“Sometimes jumping is the only way to get the job done.” It had never occurred to him to not jump.
“That’s a hard way to live.”
Nothing worth doing came easy, and he always loved a challenge. He had a feeling the woman sharing the beach with him understood that—she just found her challenges somewhere else.
She continued. “So what happens if—when—you jump in and you can’t pull the other person out?”
The memory flickered to life. He’d already had his backside hoisted into the chopper and the mission had been a routine rescue. He and Lars had put the survivor in the basket and sent him up. Daeg had gone next because of the hit he’d taken in the water, making him incapable of a climb he’d done hundreds of times before.
And then the ocean had sucked Lars under as their spotter barked curses and directions to Tag. Too late. Lars had disappeared beneath the tsunami’s deadly debris-filled water. Cal had signaled he was going back in and dived. Dived and dived again, until Cal hadn’t had the air in his tank to keep going. The chopper, too, had been dangerously low on fuel.
They’d all given up and flown away. Knowing Daeg had left a man behind, who wouldn’t be coming home, crushed him.
Hell. No.
He forced his eyes open. Having Dani in his sights was better than rehashing the past, and he wasn’t going there again. Not today. Instead, he stood up, holding out a hand to tug her up. She hesitated, then accepted it, wrapping her fingers around his.
He glanced down to where they were temporarily joined and damn if he didn’t find that small bit of contact sexier than any of the dates he’d had in recent years. She was trusting him not to let go.
“Rescues don’t always succeed,” he admitted when the silence stretched out between them for too long. “When I got this souvenir for my leg, that was one of those times everything went wrong. I jumped with a partner and we got the survivor in the basket.”
Her fingers tightened on his, but she didn’t move.
“No swimmer gets in the basket before the survivor.” Flashbacks aside, he’d replayed that afternoon a hundred times in his head. “That was the one thing that went right. We were in the Indian Ocean, got there fourteen hours after a tsunami hit. The water was a mess, still churning with destroyed boats and other crafts, but we’d set the basket down where she seemed clear.”
“But the water wasn’t clear?”
“Not even close.” The current had picked up, that first bump against his legs a nauseating wake-up call. He hadn’t known if he’d struck something, or a living and breathing something that would surface and take a chunk out of him. “The circumstances made it impossible to see. A piece of some kind of strong metal fence tore through my leg and there I was, bleeding all over the place. My partner signaled for the basket, put me in and I got out alive. Less than a minute later, he went under.”
The tsunami had wrecked a number of coastlines. All that mud and churn. Torn-up wood, dead animals and cars. Stuff that had once been a part of people’s lives, but was loose in a deadly flood. Shock had had him good by the time he’d reached the bird’s floor.
He hadn’t realized until much later that the pilot had been circling and circling, searching for the missing swimmer until there’d been no more fuel and therefore no more time.
“Surgery followed by eight weeks of rehab back in Japan, then shipped stateside. I’ll be fine by the end of summer. Strong again.”
“And then you go back.”
“Yeah. I think so.” No, he was certain. The rest of his team was waiting for him and, as soon as he could pull his own weight, he’d be there. Right now, though, he was a liability. He hated that truth, but he couldn’t shake it. He wouldn’t be helpful to anyone in the field, not with his leg the way it was. And never mind his head.
He was done examining his head, he decided, and what had gone wrong that day. The expression on Dani’s face was all caring. He didn’t want her pity.
He swept her up into his arms and dashed for the water.
“If you don’t want ice cream, you should at least have that swim you came here for.”
He tossed her gently, and all that control and sleek elegance vanished as she broke the surface of the water and then shot back up with a loud shriek, arms flailing. He let her call out while he dived in and got his arms around her, steadying her. Yeah. This was a lot better than pity.
She quickly shoved away from him, slogging toward the shore.