He slipped his hand underneath the plaid shirt she wore, trying to determine the source of her pain, and she cried out as his fingers gently probed the delicate skin below her left breast and encountered wetness too thick to be remnants of the rain. Oh Christ, it wasn’t cracked ribs. It was worse. He pulled the shirt up farther to see blood. A lot of it. She, or somebody, had tried to stanch the flow with a rag of some kind and whatever color the cloth had once been, it was now completely deep red. He peeled the rag back slowly and saw to his shock that it wasn’t a jagged cut caused by battering against a rocky cliff. It was a knife wound.
“God, Andrea, where have you been?” he muttered.
He knew what he needed to do. Rushing into the adjoining bathroom, he got a clean towel and held a portion of it under hot water and then got his first-aid kit from the cupboard. At the last minute, he went out to the bar and grabbed a bottle of whiskey.
Living in virtual isolation brought a number of perks, but expert medical attention wasn’t one of them. Evan had learned the basics for emergencies and he was healthy. But he knew the time would come when he would regret not having a hospital within traveling distance. If not for the storm, he might have chanced trying to get Andrea off the island and to the nearest hospital, but on a night like this that was out of the question. He hoped like hell she didn’t have any internal injuries.
Turning the bedside lamp up brighter, he used the towel to rub the sticky blood from her skin to clean the wound so he could get a better look. She had been lying quietly, but at his touch she roused herself with a moan. And not the good kind.
“No,” she muttered sharply, suddenly opening her eyes, the blue of them startling him.
“This is going to need stitches.” He held the bottle of whiskey up to her lips. “Drink. It’s the best I can do.”
Her head fell back and her eyes closed again. He half hoped she had fainted since he had nothing but the hard liquor to dull the pain for her and she hadn’t drunk any.
Quickly taking what he needed out of the first-aid kit, he doused the wound with disinfectant, earning not a single sound from her—she had fainted, thank God—and got down to it. The wound was just a slash of red against the white of her skin and he stitched quickly as she lay without moving.
After he finished, he removed the rest of her clothes, her limp body malleable, and bundled her in blankets, then switched the light off, listening for a minute to the sound of her troubled breathing in the dark.
He’d take a hot shower now and try to shake off this heavy sense of disorientation and incredulity and…shit…unadulterated joy at having Andrea Prentiss here.
But when she came to, he wanted answers.
* * * * *
She came awake slowly to the feeling of pain. It was a familiar sensation, but a distant one, like a long-ago dream or a faint memory. She did not welcome it back. But she could stand it if she had to. She always could. If she had to.
“Good. You’re awake.”
He was familiar too. Hauntingly, tantalizingly familiar. And he was welcome. But she wasn’t dreaming him this time. It really was him. Evan Reynolds. He was standing by the bed, with that same relaxed stance she remembered, hands in the pockets of his khaki pants, intense green eyes focused in on her as if there was no one else in the room. Of course this time there was no one else in the room.
She struggled to sit up, breathing through the pain, one hand going automatically to the bandage she had felt before she even knew it was there.
“Here, drink this.”
He handed her a glass of amber-colored liquid and she took it from him, sipping slowly. A lifelong teetotaler, she felt the whiskey burn her throat, but she would take any sedative she could get at this point.
Oh God. She had come here. She had actually come here. Care of a stolen boat and the expert seamanship she had garnered from her childhood and had needed that night to steer through near-hurricane conditions. She had come here. Like some kind of demented salmon, she had traveled over the waters back to where she instinctively longed to be. Back to him.
She glanced up at Evan Reynolds as he watched her.
She was certifiably wacko. Wacko and embarrassed.
But the survivalist in her knew deep down it was a good plan. They wouldn’t find her here. She could recuperate.
If he didn’t throw her out, that is.
She placed the empty glass down on the nightstand. “Thank you,” she croaked, trying to stay sitting upright until he leaned over her and gently pressed her bare shoulders down. When he pulled the covers up over her, she realized she was naked.
Not that it was anything he hadn’t seen before.
“It’s cleared up this morning. We can cross back to the mainland. I’d like to get you checked out in a hospital.”