by Jill Shalvis
“Most people might say thank you.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not most people. And I stand by my statement—it was a stupid move.” Once again, she lifted her blood-soaked shirt and inspected his gash. It was deep and he still hadn’t opened his eyes, pretty or not. “Are you dizzy?”
“I’m fine.”
Guy speak for yeah, he was dizzy as hell. At least this she knew how to deal with. Her hands had stopped shaking, her heart no longer pounded in her ears, but the truth was, they were still hanging, possibly by a thread, and in need of extraction.
Don’t think about it.
“It’s my mom’s fault,” he murmured.
Great, he was delirious. “Your mom?”
“She taught me to protect others, always.”
The blood was soaking through her shirt, so she deepened the pressure, making him wince. “Yeah? And how is that working out for you?”
“Great. And Jesus . . .” He tried to sit up, but she held him still. Or at least he gave her the illusion of letting her hold him still, because he was a big guy. As he lay on his side on the floor of the shuddering gondola—Nope, don’t think about that!—his long legs took up much of the room, and what little was left, his broad shoulders covered.
When she’d first noticed him sprawled out on the bench opposite of her as she’d boarded, she’d done her best to ignore him. That had been easy because she’d been distracted by her hatred of small, enclosed spaces. But it was impossible to ignore him now, on her knees and snugged into the curve of his long body, her face close to his as she checked his pulse again, his blood on her hands.
Closest you’ve been to a man in a long time, came the entirely inappropriate thought, which vanished at the shocking grinding sound of metal. She gasped and involuntarily clutched at his arm. “What was that?”
She expected him to come up with some smartass answer, but he didn’t speak at all. “No. Hell, no, don’t you dare. Stay with me.”
He groaned, and she almost burst into grateful tears. “What’s your name?” she demanded. “Mine’s Jane.”
His voice was gravelly and barely audible. “You Jane, me Tarzan.”
With a startled laugh, she sat back on her heels. “I don’t know whether to worry that you’re hallucinating or that you’re an imbecile.”
“Imbecile,” he said. “At least according to my older sister.”
Keep him talking . . . “Well, for future knowledge, it’s Jane Parks, not Tarzan’s Jane. You’re close with your family?”
“Unfortunately. I’m also the black sheep.”
“Is that because you tell stupid jokes?”
His lips quirked, but other than that, he didn’t move, and worry crept into her voice. “Open your eyes, Tarzan. Right now. I mean it.”
“Bossy.” But he cracked open one slate, bloodshot eye.
“Both eyes.”
It took him a moment, and it made him grimace and go green again, but he managed.
“Are you dizzy? Nauseous? Is there a ringing in your ears?”
“Yeah.”
She assumed that was yes to all the questions. Damn. She took one of his hands and directed it to hold the compress on his head, freeing up both of hers. “Now track my finger. Tarzan! Pay attention.”
“Levi. My name is Levi.”
“Well, Levi, are you watching my finger?”
“Yep. All twenty of them.”
Oh crap, his pupils weren’t tracking either.
Again, he tried to sit up, but she held him down. “Your only job is to stay still, you hear me?”
“That bad?”
She pasted her sweet nurse smile on her face. Yes, she had a whole repertoire of smiles. She had a professional smile. She had a fake smile. And her personal favorite, her don’t-make-me-kick-your-ass smile. “No. Not bad at all.”
A very faint laugh escaped him as he closed his eyes again. “Don’t ever play poker, Red.”
“Jane.” And she did play poker. The skill had come in handy in college. Especially since she had a fondness for having food in her belly and a roof over her head. Or a tent. She wasn’t picky. After growing up tether-less, a tumbleweed in the wind, she’d never needed more than the bare minimum to get by.
Levi had closed his eyes again.
“Hey. Hey, Levi, stay with me. Where did you grow up?”
“Here.” He swallowed hard, like he was trying not to throw up. “Tahoe. Not the gondola.”
She smiled. “Funny guy.”
“I try. Where did you grow up?”
“I didn’t. Not yet.” It was her automatic, by rote, don’t-give-too-much-of-herself-away answer, and she usually got away with it.
But Levi opened his eyes, then managed to narrow them slightly as he reached out and touched her cheek. His fingers came away with blood on them. “You’re hurt,” he said, sounding more alert now, carefully scanning his gaze over her. She watched as he took in the fact that she was crouching over him in just her bra, but his gaze was brisk and methodical. “Just a scratch,” she assured him.
He made a quick assessment anyway. Patting her down, checking the bloodstains on her.
“It’s your blood.” She caught his hand. “Levi, I’m fine.” Okay, so maybe she was a little dinged up, but she’d had worse. “Really. I’m good.”
He gave a nod so slight she almost missed it. “You are,” he agreed. “And brave as hell.” Then he closed his eyes and lay very still.
She checked his pulse again.
“My ribs are bruised, but not broken, I don’t think,” he murmured. “And you know head wounds always look worse than they are. I’m fine.”
“Yeah? You’re fine?” There might’ve been the slightest touch of hysteria in her voice. “Then maybe you could put all those well-honed muscles to use and pry us out of this tin can.”
That got a very small smirk out of him.
“Oh please, like you don’t know that you look like a walking/talking Outside magazine cover. Let me guess. You’re a wildland firefighter. A hotshot.”
His small smile widened a bit. “Data . . . scientist. Consultant.”
“Sounds very . . . cerebral.”
His smirk remained in place. “You think scientists can’t have . . . what did you call them . . . well-honed muscles . . . ?” His voice trailed off.
He was fading, and panic surged anew. “What does a data scientist consultant do?” she asked desperately.
He shrugged, which caused him to grimace in pain. “I . . . extract and design data modeling . . . processes . . .”
“Levi.”
“Hmmm?”
He was clearly having trouble finding words and keeping track of the conversation. He needed X-rays. An MRI. “What else does a data scientist consultant do?”
“Create algorithms and predictive models . . . for business needs, stuff like that.”
She looked around once again for the first aid kit that had to be here somewhere. Yes, there it was in the corner. She hooked it with her foot and opened it up. “Could you create an algorithm to tell me which fast-food joint is most likely to give me a stomachache when I’m inhaling food after a twelve-hour shift?”
“The answer is all of them. And that’s a long workday.”
“Betting you work long hours too.”
“I do. How about I feed you real food after this?”
She snorted. “Are you flirting with me right now, Levi the Data Scientist Consultant?”
The man managed a small smile, sexy as hell even with him sprawled out on the floor, bleeding. “I’m stuck in a gondola with a beautiful woman who took off her clothes. The least I can do is make her laugh.”
She did just that as she found the antiseptic and gauze and doctored up his head the best she could for the moment. “This isn’t exactly a laughable situation.”
“I know. I didn’t even get mouth-to-mouth—”
He broke off as another huge gust of wind hit them like a battering ram, rocking them violently.
Jane crouched over him to keep anything else from hitting him. “Wonder how many gondolas have fallen at this resort,” she asked with what she wanted to be a calm voice, but which sounded thin to her own ears.
Levi reached up and covered her hands with his. “Until tonight? Zero.”
“You better not be lying to make me feel better.”
“I’m not. I mean, I’d totally lie to make you feel better, but it’s also the truth. A gondola has never fallen in the Tahoe region. Scout’s honor.”
“Until now.”
His steely eyes held hers. “Until now.”
She realized their faces were inches apart. Pulling back, she began going through the stuff littered around them, finding a bottle of water. “Are you allergic to acetaminophen?” she asked.
“No.”
She handed over two pills from the small sample packet in her first aid kit. He propped himself up and popped them into his mouth, swallowing them before she got the bottle of water open. He lay back down and closed his eyes again. A muscle ticking in his jaw was the only sign he was in pain.
“What else do you need?” she asked.
“Can you reach into my front pocket?”
“Not even in your dreams.”
That got her another almost smile. “To get my phone.”
“Oh.” Right. The fact he was no longer flirting with her and his face was pinched with pain made her even more worried. Worried enough to indeed reach into his pocket and pull out his phone. She handed it over and watched as he sent out a quick text, getting an even quicker response. “I’ve got a friend on the search-and-rescue team here. He says the resort security alerted them. There’s already a team in place, but they’re being held up at base because there’s zero visibility.” He gave a very tense smile. “He said to hang tight.”
Jane risked another look out the window and was startled to realize she couldn’t see an inch past the glass, nothing beyond a swirling, vast void that seemed all encompassing. She swallowed hard. She’d done a lot of things in her lifetime that would be considered dangerous. The locales of some of the places she’d been sent to deliver health care, for instance. Or when she’d been mugged on a train in Europe. And then there’d been the time she and a group of other medical workers had been flown to a remote village in the Philippines that had caught on fire while they were there.
But this. Hanging by a thread, facing a fall that she knew neither of them could possibly survive . . .
Levi reached for her hand, his big and warm. “We’re going to be okay.”
She stared down at his long fingers gripping hers. “That would be more believable if you weren’t gripping me hard enough to make the muscles in my fingers cramp. Tell me the truth: you think we’re going to die, don’t you.”
“We don’t actually have any muscles in our fingers,” he said. “Their function is controlled by the muscles in our palms and arms.”
That was actually true. She knew it from nursing school. He was trying to distract her the way she always distracted her patients when she had a needle coming for them. “You can’t distract me. I’m indistractable.”
He managed a small smile. “I’d like to prove you wrong, but right now I’m all talk. How about we don’t put it out there into the universe that we’re going to die, okay? Let’s put it out there that we’re going to make it, that there’s no alternative.”
Looking into his eyes, she almost believed him. Then he flashed a small smile. “Besides, you haven’t thanked me for saving your life yet. Can’t die before that.” He held out his phone.
She stared at it. “What do you want me to do with that?”
“Call your family,” he said quietly.
To say goodbye, he meant, and suddenly her heart was in her throat again.
Chapter 3
Jane stared down at the cell phone, then glanced to the windows again. Snow blowing sideways, still zero visibility, still absolute chaos, but in here it was oddly quiet, insulated, almost . . . intimate. It felt odd to look out into the wilderness, so close that without the glass, she could’ve reached out and touched one of the towering heavily snow-draped Norway spruces. She felt like she was inside a snow globe in an enchanted winter wonderland scene.
Still lying down, Levi was patiently waiting for her to make a call, even though he was the one in pain and injured, and yeah, okay, they were both in an impossible situation, but his was most definitely worse than hers.
And he’d offered her his phone first. “My cat can’t answer a phone,” she said. “It’s an opposable thumbs thing.”
His lips quirked. She hadn’t been trying to be funny, but rather distract from the truth—she had no family to call.
“Your parents?” he asked.
Her mom and dad had been troubled teens when she’d come along and disrupted their lives. By the time she’d been born, her dad had peaced out and had never been a part of her life. Her mom hadn’t stuck around much longer, leaving Jane with her grandparents. Eventually her mom had grown up, settled down, and gotten herself a new family. Deeply embarrassed by her wild youth, her mom hadn’t spoken to her in years, and Jane had no intention of wasting her last few moments on earth trying to get her on the phone. “They’re not in my life.”
His eyes softened, but since she couldn’t handle sympathy, she cut him off before he could speak, handing him back the phone. “You should hurry, your battery’s nearly dead.”
Not moving anything but his finger, he activated a call on speaker, presumably so he didn’t have to exert the energy to lift the thing to his ear. A female voice answered with a soft, joyous-sounding “Levi!”
He drew a deep breath and closed his eyes. “Hey, Mom. Listen—”
“Oh, honey, I’m so glad you called! You left so quickly I didn’t get a chance to ask what you’d like for dinner. I mean, it’s so rare you get up here from San Francisco— Hold on a second. Jasper!” she yelled. “Stop that! Oh, for God’s sakes, he’s digging in the yard. We’ve got gophers in the grass again. They’re making holes all over the place, and Jasper fell into one and nearly broke his leg.”
Jane looked at Levi in concern.
Levi put a thumb over the microphone. “Jasper’s her dog. Also known as ‘Stop that!’ and ‘Drop it!’ He’s a huge goofus goldendoodle she rescued. Trust me, he’s indestructible.” He pulled his thumb from the microphone.
His mom was still talking.
“I mean, those holes . . . one of these days they’re going to be the death of someone,” she was saying. “Yesterday at my yoga class there was a woman whose son created a system with a camera that lets her know if there’s a gopher in her yard. He’s going to sell it and get rich.”
Levi looked pained. “Mom, anyone can buy a security camera—”
“Sure, but you could make something like the gopher camera and get rich.”
“I’ll get right on that,” he said on a barely-there sigh that made Jane smile. “But about why I’m calling—”
“I mean as long as it didn’t take any time from your personal life,” his mom interrupted. “You need a personal life, Levi, you work too much. You haven’t even made time to date since—”
“Mom.” Levi ran a hand over his face.
A blizzard and possible death hadn’t rattled him, but this clearly did. And now Jane wanted to know what the since meant.
“Mom, I’m trying to tell you something.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, honey. What?”
“I’m . . .”—he locked eyes with Jane—“going to be late picking up Peyton from her after-school dance program.”
Jane would bet her last ten bucks that hadn’t been what he’d planned on saying.
“Oh no,” his mom said. “Levi, you promised. Peyton told everyone in her class you were going to show them that magic trick you do, you know, the one where you make a volcano out of a soda? Oh! And did I tell you our plumbing problems are back . . .”
Levi ran a hand over his head, whic
h undoubtedly hurt like hell. “Mom—”
“The toilet in the upstairs master keeps running, and sometimes it even overflows, and I know you say it’s because your dad doesn’t give a courtesy flush, whatever that means, but there’s got to be a fix.”
Levi looked pained far beyond his injuries, and Jane couldn’t help it: a laugh escaped. They might die at the next gust of wind, but his mom had gophers and plumbing problems.
“Who was that?” his mom asked, apparently possessing bat-like ultrasonic hearing. “I heard a laugh. A feminine laugh. You’re with a woman? That’s why you can’t pick up your darling niece? Levi!”
Jane winced for him, thinking he was about to get yelled at.
“Ohmigod, you finally have a girlfriend! How wonderful! How exciting! Why didn’t you just say so? What’s her name? I want to meet her, put her on the phone.”
Jane went from laughing to walking backwards with her butt cheeks while miming no-no-no with her hands. She had zero experience with parents to begin with, which meant she was especially bad with dealing with other people’s parents.
Levi took in her panic and smiled, and, oh great, he was going to hand her the phone and she’d have to kill him. That is, if their fall down the rocky mountainside didn’t.
“Mom, I’m not putting Jane on the phone.”
“Jane! What a lovely name! Is she nice? Does she look after you? Not that you need it, you’re a grown man who’s been taking care of himself for a long time, but the thing is, you’re thirty years old and all you do is . . .” She paused. “I’m sorry. I always forget what exactly you do. It’s something with data.”
Before Levi could answer, they were slammed by another gust of wind. Over the unbelievable noise of that came the unmistakable sound of metal straining, and Jane covered her mouth with her hand to keep her startled scream to herself.
“Levi? Levi, can you hear me?” his mom asked, sounding tinny. “What was that?”
Before he could speak, his phone beeped and Jane knew what that meant. The battery was on its last breath. It was now a race as to who would die first, the battery . . . or them.