A Bad Day for Sunshine (Sunshine Vicram #1) - Darynda Jones Page 0,87
freezing weather and blizzard conditions for much of that, he picked her up and carried her.
She’d wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in the crook of his neck, letting go of herself for just a minute. He smelled like campfire and snow and felt like warm steel all around her.
When he sat her down, she reeled herself back in and gulped huge rations of air to calm down.
“Slowly,” he said, kneeling beside her in the snow.
“I’ve been there,” she said, gasping. “I’ve been in that shed.”
“Lots of people have.”
“Not by the looks of it.”
“Yeah, well. I guess it’s been a while.”
She forced herself to calm down and took a moment to look at him. To appreciate the work of art he’d grown into. The amber in his eyes mesmerized her, and she could have stared at him all day, but she had cases to solve, and they were, as her father used to say, burning daylight.
She swallowed and delivered the bad news. “It’s your uncle, Levi. Your uncle Brick.”
His lashes narrowed. “How do you know we called him that?”
“I just heard it, I guess. I’m sorry, your uncle Kubrick.”
He let his gaze slide past her toward the incident site. “Are you sure?”
She nodded. “He had a driver’s license in his pocket.”
He nodded, then looked down at the hand she’d unconsciously moved to his arm.
She pulled it back just as Quincy skidded to a halt beside them and jumped off the ATV. “What happened?” he asked, leaning down to her.
Sun shook her head. “Just get me out of here.”
Quincy helped her off the ATV and onto his as Levi stood back.
“I’m sorry for your loss, Levi.”
He shook his head. “Save it for someone worthier.”
Twenty minutes later, Sun was sitting in the back of an ambulance, being grilled by her bestie.
“What happened back there?” Quincy asked when the technician left her to her own devices. A dangerous place to just leave her willy-nilly.
“I don’t know.” She shook her head, trying to loosen the cobwebs.
“Well, can you try to figure it out, because damn. You passed out.”
“I didn’t pass out.”
“First you threw up, then you passed out.”
“I didn’t pass out. I don’t think. I don’t know. I kind of lost touch with reality there for a minute.”
“Okay. That’s a start. So why are we processing a scene that hasn’t had a visitor in a decade, by the looks of it?”
She moved the ice pack to the back of her head. “Damn door.”
“They can be such dicks. The scene?”
After taking a quick glance around, she leaned in and said, “That’s where I was held.”
If she had slapped him, he wouldn’t have been more surprised.
“I remembered. The minute I walked in, I remembered the smell. The filthy mattress. The tiny windows where the sun would only stream in at certain times of day.”
He picked up his jaw and gaped at her. “I thought . . . I mean, your head injury.”
“I know. I’ve had dreams. Nightmares, really. But I honestly thought I’d just made them up.”
Quincy looked outside, then closed the doors for total privacy. “Okay, no more bullshit. Start from the beginning, or I swear to God, I’m quitting right here and now and becoming an opera singer.”
She smiled despite herself. “You can’t sing.”
“Which is why it would be tragic.” He leaned closer and took her hand. “Look, I get it, Sun. You don’t like to talk about it, but all I know is that you were abducted in high school and held for almost a week. Then you magically ended up in the ICU at St. Vincent’s in Santa Fe with a traumatic brain injury. A month later, you woke up from a coma with retrograde amnesia. Oh, and a bun in the oven. So, mind filling in the blanks?”
“Quince, you know almost as much as I do.”
“Bullshit.” He curled his hands into fists and sat back in the paramedic’s seat. “I see how you go off into space sometimes. The look on your face when you come back is not nothing. You’re remembering something. Tell me I’m wrong.”
She blew out a breathy laugh. “It’s just, I don’t want my parents to know.”
“Like I’m going to tell them.”
“Please, my mother has you so wrapped around her little finger, it’s a wonder you can walk in a straight line.”
He shook his head. “Wrong. It’s the other way around. I have her wrapped around this finger right here.” He lifted his middle finger, sending Sun a message in crystal-clear Technicolor.