Wreckless Read Online Free Page A

slicing through her. At the door, she paused. Cara leaned over the bed and took the hand she herself had held for the last two hours. For the sake of her sanity, she decided to give it one last try.
    “Cara—”
    She rounded on her. “Are you deaf? I told you I have nothing to say to you,” she spat with enough venom to make Lexi gasp.
    Cara turned back to the bed, her voice gentling dramatically. “Fiona, it’s Cara. I’m here, sweetheart. I’ve come to see you.”
     
    Lexi choked back her sobs and stumbled out the door. The pale hospital walls receded as memories crashed through her head like giant waves.
    Twelve months. Or to be exact, eleven months, three weeks and one day, since the crash that had ripped four lives and families apart.
    She tore down the hall, the echo of her heels taking her back…back…
    London...the night of the bachelorette party…four giggling women getting into Lexi’s Beetle…Lexi secretly pleased they all lived relatively close together so she could drop them all off and still make it to Enzo’s house within the half hour.
    Was that why she’d been going a tad over the speed limit? Probably.
    All she knew was that none of them had made it home that night.
    The last thing she remembered was turning into the road leading to the apartment Cara shared with Ian, her panic at the blinding lights of the truck that loomed out of nowhere…on the wrong side of the road… She remembered the screams, the horrible screams, before everything turned black.
    She’d come out of a hazy fog by the roadside, propped up on the ambulance gurney. The policeman instructed her to blow into the Breathalyzer. Numbly, she’d complied, all the while staring with displaced horror at the remains of what used to be her car. 
    The rear had completely disappeared, the front seats held together by a precarious tangle of metal. She’d watched a tow truck lift the twisted heap onto its platform with a detached sense of shock.
    But as it’d driven past her, and she’d spied Fiona’s diamante-studded right shoe dangling from the mangled pile, she’d lost it, her hysterical screams ripping through the converged crowd. She’d felt a pinprick in her arm, before everything had once again gone mercifully blank.
    She’d woken up in the hospital, her right arm in a tight bandage, and her left wrist handcuffed to the bed, while a policeman stood guard at the foot of her bed.
    He’d instructed her to blow into a similar gadget as the Breathalyzer and calmly informed her that Sally was dead.
    She’d died instantly, having taken the major brunt of the collision to the rear left hand side of the car. Fiona, who’d been beside Sally, was in surgery fighting for her life. Cara, although she’d suffered head injuries, was out of immediate danger, but in intensive care.
    As for her, by some freak of nature, she’d escaped with nothing more than minor injuries to the right arm she’d thrown up to cover her face as the windshield glass shattered. The drunk driver of the truck had also escaped injury.
    She’d been released three hours later after a severe grilling from the policeman who’d taken her statement and ordered her to report to the station the next day. Her request to see her friends had been denied, what with Fiona still in surgery and Cara allowed only one visitor, her brother, for the moment.
    Fleetingly, as she absorbed news of Sally’s death, she’d wondered why Enzo hadn’t come to see her. She’d berated herself. At that moment, his sister needed him more than she did. She’d see him the next day when the dust had cleared a little. But it’d still hurt that he hadn’t come to find out how she was.
    As it’d turned out, fate had other plans for her. Technically and lawfully, the accident had been the fault of the truck driver, but she’d known she was also to blame, that she’d never be free of it. If she hadn’t taken that fiery swig of the cosmo, hadn’t been in such a hurry to drop the