She’d feel safer once she was across that bridge. But when she sped up with that purpose in mind, the driver matched her speed and inched closer to her car.

In desperation, she flattened the gas pedal onto the floorboard again. Even then her speed wasn’t enough to pull ahead of the other vehicle. Just as she reached the signpost, the other driver outmaneuvered her. He edged his car to the right, forcing her off the road and onto the soft shoulder that soon gave way to nothingness.

She was probably going close to a hundred miles an hour when her car hit the water. It slammed into the surface of the river with such impact that her air bag deployed. That saved her life but wasn’t really a blessing. Because she was still conscious when her car was swallowed by the greedy, swirling water.

CHAPTER 15

RALEY WAS SPEEDING TOWARD CHARLESTON, HIS TRUCK eating up the miles, when he spotted dual sets of taillights ahead of him. They flickered through the trees, often disappearing for minutes at a time before he caught sight of them again.

But even being as far behind them as he was, he could tell the second driver was tailgating the first. “Idiot.” It was just plain stupid to drive that aggressively, especially on a highway like this. If the driver was that impatient to get where he was going, why didn’t he just go around the other car?

In the back of his mind, he was hoping the first driver wouldn’t be a prick, a road hog who refused to let anyone pass him. He was in a hurry to reach Charleston and warn Britt to tread carefully. He wasn’t sure how he was going to make contact with her. She would be surrounded by police and-

“What the hell?”

The first car had moved onto the shoulder, but the second car didn’t pass. In fact, it looked like the tailgating guy was trying to nudge the other driver off the road.

He was gripped by a terrible intuition. Britt. And as suddenly as he thought it, the cars disappeared.

Had he had time to catch up with her? Not unless she was a slow driver. Not unless she’d got lost.

“Shit!”

It seemed to take forever for him to come out of the curve that had temporarily blocked the other two cars from sight, but once he did, he squinted for sharper focus. Unfortunately, he was too far away to make out the shapes of the taillights and determine the models of the cars involved in the dangerous cat-and-mouse chase. He pushed the pickup as fast as it would go, but the other cars were lighter, faster, and he couldn’t close the distance.

Again they disappeared.

He counted the seconds. Twenty maybe? Thirty?

And then he had another flickering view of one set of winking taillights disappearing from sight altogether, and those of the tailgater speeding across the bridge.

Raley uttered a sharp cry as he crammed his gas pedal against the floorboard. It seemed to take a thousand years to cover the distance to the bridge. He pounded the steering wheel as though whipping the truck to go faster.

It skidded to a jarring stop just inches away from the brink of the eroding earth embankment that supported the bridge. He was out of the truck before inertia settled it. He opened the toolbox and took out the heavy-duty flashlight he’d used earlier, then grabbed the first weighty metal object he touched. A wrench. It would have to do.

He scrambled down the embankment, half sliding, half hopping as he pulled off his sneakers. By the time he reached the water, he was barefoot and huffing deep breaths to fill his lungs, then without a second thought, he dived in.

His flashlight had a powerful beam, but he might as well have been shining it through blackstrap molasses. He knew the river, knew how impenetrably dark the water could be even where it was most shallow, and this wasn’t one of those places. Here, the channel was deep.

Frantically he swept the light from side to side and was becoming panicked when he spotted the car, settling heavily on the riverbed, surrounded by a nimbus of swirling silt. He shone the light in the direction of the driver’s window. The beam picked up a pale palm, flattened against the glass, a strand of blond hair floating eerily in the feeble shaft of light.

Britt.

The flashlight blinked once and went out. The darkness was absolute.

He dropped the light, but gave a hard kick and within seconds reached the passenger side of the car. Feeling his way, he found the windshield and hammered the wrench against it as hard as he could. It didn’t give. He pounded it several more times. Nothing.

His lungs were beginning to burn.

He continued banging the wrench against the windshield until finally he felt the safety glass break but not shatter. He kicked at it again and again until his foot pushed through. He widened the hole by continuing to kick, then wedged his shoulders through it. Broken glass scraped against his head and arms, but he ignored the pain.

Blindly he groped for Britt and found her right arm. When he touched it, she didn’t react, and his mind screamed, God, no!

He groped for her seat belt. It was unfastened. She’d managed to do that. He hooked his hands under her arms and guided her through the hole in the windshield, carefully but quickly. Neither had much time left. He was out of air, and she was completely still.

Once he had her clear of the windshield, he executed a hard scissor kick and used his free arm to claw toward the surface. His lungs were screaming for oxygen. He kicked as hard as he could, but his limbs were becoming heavier by the second, rubbery and uncoordinated. It had been five years since he’d done any rescue training; he was out of condition.

He looked toward the surface, but it was only a lighter shade of black. Still, he struggled toward it. Up. Up. And finally, his head broke the surface and he gulped a mouthful of air.

But Britt wasn’t breathing.

He made sure her face was clear of the water, then began to swim to the bank. His body was still hungry for oxygen, and he was exhausted, but he swam as fast as he could against the current. When his feet touched bottom, he waded the rest of the way, then crawled up onto the bank, dragging Britt along with him.

He flipped her onto her back and straddled her. She had a weak pulse but wasn’t breathing. Placing his hands in the center of her chest, he began CPR.

“Come on, Britt,” he said as he rhythmically pumped her chest. “Do not die on me. You’re not finished yet. Come on, come on.”

River water trickled over his face and into his eyes, but he didn’t stop the compressions or the litany of encouragement that eventually took on the inflection of a dare. “You called me a coward, but you’re the one giving up here. Are you going to let some other TV dolly grab your story? You’d never forgive yourself if you let that happen. Now breathe, goddammit!”

River water spewed from her mouth onto him. He dropped his head against his chest, weak with relief. “I thought that might bring you around.” He turned her head to one side. She coughed and gasped, coughed some more. “Get it out, that’s the way, that’s good,” he murmured, holding her wet hair away from her face as she vomited up the water she’d swallowed.

When she was breathing more easily, she turned her head and looked up at him. Her eyes were streaming tears. Her voice was hoarse, and she strangled when she tried to speak. She spat out more water, then finally managed to say, “They tried to kill me.”

He nodded. A thousand questions were demanding answers, but they would have to wait. He needed to assess her physical condition. But he also thought they needed to get the hell away from here. He couldn’t be sure that his headlights had gone unnoticed by whoever was intent on pushing her off the road. The asshole might return to make sure she hadn’t been rescued or by some miracle survived. If the would-be killer came back, they were sitting ducks.