into the phone.
“Sir, can you relay what’s happening?”
“What’s happening is that I just saved this girl’s life no thanks to you.” He was enraged that he didn’t hear any sirens yet. What the hell was taking them so long?
“Sir, are you still with the vehicle?”
“Yes. I got her out of the vehicle, which is on fire now, by the way! Where the hell is the damn ambulance?”
“Six minutes out, sir.”
“I need you to call my brother. He’s an LAPD officer with the 77. Conner Bradburn. Patch him into this accident.”
Not waiting for a response Jaxon shoved his phone back in his pocket and turned his attention back to Lucy. He didn’t like the drowsiness that had settled over her and he wanted to get her further away from the fire in case something exploded or the whole damn hillside went up in flames. He figured the decent thing to do was to give her some modesty too. Jaxon slid her jeans back up over her narrow hips and then lifted Lucy into his arms again. He tapped into the adrenaline pulsing through him and carried her up the incline and toward the road. He did his best not to jostle her, but all the movement caused her to stir.
Lucy’s hazel eyes blinked up at him, unfocused. “Alex?” she murmured.
“No. It’s Jaxon.”
Her eyes fluttered closed.
“I need you to stay with me, Lucy.”
“Don’t leave me,” she mumbled.
“I won’t. But you gotta do the same, do you hear me? Stay with me Lucy. Can you do that?”
Her head rocked to the side and thudded against Jaxon’s chest. No! This wasn’t going down this way. Not after he’d gotten her out of that inferno and kept her breathing. He was not going to let someone else die in his arms. He couldn’t survive that. “Lucy! Open your eyes. Lucy!”
Her eyes flickered open slightly and Jaxon’s heart started beating again.
“Keep talking to me, Lucy. We’re almost there.”
“Where?”
“We’re going to get help.”
“Help?”
“Yes. You just gotta stay with me, okay?”
“Stay?” she whispered.
“Stay with me,” Jaxon growled.
“Stay with you,” she echoed.
Jaxon could barely hear her soft voice over the wail of the approaching ambulance, but she’d said it. She’d said those words he needed to hear. He needed her to fight. He needed it more than she knew.
5
Brooke
When Lucy didn’t show up at the game, Brooke knew something was wrong. And when Lucy didn’t answer the hundredth text Brooke sent, she began to panic.
Brooke couldn’t shake the sense of dread that washed over her as she rushed out of the stadium with the crowd after the soccer match ended. She desperately wished she were back in her dorm room so she could consult her Magic 8 Ball, but she had a sneaking suspicion she wouldn’t like the answer if she asked the question on her mind right now. “Is everything okay with Lucy?” The response ‘very doubtful’ came to Brooke’s mind.
She knew it was hypocritical to bash Alex’s superstitions about his good luck kiss when she had a few a childish habits of her own. But Brooke swore by her Magic 8 Ball. Her Nonni gave it to her for her eighth birthday and Brooke used it religiously ever since. The damn thing was freakishly accurate and Brooke was convinced it held some sort of magic powers. Her Nonni was a self-proclaimed Wiccan, believing in the inner consciousness of the third eye and the powers of prediction it granted. When she gave Brooke the Magic 8 Ball she told her it would help her hone her gift.
Brooke had always thought her Nonni was a bit loopy when she was younger, but the more she used her Magic 8 Ball, the more she was convinced her Nonni might be on to something. Either that or she put some sort of spell on it . . .
Brooke shook her irrational thoughts from her head as she jumped into her powder blue vintage Volkswagen Beetle. She was desperate to get out of the parking lot before Alex could find her and ask her where the hell Lucy was again. One more confrontation and Brooke knew she’d cave. Plus, she didn’t want to look at Trista’s smug face one moment longer.
Alex had chosen to kiss Trista before the game started since Lucy didn’t show up. Of course his cameras had caught the whole thing, so Lucy would see it soon enough. What a slap in the face. Lucy deserved so much better than either of them. It made Brooke’s blood boil when she saw Trista’s satisfied glow after the kiss. The girl was pure evil. Brooke should know.
As she drove, Brooke forced herself to relax with some deep breathing. She pushed thoughts of Trista from her mind and decided to focus on the positive, like how she’d escaped the soccer complex without running into Alex again. She was still worried about not hearing from Lucy, but the more Brooke thought about it, the more likely it seemed that Lucy had just gone back to campus. Maybe she’d realized that traffic was too horrid to get to the game in time and decided to hide in her room rather than face Alex’s lecture. It didn’t explain why she wasn’t answering her phone though. Her battery could be dead, but that wasn’t like Lucy. She was the responsible one. It was always Brooke who was forgetting to charge her phone or blow out the candles she burned in their dorm.
Brooke and Lucy had been assigned as roommates at Saint Andrews Prep their freshman year. They’d been lucky and struck up a friendship right away. They were unlikely friends. Lucy with her tidy, preppy good looks and popularity, and Brooke with her quirky awkwardness and artsy fashion sense. But somehow they clicked.
Over the last four years, they’d become best friends. Well into their last year of high school, there wasn’t much Brooke wouldn’t do for Lucy. Except when it came to Alex. He was pretty much the only subject Lucy and Brooke disagreed about. Brooke was firmly anti-Alex, blatantly telling Lucy that her soccer-star boyfriend was a total bag of dicks and Lucy deserved better.
That’s why when Lucy asked Brooke to lie to him today she knew it must be something important. Normally, to keep their friendship running smoothly, Lucy tried to steer clear of bringing Alex up to Brooke. And she’d never asked for help lying to him before. Maybe this meant there was hope and Lucy was finally seeing the light—aka: that she didn’t need Alex.
Brooke was an eternal optimist, so she clung to the hope that Lucy was finally coming to her senses. She still had trouble ignoring the nagging feeling of unease in her gut, but as she drove onto Saint Andrews campus she told herself everything was fine.
“Lucy’s probably sitting in our dorm room right now,” Brooke muttered. “And she’s gonna have a lot of explaining to do.”
Jaxon
Jaxon called his uncle from the ambulance on the way to the hospital, so he wasn’t surprised to see him waiting at the ER bay when they arrived. His uncle made sure Lucy was rushed to the ER so all her injuries could be assessed and treated. The preliminary report was that she had a concussion and some bruised ribs, but the worst of her injuries was her leg. There was a fracture dangerously close to an artery, so she was rushed off to surgery and Jaxon was left to wait.
He paced the waiting room for what felt like hours. Lucy’s accident kept running on a loop through his mind, muddling together with memories of his own crash. Jaxon couldn’t shake Lucy’s screams of pain. They echoed through his head, mixing with the ghost of his mother’s fatal scream. Lucy’s shrill cries had nearly crippled Jaxon when he’d been trying to pull her from the car. It sounded hauntingly like the wail that escaped his mother before she died. But she’d only screamed once. It was the last sound Jaxon ever heard his mother make. Today, when Lucy’s panicked shrieks continued, it had snapped
something inside of Jaxon.
When he’d stumbled up to her wrecked Jeep and saw blood, Jaxon thought his flashbacks would swallow him whole. He’d had to work hard to remind himself to stay in the present; that it wasn’t his mother inside the car.
That was the closest Jaxon had ever come to losing it since his mother died. For a split second today he thought he was back in that car with her, helpless and terrified. But when he heard Lucy’s voice she’d drawn his attention back to where it belonged. He looked into the smoking Jeep and he saw all the fear he felt reflected in her big hazel eyes and it drove him into action. Action that probably caused severe damage to her leg.
Jaxon wished he could say it was selflessness that kept him pacing the hospital waiting room. But if he was honest, it was guilt. He may have saved Lucy’s life, but at what cost? He couldn’t live with himself if he’d caused permanent damage to her leg. She was his age for Christ’s sake. She was supposed to have her whole life ahead of her. What if she was crippled? And that’s to say if she even made it through surgery.
Jaxon had grown up in a family of doctors and cops. He knew better than most that nothing was guaranteed in situations like this. But there was nothing he could do. Pacing was useless, but sitting still was agonizing, so Jaxon continued to feel helpless as he wore tracks in the shiny white waiting room floor.
Finally, Jaxon’s uncle pushed through the double doors and into the waiting room. He was wearing dark blue scrubs and a tired expression. He pulled his surgeon’s cap off his head and Jaxon’s eyes focused on his temples, where his uncle’s dark hair was shot through with gray. He was young to have gray hair already, but Jaxon imagined the job took its toll. His uncle had been overseeing Lucy’s surgery himself to ease Jaxon’s mind. He looked drained as he approached. “Figured I’d find you here.”
The Accidental Boyfriend: A YA Contemporary Romance Novel (The Boyfriend Series Book 7) Page 3
