“Shush, honey,” she murmured, running a quick hand over his sweaty forehead and down his cheek. “Stop being a baby. You’re okay, Kruze. Just take a deep breath, and let me—”
“Show me the gawddamned thing! Was it a knife?” Felt more like a sword.
“Just this.” Bree held up a twelve-inch, straight-edged screwdriver, the tip of it dripping with his blood. “This was lodged between you and the frame at a sharp right angle. It didn’t go all the way in, just a few inches.”
“Which is a few gawddamned inches too many!”
Bree tossed the damned tool out the broken windshield. “Let’s not argue about size, Kruze. This is not a contest. Put your arm around my neck. Let’s get you out.”
That would be the day, her helping him out of his own son of a bitchin’ plane. Kruze ignored the offer, turned her ass around, and shoved her back out the window to safety. Then, and only then, was it his turn. With a mighty heave-ho, he grabbed the window frame with both hands, shoved himself out of the pilot’s seat, then maneuvered his much wider body sideways through the empty windshield. At last, he was outside, sweating, but on the fuselage alongside Bree.
It was all Kruze could do to sit upright. Planting both hands behind him, he tipped his face to the sky, not sure how much time they had before the plane blew. But needing a few seconds of cold, fresh Maine air to get his bearings. His head was spinning but he was damned if he’d pass out again.
“We can’t stay here,” Bree reminded him, her hand soft and sweet over his.
“Yeah, I know,” he gasped, those dancing spots back again. “Copy that. Let’s… let’s just go.”
“I’ll slide off first, so I can catch you if you fall,” Bree said as she bounced off the safe side of the plane, keeping clear of the ragged metal where a damned fine wing had once been.
She was doing it again, taking care of him. Kruze loved it, but he hated it, too. He was the hero, damn it. Not this slender wisp of a woman who was even now, holding her arms up to catch him, as if he were no bigger than a little boy. Hell, he outweighed her by twice her weight. Maybe more.
Kruze would’ve been fine if he just bounced to the ground. Bree made it look easy, but he wasn’t feeling it. Dizziness swarmed up like killer bees from the rocky shoreline. But if Bree could do it, he could, too, and do it better, right? It took a few seconds, but as soon as his butt slid over the now blistered skin of his ruined plane, Kruze’s shaking legs buckled, and down he went. Like a sissy. On his hands and knees.
That hurt his pride almost as much as that damned screwdriver hurt his side. Thank God, he’d landed on Bree, but only because she’d stepped in his way, half-caught, half-dropped him. But she was warm, and he was so damned tired and cold.
Darkness never felt so good.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Oh, no, no, no. You’re not going to die on me, Kruze Sinclair. Don’t you dare.” Filled with conviction, Bree ran her hands over his sweaty head, searching for something to explain why he’d passed out. He’d been in his harness. No bleeding. No bumps. But one minute he’d been his normal cocky self, and the next he was out cold. They were in trouble.
Bree lay beneath his dead weight, her arms wrapped tightly around him while she took stock of their surroundings. She brushed his hair off his face. There wasn’t much daylight left. It was late afternoon. They’d landed in a narrow canyon, shadowed by the dense forests lining both sides of the stream, which turned out to be a very noisy river. She’d never seen trees so tall nor so jam-packed together as the pines in this forest. The blue sky overhead was clear, but it was cold and growing dark. She needed to get Kruze far enough from the plane before it exploded.
Oh, that was rich. There was no place dry or warm within sight, except maybe in the forest, and he surely wasn’t going there under his own steam. Okay then. He’d saved her in Turkey. She’d save him now.
Bree didn’t have the faintest idea how to accomplish that, but they couldn’t stay where they were. Grunting like a pig, she rolled Kruze onto his side, cushioning one hand under his hard head, so she didn’t hurt him while helping him. Once on her feet, she dropped her hands to her knees and took a few seconds to suck in a couple deep, cleansing breaths. Moving Kruze anywhere would be one heck of a hard job. But she’d survived that damned hole, hadn’t she? She could do this.
Inch by inch, she wrestled him back into his leather jacket, then zipped it up, and dragged him by the jacket’s sturdy shoulders from the stony shoreline into the trees. That took a while, but at last, panting and sweating, they were under the trees and it was dry there. Good enough.
She settled Kruze onto the hard-packed ground beneath one huge pine. The forest was comprised of nothing but pine trees, but this one had a wider trunk than the others, and for some reason, that made Bree feel better. She’d battled claustrophobia for months, yet there seemed to be more air beneath these giants. She could breathe, and, since these lower trunks were devoid of branches, she could see quite a ways. Whatever.
Dropping to her knees at her unconscious companion’s side, she gently peeled Kruze’s jacket and shirt up far enough to determine what she needed to do next. That meant his holster, too. She handled it extra-carefully, not sure if jostling it might fire one of his pistols. That was the last thing they needed, for her to accidentally shoot herself—or him.
Damn. The screwdriver had made a deep, bloody hole in Kruze’s left side right above his hip bone. It was a puncture, not a tear. That could be good once she got it to stop bleeding. Smaller wounds tended to clot quicker, didn’t they? Bree honestly didn’t know.
When something loud popped from the direction of the plane, she lifted her chin and stared at the wreck. Great. The left engine had just fallen to the shore in a flaming heap. Flames were spreading to the outer skin of the plane’s left side. The right engine and most of that wing had been sheared off when they’d landed. She wasn’t sure where the fuel tanks were located, certainly not on the wings. But fuel lines burned, too. Why the whole thing hadn’t exploded by now was beyond her.
She’d been rushed getting out of the plane, but she was sure she’d seen a fire extinguisher and a compartment marked First-Aid. Somewhere. Bree hadn’t really cared before, but she did now. Lord, she had to go back.
Hurriedly, she ripped her sweatshirt over her head, then removed the t-shirt she’d layered beneath it. Folding that into a tight, compact square, she pressed it over the wound. Kruze was lucky the screwdriver hadn’t stabbed any deeper, but it might have punctured his intestines. She had no way to know. When he grimaced, Bree knew she was hurting him, but she persevered. Going back inside the plane was her next challenge. It’d sure be good if she found antibiotics.
Before she dashed away, Bree needed something to hold the homemade compress in place. Kruze’s leather belt would do. Fumbling the buckle open, she struggled until, finally, she pulled the belt from beneath his wide, heavy body. Worried she’d wasted too much time, she was now faced with sliding the belt back under Kruze. Not as a tourniquet, just to keep pressure on the bandage.
Bree swiped a weary forearm over her sweaty forehead before she began. On her elbows, with one cheek pressed flat against his chest, she ordered, “You have got to…” Grunt. Groan. “…lift…” Growl. Snort. “…your ass… up.”
At last, with her knuckles abraded and bleeding from dragging against the rocks beneath him, Bree forced the belt through the narrow space between the small of his back and the ground. With shaky fingers, she resituated the fairly clean bandage over his wound and fastened his belt, keeping the buckle on his belly and the bandage tight on his side.
Whew. Her first emergency treatment of a plane crash victim was complete, and she was running on empty. Sweating profusely, with every aching muscle in her body screaming for relief, Bree reached for him and smoother his hair out of his eyes again. Lord, even out cold he was sexy.
Summoning her second wind, Bree left Kruze beneath the tree with his
shirt pulled down and his jacket once again zipped up. She had to get that first-aid kit.
Breathing hard, short puffs of over-heated air that was quickly turning to frosty vapor, Bree slipped back into her sweatshirt and ran for the plane. Flames were now creeping over the top of the fuselage while others flickered around the passenger windows. She hurried.
Up onto the fuselage she climbed, using the huge boulder the fuselage still balanced on as a ladder. Gripping the top of the windshield frame, she slid feet first into the cabin and slipped between the pilot and co-pilot seats, assessing what was salvageable and what wasn’t as she went. The cabin was full of smoke, but Bree wouldn’t let it stop her. She could do this. She just had to be quick. Really quick.
Avoiding the left interior walls because of the heat emanating from them, she pulled the neck of her sweatshirt up and covered her mouth and nose. Feeling her way forward, she opened every compartment that she came to, searching for the first-aid kit. Where had she seen it?
The first compartments yielded supplies she hadn’t thought of. A coiled nylon rope, a small plastic case that, when opened, revealed some kind of pistol with—oh, flares. She’d found a flare gun and six flares. Great. That would come in handy.
Bree tucked the case and rope under one arm. The next compartment held two folded blankets. The next, a case of bottled water, still in its plastic carrier/holder. Two packaged tarps came next, at least, she thought that was what those stiff, floppy packages contained. She’d know for sure later.
For now, it was search by touch. Quickly, she unfolded one blanket over the co-pilot seat and dumped the smaller items there. Running out of time, she shoved the flare gun and bottled water out the windshield onto the fuselage. She still hadn’t located the first-aid kit.
Worried, she backtracked in a hurry, trying to recall where she’d seen it, palming what plane’s walls she could. The smoke seemed thicker. Her eyes stung and her lungs burned. At last. Of course. She found the first-aid kit built into the narrow strip of wall behind the co-pilot’s seat. Working against time and her rising tide of panic, Bree jerked the compartment open and found what she’d been looking for, but they were loose. Darn. It would’ve been easier if they’d been in a case. Oh, well. She turned the front of her shirt into a sling and scooped everything out of the cabinet. She had nothing to cover her mouth with now, but it didn’t matter. She was out of time.
Panic began a steady drumbeat in her already pounding head. Hurry!
Stumbling forward, trying not to gasp for air, she dumped the first-aid supplies onto the blanket, twisted the corners together, and shoved the bulky bundle through the window to the fuselage.
Hurry! Hurry!
Her turn. Frightened now, and trembling at the audacious thing she was doing, Bree climbed onto the fuselage. The damned thing was hot to the touch, and again, she wondered what was under the hood of this plane. Please, don’t let it be gallons of airplane fuel that will blow me to kingdom come. Yet that made sense. Where else would a plane’s gas tank be? In its skinny tail?
Blinking furiously to clear her teary vision, with her nose running and her poor heart coming apart, she shoved all she’d salvaged to the ground, then slipped on her backside off the plane to the rocky shoreline.
Landing on her feet, she blinked at the extraordinary thing she’d accomplished all by herself. She’d done it. But she still needed to get everything away from the plane, as quickly as possible. She brushed her hands on her pants, sure she could do that, too.
It dawned on her then, how close they’d come to landing in the river. Where everything would be wet. Where, in the worst scenario, she and Kruze could’ve drowned. Could she have gotten him out of a burning plane then? With cold water pouring in on them? Just the thought of him drowning and her watching while he died, sent a wave of anxiety flooding her already nerve-racked body.
Bree shook the panic off. It was time to run. Instead, she walked backward, dragging the makeshift travois carefully over rocks and driftwood. God, she was going to have a heart attack before this day ended.
Hurry.
At that subconscious demand, her foot slipped and she dropped to one knee. Didn’t slow her down. Bree kept her head and moved her precious cargo farther away from the danger she’d so cavalierly waltzed into just moments ago. The stupidity of her grandiose plan to re-enter a burning plane floored Bree now. What the heck had she done? She wasn’t brave, and she wasn’t a risk taker. She could’ve died in that fire. What would Robin have done then? Cry her pretty eyes out for the rest of her life, wondering why her mother and her father never came back for her?
Her. Father. Tears dripped down Bree’s cheeks at those choice words. It turned out Robin’s father had been absolutely right when he’d made the decision to divide the Banks family, to send Robin one way and Bree another. If Bree’d had her way, Robin would’ve been in that plane with her. Would that little girl have survived the crash landing? Look what happened to Kruze. He’d been injured, and he was twice Bree’s size. Ten times the size of his daughter.
A cavern of despair opened inside of Bree at the mere thought of Robin in the plane during that crash landing. Lord, that screwdriver could have hit her instead of Kruze. She looked over her shoulder to where he lay. He’d saved his child the terror of the crash. In a weird, abstract way, he’d also saved Bree. It was time to stop fighting him.
Because Robin already loved Kruze, and Bree knew it. Finally at the edge of the trees, she dropped to her butt on the first cushion of pine needles and moss she came to, exhausted. Yet so, so thankful she’d told Kruze about Robin. What if she hadn’t? What if she’d continued lying? He could be dying right now, having never met that sweet little imp with the exact same color eyes as his. His daughter, for God’s sake. Bree had denied Kruze his fatherly rights and the unconditional love of that darling little girl.
“What have I done?” she asked the noisy river. She was not a cruel person, and the night she and Kruze created their precious little girl, they had surely done it out of love. Yes, they’d been impetuous, and their lovemaking had been wild and crazy. Almost hedonistic. There was no doubt they’d been caught in a wicked tidal wave of lust that night.
But Bree knew there was a different side to Kruze than just the randy, devil-may-care veneer he hid behind now. He’d been so sweet and thoughtful in Paris, so intent on pleasuring her. That big, brave, former SEAL had even gone downstairs to the hotel’s gift shop and bought a tiny purple box of bubble bath. Okay, so he’d done that before he’d known there wasn’t a bathtub in her room, but the thought counted. What was more, Kruze counted. And Robin already loved her daddy.
Bree’s cheeks ballooned as she let a heartfelt sigh escape. She still had to drag this stuff back to Kruze, but they were alive and safe and…
“Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Before she got any more melodramatic or emotional, Bree swiped the back of one tenderized hand over her sweaty forehead and brushed her hair out of her face. It was time to make amends. Kruze knew about Robin. That was what mattered. Bree would make sure he knew he was always welcome in his daughter’s life. If that meant keeping a guest room ready for him, so be it.
Bree crafted her tangled hair into a single braid to keep it out of her way and lifted to her feet. Twisting two corners of the blanket together, she continued the slow drag back to their haphazard excuse of a camp. For the first time in months, she knew what she had to do, and she would do it. In the process of making room for Kruze in her life, Bree vowed to love him the right way—unconditionally.
After that, everything was up to him.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Kruze woke up to a small but crackling fire, the heat from it soothing. The second he stretched, he remembered that damned loose screwdriver. He had no choice, but the reminder was excruciatingly humbling. A loose tool in a plane, for fuck’s sake. Damn that Bruce. He should’ve put it where it belonged, not left it laying around in a plane where—
; “Hey. You’re awake,” Bree said softly, interrupting his mental rant.
“Umm, yeah,” Kruze replied as he struggled to sit, then pushed his back against the tree behind him when moving became too painful. One of the blankets from his plane now covered his legs. That was thoughtful. Fisting the top corner, he tugged it up over his—jacket?
He blinked, trying to remember why he was wearing his jacket, and how he’d gotten into it. Not to mention how he’d come to be in the forest with Bree, instead of on the rocky edge of the river. He came up with a whole lot of nothing. Chagrined, he swiped a hand over his forehead, combing his hair back, not remembering anything but a desperate need to get Bree out of the burning plane. Stacks of supplies that could only have come from the plane caught his eye. If those supplies were here—
“You went back into my plane,” he accused.
“I did what I had to do. We crashed,” she explained, her voice still soft. “Now we survive.”
Kruze wanted to chew her out for risking her life, but she was so calm. Which meant she was probably dead tired, because, yeah. All by her petite, little self, Bree had gotten those supplies and him out of a burning plane. He couldn’t fathom the challenge that must’ve been. A big man like him couldn’t stay angry with the fierce, little woman who’d saved his life.
He swallowed his ego and asked, “What’d I do, pass out?”
Bree nodded, sitting there on the other side of the fire, another blanket wrapped around her shoulders, her arms around her knees. “I think you hit your head when we crashed. You might have a concussion, I’m not sure.”
“Were you hurt? Burned?”
“No, just you.” Man, she was dirty, her face smudged with soot, her long hair wound into a tight braid over her shoulder. “How are you feeling? That hole in your side’s pretty deep. Does it hurt much?”
Damned (SOBs Book 4) Page 18
