He followed the path of her hand as she let it slip down, across her waist, over the curve of her hip. He knew that the motion was an unconscious act on her part, hesitant, strangely innocent—like a young gir first discovering the power of her own naked body. He wondered what kind of blind man she’d entrusted her heart to before him. What kind of man couldn’t see the molten sexuality of this woman. She’d never known if before, that much was obvious. She was just discover ing her own sexual prowess.
For him, the sight of her running her hand over her own body was wildly sexual and an open invitation foi another romp. His loins reacted instinctively. But he didn’t want just sex anymore, and he knew she wasn’t ready for lovemaking. So he squelched the rising heal in the air between them, leaned toward her, reached across her body and grabbed a handful of linen clothing.
“Dress, you shameless hussy,” he said gruffly pressing the wad of clothing against her belly, “before I think of another way to act like the animals do.”
“Promises, promises.”
He managed an uneven laugh and rose to his feet He pushed his hair back from his forehead and wan dered toward the stream to splash the cold water over his skin. He shot up as she cried out in sudden pain.
“Bee,” she said in a strained voice as she danced a little pained dance and clutched her upper arm. “] can’t believe I’ve been stung again.”
“You know,” he said, wandering over to her side “for a botanist, you get stung a lot.”
“I never get stung,” she retorted, glaring at him “Except when a certain swaggering man is around stripping me of my clothes and tossing them in patches of clover. The bee must have crawled in the sleeve—it stung me when I pulled the shirt on.”
She hadn’t yet buttoned her shirt, and he found him self distracted, for a moment, by the sight of her breasts cantilevered out of that sexy satin bra. “I wasn’t exactly aiming when I threw it, you know.”
“You have a bad habit of throwing my clothes around.”
“So this is all my fault.”
“One hundred percent.”
He grinned and touched her elbow. “Then I’ll kiss the boo-boo and make it better.”
He rummaged around in his pack for his wallet and pulled out a credit card. When he returned, she’d pulled on and buttoned her shirt. She scratched at her throat as she held out her arm.
“It’s swelling,” she said, frowning at the welts rising on her skin. “Worse than last week’s sting.”
Logan frowned at the hives rising all along her arm. Angry pink splotches blossomed on her throat, and she scratched more vigorously “Did you ever pack that antihistamine?”
“What?”
“Last week. I told you to pack some Benadryl.”
“Completely slipped my mind, Dr. Logan.”
A trill of worry shimmied up his spine. He swiped the edge of the credit card over the apex of the sting, examined the welt for remnants and then took a good, hard look at her face. She was flushed.
“You feeling hot?”
She gave him a sexy grin. “Are you going to start that again?”
“I’m serious.”
She shrugged, reaching under the collar of her shirt to scratch another welt she couldn’t see. “A little.” She arched a brow at him. “Hot sex will do that to a girl, you know.”
“You’re having an allergic reaction,” he said, gesturing to her arm, then the blotches rising up on her thighs. “Sit down—there, in the shade. I think I’ve got something in my pack.”
“Are these hives?” She frowned down at the blotches rising all over her skin. “I haven’t had hives since I was ten years old and ate some crab cake in Marseilles. I had to take oatmeal baths for a week.” She sauntered over to the tree and cast him a look over her shoulder. “This is going to put a real damper on our week of hot sex, Logan.”
He wasn’t listening. He’d dropped to his knees and started yanking things out of his pack. He always carried a first aid kit—old habits died hard—and he found himself gritting his jaw as he plowed lower and lower in the pack and couldn’t find it.
It was just hives, he told himself. A common allergic reaction. Nothing to be concerned about. More an itchy inconvenience than anything else. He would rub a washcloth full of oatmeal over her bare skin tonight to ease the itching—and he’d find a way to turn the gritty lotion into massage oil.
Relief rushed through him as he closed his hand over the first aid box. Snapping it open, he rifled through the samples for a packet of antihistamine tablets, wishing he had his other doctor’s bag. The one with the adrenaline shots, the tourniquets, the Epipens, the IV, the saline, the cell phone.
“I’ve got some,” he said, thundering across to where she sat. “Here. Take these.”
She sat cross-legged on the blanket and stopped scratching long enough to hold out her hand for the tablets. She tossed them in her mouth and washed them down with a long sip of soda. She looked hot. Tendrils of her fiery hair lay dark and wet against her temple and neck. Her skin was pink and glowing with moisture.
“Damn it, Ginny.” He was getting worried. “You should have packed your own. You shouldn’t be out here without the proper medicines.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Doctor, sir.” She set the can on the ground and swiped her forehead with the back of her forearm. “I hope those help. This itching is driving me crazy.”
He didn’t tell her that she’d better pray the only reaction she experienced was hives. He didn’t tell her that it took thirty minutes for the antihistamine to get into the bloodstream, or that anaphylactic shock could be fatal within twenty.
Damn his overactive doctor’s imagination. He was no better than a first-year medical student, seeing melanomas in common freckles, cardiac arrest in gas pains, anaphylactic shock in a simple bee sting.
Or maybe it was just Ginny, whom he loved. Ginny, whom he was afraid of losing in more ways than one.
“You’re not one of those doctors,” she said, taking a breath between words, “with a great bedside manner, are you?”
He didn’t laugh. Her pulse raced under his fingers. Her breasts heaved under the shirt. As he watched, her eyes fluttered closed for a moment, and she swayed back. “Ginny?”
“I’m all right,” she said abruptly, straightening then shaking her head as if shaking off a fog. “I just need…I just need to…sit and rest for a while.”
The words came with effort, between deep breaths. She looked at him, but it was as if she were looking from a great distance. There was no sight in those pale brown eyes.
He stated, “You’re feeling dizzy.”
She touched her temple with one shaking hand as she flattened the other on the blanket to brace herself.
“Ginny, talk to me.” He seized her shoulders. “Are you having trouble breathing?”
“I’m just…” She breathed out, emitting a hoarse croaking noise before she heaved in another breath. “Need…to…rest.”
He released her as if she were a blazing-hot ember. He shot up before her, staring down at her fiery head of hair as some dam broke and his mind flooded with thoughts that read like a medical textbook. Venom from vespids and insects belonging to the order Hymenoptera contain several vasoactive substances, are hemolytic and neurotoxic and highly potent sensitizing agents….
He wasn’t imagining this. She was wheezing now, clutching her chest and digging her fingers into her bosom. This couldn’t really be happening, he told himself again—this couldn’t really be happening. He was overreacting. She’d been stung by a bee. Only a handful of people a year get stung and had a reaction bad enough to require emergency treatment.
The allergic reaction is usually the result of previous stings, with the immunologic basis being an IgE response….
Then he remembered. Last week. She’d been stung by a bee last week. A sensitizing exposure. Jacked up the chances for an allergic reaction. He stared up at the wide-open sky, at the acres of trees around them, at the loneliness of this
spot in the wilderness.
Individuals stung by such insects may exhibit the following responses: 1. A local reaction with pain, generally swelling and redness confined to the sting site. 2. Hives, itching and swelling in areas other than the sting site.
The hives glowed nuclear pink now and stretched all over her body. He could even see one in the path in her hair, on the back of the hand she braced on the ground to keep herself from tumbling over.
3. Hoarse voice, tongue swelling.
“Logan.” She swallowed laboriously. “I don’t…feel well.”
4. Dizziness or a sharp drop in blood pressure.
His heart pounded in his chest. The straight trunks of the pines spun around him, centering him in a vortex of a silent scream. His truck was parked near the entrance—three long miles away. They had no cell phone, no flares, nothing to mark their position. Ginny struggled to stay sitting up, in vain. She sank to the ground, staring up at him with wide, disbelieving eyes as she clutched her throat.
“Ginny?” His hands shook. His palms were slick with sweat “Ginny? Don’t do this to me.”
“My chest…so tight.”
“Breathe,” he urged. “The antihistamine will take a few more minutes to work. Breathe!”
Her tissues were swelling up too quickly. The Brenadryl would take too much time to work. He’d seen this before, not with bees, but with fire ants. He’d seen a young man in Honduras die of anaphylactic shock within an hour of the fire ant sting—he’d been too far away from their makeshift hospital to get there before he went into cardiac arrest.
Oh, God.
This was some sort of cruel heavenly joke. He couldn’t do this. He was alone. He couldn’t help her, not him, not him. He’d screw it up, she’d die in his arms. Ginny, his Ginny. His mind raced. He didn’t know whether he should use a tourniquet over that arm, to prevent the venom-infested blood from reaching the heart, or if it was too late. His head was too muddled, his senses overloaded. He wasn’t worth a damn in these situations anymore. He had to get her help—professional help—and quick.
He filled his lungs with air and cried out at the top of his voice, “Can anyone hear me? Is anyone out there? We need help here.”
The sound echoed, lonely among the trees.
“Logan?”
A mere whisper. A plea.
“I’m going to build a signal fire,” he said, swirling away and frantically gathering sticks from around the clearing. “A ranger will see the smoke and come immediately. Hold on, Ginny, hold on.”
He seized anything that looked like wood, shoved it in a pile away from the trees. Tossed the contents of his pack on the blanket until he found matches. Lit the wood, nearly choking at the smoky blaze, praying that a ranger would see the smoke curling above the treetops and come to investigate.
Then he heard a strangled sound and turned to see Ginny thrashing on the blanket. He remembered symptom number five.
Unconsciousness and cardiac arrest.
12
“MS. VAN SAUN?”
Ginny blinked her eyes against the bright white light. Her lids felt heavy, as if someone had glued them together. It took a concentrated effort of will to split them open and focus on the clicking, beeping world around her.
“Ms. Van Saun?” An unfamiliar face loomed in the whiteness, then receded. “She’s coming around this time, Doctor. She’s responding.”
She tried to swallow, but it felt as if someone had stuffed a bag full of cotton balls down her throat. Her tongue was swollen thick and heavy in her mouth.
A woman’s heels clicked on the floor and someone flashed a penlight in her eyes. “Ms. Van Saun, do you know where you are?”
She scraped a dry tongue over cracked lips and mouthed one word. “Hos…pital?”
“Yes. Pine Woods Community Hospital.” The doctor gave her a brief, efficient, reassuring smile. “And you are the luckiest woman on the face of the earth.”
Ginny stared at the doctor blankly and wondered what she was talking about. She was in a hospital. How could she be lucky? She struggled with memory. Why was she here? She remembered hiking in the woods with Logan…
She worked her throat to say the name, unsuccessfully, but the doctor anticipated her question.
“Dr. Macallister left only ten minutes ago. He had something urgent he had to do, and he figured you’d be out for the night. I promised I’d call him if you came to, but hell be disappointed he missed you.” The doctor’s hands flickered over her, checking a pulse, monitoring the instruments. “Do you remember what happened?”
She dosed her eyes, sank into memory. The brightness of a summer day, the warmth of the sun on her back as Logan and she…Ginny heard the heart machine beep more quickly.
“You were stung by a bee,” the doctor said. “You had an extreme allergic reaction and went into anaphylactic shock.”
Ginny remembered sitting on the blanket, watching Logan scramble around the clearing, building a fire which curled wisps of smoke high in the air. She remembered the pounding of her own heart in her ears, the squeezing sensation in her chest, the haze that had come over her eyes before her head hit the ground. She remembered holding her hand out to Logan as her world went dark.
“Dr. Macallister gave you an antihistamine that didn’t kick in until after you went into cardiac arrest. He administered CPR, which kept you alive until a ranger came by in a Jeep to investigate a suspicious fire. They called 911 and had you transferred to an ambulance, and then here, where we finally stabilized you.”
She tried to sit up, but winced at the pain shooting from her chest.
“Don’t—” The doctor steadied her with a hand on her shoulder. “Your chest took a beating from the CPR. We x-rayed you. You’re going to have bruises the size of Kansas, but fortunately, nothing’s broken.”
She settled down into the pillow. She didn’t quite understand. She’d been stung by a bee. “CPR?” Her voice sounded like gravel. “I needed…CPR?”
“Yes, you did.”
“But…” She couldn’t quite comprehend what was going on. “I just… got stung by a bee.”
“I know, it’s highly unusual,” the doctor said as she finished fussing with the tubes and machines and clanked Ginny’s chart on the hook at the end of the bed. “It’s very rare. Sometimes it happens suddenly. Dr. Macallister told me you were stung a week ago?”
Ginny nodded.
“That’s it, then. You had a sensitizing exposure. Your immune system reacted to that sting by making a whole lot of weapons to attack the venom. When you were stung again, it launched those weapons full force—it overreacted, in other words. You fell unconscious, went into cardiac arrest.”
“Cardiac…” It dawned on her suddenly. “You mean…I almost—”
“You could have, but you didn’t.” The doctor gave her another one of those brief, reassuring smiles. “You had the illustrious Dr. Macallister to keep you with the living. That’s why you are the luckiest woman in the world. Dr. Macallister has pioneered how to do emergency procedures with the most commonly available nonmedical equipment, and has implemented them in the field, too. His papers are famous.” The doctor’s enthusiasm was evident in her voice, but glancing down at Ginny, she brought herself back to the matter at hand. “Of course, you just needed CPR, not glue sutures or pig’s-bladder saline bags. Still, you couldn’t have chosen a better hiking partner.”
Ginny wasn’t completely listening, for the enormity of the situation was just beginning to sink in. Her skin went cold.
“You’re doing very well,” the doctor continued, “but we’d like to keep you here for a few days for observation. And since this kind of allergic reaction could very well happen again, I’ll be sending an allergist up to talk to you about venom immunotherapy. You’ll have to be extra careful from now on about stings, but the therapy is ninety-nine percent effective.”
Ginny nodded numbly.
“Try to rest. I’ll make sure Dr. Macallister knows that you’ve come
to.” The doctor patted her on the shoulder twice before swiveling on one heel and heading toward the door. “Lucky lady, Ms. Van Saun. Lucky, lucky lady.”
Ginny sank deep into the bed as the doctor left the room. She didn’t feel very lucky right now. She felt sore and achy and fuzzy-headed. She felt sideswiped, shocked, confused. One minute, she’d been a perfectly healthy thirty-two-year-old woman, hiking in a park. Twenty minutes later she’d been in cardiac arrest. Now she was strapped down on this hospital bed with an IV in her arm and bruises the size of Kansas blossoming on her chest, slowly realizing that but for Logan’s intervention out there in the park, right now she’d be dancing on the clouds with Granny.
Logan. She flexed her fingers into the stiff sheets. She wished he’d stayed—she wished he was here. She needed him, she needed someone to hold on to, someone to tell her that this was just a bad dream. She hated being immobilized like this, strapped on a gurney, unable to get up, to move, to do anything for herself. She’d had an emergency appendectomy when she was twenty-three years old and hated every moment she’d spent on her back. Even then, her parents had hovered around her for the entire time, seeing to it that her basic needs were met, entertaining her between their own rounds. But her parents were thousands of miles away now, in New York, and it wasn’t her parents she was longing for. She wanted Logan.
She wanted Logan to take her in his arms, kiss her, hold her tight. She wanted to hold Logan, to feel his skin under her hands, to touch him… touch life. To reassure herself that she was still living. She wanted to hold him, and cling.
She wanted it so fiercely that tears stung her eyes. Her heart ached with a strange emptiness. She’d never felt this way before—so needy, so vulnerable, so shaky, as if she needed a big fuzzy teddy bear to hug tight. She wondered how long she’d been under. The clock read 9:35 p.m. Was it the same day? Why would Logan leave her here, all alone, all alone?
She closed her eyes and breathed through her mouth and forced herself to be calm. Logan would be back, she told herself. Then she could lie, shaking, in his arms, until the world fell back into place.
Logan's Way Page 17