Luck of the Draw (A Betting on Romance Novel Book 1) (42 page)

Forty minutes later, a chat window popped open on her screen. Kate’s stomach did a flip-flop.

Jim:
  Hi. Long time no chat.

Liz:
 
Out of town.

Jim:
 
And they don’t have computers in...?

Kate couldn’t help but smile, even though the ache in her chest throbbed anew. If only she could start over. Do it right this time.

Liz: 
Nice try. I’ve been busy. How are you?

There was a pause and then a reply appeared.

Jim: 
Okay. Tough week. Missed chatting with you.

Her heart lurched in her chest until she realized it was only a light-hearted comment on his part. He didn’t know who she was.

Liz: 
Sure you did.

Jim:
 
No, really. I did.

Liz:
 
Why?

Jim:
 
Maybe I like your sense of humor. I’ve been a little shy of that lately.

She hadn’t given him much to laugh about had she? Kate bit her lip. Typed.

Liz: 
That’s all?

Jim:
 
I don’t know. I might like your sense of style, too, but that’s yet to be determined.

Liz:
 
You’d hate it. Way out there. I’m SO not your type.

Jim:
 
Is that so?

Liz:
 
For starters, I’ve got wild hair...

Jim:
 
Maybe I like wild.

Liz:
 
...streaked with pink?

Jim:
 
Pink can be very feminine.

Liz:
 
...and multiple body piercings. Did I mention that? Even a belly button ring...

Jim:
 
I’m intrigued.

Liz:
 
...and PURPLE toenails!

Kate stared at the screen.
Purple toenails? Sh—!
Where was the delete key?!
Where was the blasted delete key?!

Jim:
 
Kate?

Kate’s pulse thudded behind her ears, her heart taking a hard skittering thump in her chest as she stared at her name on the screen.
Her name
on the screen. The jig was up.

Liz:
 
Yes?

It was probably only a few moments, but it seemed like hours before a reply flashed onto her screen.

Jim: 
I know it’s you.

Liz:
 
I was going to tell you.

Jim:
 
Of course you were, but let me guess... it was complicated.

Liz:
 
I guess I deserve that.

She stared at the screen, waiting for... what? It was over. They both knew it. This only made it official. The last nail in the coffin. She’d lied to this man from the moment they’d met. How could you form any lasting relationship on lies?

Liz: 
I’m sorry.

Jim:
 
Doesn’t change the fact that running away with Liz just got a whole lot more impractical.

Kate felt a half-smile form despite the urge to cry. Lord, he was still Jim. And she loved him despite all the... complications.

Liz: 
I’m sorry.

Jim:
 
Quit saying that.

Liz:
 
I don’t know what else to say. I know you’re angry with me. I don’t blame you.

Jim:
 
No, Kate. Not angry. Disappointed. I thought we had something together.

Liz:
 
Who? You and me or you and ‘Liz?’

Jim:
 
There never was a Liz. We both know that.

Hot tears slid noiselessly down her face as she typed her reply.

Liz: 
Well, you deserve better than an imaginary woman. Or me.

Jim:
 
Does it matter? I can’t have either.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
____________________

J
IM LOGGED OFF THE INTERNET. Five o’clock. Too early to think about bed, too late to do anything else. It was almost a relief when the call came over the scanner...
multiple vehicle accident... intersection Miller Brook and Route 6...

Jim grabbed his keys and headed for the door, the dispassionate familiarity of the routine calming. This, at least, he knew how to do. They’d call out an engine in case of a fuel spill, direct traffic, wait for the wreckers. Not too exciting, but better than sitting at home.

He sped the mile down Route 6 toward town and, hearing that Engine 2 was already on its way, headed directly to the scene.

He pulled to the side of the road just short of the intersection, behind the traffic already backing up. Engine 2 was just arriving, sirens blaring. Jim leapt from the cab of his truck.

Nothing could have prepared him for what he saw next.

“
Jesus
.” They’d need more than a wrecker for this one.

He quickly assessed the scene with a practiced eye: SUV, driver’s side mangled around a telephone pole, a pickup’s front end crushed, obviously having impacted the passenger side of the SUV.

T-boned. Christ. It had fatality written all over it. He pulled a pair of plastic gloves from his glove box.

The smell of gasoline stung his eyes. A handful of people milled around already, stunned, murmuring in hushed tones. He and three other responders hurried forward. They knew what to do. Check for injuries. Assist the paramedics. Contain the fuel spill. Direct traffic. Clear the scene.

Ted Seamans stood at the pickup, assessing the driver’s condition. Jim watched his eyes go flat. He knew then and there the news wasn’t good.

One fatality.

Jim turned and stepped off the curb toward the SUV and stumbled. On the back window there was a maroon and white Sugar Falls Wildcats sticker. A US Marine Corps emblem just below that. The vanity plate read
Futball
.

Shit
. Tommy. Tommy Daniels.

He moved quickly around the SUV and through the tinted glass saw the faint outline of a booster seat in the back
—a small limp body still in it. His chest constricted as he helped wrench open the front passenger door.

The smells of blood and death hit him in a wave. Tommy’s airbag had deployed, the fine white powder still floating in the air around him. Jim averted his eyes, not so much in deference, but because there was nothing to be done there. Meg, his wife, sat in the passenger seat, her neck angled oddly to the side, honey-colored hair matted with blood. Jim felt for her pulse. Weak, but there. He swung around and barked out a call for paramedics.

Motioning for back-up, he turned toward the back seat. Tommy and Meg’s daughter, Amy, sat slumped over a stuffed toy, her father’s blood, or maybe her own, spattered across her pink pants like dots of paint. Someone opened the back door. More sirens sounded in the distance. He watched as Roy reached in to feel the child’s neck, saw the look of surprise on his face when he found her pulse. Alive. She was alive. The air in Jim’s lungs came out in a huff—he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding it—as they swung back around, back to the blur and chaotic order of moving bodies. Vehicles. Voices.

After that, time had no meaning. He moved, acted, responded, and yet it all seemed to be happening to someone else. The little details stood out. The smell of French fries from the local fast food restaurant as it hung in the air. The discordant laugh of a toddler somewhere nearby. The heart-shaped charm that dangled from Meg’s wrist as he helped load her onto the stretcher for airlifting. It read #1 Mom.

It seemed an eternity before they were ready to load Amy for transport. As Jim helped pass her small body to the awaiting paramedics, he blinked. Paused. His hand was shaking. Jesus. His hands never shook.

Swallowing, he buried it. Time for that later. Much later. And with the chopper’s deafening roar pounding his eardrums, he turned back to the grisly task of dealing with the dead.

H
OURS LATER, TOO SHAKEN to drive home, Jim sat on a barstool in a dark corner of Lucky’s nursing a beer. He felt numb. Or wished to hell he did.

Jesus. Tommy Daniels. Dead. Old Man Richards. Dead.

Tommy was his age. Coach of the Wildcats football team. They went to Boy Scout camp together when they were ten. Snuck cigarettes under the bleachers in high school. And Meg. She’d been in the same class as Rachel. Loved to help teach kids to ice skate on the green when the Rec. Department flooded it each winter. Owned a hair dressing salon in town. Old Man Richards used to plow their driveway. Went bird hunting every October with Dad. Had a thing for pork pies and raspberry iced tea.

Jim drank and listened, in shared disbelief, as patrons and employees recounted the events of the evening, shared the same stories over and over. As if, in the retelling, they could somehow make sense of it all. Why there? Why them? Why?

He was ordering a second round when Jeff slid onto a neighboring stool. “Mind if I join you? I’ve got a ton of paperwork, but I saw your truck outside...”

“Sure.” Jim spun his drink mat on the bar.

“Makes you want to run home and tell your family how much you love ‘em, doesn’t it?” the bartender asked a nearby patron.

Jim nodded in silent agreement even though
he knew the bartender wasn’t speaking to him.

Jeff got his cola.

They drank in silence for a long while.

“I must’ve driven through that intersection a thousand times in my life,” Jim finally said. “Never gave it a second thought.”

Jeff nodded, picked up his cola and took a long pull.

“What the hell happened?”

Jeff shrugged. “Best guess is Richards had a stroke or heart attack at the wheel. Ran the light.” He shrugged again. “Doesn’t make much difference now.”

“Suppose not. Any word on Meg? Amy?”

“Both critical. That’s all I know.”

Jim stared down the neck of his bottle and tried to understand what cosmic lesson the universe was trying to teach them all. All he could see was a man
—his peer—cut down in the prime of life leaving behind a wife and child. If they even made it through the night.

“It could have been any of us,” Jim said. “It could have been you. Or me.”
Or Kate.
A flash of honey-colored hair came to mind, blurring momentarily with Meg’s, matted with blood.
It could have been Kate.
“Just like that. Everything we love.
Gone
.” Jim took another drink, and set the bottle down, his hand shaking again as he realized what he’d just said.

“Jesus.”

“I know,” Jeff said.

Love.
He loved her. He loved Kate.

Jim let out a huff of disbelief and looked around, feeling bizarrely, morbidly elated. “I could be dead.
Dead
. Just like Tommy. And Kate would never know how I feel about her.” He swiped a hand down his face. “How could I be such an idiot? What am I even doing here?”

“Getting quietly soused?”

Jim shook his head. “No! I mean
here
. In Sugar Falls. Without her. How could I let her leave?”

“Is this a rhetorical question?”

“Want to hear something really crazy?”

“Sure.”

“I think I believed letting her go wouldn’t hurt so much if I never told her. But you know what? It hurts more.” His gut clenched. “Not that it matters. She’s gone now. I fucked up and now she’s gone.”

Jeff didn’t answer, just glanced Jim a look of sympathy. He took another sip of soda. “Sorry to hear that. Anything I can do?”

Jim studied the rows of glasses overhead. “You got a magic potion to make a woman come back to you when you don’t deserve a second chance?”

“If I did, I would have used it already.”

They sat quietly for a while longer, lost in their own thoughts.

“What about Justine? Is that really over, or are you still in love with her, too?”

Jim startled at the question, turning it over in his mind, the parts that weren’t numb yet, that is. “No.”

And it was true. Sure, he’d been stunned, blind-sided by her decision to reunite with her husband, had experienced an almost visceral need to find some explanation for how and why.

But that was gone now. Spent. A memory already fading.

“I don’t know if I ever was,” he admitted as much to himself as his friend. Jim pushed away from the bar and threw some bills on the bar top. “Well,” he said, “it’s been a rough night, I think I’ll call it a
—”