by Caro Carson
If he was any kind of decent man, he’d stop sleeping with her and start acting like the distant friend—no more—that he’d inevitably end up being.
“It’s starting to snow out there,” Rebecca said as she came back inside. “Do you think it will stick? We could have a white Christmas.” She was all sunshine on this snowy day, an early Christmas gift wrapped in a Navajo blanket.
This break up was going to hurt when it happened. Trey knew it would hurt in a way he’d never get over.
She stayed near the door. “Would you help me with my boots?”
The temperature in the cabin was probably still at freezing, except directly in front of the fire. Her blanket dipped and slipped open as he hauled off one of her boots. Her breast was exposed for a moment, pure and luscious, before it was hidden by the colorful blanket once more.
Did his body respond in the freezing cold? With a vengeance.
Oblivious, smiling, Rebecca opened the blanket and invited him in. As she closed her arms around his neck, with the corners of the blanket tight in her fists, she kissed him as she had the first time, with a raw, openmouthed hunger. He’d broken off that kiss before, but he couldn’t now. This was his woman, and she wanted him, and by God, he’d worry about tomorrow when tomorrow came.
Still kissing, he backed her toward the sleeping bag, which he’d dragged closer to the fire. When her feet touched it, she dropped the blanket, and they both slid into the familiar warmth. She snuggled her bare body up to his, as familiar with him as he was with her after their hours and hours of togetherness.
There was something so primal about it, very Adam and Eve, innocent and naked, just the two of them in this log cabin. He was male, she was female, and everything about her was a pleasure to him, from her face to her voice, from her body to her laugh.
She pushed his hair back with her fingers and looked at him with those brown doe eyes. “It only hurts the first time, right?”
“That’s what I’ve heard.”
“You don’t know?” Her eyes widened, and then she started raining little kisses from one corner of his mouth to the other. “I’m your first first. I am, aren’t I?”
“Rebecca, you’re my first everything.”
He stopped himself. He’d been about to say all kinds of things. The words were lined up, ready to pour out. You’re the first good reason I’ve had to want to face the day. You’re the first woman I’ve wanted to love.
It was an agony to hold it in, but he would not tell her he loved her when he knew he would leave her.
“What do you mean, your first?” she whispered, laying him back, prowling over him. She bit her lip, excited and anxious at once for what they were about to do—for they were, with a certainty, about to come together once more. It was as inevitable as breathing. It had been from the first moment he’d held her, Trey realized.
“There’s never been another like you,” he said, his back to the hard planks of the floor as Rebecca moved on top of him once more. “There never will be.”
Together, they learned that the second time involved some physical tenderness. Rebecca had been dismayed that her body was delicate, because her desire was undeniable. Trey had led them to completion with more gentleness than he’d known he possessed, and they’d finished breathless and satisfied. The tenderness of the second time, Trey knew, had been as much in his heart as her body. It would be seared in his memory. He might forget everything else, but never that.
The silence they shared in each other’s arms was broken by the chop of a helicopter’s blades, coming to take them away.
* * *
The dusting of Texas snow turned into a blizzard under the helicopter’s blades, flakes and ice and dirt flying in all directions, pelting them with fury.
Fury. That was what Trey was feeling. The arrival of the helicopter had made Rebecca distressed, and that made him angry. She’d rushed to get dressed, insisting on wearing her underpants, although they’d begun thawing and were now both cold and damp. The destroyed cashmere cardigan was the most wet item of them all, yet she’d put it on and tried to hold it closed.
Trey had pulled the cardigan off her arms and tossed it in the fire, then dressed her in his plaid Western shirt. The material was thinner but far more dry, and it reached nearly to her knees, which satisfied her sense of modesty. She’d worn the Navajo blanket instead of her wet coat. He’d worn his jeans and wrapped the foil-backed thermal blanket around himself, and they’d left everything else behind in the cabin.
At the first blast of dirt and ice, Trey had cursed himself for leaving the goggles. As Rebecca bent her head and shaded her eyes with her hands, Trey hated his sorry excuse of a brain, which had let him down once more—and Rebecca, too.
He should have foreseen that a helicopter would arrive. He’d told his cousin to call the sheriff, something that had completely slipped his mind until now. The ice storm had stopped, the darkness had lifted, their fire had created smoke. Therefore, the helicopter had come. Why couldn’t he predict these things?
The helicopter wasn’t painted with the sheriff’s office colors, though. It was Texas Rescue and Relief’s logo that was emblazoned on the side. Texas Rescue was the organization that his brother volunteered with as a fireman. Luke’s new wife did something with them, too, but damn if Trey could remember what. He didn’t care. He was angry with Texas Rescue, because they were literally taking Rebecca away.
A man had descended with a metal basket. He was dressed like an astronaut in a full helmet and orange jumpsuit, but he kept giving them hearty, thumbs-up gestures. Trey felt like returning the hand gesture with a different one of his own.
He would have gotten Rebecca home safely. If they’d only given him some time, he could have completed the rescue. The fire that he’d just doused had been going strong. Their clothes had been drying. He would have waited one more night, letting Rebecca get stronger, and then he would have refilled the ATV with the spare gas can before beginning the return drive over the land he knew like the back of his hand. Rebecca would have ridden behind him, and his own body would have blocked the cold wind for her.
But his plan took time. Like building a fire with damp wood, each piece of his plan had to be executed step-by-step. It was a pace that worked for him.
But Trey knew, as he’d known since he’d been unceremoniously booted out of Oklahoma Tech, that the world moved at a faster pace.
Rebecca had already disappeared into the helicopter, and the astronaut was holding the basket steady for Trey to climb in. Once inside the helicopter, the pace only quickened. The astronaut removed his helmet, stuck a thermometer in Rebecca’s mouth and clipped a white plastic device on Trey’s finger. After things beeped, he switched them around, popping fresh plastic on the thermometer for Trey, clipping the white cube on Rebecca’s finger.
Then he turned to Trey and stuck his hand in front of his face. “How many fingers am I holding up?” he shouted over the relentless thumping of the rotor blades.
Alarm raced through Trey. They were going to start all this crap again, how many fingers, look up, look to the left, follow my finger with your eyes. There was nothing wrong with his eyes, there’d never been anything wrong with his eyes, just a little double vision after a hit during practice.
“How many fingers?” the man shouted again.
“Four, goddammit.”
“Jeez, Trey, nice to see you, too. Don’t take my head off.” Then he turned to Rebecca and asked her the same.
The astronaut knew him.
That sick sweat threatened. Trey rolled his shoulders and tried to concentrate on the man’s face. If he’d just hold still. If he’d just give Trey a minute to place his face—but he was shouting numbers he read off the white cube cheerfully, as if Trey would be glad to hear them, all while packing up equipment, pulling a microphone from a clip in the roof
, talking to the pilot as he took Rebecca’s temperature a second time. The engine roared, the helicopter banked, and instead of ranch land below them, city buildings and highways filled the window.
Somehow, Trey had assumed they were flying back to the ranch house. Foolish.
He could only focus on one thing at a time, and the only thing he gave a damn about was Rebecca. She looked at him, and smiled her strained, driver’s license smile.
Trey unbuckled his seat belt and moved to her side.
“You done?” he asked the astronaut, but it wasn’t really a question. He unbuckled Rebecca’s seat belt and pulled her into his lap, blanket and all.
The other man shot him a look that Trey returned evenly. This is the way it’s going to be.
The man got the message. He pulled the seat belt’s webbing out another few feet, then buckled it around Trey and Rebecca, both. “You won’t mind if I buckle my patients in. I just got my rescue swimmer’s certification. I’m not losing it for you, Waterson. And, ma’am, since your bodyguard doesn’t seem inclined to introduce us, I’m Zach Bishop. Pleased to meet you.”
Zach Bishop. Of course, Trey knew Zach Bishop. Trey’s senior year, Zach had been a freshman on the football team. He’d thought he was the best wide receiver in the state. He wasn’t, but he was good, so Trey had thrown more than a few touchdown passes his way. Just to remind the cocky freshman who was behind those scores, Trey would unleash his full, NFL-worthy strength at him during practice, and throw the ball so hard that it would knock Zach on his ass when he caught it.
He realized now why Zach was grinning at him. They had a history, a rivalry and grudging respect, one Trey had forgotten for ten years.
He looked at Rebecca’s face, still new to him, and tried to memorize it. Would she be erased from his consciousness for ten years? Would he run into her someday, and wonder why this sweet brunette acted like she knew him?
The thought made his gut churn. He couldn’t allow it to happen. He wanted those memories of their first time, and their second. If he had to keep her beside him and look at her every single day to keep that memory fresh, then that was what he’d do.
Until she wanted to move in, settle down, have children. Then he’d have to let her go.
Chapter Ten
Rebecca Cargill had never been in a hospital before.
She hated it.
Her entire twenty-four years had been spent wrapped in a pink puffy safety bubble. She’d never broken a bone and needed a cast, because she’d never climbed a tree. She’d never stepped on broken glass and needed stitches, because she’d never gone outside without her white lace socks and black patent Mary Janes. She’d gotten bronchitis once, the year she’d been sent to an exclusive all-girl boarding school courtesy of Papa Maynard, Mother’s fourth husband. A physician had come to her dormitory and prescribed an antibiotic. The floor mistress had administered it as she plumped little Becky Cargill’s precious pillows twice a day.
The helicopter had landed on the roof of the hospital, and the wind from the rotors had buffeted Rebecca every which way as she was taken out of Trey’s arms and placed on an empty stretcher. She’d been swaddled in white blankets and held down with seat belts across her legs and waist and shoulders, and then six people had run along the side of her stretcher as they rushed her away like she was on a television drama, playing the patient who was about to die.
Maybe she was. Maybe she was suffering from some aftereffects of her freezing, and didn’t know it. Everyone was so serious, so urgent. They rolled her into an elevator, and from there into a room with medical equipment hanging on its walls. Some of it she could identify, like oxygen masks, and some of it she could read, like “defibrillator,” but most of it was an array of ominous stainless steel and black plastic, waiting for a life to be in danger.
Was it hers?
It could be. Trey was not here, and without him, she could die. In this hospital, the thought didn’t seem so irrational.
A woman in scrubs informed her they were going to take some vitals, and then she unsnapped the shirt Rebecca had borrowed from Trey and stuck round electrodes on Rebecca’s chest, pushing one breast aside a bit to stick a circle on her rib. The television screen over the stretcher started to display a bright green zig-zag, and the telltale beep that Rebecca recognized from every medical movie started tracking her heartbeat.
Rebecca wondered if the number one hundred and twenty was her pulse, but before she could ask, another woman in scrubs wiped her elbow crease with cold alcohol and inserted a needle to start an IV. The bag of clear fluid, hanging from its silver hook, dripped steadily into the tube that disappeared into her arm. Sodium Chloride, it read.
Little Becky was frightened into silence, but Rebecca, who had the confidence to tell a man when he was wrong, asked the nurse a question. “What kind of medicine is that?”
“Oh, it’s nothing. Just a precaution for dehydration.” She stuck a wide piece of clear plastic over the crease of Rebecca’s elbow. Rebecca kept her arm completely straight, afraid to move and dislodge the needle.
Trey had said she was dehydrated. He’d made her drink more than she’d wanted to. Had he known how sick she was? But she wasn’t getting water now. She was getting sodium chloride, which the nurse said was nothing. She didn’t trust the nurse; nothing wouldn’t have a name.
She trusted Trey. She needed him to keep her warm and safe, but he wasn’t here. The hospital wouldn’t have kept him, she supposed, because there was nothing wrong with him. He hadn’t frozen slowly in the cold. The helicopter had dropped her off at the hospital, but maybe it had taken Trey somewhere else, since he wasn’t sick.
“My arm is cold.” The panic was threatening to make itself heard in her voice. She could feel a creeping coldness in her arm, spreading deep under her skin.
The nurse patted her hand. “Yes, sometimes you can feel the IV going in. It’s okay. The doctor will be in shortly.”
The last two people left, and shut the door.
Rebecca lay in the bed, and stared at the door. It had one lone holiday decoration, a plastic cling in the shape of a snowflake. She stared at the imitation ice crystal as her ECG machine beeped.
Her shoulder started to hurt from holding it at a funny angle to keep her arm straight, but she didn’t dare move with the needle stuck in her. They were putting a cold liquid inside her, when she never wanted to be cold again.
Trey!
No wonder people dreaded going to the hospital. She’d never felt so alone...except for the time she’d been clinging to a tree in the middle of nowhere. Her feet had frozen, minute by minute.
The ECG beeped faster. Rebecca flexed her feet. They were still there, but the seat belt kept her from moving her legs. They’d released the one across her shoulders and the one across her middle, but no one had done anything to her feet.
She held still, legs strapped in place. Needle in her arm. Wires coming out of the shirt from the stickers on her chest.
“Trey!”
She shouted his name, but he was not coming in the door this time. He was not here.
“Trey,” she said quietly, more of a wish than a cry for help.
The door opened a few inches, and yet another woman in scrubs stuck her head in. This one was Rebecca’s age, with brown hair in a high ponytail. “Hi. Did you need something?”
Rebecca swallowed. She couldn’t think of the right sentence, only the kind of stilted phrases her mother had drilled into her head. Would you please inform Mr. Waterson that Miss Cargill would like to see him?
The woman glanced at the ECG and looked back at Rebecca. She came all the way into the room. “You don’t look very comfortable. Is your IV bothering you?”
She flicked open the buckle on the leg seat belt as she walked up to Rebecca’s side and placed her hand on her arm.
&
nbsp; “Careful, please,” Rebecca said quickly. “I don’t want to wiggle the needle.”
“There’s no needle in there. They slide it out and leave a flexible tube in its place. You can bend your arm. Try it.”
Rebecca was so relieved, she could have kissed the woman.
Florence Nightingale syndrome, she could hear Trey say.
I don’t mean kiss her like that, Trey. Get your mind out of the gutter.
Oh, yes. She was bold and spunky when she talked to Trey, but she was still good little Becky everywhere else. She missed Trey intensely.
“You’re allowed to have one person in the room with you,” the woman said. “Is there someone in the waiting room I could get for you?”
“Trey Waterson. Except, I don’t know if he’s here or not.”
“Trey? Okay, I’ll go see if there is a Trey in the waiting room.”
The minutes ticked by, measured by the rapid beep of the ECG machine.
The ponytail lady came back into the room. “There’s no one named Trey, but there’s a woman out there who’d like to see you. Shall I send her in?”
Rebecca froze, and felt a new kind of cold, one she dreaded as much as any other she’d felt in Texas.
Her mother had arrived.
She lay there for a moment, obedient little Becky, and then she sat up. If Trey was not here, then she’d go find him. He was the only person in the world she trusted.
She started peeling the round circles off her chest, tossing the offensive pieces of plastic onto the stretcher, but she remembered her manners and smiled sweetly. “Thank you, but I do not wish to see that woman. It was very kind of you to check the waiting room, but I’m afraid I must be going now.”
Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew her behavior was irrational. She wouldn’t do anything dangerous this time. She wouldn’t take an ATV into the wilderness in an ice storm. She’d just use her credit card to rent another car, and she’d go back to the ranch and find Trey. Hopefully, she’d get there before her mother tracked her down.
