For Her Eyes Only

Lamplight flickered in a corner of the room.

Jessica groaned and clutched at her head as she rolled toward the glow, but the act of moving had not been wise. Her stomach lurched and she gritted her teeth. With a moan, she closed her eyes as she grabbed at the floor, waiting for the world to quit bucking.

She took a deep breath and, choosing one of her more colorful epithets to express her dismay, dug her fingers into the carpet’s pile and muttered.

“Rat feet. Rat feet. Dirty little rat feet.”

Quick bursts of bright colored lights went off behind her eyelids as she rolled into a sitting position and covered her face with her hands. When her fingers came away damp and sticky and she discovered part of her hair was stuck to her forehead, she began to shake.

Testing the place where her head hurt the worst, she was horrified to feel a large gash and a steady stream of blood flowing out and down. Her head was throbbing. The room wouldn’t stop spinning. And she needed help. She closed her eyelids, gritted her teeth and took a slow, deep breath.

When agony had subsided to a dull, pounding ache, she opened her eyes again, this time focusing on the lamp and the soft, yellow glow across the room, and she wondered if she would be able to move. When someone suddenly walked between Jessica and the light, her first thought was that help had arrived. But the woman by the desk didn’t look up.

“Help me,” Jessica said, but the woman didn’t move. In fact, Jessica could have been invisible for all the reaction her plea evoked.

She blinked slowly, trying to coordinate the action between a fresh surge of pain. The woman’s image kept wavering in and out of her consciousness, and she knew she was going to pass out again. Frantic for help, Jessica lifted her arm, waving in the woman’s direction as she tried once more to gain her attention.

“Help me. Please, help me.”

And then the woman turned and walked to the end of the desk, revealing her identity. Jessica went weak with relief.

“Olivia! Thank God it’s you.”

It didn’t seem odd to Jessica that Olivia Stuart, the mayor of Grand Springs, would be here at the lodge. After all, she was the mother of the groom who was about to be married. Where else might she have been? But Jessica didn’t think to wonder what Olivia would be doing in her office, smiling when she had so obviously been injured. All she knew was she was no longer alone.

Once again, Jessica tried to stand and got no further than her knees before the room began to spin. She paused on all fours with her head down and her arms trembling from the effort of trying to hold herself up, then slumped back to the floor with a moan.

“Olivia, I can’t do it alone. You’re going to have to help me.”

To Jessica’s disbelief, Olivia kept smiling. Then, out of the shadows, a second figure suddenly emerged. Jessica instinctively shrank back against the wall as someone grabbed Olivia from behind. A hand was clamped roughly over Olivia’s mouth, and then Olivia was shoved forward by the momentum of the attack, pinned against the end of the desk and the attacker’s body. Jessica gasped. Some stranger…a tall, powerful woman…was trying to hurt the mayor!

The struggle between the two women was horrifying. Olivia’s arms flailed helplessly as the assailant’s grip seemed to tighten. Jessica watched as Olivia struggled, trying to pull free of the woman’s clutches.

And then it seemed as if everything began to happen in slow motion. Something glittered in the assailant’s upraised hand. Jessica moaned and covered her mouth, suddenly aware that she could very likely be the woman’s next victim.

Dear God, she thought. It’s a needle! A hypodermic needle! A vein throbbed horribly at the back of Jessica’s neck, blinding her to everything but the motion of the needle as it was plunged into the back of Olivia Stuart’s leg.

Moments later, when Olivia crumpled to the floor, Jessica began to scream. Led by the sounds of her distress, Jessica’s co-workers soon found her—alone and unconscious—and bleeding profusely from a wound to the head.

* * *

Vanderbilt Memorial Hospital was a beacon in the darkness that had fallen upon Grand Springs. Operating on backup generators, faint light spilled out of the windows and doorways and into the streets beyond. Ambulance sirens screamed a warning as the first of the victims to fall prey to the blackout began to arrive.

Stone Richardson had been thrust into the ongoing scene at the hospital, almost from the onset of the blackout. After transporting an accident victim to the hospital in his own car, he found himself caught up in the turmoil going on inside. Although he was a detective on the Grand Springs police force, every able-bodied officer was working where they were most needed. And judging from the chaos in the emergency room, this seemed to be a good place to start. Caught between people in need of assistance and those who’d accompanied the injured to the hospital, he found himself in the role of referee. Twice in the last few minutes, he’d been forced to get between a doctor working on a patient and the person who’d brought in the injured person. Panic was rampant.

“Hey! Back off and let the doctor do her job!” Stone ordered, yelling to make himself heard above an angry biker’s shout. When the biker, who called himself Red, took a swing at him, Stone shoved him up against a wall.

Nearby, Amanda Jennings, one of the doctors on duty, did what she could to staunch the flow of blood spilling down the other biker’s face. Red grabbed at Stone’s arm in frustration.

“But that’s my buddy she’s—”

Stone glanced at the hand locked around his wrist, and then looked back up at the biker as his voice lowered to a menacing growl.

“I don’t care if he’s your fairy godfather. Either you sit down and shut up, or you’re going to spend the night in jail for assault.”

At that point, Red might have recognized more than the voice of authority. The gleam in Stone’s eyes was warning enough for him.

“Fine with me,” Red muttered, and glared at the doctor before slinking off to the waiting room.

Without taking her eyes from her patient and the stitches she was putting in the side of his face, Amanda Jennings muttered a quick, fervent thanks.

“Glad you were here,” she said shortly.

Stone nodded. Dr. Amanda Jennings was all business, even though her size belied her strength. She was only a couple of inches over five feet tall, but her skill more than compensated for her lack of height.

“Glad I could help,” he answered, and headed back into the hallway where humanity streamed by at a steady, frantic pace.

An ambulance slid to a halt just outside the door, and Stone stepped aside as paramedics came running into the building with a patient strapped fast to a blood-splattered gurney. From where he was standing, he got a quick glimpse of the woman beneath the sheets. She was young and slender, her long blond hair steadily staining with a blood flow the paramedics had been unable to staunch. He winced. Another person had fallen victim to the Grand Springs blackout.

As the gurney moved past him, Stone’s heart, quite literally, stopped. It was only for a moment, but the skipped beat was evidence of the shock of his recognition. He knew that upturned nose. He’d seen that mouth many times before. He’d kissed it more times than he could count. And he still remembered the shock he’d felt upon learning that Jessica Hanson had left Grand Springs without so much as a goodbye.

He hadn’t known until she was gone how much he’d cared for her, but even then it hadn’t been enough to make him go after her. Stone wasn’t stupid. He’d learned the hard way that being a cop and being married weren’t always synonymous, at least not for him. He’d cared for Jessie. He’d loved making love with her. But he wasn’t going to ruin another woman’s life and dig his own hole in the world any deeper by repeating his mistakes.

By the time he got the impetus to follow the paramedics down the hall, they had disappeared into a trauma room. While he was struggling with the fact that Jessie was back in Grand Springs and he hadn’t known it, never mind how she had come to be covered in blood, another altercation began to take place between two sets of desperate parents who were vying for a doctor’s attention. He moved toward them with fixed intent.

* * *

Jessica didn’t remember the ride to the hospital, or of being wheeled into ER amid a flurry of shouts and activity. When she did begin to come around, she opened her eyes and screamed, reacting instinctively to the sight of a portable X-ray machine being lowered into place above her. Someone grabbed at her hands, then spoke. The woman’s voice was calm, the tone reassuring.

“Take it easy, dear. You’re in a hospital.”

Jessica shuddered and moaned, then tried to relax, unaware that she was already crying. From the other side of the curtain, a child began to shriek, and in the opposite corner of the room Jessica could hear someone groaning. Pain shattered her cognizance.

Hospital? Why am I in a hospital?

Minutes passed, but to Jessica, they could have been hours. Perspective and time had no meaning. There was only the pain and confusion holding her fast to the bed.

Sometime later, she woke up again to find herself on a gurney in a hallway. Disoriented by painkillers and a headache of mammoth proportions, she knew little about what was going on around her until someone touched her arm.

“Take it easy, Jessie. You’re going to be all right.”

Jessica blinked and then groaned. That voice and those wide, imposing shoulders were all too familiar. She looked up into stormy gray eyes and let her gaze wander to that stubborn square jaw before she looked away.

Stone knew she had no idea he had followed her as she’d been moved from the trauma room, or that she’d been parked in the hallway, waiting to be taken upstairs. She also had no way of knowing, nor did Stone think she would have believed, that he’d refused to budge from her side until someone came to get her.

“Bat barf,” she muttered, and missed seeing his grin.

If it hadn’t hurt so bad, Jessica would have glared.