“No. Damned if I’m going to help an archaeological looter and thief.” He had been tortured for his passion, for archaeology, and he had come out the victor.
“When it comes to Mara, you’re not the only fool. She played me.” Kellen’s temper rose, and that seemed to ease her breathing. “I never even suspected…” She turned to Max. “If she wakes up, promise you’ll hit her again.”
“If she wakes up, this time I get to hit her,” Carson said.
Kellen indicated at the body sprawled in the entry. Nils. “Is he alive?”
Max checked for a pulse, lifted his eyelid, slid his fingers along his neck. “He’s alive.”
She was more than a little angry with Nils, and more than a little worried at his continued unconsciousness. She told Max, “He’s not one of the bad guys.”
“I know. But he made me think that you and—” Max caught himself in midsentence. Going to the couch, he grabbed a throw and tossed it on Nils. “She hit him a good one. He’s out cold. Concussion. When we get the power back, we’ll get him to the hospital. They’ll check him out. He’s going to have a headache tomorrow.”
“You sure know a lot about head wounds.”
“I learned everything I could about them when you…” He choked.
She saw a tear.
No, don’t do that. She eased herself into a more comfortable position against the wall.
Max hurried over and knelt at her side. “Can you move?”
She wiggled her left hand, moved the uninjured fingers of her right hand. The little finger was swelling, throbbing and crooked, and she used her other hand to crunch it back in place. It was still broken, but as the joint slid back into place, the relief was immediate.
“Your legs?” Max insisted.
That took more concentration, but at last she shifted her feet, pulling them toward her, then using them to leverage herself into a sitting position.
He watched, offering no assistance, and if ever a man showed terror, it was him. She knew why. He feared she had survived, only to live a life without dance, without speed, without motion. Unlike hers, his memory of her time spent unconscious and recovering in the hospital would be whole and unbearable. He feared history was repeating itself.
“I’m not paralyzed.” She put her bruised and broken hand to her shattered chest. “I am in a lot of pain. Do you have an aspirin on you?”
He sighed in relief. “Stay still. Stay quiet. We’ll get a helicopter here to lift you out.” He pulled out his phone, tried to dial and swore virulently. “Someone put some kind of damper on the system.”
“Mitch did it.” She took a breath. “Birdie killed Mitch. And I did.”
Carson said, “I don’t know much about electronics, but I know where the server center is and I can try to figure out how Mitch sabotaged it.” He moved like a man who’d been bound and tortured, like a man in pain. But his eyes sparked, his forehead scowled, his mouth sneered and, at the same time, gave the tiniest twist of pain. Kellen could see why the man had won his Academy Awards. He knew how to express emotion, and he knew the right emotion to express.
“There’s a CB radio in Annie’s office,” Kellen said.
“Right. Good! CB radio first. Then restore communications.”
“Then—” she met his eyes “—my friend Birdie…”
“I know Birdie. She has driven for me.” Carson spoke too quickly. “What’s wrong with her?”
“She was hurt. Badly. I sent Sheri Jean to her, but…can you check…?”
“I’ll check. She’s too wonderful to lose.” As Carson made his exit, she wanted to clap in appreciation of his ability to show her her own face, her own feelings.
Max disappeared into the bathroom and returned with a roll of gauze. “Let’s see what we can do with this.” Gently, he wrapped her little finger to her ring finger to hold it in place.
“Better,” she whispered.
He fetched a cashmere throw off the couch, and as he wrapped it around her, he whispered, “Do you remember?”
As soon as he spoke, that sense of being in two places returned: the cool metal of the pistol, the man springing at her assailant, the blank nothingness of…of what?
She broke a sweat, a fine sheen all over her body.
“Kellen?” His tone changed to pleading. “Ceecee?” He tried to embrace her.
“No.” Panic swamped her. She wasn’t Ceecee. She wasn’t Cecilia. She could never be Cecilia again. Those flashes of moments past…they were not memories. They were merely impressions. She held him off with one hand. “Don’t. I’m in pain. That shot to the chest…”
“The sound of that shot brought me up here.” Abruptly, she could see into his tortured memories, to that moment when he had been too slow to save Ceecee from a bullet to the brain seven years before.
“I’m fine,” she said.
At once, he was practical Max. “Oh?”
“Well. Solid hit over my heart.” She touched her chest. “Hurts.”
“Let me see.” Max removed the leather shoulder holster and placed it off to the side. He unbuttoned her shirt, slid it off her shoulders, then off her wrists. He worked the vest’s fasteners free, then eased her out of its protective embrace. Reaching behind her, he unhooked her bra and pulled it away.
Great. She was naked from the waist up. She pulled the throw closer around her shoulders.
But he wasn’t drooling, and she found herself with mixed feelings about that. Why she cared, she didn’t know. Yet it seemed unfair to strip down and not have the guy notice. It made her half-remembered erotic dreams seem pitiful, the imaginings of a desperate woman.
He winced as the bullet site was revealed. “Oh, Ceecee…”
She corrected him. “Kellen.” She looked down at herself. A two-inch black bruise radiated from the center of her chest, and it was growing. If she hadn’t worn the vest, Mara would have shot her through the heart. She would be dead, lost to this world, and all her struggles to regain her dignity, her strength, herself would be for naught.
She looked at Mara, cuffed and slumped against the iron grill, and she considered turning on the gas fire and letting her roast.
“I thought the vest would stop injury,” Max said.
“It stops death. The force of the bullet has to be dissipated, and it was dissipated on my sternum.” She wet her dry lips. “Can you call for help yet?”
Max checked his phone. “Not yet. As soon as Carson gets the damper removed, we’ll take you to the hospital.”
She reached for her shirt. “You can’t leave with me.”
“I can.” He held her shirt while she put first one arm in, then the other.
Okay, now he was looking at her boobs. She had mixed feelings about that, too. She was one big mixed feeling poured over a very confused woman. “You’re in charge of the resort.”
He started to button the shirt, got it wrong, had to start over.
Good to know her boobs still functioned as a secret weapon.
He said, “I’m not in charge.”
“Who else? Now?” She gestured around her and winced at the pain the unrestrained motion caused her.
He stood, went to the bar, brought her a bottle of water and waited while she sipped.
When she’d wet her mouth enough to speak a little more clearly, she said, “Someone has to call the cops and wait for them to show up. Someone has to reassure the staff. Someone has to…fix everything. You’re the only one capable. You know that. Annie needs you.”
She might have only just acknowledged that she knew him, but she remembered that scowl when he didn’t get his way. She drove her point home. “If you insist on coming to the hospital with me, then I can’t go to the hospital. Annie left me in charge. Someone has to be in charge.”
“Fine.” Max set his jaw and never had he looked so much like an Italian thug. “I’ll get someone to drive you to the airstrip.”
“Birdie, too. And Nils.”
“Yes, Birdie, too. And…Nils.” He finished buttoning her shirt. “But when you wake, I’ll be at your bedside.”
She thought that was a vow he had made before. “Don’t worry. I’m okay.” She thought she’d said that to him before, too.
His phone rang.
Kellen sagged with relief.