by Susan Wiggs
It never occurred to her that she should not be touching him. All she knew was that he was helpless, he needed her.
Perhaps it was only wishful thinking, but his throat felt warm compared to his face. She rested her fingers lightly at the side of his neck, closed her eyes and willed him to let her feel the pulse of blood there.
Nothing.
Maybe her hand was shaking too badly. Maybe she wasn’t touching him in the right place.
“There must be a pulse,” she whispered fiercely. “There must be. There has to be.”
Try as she might to avoid morbid thoughts, she could not help remembering the sad tale of Charlie Mott and his wife, and how after he died the poor woman was stuck with a frozen corpse the entire winter.
Deborah pushed back her sleeves and tried again. Unable to keep her hands from trembling, she could not find a pulse. She could not detect the faintest breath, could not find any evidence whatsoever that he was alive.
But he had to be. He had come from Lord-knew-where, obviously enduring incredible hardships in order to come back to her. He had sounded like a small army tramping across the porch. A man like that didn’t simply die of a gunshot wound.
The dog shivered by the fire. She added a log to it and lit a lamp, setting it close by so she could see him better. She had to get his clothes off in order to find out where she had wounded him. The bearskin coat was impossible; she could not get his arms out of the sleeves, so she concentrated on removing his mittens and boots, then unbuttoning the various shirts, chemises and trousers. She didn’t balk at the task. When a man’s life hung in the balance, one could not afford to be bashful.
Small flickers of hope kept cropping up. With each passing moment, each bit of him that she revealed, she began to suspect that there was no bullet wound.
She pulled aside the clothing as best she could, revealing his chest. It was stunningly broad. Hairy. Amazingly unlike anything she had ever imagined. She placed her hand there, unexpectedly moved by the act of touching him, wondering if it was his heartbeat she felt, or her own.
Live, she thought. Please live. You must live.
No response. The burning logs popped and spat resin, and outside, the wind raged. But in the cabin, the stillness had the pall of death.
A sense of helpless loss crept through Deborah. He was her abductor, her captor, and yet if she could have exchanged her own life for his at this moment, she would have. Her devastation was so intense that she surged to her feet, too filled with terror and grief to think straight.
Then she saw the buckshot.
A pellet was embedded in the wall of the cabin, easily three feet from the doorway. Others lay scattered on the floor.
“I only fired once,” she said, hope burning in her chest. “I only fired once, and I missed. Thank God I missed.”
But it was buckshot, not a single bullet. She had shot him with a deadly spray of lead pellets. She dropped to her knees beside him and renewed her efforts to warm him, to wake him. All the time, she spoke to him, babbling but afraid to stop. “You’re not dead. You’ve just caught a chill. You’ll be all right as soon as you’re warm….”
It took every ounce of strength she possessed, and then some, to push and pull and drag him over to the pallet where she made her bed by the fire. By the time she wrestled him so that he lay half on and half off the heap of blankets, she was sweating.
She dared to touch his face, her hand steady now.
Warmer. He felt warmer to the touch.
“Dear heaven,” she said, “it’s working. You’re going to get warm, and you’re going to be fine.” His hands and feet were still icy cold, so she built up the fire as high as she dared. Once the flames were roaring, she went to work. His clothes, especially the outer ones, were damp. She had to get him out of them.
Rolling him one way and then the other, she managed to extract him from the thick fur coat. To her horror, the movement exposed a deep, bleeding wound in his head. Fresh blood smeared the inside of the hood.
“I didn’t mean to shoot you,” she whispered over and over again. She used a long scrap of muslin from the quilting basket for a bandage, winding it around his head. Later she would clean the wound, stitch it closed if need be. But at the moment, she had to follow her instincts. Get him warm first. Laboriously she peeled away his buckskins and shirts down to the last flannel chemise. She removed this as well, for it was damp and clammy.
His denim trousers began to steam with the thawing. She set herself to removing them, thinking that trousers were an enormous bother. She had to inch the fabric down one leg, then the other, alternating between the two in a process that was excruciatingly slow. Beneath the Kentucky jeans, he wore long woolen leggings, also damp and chilled. She gritted her teeth and willed herself not to think of anything but warming him up so he wouldn’t die on her.
She managed to wrestle the jeans off him, and then the woolens. Beneath that she discovered flannel trews cut thigh length.
“You’re keeping those on,” she said through her teeth. She covered him with every blanket she had and propped his head on a pillow. Then she checked the water in the kettle to make certain there was plenty to make him tea if he awakened.
But the way he was lying there, so still and pale, she feared he would never wake up. He had frozen to death right at her door. Somehow he’d had the strength to come back through a storm for her, but now the storm was winning the battle.
“No,” she said defiantly. “You will survive this, do you hear me, Tom Silver?”
He didn’t, of course. He was cold to the bone, and the woodstove’s warmth wasn’t enough. The mound of blankets wasn’t enough.
She sat beside him on the floor, absently stroking the dog. She suspected Tom Silver had carried him inside his coat, keeping him warm. The stove filled the room with heat, yet she shivered.
Because she knew what she must do next.
She had to warm him with her body heat. Like the two men under the moose hide in the campfire story. The men who had warmed each other with their body heat. Skin to skin contact.
Everything inside her recoiled, quailed at the idea. She battled her way to logic. This was a matter of life and death. This had nothing to do with the way a man and a woman touched, she told herself. This was a survival procedure.
She didn’t dare think any more. She just acted. Peeling off her clothes, she lifted the covers and slid beneath them, hesitantly at first but then with growing conviction. The man was freezing. Next to her, he felt like a giant icicle. She had to impart the warmth of her body to him. If she didn’t, he would die.
Inside her, a furnace raged, and she wondered how on earth he could possibly be cold. Setting her jaw with determination, she wrapped her arms around him. He was so big, she couldn’t find a way to hold him in her embrace. She put out one trembling hand, resting it on his shoulder, then felt a jolt and drew back her hand as if she had touched a hot stove. It hurt to breathe. Blinding bolts of apprehension attacked her. A man’s body, pressed to hers. The smells and textures of him surrounding her, filling her.
She reared back in horror, and for a dizzying moment lost herself, going away for a while to a far place. Then, very slowly, the world came into focus, to winter stillness and firelight and the wounded man lying half-dead on the floor.
Touch him, she told herself. Touch him.
She tried again, reaching out with her hand, and as she did, she felt such a seething frustration that she nearly wept with it. She must force herself to put aside the fear. She must use her body warmth to warm Tom Silver.
This time her hand stayed where she put it—on his chest. He needed for her to be closer still. She could sense that. Spasms of fear jerked through her, and she shut her eyes, thinking of things that were benign and far away from this place and this moment. The trill of a lark outside her window. A conversation with her friends on a sun-drenched verandah. A carriage ride in Lincoln Park.
Touch him. The longer she delayed, the more sh
e put Tom Silver at risk. The cynical part of her wondered why he had come. To save her life or to reclaim his hostage?
Or had he come back because he was afraid for her, all alone on a frozen island in winter?
The thought pushed down her terror. Drawing a deep breath, she laid her head on his shoulder, then moved it to cover his chest. She could hear the sound of his heart beating, the shallow breaths rising and falling. She pressed her foot to his long, hard leg, then her thigh to his thigh, her belly to his belly.
Her breast to his chest.
The fear reared up but she forced it back. She wrapped her arm around his middle and pressed her legs against his. It helped to avoid thinking. Instead she let images drift through her head. The sun on the lake. Joking Norwegian voices from the fish house. Tom Silver walking with a hundred-pound sack of flour on each shoulder. Quilt patterns. Tunes from Lightning Jack’s harmonica.
These were the musings of a woman who was, quite possibly, losing her mind, but she clung to random notions because they held the fear at bay. It was there, lurking, waiting for her to give it a chance to leap up again, but she wouldn’t let it. Instead she concentrated on those inane thoughts that had nothing to do with anything except that they kept her from screaming.
And in the middle of thinking about nothing and laying her hands and arms and legs on Tom Silver, putting her cheek against his chest, something strange happened. Or more precisely, nothing happened. He didn’t move, didn’t reach out for her, didn’t close his big hand around her wrist, didn’t attack her. Didn’t hurt or frighten her.
“Of course not, you goose,” she said under her breath. “He’s unconscious.”
A man could be so agreeable when he was unconscious.
The dog settled right in the covers with him. She gave herself wholly to the job of warming him, moving slowly with instinct as her guide, rubbing his cold limbs and touching his face. The stones she had warmed earlier cooled, and she put them under the stove to warm again, and then she stayed close to Tom Silver and even said a broken little prayer for this big, strange, wounded man who had come across the ice for her.
TWENTY-THREE
The fire was all around him, lethal tongues of flame devouring hands and feet, a torture beyond endurance. When he tried to cry out, his throat locked up. He saw only the red haze of the deadly fire and heard only the dull roar of its inevitable progress. The inferno that had destroyed a city was upon him, and he was stuck, unable to move, to breathe or even to make a sound.
“Oh good,” said a voice through the thunder of the fire. “You’re awake.”
Shrill reality cleaved into the dream. Tom Silver’s eyes flew open. For a few seconds, he saw nothing but blinding white. Then an image took shape. Blond and anxious, with eyes the color of the lake in summer. Miss Deborah Sinclair.
“Hey, Princess,” he said. His voice sounded appallingly weak. The rasp of a rusty hinge, no more.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
He blinked, squinted at a light too bright to endure. The blinding white resolved into an image of the cabin window, snow outside, white against a white sky. “I’m alive,” he said. His words slurred together as if he were drunk. He didn’t recall drinking anything.
His feet and hands were on fire, and he was shivering violently. He lifted his hands and stared at them. The tips were blistered, an angry purple in color.
“I think your hands and feet are frostbitten,” Deborah said. “I have never actually seen a case of frostbite, but I believe that’s what has happened. Does it hurt very much?”
Like holding a branding iron to his own flesh. But he didn’t see the point of telling her that. He concentrated on trying to remember, for the ordeal on the ice had muddled his memory. He hadn’t expected to survive. After the horse had collapsed, he’d had no choice but to press on through the driving storm, crossing the ice that had not yet frozen in the deepest parts of the water.
“How on earth did you manage to come back to me?” she asked.
After the ice floe had broken away, he’d lost track of the hours. But it could not have been long or he would have frozen to death. Instead, providence or pure blind luck had favored him.
When the detached ice had nudged up against the whiter, thicker ice of the shore, he had been hovering at the edge of unconsciousness. He didn’t know whether he’d reached the island or the mainland. Not until he’d gone ashore and picked out, through the drifts and roaring wind, the distinctive jagged peak of Sugar Mountain, had he been certain he’d reached Isle Royale. Even then, he could not be sure of success. The island was big. Long and wild, filled with inhospitable rock ridges and impenetrable forests.
He barely remembered his staggering trek up the ridge, consuming the last of his hard tack and dried fish while forcing himself to walk. All he recalled was the cold, and the wind shrieking through the trees, and the notion that he was the only thing alive for miles.
“I came on foot…over the ice,” he said, too weary and in too much pain to explain further. How could he describe the agony of walking on feet that had frozen miles ago? Or the dizzying relief that had spiraled through him when he had sniffed the air like a wild animal and caught a whiff of wood smoke? Or the rise of hope that had lifted him out of his stupor when the cold winter moon had given him a glimpse of smoke twisting from a chimney?
He groaned and moved his feet, unsure whether or not they were still attached because at some point, he had lost all feeling there. Sensation was coming back with a vengeance. His feet and hands screamed in fiery protest, and he fought the searing pain, cursing between his gritted teeth. His vision swam as if he were under water, looking up.
Then she came back into focus. Deborah. The ice princess. Her image had floated in his mind, drawing him along one step at a time, like the grail. She had been his beacon, his quest as he struggled to survive. Perhaps she had even kept him alive. But she looked…different. Gone was the haughtiness, the disdain, the polished snobbery. Now she looked simply weary and worried.
“Do you think you’re going to be all right?” she asked.
He blinked, tried to swallow. “I guess I will.”
The dog trotted forward and licked him.
He grimaced, but couldn’t suppress a smile, even though it caused his lip to crack. “So the rat survived.”
“It was sweet of you to bring him.”
Sweet. No one had ever called him sweet before. No one had ever dared. “I didn’t. The fool thing followed me.”
She held out a cup. “Tea with honey. I can’t believe you came back.”
Neither could he. If she had merely been his hostage, would he have crossed the ice to find her?
He reached for the speckled enamel cup, but his blistered hands were clumsy, bumping against the mug. She pulled it away before the hot tea could spill. “Here,” she said. “Let me help.”
Though he despised the weak feeling, he submitted as she set aside the cup and propped a pillow behind him. Then she held the cup in her hands and put it to his lips. He sucked down the heavily sweetened, lukewarm liquid. By the time he finished drinking, he felt noticeably better. Stronger.
He propped himself up on his elbows and looked around. Morning. His cabin at the settlement.
“Where are my clothes?” he asked.
The color rose in her cheeks. “I hung them by the fire to dry.”
He squinted at her, trying to picture her undressing him. The image wouldn’t form, yet despite the battered state of his body, he had a deeply primal reaction. “Wish I’d been awake for that.”
“I was afraid you’d die in those wet, frozen clothes.”
“Reckon I was afraid of the same thing.”
“I thought I’d—” She broke off and swiftly glanced away.
He followed her gaze to the shotgun lying on the floor. He would never leave a gun lying out like that. Gradually memory returned in small fragments. He remembered seeing the twist of smoke from the chimney. A faint glow—moon
light flickering on an iced pane of glass. The dog scampering across the snow. He had felt such hope in those moments. I’ve found you at last. He remembered thinking that.
Then he’d flung open the door to an explosive bang.
“You shot me,” he said, sitting up straight. The wooziness caught at him, but he held himself steely and still until it passed.
She clutched her hands together in her lap. “I didn’t mean to.”
“You pointed the gun at me. Pulled the trigger. Should I read some other meaning into that?”
“What I mean is, I thought you were an intruder, a bear, actually.”
“A bear?”
“It was dark. You were wearing a bear skin.”
“Shit.”
She flinched. “I missed,” she said, lifting her chin defensively. “Well, mostly,” she added, ducking her head guiltily.
Time to get up, he decided. See for himself what damage had been done. He shoved aside the blankets, ignoring her gasp of outrage. When he stood, his feet felt as heavy and unresponsive as bags of sand. His head seemed to float from his body, and images melted into a smear of color. He felt himself sway and stagger, and he grabbed for the first thing he could—Deborah.
She wobbled beneath him, fragile as a spindly stick of furniture. She made a weird little squeaking sound.
“Quit whining,” he said. “Give me a second.” The world slowly swam back into focus. A stinging pain thudded in his head. Reaching up, he felt a crude bandage on his forehead. The fabric felt as if it were caked with drying blood. He inspected his fingers. Sure enough, blood. He let go of Deborah. “How’d this happen?”
“I missed. I swear, I missed. See?” She hurried over to the door, pointing out fresh gouges in the wooden frame. “A stray shot must have caught you.”
“Shit,” he said again.
“You shouldn’t swear.”
“Fine. What should I do, Princess? Pray?”
She stared at his bare chest while a flaming blush lit her cheeks. “You should get dressed. And then you should eat something. And then you should sleep some more.”