Just when she'd thought herself completely numb, emotions frothed to life, choking her throat, burning her eyes. Lucas was alive, a stranger or not, he lived.
She reached for him, suddenly needing so much more than a touch, instead starving for him to put his arms around her and hold her. "Lucas—"
He flinched back.
Such a small movement, likely imperceptible to most, but so very telling to her. The rejection slapped over her all the more coming from him. Dreams dissolved into the fading sunlight.
She kept her hand extended, refusing to let him see her vulnerability. "I should look at your arm while there's still a little light left."
He glanced down at his blood-soaked T-shirt strips as if he'd forgotten the injury. "I have antiseptic and a couple of bandages in my survival vest."
"I brought a first aid kit." She fished the small white box from her backpack, nudging aside her black insulin case. Thank heavens she'd had the cover of a quick trip to the bushes to check her glucose level and give herself an injection. She needed to be all the more careful with the exertion, sweating and weird diet of bananas and passion fruit.
Passion?
Great. Now even food was turning her on. She unlatched the first aid case and spread it out beside her to best catch the fading rays. "I'll try to be gentle."
"Do you always bring a first aid kit with you for a walk?"
What? A walk? He couldn't have really thought she'd climbed through a wall into the wilds with a child for a simple stroll with crocodiles and jaguars?
She'd told him about Padilla and Ramon's turf war. Surely he'd realized why she left. She thought back over their conversation...she'd never said she intended to leave. Just that she knew the battle was imminent.
"I was leaving the compound for good. Or trying to anyway." Would he believe her about escaping? Or about being stuck there all these years?
He seemed so in control of his destiny. Would he even understand how someone could have all choices taken away?
Sara peeled the cotton strips from his arm. The bleeding had stopped, at least. She tugged a bit at a time, blood oozing, but not gushing. Still the gaping gash... She swallowed down nausea.
Flesh puckered, swollen and angry, the cut deep into muscle most likely since he seemed all muscle. "You need stitches."
His face paled under his tan. "Don't you have some butterfly bandages in there or something?"
That rare hint of vulnerability in him made it easier for her to spill her story. "Of course I do. I just said you need stitches, not that I would start poking holes in your skin like in some wagon train survival story."
"Oh. Right. Go ahead." He set his jaw and looked away from the wound.
She unscrewed the cap from a water bottle and dampened a clean cotton strip—there went Lucia's spare shirt this time—and dabbed, gently. "When I woke from surgery after the shooting, Ramon was standing over me with the doctor. As I said before, he told me you were dead, Tomas, as well."
When Lucas stayed quiet, she took that as a sign to continue and poured a half bottle more of their precious water supply straight into the wound. "I wanted to die, too. Because of my injuries, I almost did die." The grief gushed over her again like the water down his arm. "My recovery took a long time in hospitals and convalescing at Ramon's compound. I don't remember much about those months."
Except for holding her stomach at night and praying her child would be all right. She'd refused pain medications, but still feared what the shooting and surgeries could have done to a developing baby: She'd fought hard, though, to keep that remaining part of Lucas alive.
To think she had almost killed him today.
She shuddered. "I'm sorry but this next part will hurt."
Sara tore open an alcohol wipe with her teeth and dabbed as gently as possible, blowing air over his arm and trying not to think of times she had done the same over other sweaty parts of him during an afternoon siesta.
His fists clenched. From pain or awareness? The last sent a shiver over her that made her forget about monkeys cackling overhead and the sweaty grime caking her skin.
"Lucia was born prematurely, and she needed so much care, respirators and doctors, all of which Ramon provided with private clinics."
She skipped over the time when she'd learned for certain she was pregnant, then that she had diabetes. She'd hoped it was merely the gestational variety. But when the condition persisted after Lucia was born, the surgeons determined that damage to her pancreas during the shooting was the real cause. One blessing emerged from the whole mess. Babies born to diabetic mothers were larger. Those extra few ounces on a premature infant helped save Lucia.
Shoving aside thoughts of those terrifying times, she moved ahead, a good plan for her life overall. "Of course the doctors and nurses were completely loyal to their generous benefactor. Now I feel like an idiot. It took me until Lucia's first birthday to realize I wasn't allowed to leave."
Muscles bunched in his arm, pulling at the wound and sending a fresh ooze trickling down his arm.