9. Nine
Nine
Henry
I surveyed the bloodied woman standing before me, trying to process exactly what I was seeing.
For that first second, I almost didn’t recognize her.
With those flaming red curls pulled back in a ponytail—even one with several locks falling loose and detritus from the forest floor tangled in it—her freckled face was streaked crimson on one side from temple to chin and she had a branch clutched before her like a staff. Nearly every inch of bare skin on her arms and legs was either criss-crossed with scratches, smeared with dirt, or darkened with bruising.
“Juliet?” I whispered, horrified by the state of her. “What the hell happened to you?”
Once I was able to drag my gaze away from her injuries, I looked sharply at the forest around us, wondering if there was an assailant somewhere that I needed to contend with.
“I’m fine,” Juliet said finally, though it didn’t answer my question.
I worried that she was already in shock. Her expression was curiously blank, those bright blue eyes startling against her bloody face.
“Fine? You look like you just walked off the set of a slasher flick. Juliet, did somebody hurt you? You’re covered in blood.”
I regretted the blunt words as soon as they were past my lips. The sound that burst from her throat was somewhere between a laugh and a sob, and I shoved my reaction down immediately, trying to keep the horror from my expression. Whatever had transpired, she was hurt and she was alone.
“Hey. Hey now, you’re safe,” I said softly, taking a few steps closer to her.
She hadn’t dropped the branch yet, so I moved slowly and kept my voice soothing. It was up to me to convince her to accept my help. When she didn’t take a swing at me, I took that as a good sign.
“Everything’s going to be okay, Juliet. Can you tell me what happened?”
“I fell.”
I glanced skeptically at the even landscape behind her. “Fell? Fell where?”
“Not here,” she replied, but the words were flat, with no trace of her usual sarcasm.
“Juliet,” I said as gently as possible, concern flooding me at both her robotic response and the faint sway of her body while I approached. “I think you might have a concussion. Do you know where you are?”
“I was at Cooper’s Point. I heard . . . I don’t know. A gunshot, I think. I stepped back and fell down the hill.”
I was close enough now to reach out and touch her, but I refrained, the memory of our altercation outside The Mermaid still fresh in my mind. Cautiously, expecting she might strike me at any moment, I stretched my arm to take the stick from her hands and set it against the trunk of a tree. Then I held her gaze as my brain caught on what she’d said.
“A gunshot?”
“Yes.” She sounded so sure, so clear despite the hazy look in her eyes.
“There aren’t many hunters out at this time of year. Are you telling me you fell down the ravine ?” I asked, thinking maybe I'd misunderstood.
I hoped so. If that was what happened, she was lucky she hadn’t broken her damn neck.
“Is that the hill off to the side of Cooper’s Point?”
Juliet’s breath hitched on the words and she looked like she might start crying at any second. My heart twisted painfully at the contrast between her current state and the spitting fury of our previous meetings. With one wrong word on my part, it was distinctly possible she would finally break down.
Though I didn’t know exactly how to reassure her, I kept my tone light as I took another half step toward her.
“I think the word ‘hill’ implies a gentle slope that kids might sled down in the winter,” I replied, “while a ravine is steep as hell and full of rocks and sharp sticks. It looks like you made the acquaintance of quite a few of them on your way down.”
Juliet gave a wobbly smile, but the sheen of tears in her eyes broke my heart. My gaze traveled over her again, this time to assess the severity of her injuries. When my inspection ended back at her forehead, I pursed my lips.
“Why don’t you sit down,” I suggested gently, gesturing to a boulder beside the creek. “Let’s have a look at you. I can take care of that cut, at the very least.”
Juliet nodded, but she stood rooted to the spot. I let out a slow, patient breath. This would have been a whole lot easier if we hadn’t gotten off to such a rocky start. I acknowledged my own culpability in that and would do whatever it took to get past it if she’d let me take care of her now.
“Look, I know you don’t like me, but you’re injured. Please let me help you.”
At my careful tone, the tears she’d been fighting spilled over, rolling down her cheeks. She didn’t protest, though, just nodded again and lowered herself onto the rock. Blue stuck close to her side and I could tell her presence was a comfort as she sat beside my unexpected patient. Juliet laid a hand on the dog’s head, dropping her gaze to the ground.
“I didn’t picture you as a dog person,” she said after a moment.
“This fact probably won’t surprise you, but I find dogs less complicated than humans.”
When she met my eyes, I smiled gently before I knelt down beside her and rummaged through the small black bag strapped to my waist, sorting through my stash of first aid supplies. I didn’t carry much with me, but it would be enough to clean the blood from her face, at least.
“Is that . . . a fanny pack?” she asked faintly.
“It most certainly is not. This, Ms. Morrison, is a lumbar pack.” I shot her a sharp look as I adopted an attitude of mock outrage. “Hikers wear lumbar packs. Tourists wear fanny packs. There’s a very clear difference. I suggest you learn it if you’re going to keep hiking around here.”
Juliet snorted, momentarily distracted from her injuries by my teasing. “Clearly. I’ll study up before my next hike. Which will probably be . . . never, after this.”
When I found the packet of gauze, I glanced up and studied her face for another moment. She seemed steadier now, her responses more fluid, so I decided to stick with humor as the antidote to her shock.
“I have to ask this, for the sake of my own safety. If I touch you now, Juliet, are you actually going to break every bone in my hand?”
With a grimace of embarrassment, she managed a shrug and a tiny, apologetic smile as she said, “Ah, no. I’m sorry about that.”
“Look, I’m sorry I was such a prick. You didn’t deserve that.”
Now was as good a time as any, even if this wasn’t how I’d imagined my apology would go. I pulled out a bottle of water and poured some onto the gauze, but I paused to meet her eyes before I spoke.
“Outside the restaurant that night, what I was trying to do was apologize, not antagonize you further. Obviously my brain and my mouth work independently of each other sometimes. I have no excuse for my behavior, but I really am sorry. Change is hard, I guess.”
“That’s the understatement of the century,” Juliet muttered under her breath, but I only grinned in response.
When I dabbed carefully at her temple with the wet gauze, she flinched. Blue laid her chin on Juliet’s uninjured knee, so she turned her attention back to stroking the dog’s ears while I cleaned up the streaks of blood. The cut didn’t look serious, and though it had obviously bled freely for a while, the flow had stopped.
As I gently swiped at the dried blood and dirt on her cheek, Juliet resolutely avoided meeting my gaze. I couldn’t blame her for that. She barely knew me, and what she did know was unflattering, to say the least.
While I didn’t want to take advantage of her current state, this might be my only chance before we butted heads again.
“Can you forgive me?” I asked quietly.
At last she met my eyes, that startling blue of hers standing out vividly against the smears I couldn’t quite remove with one small square of gauze. For a moment, she looked so lost, so vulnerable, that hot shame burned inside me. This woman had lost her mother and her grandmother, and she still had the courage to pick up and move across the country on her own.
Asshole that I was, I’d only made things harder for her. I opened my mouth to apologize again, but she held up a hand to stop me.
“I’m sorry, too,” she replied.
My shock must have been evident, because the damned woman laughed. The sound was low and musical, with a husky, breathless quality that I wasn’t sure was characteristic of her laughter or simply a result of all she’d just been through.
Either way, it sent a bolt of warmth tumbling through me, curling comfortably inside my chest. As her lips curved and her eyes brightened, I had the sinking suspicion that life in Spruce Hill was never going to be the same again.