Frantic to grab him, I hooked a hand around what felt like his knee. Knocked off-balance by his weight, I pushed up with the one foot still touching the sand. I didn’t get much leverage and clawed desperately at the water. Air. I needed air. My head broke the surface and I gulped a mouthful of seawater, choked, and gasped for air. Then, I let my hands climb the surfer’s body, desperate to lift his face from the water. Tangling my fingers in his hair, I pulled his head up. His eyes were shut. Blinking salt out of my eyes, I tried to see if he was breathing, but I couldn’t tell.
Another wave broke over us, but to my relief it seemed to be pushing us toward the shore, not pulling us away. The tide must be coming in. My toes scraped sand and I tried to stand, but the surfer’s weight and the sucking of the water as the wave receded kept me down.
“Hold on,” strong voices called from the shore. “We’re coming.”
Water blurred my vision, but I thought I saw three men pounding toward us, carrying the yellow and green surfboard and a flotation ring. One of them flung it toward me and it bounced off my forehead. I hardly registered the pain. Still holding the surfer by his hair, I grabbed for the ring just as the men splashed up to me in what turned out to be only waist-high water. Two of them grabbed the unconscious surfer while the third helped me stand. My every muscle trembled, and he put his arm around my waist to keep me from falling. I looked up into his face, at blue eyes framed by bushy white brows and seamed skin that spoke of decades in the sun, and thought I’d never seen anything so wonderful.
BACK IN MOM’s KITCHEN AN HOUR LATER AFTER A shower, shampoo, and change of clothes, I spooned up chicken noodle soup and defused Mom’s worries.
“You said you wouldn’t go in the water,” she said, ladling more soup out of the pot into my bowl.
“I’m full,” I protested. I cupped my hands around the bowl, letting the heat seep into me. The room exuded warmth with its brick wall, yellow paint, copper pans hanging from a rack overhead, and a faint scent of vanilla. “And it’s not like I planned to go swimming. What did you want me to do—leave the poor guy to drown?”
“Of course not. Whatever possessed him to trying surfing with a hurricane off the coast? Didn’t he know how dangerous it was?”
I rather thought that was the point. The surfer had turned out to be a man in his mid-twenties who worked for some government organization in Atlanta. He’d regained consciousness and thanked me and the fishermen for rescuing him as the EMTs prepared to load him into the ambulance to have his broken arm set at the hospital. Over his shoulder, I noticed a reporter speaking with a police officer who had responded with the medics.
“You saved my life,” the surfer said, surprising me with a kiss on the cheek. “My parents thank you.”
“The surf was pushing you toward the beach, anyway,” I said, embarrassed by his gratitude. My hair dripped onto the blanket the EMTs had wrapped around him, and I shivered.
“Still. If there’s ever anything I can do for you, let me know.” Brown-flecked hazel eyes looked into mine with grateful sincerity. “And next time you’re in Atlanta, I’m taking you to dinner.” He pressed a business card into my hand, fishing it from the pocket of khaki shorts the fishermen had retrieved, along with his shoes and wallet, from a heap down the beach. His gaze strayed to the heaving water behind me. “What a rush!”
He was certifiably insane. I told him so and he grinned. As the ambulance started down the road, I glanced at his card: “Stuart Varnet,” it read, “Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.” Sounded like a cheery job.
Rachel had driven me to my apartment in my car, where I’d cleaned up and put Band-Aids on a couple of places scraped raw in the surf. The worst spot was high on my cheekbone, and any facial movement—smiling, frowning, laughing—tugged at it and made me wince. Now, while Rachel and Althea dealt with a client up front, I brought Mom up to speed on what Rachel had told me and what I’d learned from Dillon and Coach Peet. I didn’t mention my upcoming date with Dillon; that was a development I wanted to keep private for the moment.
“I can’t believe Braden was participating in a pharmaceutical study,” she said. “Aren’t there a lot of risks involved?”
“Can’t be any worse than surfing in a hurricane,” I said.
She laughed. “That’s a true fact, but I’m sure Braden had to have his parents’ permission to take part in a drug study; that young daredevil today certainly didn’t tell his folks. It would be just criminal if Braden had a reaction to the drug and it contributed to his death in some way. Could the medicine have made him dizzy so that he fell?”