“You’re bleeding.”
“I’ll get a Band-Aid later.” He shrugged off her support and looked back up the hillside. “How the hell did this happen?”
“I don’t know.” What she did know was that Quinn looked worse.
His knees buckled. Before Lily could reach him, he fell. She cried out and knelt beside him. Pounding footsteps made her look up. Max and the children were running toward them.
“Well, damn,” Quinn said, struggling to stand up.
“You stay put.” She pushed him back down.
“Damned if I will.” Somehow, though, Quinn found himself without the energy to stand. Which was ridiculous. The woman couldn’t weigh more than a hundred and ten pounds sopping wet. He bench-pressed triple that. Of course she couldn’t hold him down.
Except that resting for a minute seemed like a better idea.
Through a haze of red he watched Max and the two children come to a halt next to him. Lily’s child threw her arms around her mother. Lily automatically hugged Annmarie with words of reassurance and a gentle admonishment to stay out of the way.
That didn’t keep the child from kneeling next to him and peering into his eyes. “You’re going to be okay,” she crooned, patting his hand, then said, “I don’t think he’s in there, Mom.”
Where else would he be? Especially since his head was beginning to feel like it would crack open if he so much as moved it.
“Got your car keys in your pocket?” Max asked, appearing in Quinn’s line of vision.
“Vest,” Quinn responded, his voice sounding thick to his own ears. Everything was growing more blurry by the second.
The next time he looked up, his car was parked right next to him and Max was getting out of it. Didn’t make sense since they’d just been talking.
Lily’s face appeared in front of him and Quinn tried to smile. Her hair framed her face in a golden halo. God, but she was pretty. Why had he been mad at her?
“Can you stand up?” she asked.
He nodded.
To his complete irritation, he felt as weak as a wet noodle, and it took both Lily and Max to hoist him up. Just moving…made him sure that any second his head would simply explode.
After an eternity of awkward moves to get in the car, he collapsed in the back seat with Lily. Max and the two kids were in the front seat. The ride down the hill to Lynx Point had never seemed longer, and Max didn’t miss a single pothole on the way down, Quinn was sure of it. He wanted to know where they were going, but didn’t have the energy to ask.
He slumped over, somehow found his head resting on Lily’s lap. He opened his eyes and looked at her. Her mouth was moving, but it took too much effort to figure out what she was saying, so he watched her. He didn’t think anyone had ever smelled better, and he turned his head toward her belly and inhaled. She smelled like comfort. Through the soft texture of her sweater against his cheek, her body was warm. He decided being right here like this would be about perfect if his head weren’t pounding.
“I’ll go get a gurney,” Max said sometime later.
Quinn managed to open an eye. Through the window he could see a weathered sign. Medical Clinic. A scant two months had passed since he was last here. No way was he being wheeled in.
“I can walk.” Straightening and opening the car door required a Herculean effort that made him break into a sweat.
This time he managed to stand with only Lily supporting him, her shoulder fitting under his arm like it was meant to be there. She wrapped an arm firmly around his waist. Somehow he managed to walk the eight or ten steps to the door of the clinic.
Thad opened the door, and Quinn made every effort to walk through in a straight line. He’d had to do that once for a cop after he’d celebrated getting a scholarship for college. It had been easier then.
At the jingling sound of the bell, Hilda Raven-in-Moonlight came out of one of the back rooms of the clinic. Remembering something about Thad being her son and being Lily’s childhood friend, Quinn studied her. As usual, she was dressed in jeans, a unisex sweater, and jangly earrings he’d never seen her without.
“You never told me you had a kid, Doc.” Quinn flashed her a smile, straightening to his full height, and hoping for her usual tart reply to being called “Doc.” The very first time he’d been to see her, she had informed him she was a physician’s assistant, not a doctor. In his book, she was better than an M.D. any day of the week. Hopefully she hadn’t noticed that he’d fall over if Lily wasn’t holding him up.
“I have four of them, and that gash on your head will get bigger if it involves any of them.” For all the gruffness in her tone, she was gentle when she put an arm around his other side and steered them toward an examining room. She settled him on the examining table, hoisting his feet up. “How did he manage to get you involved in one of his hare-brained schemes, girl?”
“No scheme.” Lily caught his bloody head as though she somehow knew it was killing him and gently eased it back until he was lying down. “A stupid accident. This happened when he tried to keep my car from running into a trailer.”
Quinn heard tears clog her voice. Realizing she was more affected than her casual words suggested, he reached for her hand and found it was trembling.
“You should have seen it,” Annmarie said, close enough that she could peer into his eyes. “Mommy’s car bumped along and then it crashed right into the other one with a big kaboom.”
“Everybody else okay?” Hilda asked.
“Fine,” Max said. He came through the doorway and dropped the keys to Quinn’s car in Lily’s hand. “I’m going to go and see what needs to be done to take care of things at the lab.”
“Do you need a ride?” Lily asked.
“Nah. It’s not that far.” With one of his quick smiles that always looked vaguely foreign on his face, he turned around without waiting for a goodbye.
“Me and Annmarie are gonna play video games,” Thad said.
“I want to watch Hilda sew Mr. Quinn up,” Annmarie said. “Okay, Mom?”
Lily shook her head. “Not okay. Go play with Thad and I’ll be along in a bit.”
“Mom.”
“Go.”
Quinn liked the way Lily was firm with her daughter—as though what she did really mattered. Mrs. Perkins had been like Lily in that way. He closed his eyes and allowed himself to remember, just for a moment.
He had been one of five foster children in her house. She had made sure they studied and did the chores and remembered to say “Yes, sir” and “Yes, ma’am” when talking to grown-ups. Quinn had been pretty sure she was a mean old biddy until she died less than a year after he had gone to live with her. Kenny Jones had been in the car with her, and he died, too. Not the drunk who hit them, though.
As foster parents went, she hadn’t been so bad. She’d never taken a strap to him. She’d never treated him like she figured he’d steal whatever wasn’t tied down. She insisted that “sir” and “ma’am” be used when addressing adults and that he do his homework in the kitchen under her watchful eye. After she died, those two habits were key to his staying out of trouble.
His hand tightened around Lily’s and her fingers pressed reassuringly back. He sighed and opened his eyes, staring at the ceiling until the crack he remembered from his last visit came into focus.
“A mundane car accident?” Hilda said from the vicinity of the sink. “That’s a first. Last time it was pulling seaweed out of a propeller.”
When Lily glanced back down at him, he nodded toward his arm closest to her