“We should be able to find shelter. I can make something if I have to, but there are all sorts of crannies and caves along the river.”
We trudged along for another twenty minutes. Every step was agony now that I was aware of the blisters. When I saw a break in the river causing a small waterfall, I led us toward it. There was a slight overhang near some boulders. It wasn’t great, but it would at least allow us to get out of the rain.
I shined the light from my phone inside, and when I didn’t see any scary-looking critters, I didn’t hesitate to crawl in and lie down. There wasn’t much room, barely enough to sit up, but it was dry. Ian wasn’t so quick to follow me inside.
“Is this okay? Did you decide we should keep going?” Oh God, I hoped not. I really didn’t think my feet could take it. It felt so good to sit down.
“No.” He finally scooted in next to me. “No, this is fine.”
I turned my phone light back on so he could see. He wasn’t from Wyoming, so he probably didn’t like crawling into dark caves that might have all sorts of creatures inside.
Or maybe he was hurt worse than I’d thought. He was unnaturally stiff. No sigh of relief to be off his feet and out of the rain. No quips about being attacked by bears.
“Do I need to look at your arm?” Not that there was much that I could do about it.
“No.” His voice was tight. “I’m okay.”
He didn’t sound okay at all. Maybe he thought we should keep going. I didn’t know how I’d do it, but I would if I had to. “I’m pretty sure my feet resemble ground beef. It’s not pretty. But I can keep going if you think we should.”
He sucked in a breath, then let it out. “No. You need to rest. Staying here is the smartest move. If one of us turned an ankle, it would be worse.”
Thank goodness.
He sat up as much as the cave would allow. “Let me look at your feet. We should treat those. Otherwise, you’re not going to be able to walk on them tomorrow. And like you said, we still have quite a few miles to go.”
“I have no clue how to treat blisters like this.”
“Puncturing each one is the best thing for them. Normally, I would have a knife. You don’t happen to have a safety pin, do you?”
I did. Oh Lord. Every time I was with him, I thought I couldn’t say or do something more mortifying than the time before, yet here I was about to top it again.
“I do have a safety pin. It’s holding the back part of my bra together.” I’d changed into cute flats at the possibility of seeing Ian, but that he might get up close and personal with my bra had never occurred to me.
For the first time since we’d entered the little cave, he relaxed the slightest bit. “That will work fine if you’re willing to sacrifice it.”
I peeled my gross, wet blouse away from me as best I could and reached around to try to unhook my bra, but it was stuck in the fabric. I couldn’t do it.
He chuckled. “Can I help?”
Despite my mortification, I liked the sound of that soft laugh. “I think you might have to.”
I don’t know how his hands could be warm in all this, but they were as they moved against the skin of my back and found the safety pin holding the bra together. Damn it, I had meant to get a new one for the past three months but had never gotten around to it.
“Got it,” he said.
Was it my imagination or did his fingers trail along the skin of my back as he pulled them away?
He slid down to my feet and eased my shoes off. He switched on his phone light. “Those look pretty rough.”
“I probably shouldn’t look at them. It’s better if I can’t visualize it.”
“I understand. Hang on. I’ll puncture the worst ones and drain the fluid. It would be best if we had some sort of bandage, but this is better than nothing. Better than them rupturing.”
“How do you know all this?” I wanted to keep him talking. Anything to take my mind off fluid oozing from my feet.
“I’ve had plenty of blisters during my Navy SEAL years.”
I shouldn’t be surprised. Finn had been Special Forces in the army. A lot of the Linear Tactical guys had served with him. It was no surprise Ian had that same sort of training.
He had punctured the first blister as he spoke. I couldn’t feel any pain since the skin was dead, but I could feel the pressure.
His hands were gentle on my feet. “You’re pretty tough to keep moving on these. I’ve seen full-fledged soldiers roll over and cry with less.”
“That might still happen. I’m such a visual learner that not seeing them is probably the best possible thing for me. If I saw them, I’d be convinced I was about to die.”
The pin lanced the second blister. But again, his hands were so gentle, I couldn’t say that it hurt.
“One more,” he said softly. His thumb trailed over the arch of my foot, and I shivered a little.
When I’d taken off for Reddington City a few hours ago on my ill-planned attempt to spend time with him, this was not what I’d had in mind.
But it was sort of nice. He was gentle. Soothing.
“Okay, done. You get an A plus as a patient.”
“Well, you get an A minus as a doctor since you didn’t wash your hands. But that’s not bad.”
He chuckled again. I loved that sound. It was so rusty and disused. I liked drawing those little laughs out of him. He pinned my bra back in place, and I could swear his fingers trailed over my skin again.
But when he lay down beside me, he was tense again. I almost asked him what was wrong, but I’d have to be an idiot not to know the answer.
We were spending the night in the wilderness with armed thugs after us. Both of us were injured and we had no food or water. Any normal person would be tense.
So yeah, I was an idiot for enjoying myself a little. I should be as tense as him.
6
Ian
Wavy fell asleep in the middle of a sentence.
It was like nothing I’d ever seen. She’d talked to me for hours inside that hellish little cave once she found out that I liked it. And I did like it.
It wasn’t so much her stories, although those were pretty interesting—tales of growing up in Oak Creek sandwiched between two brothers, the younger who’d thought his name was actually Baby until he was well into elementary school.
It was the sound of her voice. It gave me something to focus on, to steady my breathing around. It gave me a reason not to give in to the panic clawing to get out, trying to convince me I was once again trapped. I was once again going to die.
If it had just been me out here in this wilderness, I would’ve gladly sat out in the storm. But it wasn’t just me.
At one point, she’d stopped midstory, something about the time that, as kids, she and her friends had started a cookie baking company and decided it was a good idea to call it the Chocolate Spit Cookie Company. A little bit of spit would be the “secret ingredient.”
“This must all sound so stupid to you,” she’d said. “I’ll stop.”
“No,” I’d responded, probably too quickly, but she hadn’t seemed to notice. “Please keep going.”
There wasn’t actually much more to the story. Not surprisingly, the Chocolate Spit Cookie Company had not been as big a success as the kids had hoped it would be.