Chapter Three

I can’t worry about that now.

Chance couldn’t work fast enough. The wound on her thigh wasn’t deep and it wasn’t bleeding, but it would as soon as her blood warmed, and that was the kicker. It needed a good cleaning, stitches, and a pressure bandage, exactly what was in his first-aid kit. But if she came to while he treated her, she’d fight. He would if he were in her situation, but he had no anesthetic to offer other than the booze in his liquor cabinet, not what a person with compromised lung capacity needed.

“Sorry about this,” he said as he went for a piece of nylon rope from the closet near his front door. “I don’t usually tie ladies up, but…” It had to be done.

Looping the rope around her knee, he tugged her left knee forward and out of the blanket, careful not to stretch the painful looking wound any more than he had to. Fortunately, his couch came with three sturdy legs at the front of it, three more at the rear. Tucking one of the washcloths into the loop of the rope to cushion the rope against her skin, he tied the opposite end around the center couch leg to hold her leg taut and still.

With her still unconscious and sufficiently restrained, he dragged the coffee table from against the wall where he usually kept it, over to the couch and used it for a stool. The moment he dropped his butt to the table, training from his years on the teams took over. He disinfected the length of the gash with simple sudsy water. Using the sterile tweezers from his kit, he worked quickly, picking out a few rock shards, some as sharp as needles. She made no sound, not a peep, and he was seriously worried that brain damage might be her real problem.

What if I’m too late? A fall that far…

I can’t worry about that either. Triage. He could only manage what he knew, and now that she was inside and, hopefully, growing warm, the oozing tear on her thigh took precedence. A person could bleed to death with an open wound that size. Her other injuries were guesses anyway.

Carefully, with steady hands and gentle fingertips, he closed the narrow end of the cut nearest her kneecap, spacing his sutures evenly and as small as he could. When the width of the laceration widened and he could stitch no more, Chance covered the rest of the gaping sore with a pressure bandage. Lifting her limb, he wrapped layers of flesh-toned stretch tape around her thigh to hold everything in place. He kept an eye out for broken bones and other injuries as he worked. Finding none on her legs, he rotated the hip socket.

Everything seemed to be in physical working order, but worry tapped at the base of his skull. She hadn’t yet made a sound. She barely inhaled. He had to listen closely to detect any indication that she was still alive. Even a whimper would’ve encouraged him. A grunt. A shudder. But she remained unresponsive. It was as if he was treating a corpse. Chance swallowed hard, knowing he might be doing just that.

Gallo sat grooming his sodden fur at the hearth, for once doing what he’d been told. But the more Chance took care of his silent patient, the more questions begged answers. Suicide seemed too obvious. This woman hadn’t been wearing a coat when he’d found her, yet her boots were top-of-the-line hikers with fur linings. Her socks were super-thick Thorlos, designed to prevent blisters while they delivered maximum warmth to mountain climbers and hikers. Nothing about the extra-padded flannel shirt he’d stripped off of her said I-want-to-kill-myself, either. He was fairly certain the cylindrical shape he’d felt in her chest pocket when he stripped her out of her shirt was lip-gloss or lipstick, not a live round. It didn’t add up. Would a woman bundle up to keep warm and then worry about chapped lips if she’d meant to end herself?

And another thing, the bra and panties now laying in a pile with her boots and pants were high-end satin, a matching set of lace he would’ve lusted over given different conditions. Her jeans were sturdy denim, and new. They weren’t the run-of-the-mill shabby fashion statements with holes and slashes that most young people liked these days, but pants that serious sportsmen and sportswomen wore. The knees were scraped and one leg was torn at the thigh, but that probably happened in the fall.

It wasn’t until he’d decided his work was done that Chance caught sight of the black bruise on her left butt cheek close to her hipbone. “What the hell?” he ran his palm up her thigh and placed two fingers to the bruise. Softball sized, it throbbed at his touch, and he didn’t know what to make of it. As swollen as it was, as angry looking…

Shit. An infection? Already? A shattered bone beneath the muscle, bleeding, maybe hemorrhaging? What do I do now?

He swallowed hard, intent on treating her while she was still out. “I’m sorry,” he said again as he rummaged in his first-aid kit for the heavy-duty plastic sleeve that held a single surgical scalpel. “But whatever’s in there has to come out. Hold on. This won’t take long.” But it will hurt.

Just to be safe, Chance opened another pre-packaged pressure bandage and lined up a few sterile wipes to disinfect the aftermath. He hedged his bets with a towel to catch any infection, held his breath, and—one, two, three— he pierced her hot-to-the-touch skin. A geyser of infection shot into the towel like a pressurized load. What the hell, indeed. There could be no stitches for a wound like this. This tender knot needed to drain until all the infection was gone.

Carefully, he pressed and probed her butt muscle to extract as much bloody fluid as he could. “How’d you do this?” he asked as blood and pus drained onto the towel, “and how long have you been dealing with it? Weeks? It had to hurt like a mother. Do you do drugs?” What doper shoots up in their butt cheek?

“You know what? I can’t worry about that either,” he told his big-eared sidekick. “She might not live through the night. All I can do, is do the best I can do. The rest is up to her.”

Right on cue, Gallo’s ears perked up as if he understood, while Chance taped a thick layer of sterile gauze over the latest discovery on his patient’s backside and called it good. Moving on, he undid the rope and tucked her bandaged leg under the blankets. She should’ve been plenty warm by then, but her skin was clammy and still cold as ice.

He examined her more thoroughly then, keeping her covered as he went. Smoothing his hands over her ribcage, he moved quickly to her neck and collarbones. Whoever she was, she deserved to be handled with dignity and respect, especially now. No broken bones presented themselves. That much was good.

Moving his fingertips quickly over her shoulders, shoulder blades, and spine, Chance mapped as he went, diagnosing and hoping. She’d roused for a moment, but that moment was short-lived and amounted to nothing more than her taking a shuddering breath.

Moving to her lower extremities, he examined her ankles and tiny feet, her long legs and poor, scraped-raw knees. She has pretty toes. Not pudgy, but slender and elegant. Manicured nails. Strong calves and a decent, athletic build, too. Nothing seemed broken and he located no more open wounds or bruises like that one on her backside. For now, her life rested in his hands, but with every inch and curve his fingers mapped, he wished he was a smarter, wiser man who could more aptly help her. She needed a real doctor, not him.

Extending her right arm, he flattened her much smaller hand over his palm. Fury hissed out of him at the sight of her much smaller hand in his. Defensive wounds. The woman had definitely fought someone, and she’d fought hard. Every fingernail was broken. Her fingertips were bloodied and shredded into hamburger. The poor damned thing. Mottled bruises circled both wrists like ugly bracelets.

“Who the hell did this to you?” he asked, angry as a son-of-a-bitch that one so delicate had been treated so badly. A vicious kick could explain the nasty bruise on her butt. He’d seen bumps and bangs in the field lead to anaerobic infections deep beneath the surface of the skin. Was that what she’d been dealing with? Prior abuse? For how long?

The towel he’d wrapped like a thick turban around her head was soaked by then, and Chance still needed to inspect her face. Tucking her into the double layers, he shifted on the coffee table to focus on her head and hair. Cupping her head gently in his big palm, he unwrapped the wet towel. Burnished auburn tangles fell everywhere, but as they fell away from her face, a hearty “Oh, shit!” slammed out of Chance. It can’t be. He knew this woman. The whole world did. He’d rescued Suede Tennyson, the wild-as-sin daughter of the governor of Oregon.

She didn’t look so wild nor so temperamental tonight, not with her split lip, bruised cheek, and that vivid red mark high on her cheekbone. Shadows rimmed her sunken eyes, but the worst indignity? The boot print purpling at the center of her forehead. Compassion flared.

“You poor thing.” Chance traced the pad of his thumb over the mottled imprint, pissed as hell. “What jackass used you for target practice, baby?”

Righteous rage lifted its weary head. This wasn’t suicide. It was attempted murder.

*****

Suede came to at the edge of life and found herself on the Titanic, going down along with everyone else, sinking into freezing, frigid depths. Icy tentacles circled her ankles and legs like weighted shackles. The frightened dying shrieked like banshees around her, deafening her sensitive eardrums. Waves of wicked cold whipped at any exposed skin, flailing her ribs and spine with a cat-o-nine-tails. Stinging. Biting. Death seemed a welcome friend. Breathing surely wasn’t.

The noise in her ears threatened her slim hold on sanity. Her head reverberated from the pain. Stiff and numb, her fingers were useless. She couldn’t make them bend to work. I can’t hold on because there’s nothing to hold onto. Nothing, but all that noise. I’m dying.

A woman can only fight for so long, and Suede Tennyson had been fighting all of her life. Why would death, with its alleged promise of freedom from misery, be any less a struggle, damn it?

Passing over wasn’t supposed to hurt this bad, was it? Wasn’t a big, bright light supposed to pull her upward and into a better existence, someplace peaceful where angels were real and some magnanimous entity had a big heart that loved even bad girls and boys? Wasn’t that how death was supposed to work? Why’d everything have to hurt so fucking bad? She should’ve known better. Death was no different than life.

Lies. More lies.

Just when all seemed lost, just when hysteria edged up her throat, choking her, a gentle warm current slipped over and around her. The noise in her head ebbed, and she became aware of a persistent probing of her every last muscle and nerve. It moved over her battered body, parsing her in methodical sections. Some devil must truly hate her to inflict the torture she felt now. Someone strong and precise, who knew how to make lost souls suffer.

Resistance was futile. Suede couldn’t open an eyelid or crack her lips, much less lift a finger to defend herself. Fuck off, she meant to declare with her usual snark. That never failed to get her noticed in the past. She meant to shrug this shadowy ghoul hovering over her away. He was every bit as evil as the others. Life was a fucking bitter disappointment, but death wasn’t any better.

Let me be. Let me die.

Yet even as despair crystallized in her stubborn heart, the tiniest scent of pine and manly sweat breached the debris in what stung like a tender, broken nose. A persistent ‘Not yet’ blurted out of her impetuous soul. She hadn’t come this far, nor gone through all she’d endured in her short twenty years, to give up now. Hell no.

A mellow voice whispered down at her from far above, “All you’ve got to do is breathe for me, ma’am. I know it’s hard, but I promise, if you’ll concentrate on living, I can take it from there.”

Breathe, huh? Like that’s so fucking easy? Just snap my fingers and turn the dragon fire in my lungs into a springtime breeze? Yet want to or not, this stranger had evoked a long drawn inhalation from her compressed lungs. It wasn’t deep and it hurt like a motherfucker, but it helped, too. Her lungs had expanded a tiny bit more that time. Oxygen had saturated her body. Something warm uncoiled at the center of her innermost self. Felt like—life.

The same warm wind sliced over her, whispering, “There you go. I knew you could do it,” and for some reason, Suede was reminded of candy canes and childhood dreams, evergreens and Santa. Almost being like every other kid in her class. Almost being good enough.

Tender fingertips traced her shoulder blades, “I won’t hurt you. You’re going to live. I’ll make sure of that.”

The last thing she wanted was some strange guy manhandling her, but touch her, this idiot did. With efficient care and gentleness she hadn’t realized that she desperately craved, he massaged and rubbed warmth into her chilled neck and shoulder muscles. Down her back and up her spine again he went, gentle fingers stroking past her hair, kneading luxurious comfort into her scalp.

Suede found herself leaning into that wide, masculine palm smoothing over her, gentling her as easily as if she were a skittish colt in spring. Damn, it felt good. This guy, this stranger, seemed to care that she was comfortable and warm. It mattered to him that she lived.

A tear stung the corner of her eye. Whoever he was, this new demon in her life made her want to believe again. Almost…