Eye to Eye
Unedited excerpt
Her eyes wouldn’t open.
Braelyn Eades’ mind hollered a command to her eyes, but her lids wouldn’t budge.
Crap.
She’d be the first to admit she didn’t walk the realm of morning people, but this bordered on ridiculous. She tried again, visualized the order traveling the nerves from her brain to her eyelids.
Nothing.
Now what?
Even worse, her limbs lay there like inanimate tree trunks. She conveyed a ’spring into action’ message to her body parts. Move, arms!
Still nothing.
Lovely. Just lovely. She couldn’t will her eyes open, and her arms wouldn’t get up off their proverbial asses to pry her lids upward.
She grunted.
Then froze.
When had she fallen asleep? She didn’t recall stumbling to her bedroom in her customary reluctant trudge to dreamland. She remembered sitting on her living room floor in front of the coffee table, her Tarot cards laying before her in a Celtic Cross spread, Tarot For Dummies open in her lap.
She’d been trying to learn to read the cards. To broaden her horizons. To please her mother.
“Can’t put all your psychic eggs in one basket, sugar pie.”
Her mother had lectured her—again—in her perpetually smoke-roughened voice. At least this time she’d done it over the phone. Braelyn had rolled her eyes, then rolled them again before cutting the lecture short with a promise to study the cards.
Ugh.
Double ugh.
That’s it. She must’ve crashed in her living room again. Bored herself to sleep. Face on the coffee table, plastic coated cards clinging to her cheek.
But that didn’t explain why she was in a bed, her head cradled in a cloud of a pillow. It’s not like Sammy flopped out of his little goldfishie bowl, threw her on his little goldfishie back and carried her to her bedroom.
Something wasn’t right.
She searched the gray matter residing in her head. Fought to remember anything beyond her butt on the floor of her living room.
Darkness.
Battling her way through the inky blackness of amnesia, she groped for a fragment, just one iota of memory, to explain her current predicament.
No luck.
Her struggles had resulted only in frustration, so she went the opposite direction. Opened her mind and let her senses take over. Saw without eyes.
The sheets beneath her brushed the bare skin of her arms with cool softness. High thread count. Not her favorite jersey knits.
Not her bed.
Her nose twitched at a mixture of scents: pine and hospital-like sterility.
Not her room.
She reached out with her ears for anything familiar. Her grandfather clock ticking in the hallway. The faint strains of the classic rock station that constantly played on the radio in her kitchen. That annoying drip, drip, drip of the leaky faucet in her bathroom.
Nothing. Not even the rush of the air conditioning unit blowing cold air across her face.
She found the utter absence of sound even more disconcerting than anything else.
An itchy tingle started at the tips of her toes and moved upward, spreading across her torso, out through her arms, and up into her head. The rush of blood. Her limbs rousing from a deep sleep.
Had her mind awakened before her body?
Not an implausible theory. Maybe if her body was finally waking she’d be able to get her eyes open. Worth a shot. Once again, her brain sent a message to her eyelids.
Nothing.
She growled in frustration.
Maybe if she squeezed her eyes tight… Reverse psychology on her eyelids? She snorted. Her mother’s stock admonition flashed through her mind.
“Ladies do not snort.”
She snorted again. Ladies don’t end up immobilized in strange beds, either.
Regardless of how stupid it sounded, pulling the wool over her eyelids—so to speak—was the only plan she had. Hell, anything was worth a shot.
She took a deep breath and scrunched her face. Movement! She felt movement! She squeezed even harder and held, counting to ten slowly. Relaxed.
With all the speed of a snail on Quaaludes, her lethargic eyelids dragged upward.
Success!
Maybe.
Where before she’d seen only murky darkness, now everything was fuzzy and white. Nothing distinct. No hard edges.
She’d fought for this?
She blinked hard, then again, and again. Tried to force her vision to clear. The blurriness receded and finally her eyes focused.
An industrial tile ceiling.
Not her ceiling.
No big shocker there.
Still, if her legs hadn’t been acting like lazy slugs, she’d have jumped out of bed and happy danced. But her legs weren’t moving, she wasn’t dancing, and it was time to be pragmatic.
She needed to check the room out. Play Nancy Drew. Try to figure out where the hell she was.
Her head still wouldn’t move. Her mother’s curse had backfired. Instead of children inheriting her stubbornness, it was her own damn body.
She was in a foreign bed, in an unknown room, and all she could do was count ceiling tiles. Forget Nancy Drew, she felt more like Inspector Gadget. Faulty gadgets and all.
Go, go, gadget arm!
Nothing happened, but at least she felt like an idiot. Could things possibly get any worse?
The grind of a key pushing into a lock broke the stillness of the room.
Damn, she had to go and ask, didn’t she?
Her eyes slid in the direction of the sound and she
waited.
