did, bullets started flying again. The first couple missed. He felt them whiz past, one behind him, then one in front. Ten more yards to go. Barricades had been placed to keep vehicles at a distance so the ambulance could only get so close. It waited like a safe haven, lights flashing attendants waiting behind the doors for cover... So close.
Another shot pierced the air. The bullet slammed into his upper arm almost immediately. It knocked him back a step but he kept going. The heat, the instantaneous and awesome pain traveled to his brain with lightning speed, but he couldn’t stop. The American public would kill him if Julie Fraser died in his arms. He just made it behind the ambulance when two paramedics wrestled Julie from his arms. Troy stumbled and cursed as another paramedic reached for him.
“Oh, Jesus,” he heard the guy mumble.
Troy looked down at his arm, at the blood that flowed freely like water from a hose. The gruesome trail of red soaked his white shirt and dripped from his cuff. He stumbled again, but someone caught him, eased him to the ground.
“Bullet hit an artery,” the paramedic yelled over his shoulder. “We need him to go with her.”
An artery. Not good. He didn’t have to be a doctor to figure that out. But even if he’d known the outcome, he’d have done the same thing if it meant Julie got the help she needed.
Troy kept his eyes on Julie as they worked to stabilize her, but his vision got blurry. The throbbing wound blossomed to a full-fledged nightmare of pain as the man stripped off Troy’s shirt sleeve and began working on his arm. Two guys hefted him onto a gurney and pushed him into the ambulance next to America’s Sweetheart.
Paramedics worked feverishly in the small space. Troy barely registered the stick of the needle for the IV. Someone secured an oxygen mask over his face and the world tilted even more. Their conversation drifted over his head along with the elevated urgency when they discovered they had Julie Fraser in their ambulance.
Unlike Julie, Troy didn’t have anyone to give a message to. He had no idea where his father was and even if he did, he had nothing to say to the man. His uncle might want to know he’d been shot, but Troy hadn’t seen him in so long he doubted the man even remembered he existed.
Being alone hadn’t bothered him until right this second when it dawned on him that no one cared.
Julie turned her head and their gazes met. She’d been on television for years before she’d gone into movies. Though more of a sports guy, he’d seen some episodes of her popular sitcom. Very few things made him smile, but she always could. She had a freshness about her, a unique quality that made her human and approachable. She was the girl next door who everyone loved, with the caveat being that she was an A-list movie star. He tried to smile, tried to reassure her, but this situation didn’t look good for either one of them. Her face blurred as her eyes fluttered closed, then blackness sucked him under.
Chapter Two
Julie stared at the sterile white walls of the hospital room and the muted blues and greens of the curtain next to her bed. She wanted out of this place desperately. She wanted her bed and her house. She wanted her mother. After thirty-six hours in the hospital, Julie had stabilized and her mother, barely recovered from the food poisoning, had caught a flight to deal with another family emergency. Julie’s uncle had taken a turn for the worse and it didn’t look as if he’d survive this latest bout of cancer, so she’d persuaded her mother to be with him. Elena had gone from one hospital in California to another in Arizona.
Twenty-seven years old, and her mother was one of her best friends. That was either really cool or really sad. She wasn’t sure which. Alone in her room, Julie had plenty of hours to think about the other evening, about the helplessness of being a victim and the pain of actually getting shot, about the fact that a police officer lay in a coma in ICU from a bullet to his head. How could someone commit such a violent act? Why? What triggered it? Mostly she thought about how lucky she was to be alive and about the man who’d rescued her. Because of him, she might