One (Count to Ten Book 1) by Jane Blythe

Author:Jane Blythe [Blythe, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bear Spots Publications
Published: 2016-01-07T16:00:00+00:00

* * * * *

11:17 A.M.

“Xavier, are you okay?” Kate jumped from her car and ran over to her partner who was hovering in the middle of the street.

“I’m fine,” he assured her.

Giving him a once-over, his voice was a little croaky and he smelled like a smokehouse, but other than that, he seemed all right. “You scared me half to death,” she admonished shakily. She hadn't been able to stop shaking since Xavier had called her ten minutes ago to inform her of his and Annabelle’s near deaths.

“Kate, I’m really okay,” he patted her shoulder.

She turned her attention to the still smoldering Englewood house that the firefighters almost had under control. “You were lucky to make it out of there alive,” she murmured.

“Someone didn’t like that we came back here.” Xavier’s gaze shifted to the ambulance a few yards away. “I'm just gonna go check on Annabelle.”

Kate followed him to the back of the ambulance where Annabelle was lying on a stretcher. Her face was pale, eyes closed, and even with an oxygen mask over her mouth her breathing was still labored.

Xavier took Annabelle’s hand and stroked her hair. At his touch her eyes fluttered open to gaze up at him, and Kate could see immediately that things had changed between her partner and Annabelle.

“We’re ready to leave for the hospital,” one of the medics announced. “You coming with us, Detective?”

“No, I'm fine…”

“Xavier,” Kate began to protest, the medic looking like he was about to join her.

Cutting her off, he said, “Really, I'm fine. I wasn’t in there as long as Belle was.”

“You're not coming with me?” Annabelle’s eyes flared with panic as she pulled off the mask.

“I'm going to be there really soon,” Xavier soothed, gently extracting the oxygen mask from her hand and positioning it back over her nose and mouth. “I just need to talk to Kate first, and your neighbors, see if anyone saw anything, but the second I'm done I'm going to come straight to the hospital, okay?”

“Okay,” Annabelle’s small voice whispered, her eyes drifting tiredly closed.

“Hey,” Xavier shook her gently, waiting till she was looking at him. “You are amazing, always remember that.”

Annabelle smiled up at him and Xavier kissed her forehead tenderly before climbing down from the ambulance, watching it intently as it drove off down the street.

Kate was watching her partner just as intently. “She remember anything?”

Tearing his eyes away from the corner where the ambulance had just disappeared, he answered, “Actually, yeah. She remembered someone hovering over her during the night—tall and muscled with blue eyes, but she said his face was fuzzy and she couldn’t see it properly. Same description we got from both Nicole Jenner and Lorraine Rankling. And she said he spoke to her. Apparently, he called her by name and told her he’d been waiting a long time for this.” Xavier’s jaw clenched as he repeated what the killer had said to Annabelle right before he raped her.

“So the killer definitely knows his victims,” she mused.

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