Bring Your Heart (Golden Falls Fire Book 2) by Scarlett Andrews (32)

Elizabeth Armstrong was buckled into the passenger seat of her untrustworthy 1989 Ford Bronco with her eyes closed. Already tired from a long bartending shift at the Sled Dog Brewing Company, she’d reluctantly attended an after-bar party thrown by her brother Emmett’s friend.

Lulled by the rhythm of the windshield wipers fighting off what had been merely a soft snowfall when they’d left the party, she vaguely heard the song on the radio about summer and blue skies and a love that never ends. In her dreamy half-asleep state, that kind of summer felt possible in way it never did when she was awake.

Emmett was quiet beside her in the driver’s seat, and the drive was calm and peaceful—until it wasn’t. Just like her life. Going along and going along, and then POW, the universe would scream at her. Don’t get comfortable, Elizabeth. Don’t think for one second that life will ever be easy for you.

The Bronco didn’t skid on the icy highway east of Golden Falls, Alaska. The skid would have jolted her awake. Instead, she woke when her seatbelt tightened against her as the vehicle plunged down an embankment after sideswiping a speed limit sign at full speed.

In her peripheral vision she saw Emmett’s chest slam into the steering wheel and the side of his head smash against the driver’s side window. Thankfully, it didn’t break. The headlights stayed lit, and all Elizabeth could see out the windshield was the soft white pillow of snow surrounding the vehicle.

“Emmett!” she cried to her brother, older by five years. He was thirty to her twenty-five. “Are you okay?”

Of course he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. What was he thinking, driving at four in the morning during a snowstorm without buckling up? He wasn’t thinking, she knew. It was like his brain had simply stopped working in the past few months. Mistake after mistake was piling up behind him, and driving that night was yet another mistake. They should have gone home after she got off work, like she’d wanted.

She grabbed the collar of his coat and yanked him upright. “Emmett?”

He groaned but did not open his eyes. He was bleeding from the forehead, mouth, and from a gash on his right hand, and a lump was swelling on his temple. She shook his shoulder.

“Can you hear me?”

When he didn’t respond, her fear went into overdrive. She pulled out her cell phone and could hardly hold it for how she was shaking. Emmett might be a shit sometimes, but he’d stuck by her through the worst hard times, and her love for him was fierce. All they’d ever had in this world was each other.

“I’m calling 911,” she said loudly, trying to rouse him. “Where are we, do you know? What mile marker? Emmett? Answer me.”

“Can’t call,” he mumbled.

“We have to,” she said, although she understood his reluctance. He had no health insurance, and they barely had the savings to cover even a simple visit to the doctor’s office. “You might have internal bleeding or a concussion or something even worse.”

He pressed his right palm over his mouth, trying to feel what had happened or maybe hold in what was left of his teeth. His eyes latched onto hers.

“I fucked up again,” he said, his words garbled from the injury to his mouth.

Yes, you did, she thought wearily, and in her mind she could see the few hundred dollars she’d set aside for pre-nursing classes at the community college go up in smoke. Her dream deferred, yet again.

“No worries,” she said with a resoluteness she didn’t feel. “That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right?”

Emmett winced as he tried to smile. It was their family motto or, rather, their brother-sister motto as they tried to make their way through the world alone—alone and together—burdened by the weight of their parents’ failings. Alone and together. That was their blessing; it was also their challenge.

As her finger hovered above the “Emergency Call” icon on her phone, a panicked Emmett grabbed her phone and clutched it to his chest.

“Hey, give it back!” She unsnapped her seatbelt and reached for it, but he wouldn’t let go. “I need to call for help!”

“You can’t.” He clutched his stomach and winced from the pain. “We need to handle this ourselves.”

“We need help,” Elizabeth said. “Otherwise, we could be stuck out here for hours, and it’s below zero. You just hit a road sign. That’s no big deal.” Then a horrible thought struck her. “Wait—you didn’t hit another car, did you?”

He shook his head.

“Then it’s okay. Just give me back my phone.”

But instead, he pushed open his door, shoving hard against the snow, grunting from the effort. He stumbled out, taking her phone with him.

“Emmett, get back here!” she yelled. “Stay in the car!”

Blood dripped onto the snow as he tried to climb his way out of the ditch. He slipped twice and grunted in pain both times.

“Stay here!” she cried, scrambling over to his side of the Bronco. He paid her no mind, so she went after him, but in the time it took her to get out of the car, Emmett had made the roughly eight-foot climb to the highway and stood on the road looking down at her.

“I can’t go to the hospital.” A trail of blood revealed the path he’d climbed through the snowbank. “They can’t test my blood.”

“Why not? You didn’t drink.”

He gave her a hard look. “They’d check my system for drugs.”

Elizabeth stood in the ditch, dumbfounded. “But you don’t—”

And just like that, the realization dawned on her. He was on drugs. It explained so much: the loss of appetite, the ragged emotions, his wayward spiral.

“With all the crap we have going on?” she said, stunned. “You choose to add to it by using drugs?”

“You need to say you were driving,” he said. “No one can even know I was here.”

“That won’t work.” Her breath came out puffy, and her face hurt, it was so cold. The kind of cold that made it hard to talk right. A middle-of-the-night, January-in-Alaska kind of cold. The kind of cold that made her wonder why she hadn’t packed up and left. Or, like the American golden-plover birds she loved, migrated south to Argentina for the winter.

“I had two really strong drinks at the party. My blood-alcohol level might put me over the limit. You were supposed to be the designated driver!” Fury flooded through her. “Dad will be so proud, Emmett.”

“Our father, the felon? I don’t give a shit what he thinks.”

“But he’s coming home soon,” she said. “And he needs us to have our shit together so we can help him get his shit together. And here you totaled my car, and you need medical help, and there’s no way we’re going to make it back in time for you to get treated and be at work on time in the morning, which means you can’t pay your half of the mortgage. Again.” Tears of frustration blinded her. “No matter how bad things have been, Emmett, at least we had each other. And you’re ruining even that, don’t you see? You’re ruining the only good thing we have going for us.”

“I’m sorry, Lizzie Bean, but you’ve got to take one for the team tonight. If I go to jail, that’s months of me not being to help with the mortgage. And do you really want me going to prison just when Dad’s about to be released?”

He tossed her phone onto the ground and took off across the highway, lurching unsteadily. They were in the middle of nowhere—just where the hell did he think he was going?

In the time it took her to scramble up the snowbank, he’d disappeared. She crossed the highway and peered into the culvert on the other side. She saw where he’d jumped and where he’d climbed up the other bank, leaving splatters of blood in his wake, but where had he gone from there? Was he right there, and she just couldn’t see him because of the now-whiteout conditions? Or had he disappeared into the woods?

“Please come back, Emmett! You could die out there!”

The wind blew her words back to her. She wouldn’t follow; it would be suicide on a night like this.

“Unbelievable,” she said aloud. What was it about the Armstrong men, always letting down the Armstrong women? She crossed back so she could take shelter in the Bronco. She hated to go back down there—it felt like she was descending into a snowy tomb. What if the snow kept falling and the car got buried in the snow and she couldn’t get herself back out? What if she fell asleep down there and never woke up?

Alaska was the land of big dreams and harsh realities, and the reality was she was as likely to die on the road waiting for a passerby at four in the morning as she was to die in her vehicle. Probably more so, because her emergency supplies were in the Bronco and at least she’d be out of the wind. So into the snowy tomb she’d go.

But before she descended, she retrieved her phone and nearly wept with gratitude to find she had a signal.

She knew exactly who to call.

* * *

When Jack Barnes, riding shotgun in the Engine One fire truck, saw the slender bundle of a woman standing alone up ahead, shivering on the side of the highway, his heart went out to her. Wrapped in a red sleeping bag, she looked tiny and in danger of being blown over by a strong gust of wind.

“Dispatch, this is Engine One.” He kept his eyes on her as he radioed in, wondering why she wasn’t flagging them down. People usually did, even when completely unnecessary. “We’re on Highway Thirty just past mile marker forty-six, and we see the vehicle and one patient standing on the road. No police on scene yet.”

The dispatcher came back. “PD’s still en route. Sure there’s not a second patient? The trucker thought there were two people in the SUV.”

“I’ll let you know,” Jack said. “We’re pulling up now.”

“Damn, she looks cold,” said Sean Kelly, who was driving Engine One.

“No shit, Sherlock,” said Dylan Hart from the back of the rig. “It’s minus twenty-two.”

Sean pulled to a stop a safe distance from the woman, and Jack jumped out of the rig. He bristled against the bitter wind as he began to approach her, but, struck by the image before him, he had to stop for a moment.

Some scenes from the job stayed with him forever like paintings in his brain, to be studied time and again, and he knew this would be one of those scenes—a woman totally alone on a highway in Alaska’s dark, cold winter in the dead of night. The flashing red lights of the fire truck, help on the way. Snow assaulting her from the side. An SUV facedown in the ditch. He’d call the painting “Brutal Alaska.”

“I’m Jack Barnes from the Golden Falls Fire Department,” he called, approaching. She just stared at him and said nothing. Was she in shock? “Ma’am? Are you okay?”

Her nod was barely perceptible.

“Is anyone with you? We got a call there were two of you in the vehicle.”

“I’m alone,” she said, in a way that broke his heart a little bit.

“Not anymore, you’re not.”

Now that he was right in front of her, her summer-sky blue eyes revealed fear, maybe even panic. She took a few steps back, like a frightened deer about to bolt. He put out a hand behind him to tell Sean to halt his approach.

“Can you tell me your name?” Jack asked the woman gently.

“I’m Elizabeth,” she said.

Her eyes were the sort a man could drown in. Big. Blue. Doe-eyed. Expressive. Midnight black lashes. And not surprised to find herself in a bad spot, not surprised at all.

“Are you hurt, Elizabeth?”

She looked familiar, with her long blond hair that weaved into black at the bottom. Ombre. He recalled the term from the magazines he flipped through at the Golden Touch Barber Shop, owned by Andrew Blake, his former captain. He thought it was a cool look, but it hadn’t made its way to Golden Falls, that was for sure. And yet here she was, and he’d seen her before but couldn’t remember where.

Thankfully, Cody Bradford, one of the EMT firefighters, did.

“Hey, Elizabeth,” Cody said, as he came over and wrapped the sleeping bag more tightly around her. “Rough night, huh? You’re a long way from the Sled Dog.”

That’s right, Jack thought. She bartended at the most popular craft brewery in Golden Falls. He’d never spoken with her, but he’d noticed her from a distance while out with friends.

“Is it just you out here?” Cody asked.

“It’s just me,” she said, adding, “But why are you here? I didn’t call for help.”

“A trucker was ahead of you and thought he saw you drive off the road,” Cody said. “He wasn’t sure, but he called it in just in case. “

Normally, Jack would expect an expression of relief or gratitude for the trucker’s actions, but that didn’t happen.

Instead she asked if the police were coming. When Jack told her they were on the way, her eyes took on a look of impending doom.

“Cody, go ahead and help Dylan inspect the vehicle,” Jack said.

“Sure thing.”

As Cody went after Dylan, who’d already started down the ditch to the vehicle, Jack studied Elizabeth, whose eyes kept darting off to the side of the highway, opposite from where her car was.

“The truck driver said there were two people in the SUV.” He stepped closer to her. “Were there?”

She gave a small shake of her head.

“How much did you have to drink tonight, Elizabeth?” Asking that question, Jack had a flashback to his one year as a cop before his career pivot into the fire service.

“Please.” Tears welled in Elizabeth’s eyes, and he could smell the alcohol now, confirming his suspicion. “It’s not what you think.”

He never could stand to see a woman cry—his ex-wife, Jolene, had used tears to great effect—and this one in particular got to him for some reason. A bit heavy on the makeup for his tastes, Elizabeth’s black eyeliner was streaked. As she wiped away her tears with her mitten before they could freeze, he could see her embarrassment, her anger at herself for crying, and her shame—and he appreciated the fact that she wasn’t crying just for effect.

“Then tell me what I should think,” he said.

Elizabeth clamped her mouth shut.

“Blood on the steering wheel,” Dylan called up to them, peering through the Bronco’s driver side window. He pulled open the door. “Blood on the window and on the seat. She’s gotta be hurt somewhere.”

Jack gave her a visual examination. He saw no blood and no visible injuries, major or minor. No scrapes, no contusions. He did, however, notice the softness of her pale skin and the sensual bow shape of her lips. He sternly reminded himself to focus on patient care. “Where are you hurt?”

“I’m not,” she said.

“You might not realize you are, but the blood must have come from somewhere. Here. Let’s see what we’re dealing with.”

Instead of letting him check her, she pulled the sleeping bag closer around her, which tried Jack’s patience.

“Are you refusing treatment?” he said. “Would you prefer that we wait for the cops to do a Breathalyzer instead?”

“No, please!” She gripped his arm. “Please don’t. The cops won’t be fair to me, I know it for a fact. Could you just call them and tell them not to come? Not to bother coming? Tell them everything’s all right here.”

“I can’t do that,” Jack said, nor would he if he could. “You’ve been in trouble with the law before?”

“Not exactly,” she said.

“Then tell me what happened. Based on your lack of injuries, I know you weren’t the one driving, and all I can say is that if you’re covering for a boyfriend, don’t.”

“I’m not.” Her voice trembled, and he didn’t believe her.

“Because no guy’s worth it, and you deserve better.”

Fresh tears welled in her eyes. “You just say that because you don’t know me.”

“He’s not worth it,” he said again quietly, hoping this time it would get through. “No guy is worth losing your job over or going to jail for. It’s obvious someone else was driving, and they ditched you here, and they’re trying to force you to take the blame. Don’t let them. Let us help you. Let me help you.”

The guys started heading back from the vehicle, and headlights appeared in the distance. Jack expected it was the police, but realized it wasn’t when there were no flashing lights. As the vehicle neared, he saw it was a large pickup truck.

Relief crossed Elizabeth’s face. “That’s my lawyer,” she said, looking at Jack with apology in her eyes.

He studied her, annoyed now. “You called a lawyer.”

He glanced at the other guys on his crew. After years of working together, they were often able to communicate without words, with just a glance of confirmation. And it was clear they all agreed—the fact that she’d called a lawyer just about guaranteed she had something to hide.

“I told you, the cops would throw the book at me.”

“She’s right about that,” Dylan said. “Jack, this is Elizabeth Armstrong. She’s Nate Armstrong’s kid. Remember him? Dirty cop. Stole all that money from the evidence room.”

Armstrong. The name pounded through Jack’s brain. It was a name he tried never to think about.

“I remember,” he said, feeling lightheaded.

The Nate Armstrong situation had gone down while his mother was dying of ovarian cancer, nearly a decade and a half ago. Jack had just finished up at the police academy and was in his rookie year, planning to make a career out of it like his old man and his hero—Bruce Barnes. The man he now couldn’t even be in the same room with, so deep was the animosity.

“I’m sorry,” Elizabeth said again.

“Don’t apologize.” Jack was reeling. “Never apologize. Especially not to me.”

* * *