Chapter 3 #2
She struggled and found that the soft ground wrapped itself around her leg, grabbing her and pulling her more deeply into the earth.
Her ankle was throbbing, and she was sure she was bleeding, and that debris and mud were getting into her cuts as the wet ground persistently shaped itself around her legs.
She struggled against the rocks around her hips, trying to reach into her pocket. But her phone wasn’t there.
Damn the shallow skirt pockets. They had slid out while she was falling, she was sure.
Fear gripped her chest.
But she had sent a text to Marlowe letting her know where she was.
So, somebody would find her.
But when?
Because she didn’t live on the ranch, she lived by herself. Because no one had been expecting to see her tonight.
For the first time, she felt terrified.
She was getting pelted with rain, she was sitting there in abject misery, and getting more and more frightened as time ticked on.
It could’ve been an hour, it could’ve been four hours.
It could’ve been five minutes. It was darker than it should be because of the clouds, and she couldn’t see the sun. And she was beginning to get panicky.
She tried to tell herself not to panic. Tried to tell herself that making it so she couldn’t breathe was only going to make things worse.
She leaned back and tried to steady herself.
Tried to normalize her breathing. There was a rock digging into her back, and she wiggled her toes, just to prove to herself that she could.
She didn’t think she was horribly injured, she was just pinned.
Vaguely, she remembered the story about the guy who had to cut his own arm off to escape a similar situation.
She was not feeling that desperate yet.
The very idea of having to get that desperate made her start to panic again. Her heart was racing.
She tried to calm down. She thought about innocuous things. About yarn. She tried to imagine her crochet pattern.
Then she found her mind wandering back to Zane.
What had he been doing when she’d gone up to his place, and he came walking out of the woods shirtless?
Detective work. She loved a good detective show.
Usually, that included solving murders, but she could solve for shirtless Zane as well.
His hair had been wet. She was reasonably sure.
He didn’t have his hat on his head. He was holding it in his hand.
Maybe he’d been holding his shirt too, and she hadn’t noticed?
Maybe it had been in the hat. Which meant maybe he had it when he went where he was.
Maybe there was a creek back there? There was a river that ran through the Painted Ridge Ranch, maybe it went all the way through Zane’s property. That would stand to reason.
So maybe he had been bathing himself.
This was really stupid. She was maybe dying, half buried in a mudslide, and she was thinking about Zane. Naked.
But then, why not think about it? Why not fully indulge herself? It was distracting anyway.
And it was either that or get panicky again. Start to think about how she might die here.
Overdramatic. That’s very overdramatic.
Yes, it was. She didn’t think this was a life-or-death situation.
Did people realize they were in life-or-death situations? Or did their bodies go into shock?
What if she were actually gravely injured, and her body was blocking it out? She knew that bodies did things like that. That they tried to protect you from reality. So that you could survive.
Okay. She was going to try to think about Zane again. Naked. In the river, moving his hands over his bare chest.
Maybe a bar of soap in his hand? A washcloth? He hadn’t had any of those things with him that she’d seen, but…
Did his cabin have running water?
Her thoughts stopped making quite so much sense, but at least it stopped raining. It was getting dark, though.
Very dark.
She started to struggle against her prison again, and she could feel the dirt sucking down beneath just as it had the first time she’d tried to break free, but now that some of her adrenaline had worn off, she could think.
It was suction. You couldn’t pull directly against something with tight suction like this, you had to break the seal.
She let out a harsh breath.
Okay. So there was nothing she could do if people didn’t find her tonight.
And what if they didn’t find her? That meant that getting out of this impossible situation was the first order of business.
She found a little surge of energy and started to experiment with what happened if she moved differently.
If she didn’t try to pull herself up, but try to wiggle herself incrementally back through the sucking mud, then maybe she could get some momentum.
She was almost sure she’d managed to move herself an inch.
Bolstered by that, she began to move slowly, realizing that struggling only pulled her down further. Like quicksand.
Yes. Like quicksand. She had been given to believe the quicksand would be a pretty big problem all through her growing-up years but then had never encountered it outside of a cartoon.
But she knew the physics of it. When you struggled against it, then it only pulled you down deeper.
Which was what had been happening to her lower body.
She had been sinking into the soft ground, the rocks piling on top and pushing her deeper.
So if she could just be still as she used her upper body to try to pull herself out…
She moved another inch. It was ridiculously hard work. She had a feeling that the mud had also cushioned her from being crushed, but that it was part of why it was so difficult now, particularly with the weight of the rocks on top.
She wiggled and wiggled, and finally, after what seemed like more than an hour of trying, after the sky had become completely black, no stars visible through the thick clouds, she managed to pull herself free.
She scrambled to her feet and immediately went down.
Her ankle was definitely sprained. She didn’t think broken, because she had been able to put her weight on it, at least for a moment.
Not that she knew anything about broken bones.
But it felt… Not good. And there was no way she was going to be able to figure out where to go in the darkness.
She was off the trail, that much she could be certain about.
She didn’t have her phone, which meant she had no flashlight.
She was so far from where she had started, and she had no idea how to get back.
Scrambling up the embankment in the dark was not a good idea.
That much she knew. Because she was aware enough to realize that none of that was stable right now, even though it hadn’t been raining for a few hours.
She was freezing. Her legs were scraped and dirty, and her ankle hurt.
She collapsed, back against the embankment, knees pulled up to her chest, and she started to cry. She could only be thankful that it was summer. That even though she was cold, it was probably sixty degrees. She wasn’t going to get hypothermia. She wasn’t going to die from the elements.
She wasn’t.
In the morning, she would be able to see where she was. She would be able to figure out how to get out.
It was just… she was going to be spending the night in the wilderness. That much was clear now, and she hadn’t even really wanted to spend a few hours in the wilderness.
Exhaustion bled through her. She leaned back, her shoulder sagging. Her eyes began to close voluntarily.
Maybe she was dying.
Maybe this was her punishment for trying to do something even a little bit adventurous.
Maybe she wasn’t allowed to.
Maybe she wasn’t allowed to have a life at all.
Maybe her life would only ever be weird illicit fantasies about a man she had never even had a real conversation with that lasted more than five minutes, and cross-country moves, the beginnings of a successful business.
No family of her own. No life of her own, not really.
Three months of freedom, and still stained by grief.
Still affected by the loss of her mother.
No freedom. No hope. Nothing new.
Tears slid down her cheeks, and she slept.
It was a jagged, uneven sleep, but her distress and her physical exertion had left her entirely drained.
It wasn’t until she heard a deep masculine voice calling her name that she stirred. She had to be hallucinating. She couldn’t break herself out of her sleep, but she heard her name, over and over again.
“Cara!”
She heard pounding, and she had no idea what that could be. At first, for a moment, she thought maybe somebody was pounding on her bedroom door. But she wasn’t in her bedroom. She was on the ground, and her whole body hurt.
She was outside.
Her eyes popped open. “I’m here,” she said.
Her voice was so weak. She could barely get a sound out.
“Cara!”
“Here!” She croaked just a little bit louder, but it was enough. It was enough.
The pounding sound got closer. Hooves, she realized.
It was gray now outside, the early morning hours.
In the distance, moving closer, could see a black horse moving closer and closer, the rider on top dressed all in black. He had come to save her.
Or she was dead. She was dead, and she was hallucinating that he was the angel come to get her because that had been what she was thinking about before she died. Zane’s naked body.
So maybe he was taking her to hell for being prurient.
Or she was delirious, and none of this was happening at all.
“Are you okay?”
This was the first time she had ever heard this much emotion in Zane’s voice.
Normally, he was monotone.
So this had to be some kind of hallucination. He jumped off his horse and ran over to where she was, kneeling down in front of her and cupping her face. His hands were hot, rough, and she didn’t think she would know enough to be able to imagine hands so rough.
Like they were made of worn leather.
From all the work that he did outside.
She looked up at him, tried to make eye contact, but found her eyes crossing.
“Did you hit your head?”