“Where does it hurt? Anything broken?”
Oh. He meant her body. She thought about that really carefully. “Everywhere hurts,” she said. “My hip, where I hit the ground. I feel like someone took a stick to me. My leg is throbbing. My back.”
“You crashed through the underbrush, and you’ve got a serious case of road rash,” he said. “Stay still. You might have spinal cord damage. Paramedics are on their way.”
“I hear sirens,” she said.
“I called 911 then called a friend in the police department,” he explained.
“How embarrassing,” she said.
“Everything okay down there? Need me to call 911?”
A strange man’s voice, calling down from over the guardrail. He was upside down in Erin’s field of vision, which made her dizzy. She closed her eyes again.
“Already did,” Jack said tersely. “Can you get her bike out of the road?”
“No problem,” the guy said, and disappeared.
“That’s nice of him,” Erin said, “but he was making me dizzy. How’s my bike?”
“You paid your insurance, right?” Jack asked.
Yesterday. She’d dropped off a check with the agent on her way to work yesterday, looking for reasons to run errands, go out of her way, because she loved riding her Duc. “That bad?”
“Your naked bike is now naked to the point of being totaled,” Jack said.
“That’s really embarrassing,” she said, and closed her eyes again.
The sirens finally stopped. Doors slammed, then two paramedics were crashing through the underbrush to drop to their knees beside her.
“Female, thirty-four, laid down the bike and slid under the guardrail, awake and aware,” Jack said tersely, then rattled off her pulse, breathing, pupils, feeling and movement in fingers and toes. After what seemed like an interminable discussion she was on the backboard being carried up the embankment to the side of the road. “Where are you taking her?”
“County’s closest. Where’s her bike?”
Jack pointed to the Ducati, now leaning against the guardrail Erin had slid under.
“Damn, girl,” the paramedic said as she fastened the straps around Erin’s torso. “Got a death wish?”
“I just wanted to live,” Erin said, and closed her eyes again.
*
She let herself drift on the ride to the hospital. Jack was there when they opened the ambulance doors in the ER entrance, helmet in hand, striding along beside the gurney as they wheeled her in the doors. A nurse held up a hand when they trundled her right into an examining room. “Who are you?”
“I’m her…”
Enabler? Lover? Fellow adrenaline junkie? Dream man? Funny how some people took on easy titles—husband, parent, friend—but others resisted easy categorization. “He’s my friend,” Erin settled for. “Let him in. Please.”
A doctor showed up almost immediately, tall, thin, dressed in scrubs, scanning her with a practiced eye. “Hi, Erin,” he said, flicking a penlight at her eyes. “I’m Doctor Clay. How are you feeling?”
“Like I laid down my bike and slid into a ravine,” she answered.
He smiled. “What happened?” he asked.
I fell in love. “A rabbit ran in front of my bike. I swerved and lost control. Actually,” she said, “I overbraked my rear tire and underbraked my front tire. Stupid mistake.”
The nurse whisked the curtain around the gurney, then handed Dr. Clay a pair of scissors. They both started cutting Erin out of her clothes. “How long have you been riding?”
“About a week?”
He chuckled, but his expression went a little blank as he carefully peeled back her shirt. On the other side of the gurney a nurse was doing the same thing to her ruined jeans.
“You’ve got quite a collection of bruises,” Dr. Clay said. His voice was mild, but the look in his eyes was anything but as his gaze flicked from her collarbone to her hips.
“Oh. I jumped out of an airplane right before I wrecked my bike,” she said, trying to figure out how she’d managed to mark up her throat. Oh. Jack’s mouth. “Those … the others are … were … consensual,” she finished weakly, her face in flames. Jack was studying the floor, his arms folded across his chest, his feet spread. She couldn’t tell if he was amused or mortified.
“Good,” Dr. Clay said. The nurse draped a hospital gown over Erin’s body, then pulled up a blanket. “I want to run some tests, get X-rays, that sort of thing.”
A couple of hours later an orderly wheeled her back into her room, where Jack was waiting, sprawled in a chair with his head back and his eyes closed, both helmets on the floor beside him. His eyes flashed open when the orderly said cheerfully, “Here we go.”