Wounded Angel (The Earth Angels) - By Stacy Gail Page 0,30

this time. She’d thought that after years of training, she was now better equipped to handle anything, but in a heartbeat he’d proved that was a pie-in-the-sky fantasy. Another curveball full of crazy had come her way, and this time Nate was the pitcher who’d thrown it. The least he could do now was let her find out if this reawakening to life was the real deal, or if she was still frozen in her cocoon of benumbed existence. She’d call him to see where he was, she decided, slipping lower on the sofa cushions. If he was still in town, she was more than happy to return the jacket he’d wrapped her in so long ago, and from there...she’d cross that bridge if and when she ever came to it.

Ella wasn’t aware of falling asleep until the ringing of the phone jerked her awake. Weak rays of the morning sun leaked through the blinds veiling the front windows. With a yawn she forced her body, stiff from spending the night curled up in a fetal position to avoid the worst of the couch’s lumps, to a vaguely upright position and grabbed for the phone.

Habit had her looking at the readout before her eyes were capable of focusing. At last the message made sense—unknown. Stupid telemarketers calling at seven in the freaking morning had to be breaking some kind of harassment law, she thought, slamming the phone back into its dock. Calls this early were positively obscene.

The answering machine clicked on. Instead of the expected hang-up or the sounds of a busy boiler room churning away, faint strains of twangy, tears-in-your-beer music whispered over the line.

Again?

She shook her head and huddled deeper into the couch cushions. She seriously doubted she was being stalked by a serial musician, bent on bugging her with country music. No doubt someone had slipped up and accidentally hit the Hold button instead of the Talk button and now she was stuck in Muzak purgatory. With an irritated sigh she prepared herself to ignore the message until it did its automatic disconnect, when the tune finally sank in.

Smoky Mountain Rain

Keeps on fallin’.

I keep on callin’

Her name.

Invisible ice cascaded over her while her heart squeezed and squeezed until she couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t do anything, except revert to what she’d been two years ago.

A victim.

The Smoky Mountains meant home for the woman she once was, the woman she’d struggled so hard to grow out of and recover from. Charles Rainier had used his family’s millions to hide his well-fortified cabin of horrors deep in the Smoky Mountains. They were a part of a past she sure as hell didn’t want to be reminded of through some cheesy song. She jerked back up to grab the phone out of its dock and disconnected it, only to change her mind a second later, but it was too late. Nothing but blank dial tone greeted her as she brought the phone back to her ear.

“Damn it.” More shaken than she cared to admit, Ella dropped the phone back in its dock, then pretended not to see the tremor in her hand. It was nothing more than a song that reminded her of home, that’s all. Just a stupid little tune sent to her no doubt from a sleepy telemarketer who accidentally hit the Hold button. If she allowed something as harmless as elevator music to shatter her reconstructed self-confidence, she might as well shove all the furniture in front of the doors, dig a bunker in the basement and never poke her head outside again.

One thing Nate had said about her was true; she was a fighter. Early on after her escape from Charles Rainier, she’d made herself go through intensive therapy called PE, or Prolonged Exposure therapy, a type of therapy that war veterans went through in order to deal with traumatic memories. Breathing techniques, coupled with confronting memories that brought about anxiety through descriptive talk therapy, helped diminish the power that trauma-induced anxieties had over her. Avoidance of painful things only made the wound sink deeper, so as she lay there she deliberately hummed the tune to herself until her heart rate settled and it became nothing more than a dated bit of sentimental noise.

Ella, one. Nightmares of the past, zero.

A sudden pounding on the front door through the security bars loosed a startled yelp out of her before she hopped to her feet and grabbed the nearest weapon, a baseball bat she kept leaning in a