Trent chuckled, but still hesitated.
“Look, Trent,” Chase said, feeling oddly defensive. “I don’t plan to saddle up and ride off into the sunset. I’m not going to back out on her. I just want a few minutes alone.”
“Okay,” Trent said. “Just don’t…” He frowned. “Don’t stay out here so long it ends up embarrassing her.”
Chase nodded. “Never,” he said solemnly. He held Trent’s gaze. “That’s a promise.”
After Trent was gone, the minutes stretched out quietly, interrupted only by the carrying-on of the robins and the wind flirting with the sweet gum tree. Chase let his tired gaze rest on the bluebonnets, which were blooming their hearts out today.
They should have held the party out here. Susannah had the terrace decorated like something out of a magazine, lots of cute ribbons and potted plants shaped like illustrations from geometry textbooks. But for his money you couldn’t beat the first big honest splash of spring flowers.
He felt his chest relaxing. His breath came deeper, from the gut, where it was supposed to. After a few more minutes, he was a little sun-stunned, and when he heard a strange noise in the distance he wasn’t completely sure he wasn’t dreaming.
But then he transferred his gaze to the road and identified a foreign spot on the horizon. A car. Almost half a mile away, where the straight, tree-lined drive met the public road. He could tell it was coming too fast, but judging the speed of a vehicle moving straight toward you was tricky.
It wasn’t until it was about two hundred yards away that he realized the driver must be drunk…or crazy. Or both.
The guy was going maybe sixty. On a private drive, where kids or horses or tractors or stupid chickens might come darting out any minute, that was criminal. Chase straightened from his comfortable slouch and waved his hands.
“Slow down, you fool,” he called. He took the porch steps quickly and began walking fast down the driveway.
The car veered, from one side to the other, then up onto the slight rise of the thick green spring grass. It barely missed the fence.
“Slow down, damn it!”
He couldn’t see the driver, but he definitely didn’t recognize the automobile. It was small and old and hadn’t cost much even when it was new. It used to be white, but now it needed either a wash or a new paint job or both.
“Goddamn it, what’s wrong with you?”
At the last minute, he had to jump away, because the idiot behind the wheel clearly wasn’t going to turn to avoid a collision. He couldn’t believe it. The car kept coming, finally slowing a little, but it was too late.
Still going about thirty miles an hour, it slammed into the large, white-brick pillar that marked the front boundaries of the house. The pillar wasn’t going to give an inch, so that car had to. The front end folded up like a paper fan.
It seemed to take forever for the car to settle, as if the trauma happened in slow motion, reverberating from the front to the back of the car in ripples of destruction. The front windshield seemed to ice over with lethal bits of glassy frost. Then the side windows exploded.
The front driver’s door wrenched open, as if the car wanted to expel its contents. Metal buckled hideously. Small pieces like hubcaps skipped and ricocheted insanely across the oyster-shell driveway.
Finally, everything was still. Into the silence, a plume of steam shot up like a geyser, smelling of rust and heat. Its snakelike hiss almost smothered the low, agonized moan of the driver.
Chase’s anger had disappeared. He didn’t feel anything but a dull sense of disbelief. Things like this didn’t happen in real life. Not in his life. Maybe the sun had actually put him to sleep.
But he was already kneeling beside the car. The driver was a woman. There was no air bag. The frosty glass of the windshield was dotted with small flecks of blood. She must have hit it with her head, because just below her hairline a red liquid was seeping out. He touched it. He tried to wipe it away before it reached her eyebrow, though of course that made no sense at all. Her eyes were shut.
Was she conscious? Did he dare move her? Her dress was covered in glass, and the metal of the car was sticking out dangerously in all the wrong places.
Then he remembered, with an intense relief, that every good medical man in the county was here, just behind the house, drinking his champagne. He found his phone and paged Trent.
The woman moaned again.
Alive, then. Thank God for that.
He saw Trent coming toward him, starting out at a lope, but switching to a full run when he saw the car.
“Get Dr. Marchant,” Chase called. “Don’t bother with 911.”
Trent didn’t take long to assess the situation. A fraction of a second, and he began pulling out his cell phone and running toward the house.
The yelling seemed to have roused the woman. She opened her eyes. They were blue, and clouded with pain and confusion.
“Chase,” she said.
His breath stalled. His head pulled back. “What?”
Her only answer was another moan, and he wondered if he had imagined the word. He reached around her and put his arm behind her shoulders. She was tiny. Probably petite by nature, but surely way too thin. He could feel her shoulder blades pushing against her skin, as fragile as the wishbone in a turkey.
She seemed to have passed out, so he put his other arm under her knees and lifted her from the car. He tried to avoid the jagged metal, but her skirt caught on a piece and the tearing sound seemed to wake her again.
“No,” she said. “Please.”
“I’m just trying to help,” he said. “It’s going to be all right.”
She seemed profoundly distressed. She wriggled in his arms, and she was so weak, like a broken bird. It made him feel too big and brutish. And intrusive. As if touching her this way, his bare hands against the warm skin behind her knees, were somehow a transgression.
He wished he could be more delicate. But he smelled gasoline, and he knew it wasn’t safe to leave her.
Finally he heard the sound of voices, as guests began to run around the side of the house, alerted by Trent. Dr. Marchant was at the front, racing toward them as if he were forty instead of seventy. Susannah was right behind him, her green dress floating around her trim legs.
“Please,” the woman in his arms murmured again. She looked at him, the expression in her blue eyes lost and bewildered. He wondered if she might be on drugs. Hitting her head on the windshield might account for this unfocused, glazed look, but it couldn’t explain the crazy driving.
“Please, put me down. Susannah… This wedding…”
Chase’s arms tightened instinctively, and he froze in his tracks. She whimpered, and he realized he might be hurting her. “Say that again?”
“The wedding. I have to stop it.”
CHAPTER THREE
CHASE ENDURED the next hour the way he’d endured most of the crises in his life—he kept busy.
He played host the best he could. He soothed the hysterical—Jenny Wilcox was hyperventilating and her husband, Pastor Wilcox, wasn’t far behind. He deflected the curious. He tried to get as many guests as possible to go home. This became much more difficult once the rumor began to circulate that the mysterious woman lying upstairs in the north guest room, being tended by Dr. Marchant, was Chase Clayton’s discarded, suicidal lover.
And he refused to dwell on worst-case scenarios. Josephine Ellen Whitford, twenty-five years old, from Riverfork—all information they’d learned from her driver’s license—was