Twice Kissed - Lisa Jackson [135]
She squeezed her eyes shut and, for the first time since the day of her father’s funeral, Becca McCrae prayed.
Chapter Seventeen
Brring! The phone jangled, jarring Maggie from a fitful sleep. Where was she and who—oh, God, she was with Thane in the hotel room and she’d just…
Again the phone blasted.
Becca. Or Mary Theresa.
Still half-asleep, she scrabbled for the receiver of the telephone, her heart hammering as if she expected bad news. It was morning, sunlight seeping through the cracks of the curtains, the noise of traffic from the street and water running in nearby rooms sifting through the walls.
“Hello?” she called into the mouthpiece as she sat up and scooted to the head of the bed, where her pillow was pressed to her back. Thane propped himself up on an elbow, his naked skin gleaming in the morning light, his mouth set in a hard, worried line.
“Ms. McCrae?” a male voice she recognized asked.
“Yes.”
“This is Detective Henderson.”
Her heart nearly stopped. The man’s voice was toneless. “Yes?”
“Listen, you’d better sit down. Your sister’s Jeep’s been located. Off the highway near Turkey Canyon. Single-car accident.”
“What?” Tears sprang to her eyes. Denial screamed through her brain. “I—I don’t believe it.” She was shaking violently.
“Maggie, let me—” Thane reached for the receiver, but she wouldn’t let go, held on to the damned phone as if it were a lifeline to Mary Theresa.
“Are you still there?” Henderson asked.
“Yes,” she said, her voice the barest of whispers. She began to shiver as the words sank in. “But I don’t believe…I can’t believe that my sister…” Her voice failed her altogether.
Thane’s eyebrows slammed together, and he stared at her hard, his naked body close, his eyes filled with questions.
“I’m sorry, Ms. McCrae, but there’s no doubt about it. The license plate and description of the Wrangler match,” Henderson said. “It’s hard to miss your sister’s vanity plate. It reads ‘Marquise.’”
“Oh, God,” she whispered, her fingers holding the receiver in a death grip. A million images of her sister swirled in a blurred kaleidoscope through her mind. Mary Theresa as a blond tot, as a preteen hiding under the covers and reading her brother’s Playboy magazine, as an adolescent smoking and sneaking out of the house, as a young woman pregnant with Thane’s child and scared to death…Maggie swallowed hard, had trouble finding her voice. “Mary Theresa. Is she—? Is she alive?”
Thane reached for the phone again, but Maggie shook her head, pushed him away.
“We don’t know yet. A state trooper found the rig as the snow began to melt. The Wrangler’s pinned beneath the top of a pine tree that must’ve split on impact and there’s nearly a foot of snow on top of that.”
“Sweet Jesus,” she whispered, her throat catching, tears drizzling from her eyes.
“The trooper called in for backup, and a team’s dug deep enough to see someone—a woman—in the front seat, but it’ll be some time before they can get her out and look for identification.”
She let out a little squeak of protest. Her stomach clenched, but she couldn’t let the fear get the better of her. “I’ll—we’ll—be at the station in twenty minutes,” she said into the phone, her blood turning to ice, her heart cold as death. She was shaking so violently she could barely hang up the phone.
“That was the police.”
“I gathered that much. Are you okay?” Concern darkened his eyes.
“Yes…no…yes, I will be.” She tried to pull herself together. “They…they think they found her,” she said in a voice that sounded distant and distraught, not at all like her own. “And…and there was some kind of accident.” She blinked and drew in a quivering breath. “Detective Henderson didn’t say it, but I could hear it in his voice. He thinks Mary Theresa is dead. Dead! Oh, God, Thane she can’t be, she just…can’t be.”
“Wait a minute, slow down.” He tried to