"Don't leave me," he whispered. He had to keep her here until he could figure out what to do.
"I won't," she said in that soft little voice. She looked around them. "We can't stay here. The tide's coming in and you'll drown. We've got to go up that hill."
"Hill?" He tried to turn his head to see where she pointed, but he didn't see any hill, just the sheer, pale cliffs he couldn't possibly climb.
Suddenly she was on her feet, standing over him. "Stay here. I'm going to call for help. I'll be back as fast as I can."
He tried to shout to her, but no sound came out of his ravaged throat. She just waved reassuringly at him and kept going. He felt himself gripped by a primitive, cowardly fear that this was finally it. The untouchable, uncatchable Shadow had been caught. He'd be dead as soon as she got on that radio and announced where he was to anyone listening in. And she'd be dead, too. That was what shook him out of his stupor. Maybe his life was expendable, but hers wasn't.
He rolled onto his stomach, only then realizing just how much his body hurt. But the effort of moving also made him start shivering once again, and that was a good thing. The shivering would stave off hypothermia. A bit of light exercise would warm up his body and do him good.
He tried to pull himself upright, using the nearest boulder for support. The bad leg scraped across sharp rocks. He didn't scream. He was good at not screaming. He was an expert at not screaming. And this was nothing. Some sore muscles, a shivering that made his teeth chatter until they ached, and one minor gunshot wound.
Piece of cake.
He became intimately acquainted with three more boulders before he had to stop and rest.
He looked back. He'd covered about four yards. He was all the way out of the water now, but it wasn't enough. Not nearly enough. If he could make it to that big rock at the base of the cliff, he could hide before anyone else got here. He hadn't yet figured out what to do when they walked around the rock and shot him in the back, but he was working on it.
"You're going the wrong way!" She was back, and kneeling down by him.
He rolled over to face her, intending to knock her out, but he didn't. It was really hard to slug a woman, even a foolish girl who might get him killed. One of his weaknesses. Gold-tipped eyelashes were hardly a good reason to let down his guard.
"I can't leave you like this," she said. "You're delirious."
She fetched the raincoat he'd dropped in his struggle through the rocks and brought it back, placing it around his shoulders again.
"Radio?" It was the only thing on his mind.
She shook her head. "I haven't gotten back to the lighthouse yet. I'll have to wait until I can get you out of danger before I call."
"Danger?"
She pointed toward the sea. "The tide's rising too fast. You can't stay here."
Oh. That kind of danger. He felt himself grinning.
"I don't see what's so funny. You're a mess, and the tide is coming in, and I need to get help."
"No help," he whispered.
"Look, Mister Tough Guy, don't try to be all macho. You need help. Why you surfers think you have to risk your lives just for some stupid thrill is beyond me."
A surfer. That's what she thought he was. Okay, that'll work. "Sorry," he whispered. "Stupid."
"Yeah, that makes two of us. Now what am I going to do with you?"
Good question, Lorelei York.
She stood up and put her hands on her hips.
He watched her. She bit her lower lip when she concentrated, he noticed. This was not a good thing. It made her look even younger than her twenty-something years. How many years? He thought hard again.
"24," he whispered.
"Huh?" she said. She looked him over, as if assessing him. Blue eyes. Wide eyes. Dangerously innocent eyes. There was an eerie familiarity about them. He had felt it at the grocery store, too.
She was beautiful. No, not beautiful, really. Not some abstract perfection like a fashion model. The nose was a bit too crooked, the eyes a bit too wide-set, the mouth a bit lopsided. Not physical perfection.
Cute? No, that wasn't quite it either. She was small and skinny, but not childlike. More wiry than slender. And there was too much character in the face, too much intelligence in the eyes for cute.
But a presence. Powerful and memorable. Unforgettable. And eerily familiar, as if he'd seen her, known her somewhere before, long ago. But that was impossible. He knew everything about her, and they'd never met before that run-in at Santos'.
She continued to look him over, small white teeth nibbling on that lower lip as she tried to figure out how to rescue him.
It really did appear that she was attempting to rescue him. Obviously she had no idea who he was.
He tried to put on a friendly, not-too-intimidating expression.
She smiled at him. Good.
He had to try to think. For some reason his mind was so foggy. He squinted, trying to break through the vagueness to his usual crisp analytical pattern. What did he need from this woman? Concentrate.
"Has the bleeding stopped?" he finally whispered.
She nodded. "It's not gushing out or anything." Then she frowned. "But it must hurt."
That was a masterful understatement. Rubbing sand into flesh wounds was a standard torture method in at least three countries he'd visited recently.
One look at her wide, scared eyes and he swallowed that remark, and instead smiled his best Harmless Civilian smile, and said, "then there's no problem."
•••
This man was impossible. One minute he was practically hysterical with delirium, crawling around on the rocks and acting crazy. The next he was smiling and acting like this was no big deal. So what if he he had a gut-wrenching gash covering half his leg? So what if he was passing out from exhaustion? No biggie.
The tide was coming closer each time the waves crashed up against the rocks. If she didn't get him out of this little cove he would drown by the time she climbed up to the signal room, called for help on the radio, and got back here.
But she couldn't possibly move him. And he didn't seem to be able to help himself.
She felt the tears welling up, and that made her mad.
She turned her back on him and wiped her face with one grimy palm.
So try again. She wiped her eyes impatiently. Just act like the dozens of doctors you've encountered over the years.
She turned back to face him. "Let's have a look at that leg," she said in her best officious tone. "Lie back and stop moving around."
Silently he leaned back against a boulder.
She knelt down on the ground next to him.
Wow, his leg was an even worse mess than it had looked at first glance. His wetsuit was ripped from knee to ankle, and the gruesome gash in the flesh beneath oozed blood.
She swallowed hard. Emergency room doctors did not throw up at the sight of gore, she reminded herself. She had to stop thinking about how much pain he must be in. Doctors must be able to turn off their empathy at will. Otherwise they'd spend a lot of their time passed out on the emergency room floor.
She looked down at the wound again, then up at the man patiently waiting for her to do something brilliant.
She pulled the raincoat off of him and felt around the neckline. Yup, the hood zipped off. She unzipped it and then folded it over lengthwise. It was just long enough to go around his leg.
"What are you doing?" he asked in that awful, raspy voice.
"I'm going to wrap this around your leg to keep the gap in your wetsuit closed. Then the cut won't get any more sand in it, and I can do a proper job of cleaning you up once we get to the house."
That sounded so confident and matter-of-fact she almost believed it herself. While she placed the folded hood across the gaping gash and tied it on with the hood string she ignored all the questions battering at her mind. How to "get to the house" with a huge, one-legged, muscle-bound jock. How to make sure he didn't catch some awful infection that made his leg tu
rn gangrenous and fall off before help arrived.
She put on a stern expression. "Don't worry. I've got everything under control, uh... what is your name, anyway?" She supposed calling him My Pirate was out of the question....
He seemed to be seriously contemplating her question, as if he were turning over several possible responses in his mind, discarding each one until he finally came to the best answer: "Huh?"
His voice still held that raspy undertone that made her wonder if he'd swallowed sea water. People died of that, didn't they? And of exposure, or hypothermia, or whatever it was people died of when they were swept ashore in the middle of winter storms.
She tried again. "Your name. What's your name?" Were his ears full of water or was he really this dumb?
Again that slow, wary deliberation while he gathered the raincoat closer around him with shivering hands. Finally, the response. A shrug of the shoulders.
Maybe his condition was deteriorating. Well, she may not be an expert at search and rescue, but he wasn't going to die on her watch.
If he passed out cold that was the end of it. No way could she carry him up that hill.
She felt something on the back of her neck, and impatiently brushed it away.
Water.
Drops of water.
She looked up and one plopped in her eye. She blinked it away. The mist had turned to drizzle. Soon the rain would be back, and her pirate would freeze to death before her eyes.
"We're leaving now," she told him. "Get up."
He just looked at her blankly.
Okay, no more coddling him. "On your feet. Now." She held out her hand to him.
He looked incredulous—at her tone of voice, or at her assumption that he could stand, she wasn't sure.
His black hair glistened with raindrops.
She leaned down and shouted right into his face: "Move it! NOW!"
Amazingly, it worked. He pulled himself to his feet—or, rather, to his foot, with the bad leg bent so it didn't touch the ground.
"Which way, Sarge?" he asked meekly, but with a twinkle in his eye.
She ignored the fact that he was mocking her, and the fact that he looked even more handsome all tousled and rain-soaked, and simply pointed toward the path up the hill.
"We're going that way. Come on." She wrapped one arm around him—well, partway around him; this guy was huge—and they set off.
One hop, and his weight nearly knocked her to the ground.
She must have grunted in pain, because he immediately stopped.
"No way," he said in that gravelly whisper. "I'll crush you."
"Shut up and hop," she ordered.
She could feel his body shivering violently, but he moved forward. Another hop. This time she gritted her teeth and no sound escaped her lips.
He stopped. "Sweetheart, I'm six-foot-three and weigh 180. You can't be much more than half my size—"
"—this is not the time to discuss my weight."
"But you can't carry me."
"I won't have to if you shut up and hop."
He hopped.
By the time they got to the base of the sandstone cliff the rain was pouring down steadily and the wind was whistling through the rocks with a cry like one of her imaginary ghosts.
His wetsuit was slippery and it was hard for her to prop him up. Both of them were panting.
"Rest," he said.
"One minute," she told him. "But no sitting down."
He placed both hands against the sandstone wall in front of him and dropped his head.
She pulled back her sleeve to look at her watch. "Okay, one minute starts now."
He glanced at her. "You're timing me?"
"45 more seconds," she responded, trying to look stern. If he sat down she'd never get him up again.
"There," she said when the secondhand had completed its circle. "Now we're ready to go on."
He had no response to that.
She grabbed his wrist. It didn't take a medical degree to know his pulse was beating too quickly. He was shaking uncontrollably now.
She gave him one more minute, then felt his forehead. Clammy. Sweaty. Pain was written all over his face.
Those deep brown eyes looked worriedly at her. "Are you okay?" he asked. "You look exhausted."
She was shocked by his concern. The guy was half-dead and he was thinking about how she felt? She probably did look awful. Her usual post-seizure headache roared in her ears, and she wasn't a hundred-percent sure she wouldn't throw up on him before they got through this.
She looked him in the eye. "We don't have a choice. You've got to climb the path up the cliff. I can help, but I can't do it for you."
"Lori, you are a very sweet girl," he said, completely irrelevantly.
"I know," she said. She wrapped her arm around him again. "Now get moving."
chapter four
Somehow he did it, hopping, scrambling, clinging to exposed tree roots. Sometimes she grabbed his arm and pulled him up with all her strength. Sometimes she got behind him and pushed till her legs ached.
Finally, all six-foot-three, 180 pounds of him was at the top of the hill. He collapsed on the muddy ground while she sprawled next to him. He clung to her hand as if he didn't want to let go.
The rain poured down on them unrelentingly. Far off, she heard the rumble of thunder. It was getting closer. They were too exposed out here. They had to get inside before the lightning reached the island.
She sat up, disentangling her hand from his. She brushed the hair back from his face. He looked terrible—skin blanched pale beneath his tan, pulse beating wildly in his throat. Had she done the right thing, forcing him to climb the cliff? It didn't matter; it was too late to undo the damage now.
His dark, rain-soaked lashes fluttered against his face as if he hadn't the strength to open his eyes. "Shhh," she whispered. "Rest just a bit longer."
She leaned over him, sheltering him from the downpour. The raindrops glistened on his face. She brushed them away from his full lips that were tinged a frightening blue with cold, from the stubble of dark beard at his cheek. Surfing. What had possessed him to go surfing in this weather?
She realized to her surprise that she was cradling one of those gorgeous dumb jocks she had mooned over in high school. The kind of guy who made her tingle all over every time he passed her in the hall; the kind of guy who was so busy fighting off bubbly cheerleaders he never noticed she was alive.
She had always comforted herself with the thought that guys like that ended up pot-bellied has-beens by the time they were 30.
This one—acres of rock-hard muscle—appeared to buck that stereotype.
She brushed the raindrops from his face with her sweatshirt sleeve. The thunder was louder now.
His eyes opened.
"Only a few more yards," she said gently. "It's all flat from here. But we have to get out of the storm."
Silently he gathered himself up and struggled to stand. He leaned heavily against her, apparently exhausted beyond any attempt at walking on his own.
"Just a few more yards," she repeated. "This way."
She turned to face the house and noticed to her surprise that the "dog" was back. Odd how even from this angle yards away from the lighthouse the ghostly image could still be seen. Also odd that the illusion was visible in this dull, gray downpour when before it had appeared as a reflection in the semi-darkness before the dawn.
She looked away from the dog, down at the ground, not wanting a repeat of her last apparition-induced seizure.
"Grrrr."
Grrrr? She heard the distinctively canine growl and realized she had completely forgotten about the howl that had driven her outside in the first place. Ghosts, particularly fictional ghosts created by tricks of light, did not make noise.
She looked up to find herself staring at, not a ghost, not even a dog, but what could only be a man-eating wolf, huge and shaggy black, with a menacing expression in its deadly black eyes.
"Grr
rr," it said again, then bounded straight toward them.
"Look out!" Lori tried to push the injured man behind her, to protect him from the attacking creature.
But the dog ran past her to jump up on the man.
The man hugged the big beast to him, looking like he was about to cry with relief. "I thought you were drowned," he whispered into the dog's fur. The canine licked his face, as if to say, "I thought you were, too."
This was getting weirder by the minute.
Seeing it up close she did have to admit that it was just a normal, if large, pet dog, and not a wild wolf. And maybe it wasn't as evil as it had first appeared. It frolicked around in the mud, barking happily, and feigning leaps at the man as if begging to play. And the man was actually grinning. He was swaying dangerously in a losing effort to stay upright, and he was shaking like a leaf, but he was grinning.
The beast came toward her and she backed up. "Keep it away from me!"
He frowned. "He's not going to hurt you. He's a really friendly dog."
"I don't like animals," she said.
He started to ask about that, but she stopped him. "Not now. I hate to break up this reunion," she said, trying to slow the pounding of her heart, "but the lightning's getting closer, and you've got another ten yards to hop."
•••
Ophelia was waiting when they entered the kitchen. Her expression upon seeing Lori and the semi-conscious, wetsuit-clad man was one of pure shock. When the dog trotted through the door in their wake and sat down in the middle of the floor Lori swore Ophie's jaw actually dropped open.
"I told you so," Lori told the cat.
Ophelia, puffed up into a fluffy gray fuzzball, hissed in response.
Lori plopped the man down unceremoniously on the floor next to the Aga. The dog sprawled next to him with a sigh of relief, then promptly started snoring.
The cat expressed her displeasure at this turn of events with a growl louder than the thunder outside, then shot past them and headed for a hiding place under a chair in the adjoining sitting room. She crouched there and glared at them, growling all the while. "Knock it off, Ophie," Lori said.
Shadow's Lady (A Pajaro Bay Cozy Mystery + Sweet Romance) Page 4