Two Alone

“When did you do this?” His eyes, razor sharp, moved up to hers. “What happened?”

Dismayed, she looked at Cooper and wordlessly shook her head.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were hurt?”

“I didn’t know,” she said weakly.

He slipped his knife from its scabbard. Pinching up the blood-soaked hem of her trousers, he slid the knife into the crease and jerked it upward. With one heart-stopping stroke, it cut straight up her pants leg, neatly slicing the fabric all the way from her hem to the elastic leg of her underpants. Shocked and fearful, she sucked in her breath.

Cooper, gazing down at her leg, expelled a long, defeated breath. “Hell.”

Chapter Two

Rusty’s head began to buzz. She felt nauseous. Her earlobes were throbbing and her throat was on fire. Each individual hair follicle on her head felt like a pinprick. The pads of her fingers and toes were tingling. She’d fainted once after having a root canal. She knew the symptoms.

But, damn, did they have to afflict her here? In front of him?

“Easy, easy.” He grasped her shoulders and lowered her to the ground. “You don’t remember hurting yourself?” She shook her head dumbly. “Must have happened when we crashed.”

“I didn’t feel any pain.”

“You were too shocked. How does it feel now?”

Only then did she become aware of the pain. “Not bad.” His eyes probed hers for the truth. “Really, it’s not that bad. I’ve bled a lot, though, haven’t I?”

“Yeah.” Grim-faced, he rummaged through the first-aid kit. “I’ve got to sponge up the blood so I can see where it’s coming from.”

He tore into the backpack she’d been carrying and selected a soft cotton undershirt to swab up the blood. She felt the pressure of his hands, but little else as she gazed up through the branches of the trees overhead. Maybe she’d been premature to thank God for being alive. She might bleed to death lying here on the ground. And there wouldn’t be anything Cooper or she could do about it. In fact, he would probably be glad to get rid of her.

His soft curse roused her from her macabre musings. She tilted her head up and looked down at her injured leg. Along her shinbone a gash ran from just below her knee to just above her sock. She could see flesh, muscle. It was sickening. She whimpered.

“Lie down, dammit.”

Weakly, Rusty obeyed the emphatic order. “How could that happen without my feeling it?”

“Probably split like a tomato skin the moment of impact.”

“Can you do anything?”

“Clean it with peroxide.” He opened the brown opaque plastic bottle he’d found in the first-aid kit and soaked the sleeve of the T-shirt with the peroxide.

“Is it going to hurt?”

“Probably.”

Ignoring her tearful, frightened eyes, he dabbed at the wound with the peroxide. Rusty clamped her lower lip with her teeth to keep from crying out, but her face twisted with anguish. Actually, the thought of the peroxide bubbling in the gash was as bad as the pain.

“Breathe through your mouth if you feel like vomiting,” he told her tonelessly. “I’m almost finished.”

She squeezed her eyes shut and didn’t open them until she heard the sound of ripping cloth. He was tearing another T-shirt into strips. One by one he wrapped them around her calf, binding her lower leg tightly.

“That’ll have to do for now,” he said, more to himself than to her. Picking up his knife again, he said, “Raise your hips.” She did, avoiding his eyes. He cut the leg of her trousers from around her upper thigh. His hands worked beneath her thighs and between them. His callused knuckles brushed against her smooth, warm skin, but she needn’t have felt any embarrassment. He could have been cutting up a steak for all the emotion he showed.

“You damn sure can’t walk.”

“I can!” Rusty insisted frantically.

She was afraid that he would go off without her. He was standing