She hit the button for her window, and cold air spilled inside as she leaned out. “Cam, wait!”
He paused and turned toward her voice. Brow furrowing under the brim of his winter hat, he started toward her.
His car exploded into a fireball.
The shock of it blew out her windshield and knocked her back against the seat, her ears ringing, her lungs struggling to drag in a full breath. Her skin felt hot, raw, scratched up from the glass, and as she blearily focused on her hands, she realized she was bleeding.
Cam.
Oh, God.
She scrambled out of her car, bits of glass tinkling onto the icy pavement as she staggered and tried to find her bearings. A black and red blur bolted past her. Cam wasn’t wearing black. So who…?
Her mind finally started firing on all cylinders again. The bomber was here and trying to escape.
Hell no.
She spun, reaching out blindly to snag his coat. She missed, but he slipped when he tried to dodge her, pinwheeled across the ice, and ended up flat on his face several feet away. She jumped on his back, but discovered it was unnecessary—he’d knocked himself out when he fell. If only all criminals were so helpful. She made short work cuffing him, then scanned the scene. The 4Runner blazed sky high and the flames had spread to the office. She didn’t see Cam, and pain like she’d never felt before cleaved her in half.
Where was he?
There. She spotted him lying face-down in the snow ten feet from where he’d stood when the bomb went off.
Unmoving.
No.
She raced across the lot to him, slipping and sliding, scrambling to find and dial her phone with numb fingers, but gave up on calling 9-1-1 when she heard the wail of sirens.
Please, please let him be alive.
She didn’t dare touch him to roll him over, so she flattened herself out on her stomach next to him. She reached for his hand, but thought better of it when she noticed the burns already blistering his skin.
“Cam?” She couldn’t keep the break from her voice. Didn’t even try. “Cam, you hang on. Help’s coming, okay?”
His eyes opened to blurry slits, and he tried to push himself upright.
She lay a gentle hand on his back, wincing at the heat rolling off his body. “Hey, no. Stay still.”
A slow blink cleared some of the haziness from his eyes, and his lips peeled back from his teeth in a grimace of pain. “What. The. Fuck?”
Letting go a shaky laugh, Eva sat up beside him and pressed her palms to her face, the heat on her cheeks warming her icy fingers. She probably looked like she had a bad sunburn, but it didn’t matter.
Cam would be okay.
And if she’d just stop shaking, so would she.
Chapter Twenty-three
“Eva?”
As she stepped off the elevator, the woman’s surprised voice stopped her in her tracks. Lark Warren stood in the hallway outside the room Cam was supposed to be in, as small and pale as a china doll in her ivory colored coat with her streaky brown hair pulled back into a sloppy knot on top of her head. She wore no make-up and looked as if she hadn’t slept in a few days.
“Lark. Uh, hi. What are you doing here?”
“I was just…” She wrapped her arms around her middle and her cheeks flushed a pink that could only be described as pretty. “Visiting a friend.”
A friend? She couldn’t mean Cam…could she? Were they the kind of friends that visited each other in the hospital? Were they more than—
No. Eva shut down the line of thought before jealousy consumed her. Cam was a one woman kind of man. He wasn’t a cheater—which made her feel like the lowest kind of slime now that she thought about it. Going out with Preston for dinner had been so incredibly wrong. Sure, she and Cam had never agreed to more than a friends-with-benefits relationship. No commitment, no exclusivity. But, dammit, he never would have dated someone else as long as he was sleeping with her.
So she had no reason to be jealous of Lark. Had to be her exhaustion talking. Nearly twenty-four hours had passed since the bomb went off, and between the craziness at the scene, the arrest and interrogation of her suspect, and the ensuing paperwork, she was only standing right now by the sheer power of her will because she refused to go home before she saw Cam.
A lump swelled in her throat and she lifted her chin, indicating the door to his room. “How is he?”
“You know…?” Lark’s deer-in-the-headlights expression might have been comical if Eva wasn’t fighting back a rising sense of panic.
“Yeah, I was there. Is he all right?”
The corners of her mouth turned down into a ridiculously pretty frown, and a crease appeared between her eyebrows. “What do you mean?”
Okay, not the brightest bulb, was she? “I saw the bomb. I got the guy that did it.”
“Oh.” And back to the wide-eyed deer expression. “Oh. Uh, I need to go.”
“What?”
“I…need to go now.”