Chapter 11
The fiery pain in her left thigh made her want to scream a third time, but Hetty knew that first loud gasp of shock and surprise was what had given her away.
She hadn’t been able to stop it, not after what she had found in the trees just past the tiny waterfall.
She had the feeling the horrible image would be with her for the rest of her life.
Assuming she didn’t bleed to death right here and now.
She couldn’t get to her feet, was afraid she’d scream again if she even tried, so instead she rolled over, biting her lip fiercely to keep from crying out as her wounded leg took her weight for a moment.
Shot. She’d actually been shot.
She kept rolling, knowing the sooner she got out of sight in the trees, the better.
The bullet had gone from the front of her thigh through the back, and she knew enough to know the exit wound would be the worst. But as far as she could tell, it hadn’t hit the bone, so the big thing she had to worry about was the femoral artery.
She kept as much pressure as she could on the wound while still getting herself under some kind of cover.
She tried to blank the pain by concentrating on working out exactly what had happened.
She’d taken a grateful drink of the clear, cool water, straightened and…
Had she started back down yet? Or had she been in his line of fire simply by being at the waterfall?
Had he known where it was and that, needing water, they would end up there?
Had he spotted her and followed? Or had it just been chance that they’d both wound up within sight of each other?
Within sight.
That’s what she should be thinking about.
The fact that she’d seen him, although only a glimpse.
Enough to tell he was indeed male, tall and with longish, wavy blond hair trailing down below the edge of what had looked like a knit cap.
She thought she’d seen a mark on his face, a scar maybe, on his left cheek, but it could have just been a smear of something.
And he was wearing some sort of camouflage. The gray-and-black stuff. Which didn’t work so well. She felt a spark of disdain for the man who clearly had thought it was always snow and rock here, when in fact so much burst into greenery this time of year.
She wondered if the guy—
“Hetty!”
It was a low but powerful sound, a whisper, yet projected all the way to where she was now lying in the shelter of the trees.
“Here,” she answered, trying to get the same power into her voice as he had. She did, but only by letting some of the pain drive it. She thought she heard him swear, low and harsh, and knew he’d read the undertone.
It was probably less than a couple of minutes before he found her, although it seemed longer as she grasped at the bloody hole in her leg, still trying to stem the bleeding. He was on his knees beside her in an instant, edging her hands away from the wound.
“Spence, I found—”
“Shh. Let me check.”
She hushed. Her apology for bringing this down on them could wait. So could the reason for it, for the moment. She concentrated on not screaming as he examined her leg. It took her a moment to realize what he was doing when at first he simply held her leg and watched it bleed, front and back.
“The artery?” she asked, trying not to let her fear into her voice.
“I don’t think so. It’s not pulsing, just bleeding. But it’s bleeding a lot, and we’ve got to stop it.”
He yanked off his belt free and wrapped it around her leg as a makeshift tourniquet.
“But he’s out there—”
“I know.” He tightened the belt hard enough she nearly moaned. “So we’re moving right now.”
“But I don’t think I can—”
Before she could finish the sentence, Spence was picking her up.
More easily than she would have thought possible given she was not a small woman at five-eight and she had a lot of muscle.
She opened her mouth to protest but it died in her throat.
If him carrying her hurt this much, it was obvious she couldn’t walk.
He got to his feet as if she weighed no more than that stoat they’d seen.
Cradling her carefully, he started toward the cave.
It was a strange feeling for her, this helplessness.
She’d fought it all her life, vowing at an early age to never be that helpless sort of female.
Or, for that matter, male, like the scared-of-his-own-shadow kid from her first computer class back in high school.
She’d felt an odd sort of pride that she hadn’t been as nervous as he’d been, and never had been.
Thanks to her mom and dad, she had more faith in herself than that boy’d had.
But now she didn’t seem to have the strength to fight that helpless feeling. Or maybe it was just because it was Spence and she knew that, in this, she could trust him with her life. Because when the chips were down, Spence Colton would come through. He always had, and he always would.
Hetty surrendered to the weakness she’d always fought.
She didn’t ever want to be seen as weak, by anyone.
She wanted to be like her mother, tough, strong, bending but never breaking no matter what life threw at her.
But that was one more thing; Spence would never hold this against her, or throw it back at her the next time they fought over…
well, the only thing they ever fought over.
She let her head rest against his shoulder, taking what comfort she could from his strength, his heat.
The pain from her leg did not lessen, but it seemed to matter less at the moment.
That was a marvelous knack he had. She’d seen him calm others when something happened on a trek.
He always managed to take the edge off a situation, no matter what it was.
He was especially good with kids, which she’d always found appealing.
Come on. You find everything about him appealing, except the fact that every other woman seems to feel the same way.
She’d never minded competition. In fact, she thrived on it in many arenas.
Except this one. The one she couldn’t handle: competing for attention from the man who had once been the tangled-up teenager she’d tutored in high school.
The kid who had had to fight so hard to do what other kids their age did easily.
The kid who had lit up when she’d made that crucial suggestion one day years ago and it had worked.
And three days later, after he’d practiced the visualization idea with words and sounds over the weekend, he’d showed up at their session and given her a huge, fierce hug that had made her breath stop and her heart race. She had—
She snapped out of the hazy reverie when she realized they were at the cave entrance.
“I’ll set you down here. You hang on to my arm and try using your good leg to slip through. Stop there until I get in, and then we’ll pick a spot for you to get off that leg.”
It took her a moment to process what he was saying. It made perfect sense. It should have been easy to understand. Was she in shock? God, was she bleeding out? Was that why her head was fuzzy?
It took all she had to accomplish the simple thing he’d asked of her. And when she was inside, she had to lean on the cave wall to stay upright. Just seconds later, Spence was there and sweeping her up into his arms again.
To her surprise, he walked straight back then cut right slightly. He must have had time to explore a little or else he remembered the layout of the cave from the last time they’d been there. Knowing him, it was probably the latter.
A large piece of rock jutted out from the wall and he went past it. Then he stopped and lowered her gently.
“Why…?” she began, but didn’t have the energy to finish asking why all the way back here, away from what light was coming through the entrance.
“If somebody just looks in from the entrance, they won’t see anything,” he explained.
With her current sluggishness, she didn’t realize right away that she hadn’t even gotten the question out, but he’d answered it anyway.
As if he’d read her mind or something. And, for some reason, that gave her the strength to get out a complete thought this time.
“You think he could find it?” she asked, tamping down the apprehension that flared. “I mean we only found it that first time by accident.”
“Depends on if they know the territory at all.”
He didn’t even look at her when he spoke, he was busy checking her wound. He loosened his belt around her leg. Even that made her clench her jaw. But there was something she needed to tell him.
“I don’t think he does,” she said. “I saw him, Spence.”
He froze. Looked at her. She told him what little she knew, including about the color of his attire.
“Huh. You’d think somebody from here would know better,” he said.
“Exactly what I was thinking.”
“So maybe an import,” he muttered as he shrugged his pack off. He dug into it, bringing out the red box that was his basic first-aid kit. He dug out what else he wanted, went back for one more thing, then, oddly, wrapped what looked like a wooden tongue depressor in gauze. He handed it to her.
“Bite down. This is going to hurt, and we don’t want him to hear you.”
“Think I’m going to scream?”
He gave her a solemn look. “I would.”
She sighed. She’d had no room to talk, it had been her shocked cry, after all, that had drawn the shooter’s attention. She had nobody to blame but herself for ending up lying here with that burning agony swirling out from her leg. But who wouldn’t have done the same?
“I had reason, Spence,” she said, rushing the words out. “There’s a body out there, right by the waterfall.”
He went still once more, this time in the act of using his knife—carefully sterilized with a wipe from the kit—to cut a bigger hole in her jeans so he could work on the wound. “He’s already killed someone?”
“I don’t think so. It looks like it’s…been there a while. She. It’s a woman. Half buried.”
That information, that the body wasn’t fresh, was apparently what he’d needed to shove the revelation into a compartment for later while he worked on the here and now. He’d always been good at that, too—putting things aside in order to tackle the present.
It turned out she did need the gauze-encased wood to clamp down on as he worked.
The exit was the worst, and he used the one haemostatic sponge he had there to stop the worst of the bleeding.
He used the kit’s tourniquet up above the wound, a much better option than his belt.
Then he dug out the roll of gauze and hoped there was enough.
When he was done, and the best bandage he could manage was in place, she let out an exhausted breath. The pain ebbed to a pulsing throb and she had to force herself to think.
“I don’t think I can walk, not over the terrain here. And I know I couldn’t keep up with you like this, even if I could walk.”
“You’re not even going to try,” he said in a determined, decisive tone she’d only heard in tense situations. Situations where Spence did what was necessary. It was one of the things that had proved to her that the depth she’d first seen in him all those years ago was still there.
“I agree. So—”
“I slowed down the bleeding, but if you try walking, it’ll be back to square one. You need medical attention.”
It was as if he hadn’t even heard her agree with him. Was he so used to her disagreeing with him he hadn’t even noticed she wasn’t? She spoke with more emphasis this time.
“I know that. So you’ll have to go down past the lake until you can get a cell signal and let RTA know they need to get here ASAP.”
He stopped with the debris from his work on her in his hand, which, at her words, had curled into a fist. “That’s at least ten miles.”
She gave him a puzzled look. A ten-mile hike in this wild country might be daunting to many, even most, but not to Spence. He did it for fun whenever he had a day off.
“I’m not leaving you alone here, unarmed, with a shooter out there. No way, Hetty, I’m just not.”
Oh.
She felt heat rise to her cheeks, knew if they were out in the sun, it would show despite the darker tone of her skin. And if they were, she knew he’d notice. Mr. Sharp Eye never missed a thing. She turned her head instinctively, shielding her reaction to his words.
The movement shifted her balance, just slightly, but that was all it took to send a stabbing reminder through her leg. She winced, but managed not to cry out.
Spence’s jaw tightened and he turned back to the first-aid kit.
He came up with a small paper packet of pills and a collapsed silicone circle. He tugged at the outer edge until it expanded into a small cup, then handed her the packet. “These should take the edge off. I’ll go get some water for you to get them down.”
Leave it to Spence to remember, even now, that she sometimes had trouble getting pills down. Then something else drove that out of her mind. “But he could still be there, watching that spot.”
“I’ll be careful.” He hesitated then said, “And I need to go look at…what you found, anyway.”
She should have known. Of course, he would. With a smothered sigh, she nodded. She looked at the pills then back at him.
“These won’t make me groggy, will they?” That was the last thing she needed right now. She was having enough trouble keeping her act together, she didn’t want to be drugged into more sluggishness.
“No, it’s nonnarcotic. And like I said, it’ll only take the edge off.”
“That’s all I need.”
He gave her a smile that made her think of that moment in the plane when she’d threatened him with a knee applied to sensitive body parts and he’d laughed and said, “That’s my girl.”
And suddenly there was an ache inside her that almost surpassed the physical pain.
An ache that reminded her of just how long she’d been wishing that were true.