Page 134 of Noel Secrets

Through the shattered windshield, she saw the SUV parked at the roadside. A man climbed out and ran toward her.

This wasn’t an accident.

He’d come to finish the job.

Her body refused to move. Her lips wouldn’t form a scream.

Clay’s voice echoed from the phone—frantic, calling her name, pleading for an answer. She wanted to let him know she was in trouble, but she couldn’t speak.

Darkness swallowed her whole.

Chapter Seven

His heart had dropped to his stomach at the sounds of a crash and her last cry for help. Now, nothing. He couldn’t even hear her moaning or moving. She could be seriously injured from the wreck—or worse.

Clay held the accelerator to the floor, but he urged his pickup to go even faster. He could see from the GPS that he was only minutes away.

He prayed those minutes weren’t too late.

He spotted two vehicles on the shoulder up ahead, one pulling over as he approached. A woman hurried out just as another figure ran back up the embankment, jumped into the parked SUV, and took off. Clay parked on the shoulder behind the woman’s vehicle.

He caught sight of Darby’s car, slammed against a large tree down the embankment and it stopped him cold. The memory of his wife’s totaled vehicle flooded his mind. The same crushed metal that had taken Jackie and Olivia from him. “No,” he rasped, his legs propelling him down the embankment. “Please God, not again.”

He reached the car where the other woman stood gaping into the vehicle.

She pointed to the van. “Help me,” she called to him, her voice calm but determined. “There’s a woman in here. She’s unconscious and I can’t get the door open to get to her.”

Clay hurried to the window and peeked inside. Darby sat still as death in her seat, head on the headrest, eyes closed, but the gentle rise and fall of her chest told him she was breathing.

A gash on her forehead dripped blood. “Did you see what happened?”

“No, I saw that other guy’s truck then the crashed van. When I got out to help, he ran back to his vehicle and took off.”

“What kind of vehicle was it?”

“A black SUV.”

Darby had mentioned an SUV in her final words to him and he’d seen one drive away as he approached the scene.

“Your stopping to help probably saved her life,” Clay told the woman. If the crash hadn’t killed her, that man would have finished her off.

With no witnesses.

He tried the door. Locked.

The front end had buckled, and the hood and engine had practically become part of the tree. Even if the doors had been unlocked, the frame had bent, which meant the door was unlikely to open.

“I called for help as I got out of my car but the call dropped as I was coming down,” she explained. “The police and ambulance should be on the way.”

Good. He’d need help to get her out of the vehicle.

For now, he wanted to make sure she knew she wasn’t alone. He ran over and found a rock then told the woman to stand back as he used it to bust the passenger’s side window.

Once it was clear, he slid into the van, then he leaned over the seat to check on her. The front dashboard was practically in her lap, pinning her legs but he saw no other obvious signs of trauma other than the cut on her forehead though she could have suffered internal injuries or head trauma.

“Darby.” Clay touched her face and called her name, and she stirred. Her eyelids fluttered and she groaned, which was a good sign. “Darby, can you hear me?”

She moved her hand to her head and groaned again. “What happened?”