Category: Flash Fiction

“You’re sure she’s okay?” Dean asked. Demanded really. And the young doctor quivered in her shoes. He should ease up on her but seeing Tayla lying unconscious in his arms, blood trickling from her nose, her whole body contorting in pain even as she passed out had shaken him.

Seeing Tayla like that had stirred hidden feelings.

Feelings he’d thought he’d buried deep enough to be gone forever.

“She’s okay,” the doctor assured him.

“When will she wake up?”

“She’s awake now,” Tayla’s weak voice floated from the bed behind them.

Dean whirled around and stalked over to her, she’d just about given him a heart attack, collapsing like that, and terrified as he was he didn’t know what to do with those feelings so he fell back on terse.

“You feeling okay?” he demanded.

Tayla shrunk back into the mattress. “Are you going to take me back to jail?”

He sighed and scrubbed his hands over his tired face. He had to calm down, he was scaring her and that was the last thing he should be doing, when she learned what he and his partner suspected was really going on she was going to have plenty to be afraid about. “No, we’re not taking you back to jail.”

She relaxed a little but her face was still drawn and tense, and the tight lines around her mouth said she was still in pain. “What’s going on? What happened to me?”

“Can you give us a minute,” he said to the doctor who hurried out of the room. Pulling over a chair to Tayla’s bedside he sat and prepared himself to explain. He hated the fear in Tayla’s gorgeous eyes, hated that he was partially responsible for putting it there.

“Dean?” she prompted when he didn’t speak.

“Mara Mason wasn’t the first of your patients to be murdered. She was the fourth. There were three deaths that had been deemed suicides, we didn’t put it together until Mara. All four of them had reported being ill the day of their deaths, we think that whoever killed them poisoned them then when they were weakened he killed them. He must have gotten frustrated that we hadn’t noticed the deaths so he stopped making it look like suicide and stabbed Mara.”

“D-do you think I k-killed them?” Tayla stammered.

“No, I don’t think that you killed them, I think …” he trailed off, not wanting to verbalise his theory because it felt like once he did it would become real.

Tayla gasped, her honey coloured eyes growing wide. “You think that its me he’s really after? If you hadn’t taken me down to the station I would have gone home alone and he would have gotten me too.”

As much as he wanted to allay her fears and deny her theory he couldn’t.

Because that was exactly what he believed.

So they hadn’t put her in handcuffs, but they had put her in the back of their police car, driven her down to the station, put her in an interview room and left her in here to stew.

Tayla was sitting at the table, trying to look calm and nonchalant but knowing she was failing.

They were watching her.

She couldn’t see them through the one way glass but she knew that Dean and his partner were out there. They wanted to see if she was going to give anything away, and from the nervous way she was twitching and fidgeting she knew they must think she was guilty.

How long were they going to make her wait?

Just how bad was this?

How much trouble was she in?

If they really thought that she had done this was she going to be able to convince them that she was innocent?

The door open and her gaze snapped up to meet Dean’s ice blue eyes. They were so cold. What had become of the funny, sexy, borderline arrogant teenager she remembered?

He didn’t say a word, just walked over to the table and threw some photos down on it.

Although she didn’t want to know what they were her hands moved of their own accord and picked one up.

It was a photo of Mara Mason. A beautiful and vibrant woman in her mid-twenties who had been horribly scarred in a vicious assault. In this picture the woman had been stabbed what looked like dozens of times.

“I’m going to be sick,” she stammered as an icy wave of nausea washed over her. Tayla staggered to her feet and over into a corner of the room where she violently vomited.

The nausea didn’t stop.

Someone had killed one of her patients and Dean and his partner thought it was her.

Mara had been horrible murdered, just when she’d been starting to make progress.

“Tayla?” Dean knelt beside her and rested a hand on her shoulder.

“Someone killed Mara,” she said, knowing it was obvious, but she couldn’t quite accept this was happening.

“Are you alright?” His blue eyes were no longer ice cold now they were filled with concern.

“C-cold,” she said, teeth chattering. She was feeling worse, her stomach churned, and her head was pounding with a headache.

Dean touched the back of his hand to her forehead. “She has a fever,” he called over his shoulder to his partner.

“She has a fever still,” she corrected as her whole body began to tremble.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve been sick all day,” she murmured, drowsy now. She wanted to close her eyes, go to sleep, and then wake up to find all of this had just been a bad dream. Tayla felt something wet on her face and when she touched a hand under her nose and it came away bright red with her blood. she turned terrified eyes to Dean. What was happening to her?

Dean picked up her wrist to take her pulse, then shrugged out of his jacket, draping it around her and then gathering her into his arms. “We have to get her to the hospital,” he said, a hint of panic in his voice.

“What’s going on?” she asked, as her tremors increased, and the pain in her head became crippling.

“I think you’ve been poisoned.”

Poisoned?

A murdered patient and now someone had tried to kill her?

Tayla wanted to ask more questions but the world around her grayed and then faded to nothing as she passed out.

“Its been a year.”

“And?” Tayla glared at her colleague who also happened to be her best friend.

“And I think its okay to move on if you want to,” Mackenzie patiently replied, not deterred by her angry glower or the frosty tone of her voice.

“I know that,” Tayla snapped. It had been a year since her husband died and she knew that there was no right or wrong when it came to moving on after the loss of a loved one. She and Mackenzie were both trauma counsellors, they’d been friends since the first day of kindergarten, gone through something traumatic together, decided to both study psychiatry, both specialised in trauma counselling, and had opened their practice together. There was no one on this earth who knew her better than her best friend.

No one except her husband.

Only he wasn’t on this earth anymore.

He was dead, had been killed by some fourteen year old rebel who had decided to go joyriding with his girlfriend in his dad’s convertible. He’d lost control of the car, plowed straight into Max’s car, killing him instantly.

Her husband was gone, there was a hole in her heart that would never be filled, and to be quite honest she didn’t want to fill it. Tayla might be only twenty-nine, but she couldn’t imagine falling in love again, so she was resigned to living out the rest of her life alone.

“Tay, don’t do that,” Mackenzie said, wrapping an arm around her shoulders as they turned off the lights in their offices, closed the doors, and started walking down the hall to the reception room and the exit to their suite.

“Do what?” she asked, all innocent.

“Pretend that you’re okay with being alone. I know Max, and I know that he would want you to find someone else to share your life with. He was the least selfish guy on the planet and he would want you to be happy.”

“I am happy,” she protested. As happy as a widow who was still grieving could be anyway.

“Liar,” Mackenzie muttered, but before she could say more the door to their suite was opened and two good looking men in suits stepped through it.

Wait.

She knew one of those men.

Dean Franelle.

She had known him almost as long as she had known Mackenzie. He’d been her older brother’s best friend, she’d had a crush on him for as long as she could remember but to her she was just Squirt, the annoying kid sister of his best friend. One night, just before she left for college, there had been one night of magical lovemaking, and while she had dreamed of a future for the two of them he’d had different ideas. He’d taken her virginity then been gone before she woke in the morning. He’d broken her heart but Max had mended it before breaking it all over again with his death.

But she wasn’t that sweet, shy girl anymore, standing in the shadows making up fantasies of what it would be like to be carried in Dean’s strong arms, kissed by that mouth with the dimples on either side, made love to by that body that would put any model on the cover of the romance books she loved to shame. This time she was going to be the one to snub him like he didn’t matter then never see him again so she could finally say love this ending to their little story.

Now she was a woman who was well and truly fully prepared to spend the rest of her years alone. A sexy body wasn’t enough to entice her anymore.

“Come on, Mackenzie, lets go,” she growled, intending to stalk right past Dean and his friend.

“Umm, okay, but shouldn’t we like, you know, find out what they want?” Mackenzie asked.

“I don’t care what they want,” she huffed, releasing her grip on her friend, if Mackenzie wanted to stand here and listen to Dean then she could but she was leaving.

“You can’t leave, Tayla,” Dean said, grabbing her arm as she tried to walk past him, and darn it if her stupid body didn’t respond instantly to his touch. It had been twelve months and nine days since Max died, and twelve months and eleven days since she had last had been with a man, this stupid electricity that was zapping through her body was nothing more than a natural reaction to a physically pleasing specimen.

“I most certainly can,” she said, trying to pull herself free but he wouldn’t release her.

“Uh, I’m getting the vibe that there’s something going on here, do you two know each other?” Dean’s friend asked.

“He broke her heart,” Mackenzie supplied.

“Ah,” the man nodded like that all made sense.

“We’re here about a murder,” Dean informed them, his tone cold and clipped, nothing like the Dean she remembered. “One of your patients was murdered, Tayla.”

One of her patients was murdered? Which one? How? Who did it? Since Dean was still friends with her brother she knew that he was a cop and this other man was no doubt his partner. If they were here informing her of this murder did that mean they thought that she had committed it?

The color drained from her face and she was suddenly ice cold. “Do you think I did it?”