Dangerous Waters

by Radclyffe

  God, she wished she could reach out, comfort her somehow. But she couldn’t, could she. Something so personal, so intimate. So risky. Especially when a big part of her wanted to do more than comfort her. She hadn’t had a serious interest in anyone in a long time—she’d been too busy, too cautious, too careful about leaving herself open to disappointment. And now, in the worst of circumstances, Sawyer came along and unleashed a storm of emotions and desires she hadn’t even realized she’d locked away.

  “Are you awake?” Sawyer asked quietly.

  Dara caught her breath. Thank goodness Sawyer couldn’t have been reading her face in the dark, although she sometimes seemed to be reading her mind. “Yes. Am I keeping you up?”

  Now the springs above her creaked for a few seconds, and she imagined Sawyer turning on her side, perhaps looking down in the darkness as she was looking up, as if they could see each other somehow. The image made her smile, and the now familiar heat surged through her again.

  “I got some rest. You?”

  Dara chuckled. “My feet feel better.”

  “That’s always a good start.”

  “I’m sorry, terribly sorry,” Dara said, as inadequate as the words might be. She had to say something. Had to let Sawyer know she’d been heard, deep down inside. “For everything you and your family went through.”

  “Dara,” Sawyer said so gently the word floated down like spring rain in the mist. “I don’t want you to be sorry or sad. I wanted to tell you. I didn’t want it to be a secret.”

  Dara’s heart beat so quickly she was afraid her voice would tremble. She swallowed. “Then thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Catherine is wrong to drag that up now. I’d be happy to tell her so.”

  The bedsprings creaked again, and Sawyer flipped down onto the floor, landing almost soundlessly next to Dara. An instant later, her weight settled on the end of Dara’s bed, just an inch from the bottom of her foot. In the light from beneath the door, all Dara could see was the silhouette of Sawyer’s form, straight and strong. They weren’t touching, but her body tingled.

  “I wouldn’t recommend taking her on,” Sawyer mused. “She would be a formidable opponent, I think. And she’s not going to get anywhere with it. I’m not gonna talk to her about it.”

  “You realize she can still write your past into the story. It’s a matter of public record, I imagine.”

  “No doubt. Nothing’s private anymore, even our suffering. If she does, then antagonizing her won’t change anything.” Sawyer’s hand curled around the top of Dara’s foot and squeezed gently. “But I appreciate you wanting to stand up for me.”

  “I don’t understand how some people feel it’s okay to encroach on other people’s privacy.” Dara’s ire was irrational—she knew that. She’d seen the way her mother had been deluged with gossip hounds and even so-called friends when the scandal of her father’s affair, quick divorce, and quicker remarriage had made headlines. Not the same thing as what Sawyer endured, not even close, but she’d been caught in the backwash at school, in her group of friends, and in her relationships for a long time after. She’d learned to ignore the invasion by putting walls between herself and everyone who saw her only as her father’s daughter. The heiress to an empire.

  “I guess Catherine sees the news as her battlefield,” Sawyer said. “She’s the standard bearer, right? The truth teller.”

  “Please,” Dara muttered. “Acting in the name of some greater good sounds lofty, but I bet she’s watching the ratings more than anything else.”

  Sawyer laughed and gave her foot a shake. “Hey. It’s okay.”

  Dara blew out a breath. “Sorry. I just have a thing about reporters who think they have a right to dig around in your private life. Especially when things are messy or painful or, in your case, tragic.”

  “I guess you’ve had a lot of that.”

  “Oh, poor me.” Dara snorted. “Sorry about my little burst of self-pity.”

  “I don’t think that.” Sawyer rubbed the top of her foot in slow, easy circles. “If I had to put up with people dissecting my every move my whole life, I’d be pretty damn angry.”

  Dara didn’t want to move. If she did, Sawyer might move her hand. Despite the light sheet and the fact she was still wearing socks, she could feel the heat of Sawyer’s hand racing up her leg, stirring places that absolutely should not be stirred here and now or probably ever. But damn, she liked it. “As long as you’re okay with Catherine bringing up the past, I promise not to gag her.”

  “You know,” Sawyer said, “I feel better about the subject coming up than I ever have. I’ve never actually told anyone the whole story before.”

  Dara couldn’t resist any longer and sat up, bending her knees a little and ducking her head so she wouldn’t hit it on the underside of the upper bunk. She reached out in the semidarkness and found Sawyer’s hand. Their fingers entwined almost naturally, as if they’d done it a hundred times before. “I’m glad it was me.”

  “So am I.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  NOAA Hurricane Advisory

  Storm Path Update

  Hurricane Leo

  5:00 a.m. AST

  Location: 17° N 61° W

  Moving: NNW at 12 mph

  Min pressure: 980 mb

  Max sustained: 130 mph

  “Anna,” Stan said when his wife answered the phone on the second ring.

  “You’re early,” she said, sounding awake even though she didn’t usually get up until seven.

  He was always the one to make the coffee and take the dog out, and he realized with a pang he missed it. He missed being home, and the routine of their days. “You too.”

  “Watching the news. The governor sounds pretty doom and gloom. How bad is it really?”

  “That’s why I’m calling. He’s about to sound a lot more dire pretty soon. The storm trajectory has shifted a few degrees.”

  “I don’t suppose that means out into the Gulf?”

  Stan snorted. “That would be nice. No. Leo’s shifted north. His path is tightening up and wind speed is climbing. He’s a Cat 4, and he’s headed for us.”

  “Us—us as in Florida, or…”

  “Us as in Miami.” Stan tried not to sound worried, but he was plenty worried. The time frame to landfall was getting shorter, and five million people lived in the Miami metropolitan area. “You need to leave now. The governor will be issuing a mandatory evac order any minute, and once he does, the highways will be a mess.”

  His warning elicited nothing but silence. “Anna? You there?”

  “Where are you going to be?”

  “What? Me? You know where I’ll be.”

  “You know how bad Willis is on long car trips.”

  Stan rubbed his neck and winced. He was going to be permanently impaired after sleeping on that rollaway for two weeks. “Just put him in his crate and stick him in the back seat. He’ll be fine.”

  “Jeremy assures me the condo is perfectly secured. He even said he could put metal sheets over the doors and storm shutters. I’ll call him.”

  “Jeremy is the property manager—of course he says everything is fine. And metal shutters won’t do a damn thing in hundred eighty mile an hour winds.”

  “We’ll be fine. We’re on the second floor.”

  “Anna—”

  “We don’t have a basement or a roof to worry about, Stanley. We’ll be fine.”

  “God damn it, Anna.”

  “I’d rather be here than on the road for who knows how long and still run the risk of getting caught. When’s landfall?”

  She was too damn smart after all these years. Everyone wanted him to say exactly when—to the minute—and where—pinpointed on a map—and how big—pretty goddamned huge ought to cover it—Leo was going to be, as if radar and satellite and pilots flying through the eyewall were the equivalent of a crystal ball. They weren’t, and three days might as well be a month in storm tracking terms. The NHC h
ad the best forecasters and computer models in the world, but the weather was the weather. Nature forged its own destiny. “Thirty-six hours, depending on…well, you know that story. Depending on a lot of things.”

  “Mmm. I’ll talk to you tonight. And don’t worry. We’ve been through plenty of hurricanes before.”

  Not like this one. Stan sighed and said, “I’ll call you. Love you.”

  “I love you too. Don’t drink too much coffee.”

  5:10 a.m.

  Key West Memorial Hospital

  “How is it looking?” Sawyer asked the crew chief as Norton slipped out from under the tail of the Black Hawk where she’d been checking the mechanics.

  “We’re ready when you are,” Norton said. “Any update on ETD?”

  Sawyer resisted the urge to swipe at the water running down the back of her neck from the thick mist that had condensed in her hair on the short walk across the parking lot. The fog hung low, obscuring the horizon, and dawn hadn’t done much to improve visibility. The cloud cover, intensified by the outer bands of Leo’s advancing storm wall, blotted out the sun, and only pale gray light penetrated. The pilots would be dependent on their embedded global positioning air control systems to navigate them back to Homestead.

  “They brought the surgical patient down about fifty minutes ago,” she said, “so as soon as the neurosurgeon gives us the green, we’re good to go. All the rest are packed up and just waiting for us to transfer them out.”

  “Good. I was just about to call you,” Norton said.

  Sawyer glimpsed Jeff, one of the two pilots, hustling his way from the ER. He’d probably taken advantage of the downtime to catch some sleep in the on-call rooms they’d been provided. His face was puffy and his jaw shadowed. Not a lot of sleep, it looked like. This didn’t look good. If the crew chief wanted to brief them, something had changed in the mission directives. Sawyer readied herself to face the problem. Out here, whatever decisions needed to be made were on her back.

  “Hey, Chief, Colonel,” Jeff said, pushing wet strands of blond hair off his forehead. “Mariann’s grabbing some chow. She’ll be right out. We all set?”

  “Not quite,” Norton said. “I just got off the radio with Homestead. They’re rerouting us. The storm front is making the air too choppy to reverse course and come in from the east on our return. We’re going to swing out over the Gulf and cross the mainland west to east on our way home. Flight time’s going to be about forty minutes longer. I sent the new coordinates to your onboard flight control computer.”

  Jeff shot Sawyer a look. “Your patients going to be able to handle the longer trip?”

  Sawyer read in his eyes he wasn’t happy, and she didn’t blame him. Dara wasn’t going to be pleased either. The long loop away from Leo’s outer bands added time and mileage to their trip. An extra forty minutes might make a critical difference if one of the patients got into trouble. “Can we trim the time down any?”

  “Maybe, as long as we don’t run into even more turbulence or heavy air we have to maneuver around.” He grimaced. “And I wouldn’t bet on any of that. We’re going to be cutting it close on fuel reserves as it is. But we’ll give it our best shot.”

  “That’ll do fine, then.” Sawyer didn’t need to tell the HH-60 pilots what was at stake. Time was the enemy on casevac runs. And these were experienced pilots. “I’ll brief the medical people and tell them we need to get moving.”

  “Yeah,” the pilot said. “That’d be a real good idea, Colonel.”

  Sawyer jogged toward the hospital, passing the second pilot on her way inside.

  “Morning, Colonel,” the pilot said, looking more awake than her copilot had.

  “Lieutenant,” Sawyer replied, returning the second pilot’s salute.

  On her way to the ICU, Sawyer paused by room 110 and, on impulse, pushed the door open, even though she knew Dara wasn’t going to be inside. She’d last left Dara drinking coffee in the break room, waiting for the neurosurgical patient to arrive in the ICU from the OR. She was probably in there with him now.

  As she expected, the room was empty, the rumpled sheets on the bunks the only signs anyone had been there. Crazy to be disappointed. She’d been hoping for a minute or two, just to…just to see her, to connect, to recapture the feeling of those moments they’d spent talking in the dark. She couldn’t recall when talking to anyone had felt so right, so easy—even when the words had been so hard. Not the saying so much as the remembering, and the haunting regret that lingered still. She hadn’t told Dara everything, about the guilt she’d never been able to shed, even when she’d gotten older and understood her seven-year-old self couldn’t have made a difference. Some part of her would never be sure. She’d helped her mom and siblings survive, hadn’t she? And no one had helped her dad. She should have gone with him. Maybe if she’d been there she could have warned him about whatever danger had caught him unawares. Because he would have come back, she knew that in every atom of her being, if he could have. He’d never leave them alone.

  You didn’t leave the ones you swore to protect behind.

  Sawyer let the on-call room door swing closed, leaving the memories, painful and pleasurable, to the silence inside. There wasn’t time to pull Dara aside now, to tease a brilliant smile and raised brow from her, to soak up the attention that seemed aimed only at her. She didn’t know when they’d have a chance to be alone again. Possibly…probably…never. And if that was true, she’d be sorry. The ache in her chest was unexpected, and she struggled to lock it down tight. Usually she could. Closing Dara out was pretty much impossible, and she wasn’t even sure she wanted to.

  The intensity of her connection to Dara had just caught her off guard, that was all. She didn’t have trouble talking with women. Sure, those were rare occasions when she took time from more important things to even be in a situation where she needed to socialize. Usually some barbecue or birthday celebration Rambo dragged her to. True, she never talked about personal things, just the kinds of surface things you talked about with strangers. And, of course, what she did for a living was always good for at least an hour’s worth of conversation. She smiled to herself. The uniform came in handy sometimes, although her occupation hadn’t seemed to impress Dara. No, the superficial things wouldn’t impress her. With Dara, only the flesh and bone would do, and somehow, she’d bared it all in those few quiet hours in room 110.

  Slapping the red button on the wall to open the ICU doors, Sawyer put aside the churning in her belly along with thoughts of the past and Dara. All the lights were on in the ICU, the artificial glare reminding her of the parade ground at night—stark, harsh, isolated from the world beyond the wire. Phyllis and the PA, a guy named Tom, moved efficiently from bed to bed, disconnecting lines and tubes, hooking up portable monitors, and getting the five relatively stable patients onto gurneys for the trip outside to the Black Hawk. Dara, Randall, and the neurosurgeon conferred beside the bed with the postop patient, a twenty-three-year-old who’d missed a turn on his motorcycle and, if it hadn’t been for his helmet, would’ve died when he was thrown twenty feet into a stand of trees. Fortunately for him, he didn’t hit any of those, but not so good news, he broke his neck when he landed. Currently he was intubated with an external cranial fixator encircling his head like a torturous halo. According to the neurosurgeons, the metal frame secured to his skull with screws drilled into the bone would prevent torsion on his spine and needed to stay in place at least six weeks until the bone grafts they’d placed along his pulverized spine fused in place and offered him some degree of safety.

  “He’s looking good,” the surgeon said, her wrinkled scrubs in distinct contrast to her perky expression and bright gaze. She looked as if she’d just come in from an afternoon at the beach—relaxed and ready for a night of dinner and dancing. Since she looked about twenty, the image didn’t seem too far off. “As long as the ride’s not too bumpy, and you keep his pressure stable, he ought to be fine.”

  Sawyer didn’t see any poin
t in mentioning the obvious—they were flying along the edge of a storm wall with a hurricane coming in behind it. It might get a bit bumpy. “The external fixator ought to protect him, shouldn’t it?”

  She got another bright smile. “It should.”

  Dara said, “Well, let’s get him ready, then. Thanks, Dr. Myers.”

  “I’ll wait till you get him loaded. You can let me know when he’s tucked away at your place, and I’ll update the family,” Myers said, making a note in the patient’s chart. His parents had refused to evacuate until his surgery was completed. Dara and Myers had finally convinced them that remaining at the hospital any longer was not necessary, and they’d left a few minutes before.

  “Are you leaving town, Susie?” Randall asked the surgeon.

  “Nah. Bet you a dollar we’re back in business in three days, and I’ve got patients scheduled.” She sketched a wave. “I’ll catch you outside.”

  Sawyer figured the jaunty surgeon would lose that dollar if anyone took the bet, but probably 30 percent of the population in the Keys agreed with her and would ignore the evac order. Unless local law enforcement went door to door enforcing the order, which wasn’t going to happen, all she could do was get these patients to safety and hope she wouldn’t be heading up another SAR run down here in a few days.

  Phyllis said, “We’re ready with the first one.”

  Sawyer took one end of the stretcher as Dara grabbed the other. As they pushed the patient out through the ICU doors into the hall, Sawyer asked, “Have you seen Catherine?”

  “Not since we all grabbed coffee in the break room,” Dara said. “I thought she was outside with you.”