Did Sam have someone like that at home? Someone worrying about him when he was out? She could hardly ask that question, so she asked instead, ‘How many lives have you saved?’
He didn’t even need to count. ‘Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight after today.’
Aimee’s eyebrows shot up, and she turned in her seat as best she could. Her shoulder bit cruelly. His hand pressed her back into stillness gently.
‘Twenty-seven! That’s amazing.’ Then she looked more closely at him. At the shadows in his gaze. ‘How many have you lost?’
‘I don’t count the losses.’
Rubbish. Everyone counted the losses. It was human nature. ‘Meaning, “I’m not about to tell a woman trapped in her car whether or not I saved the last woman trapped in her car”?’
His smile was gentle. ‘Meaning I don’t like to think about it.’
No. She could understand that. Given how much of a partnership this rescue was, she could only imagine how he’d feel when he couldn’t save someone. Maybe someone he’d bonded with. Like they were bonding now. She smiled tightly. ‘Well, on behalf of all women everywhere trapped in their cars I’d like to say thank you for trying. We can’t ask for more.’
Ridiculously, just acknowledging that she wasn’t the first person who’d been in a life-or-death situation made her feel just a little bit more in control of this one. Other people had survived to tell their tales.
In control. A further novelty. She frowned. How bad had she let things get?
‘Sure you can. You can ask me for whatever you need right up until they’re loading you into the back of the ambulance. Then I know I’ve done everything I can.’
‘Putting yourself at so much risk. It must be hard on …’ Your family. Your girlfriend. Was she seriously going to start obsessing on his availability? It seemed so transparent. Not to mention hideously inappropriate. In that moment she determined not to even hint for more information about his personal life. ‘Hard on you … emotionally.’
He thought about that. ‘The benefits outweigh the negatives or I wouldn’t do it.’
He reached forward to check her pulse again and she studied the line of his face. There was more to it than that, she was sure. But it would be rude to dig. His fingers brushed under her jaw for the third time and her already tight breath caught further.
‘Would my wrist be easier?’ she asked, lifting her good arm because it felt like the appropriate thing to do.
He shook his head and pressed tantalisingly into the skin just down from her ear, monitoring his watch. ‘You have a nice strong pulse there.’
And it gets stronger every time you brush those fingers along my throat.
‘Aimee …?’ She looked at him sideways, her lashes as low as his voice. His smile was half twist, half chuckle. ‘Don’t hold your breath—it affects your pulse.’
Heat surged up her throat around his fingers. Wow. Did ant juice turn everyone into a hormone harlot?
Fortunately he misread her flush. ‘Don’t feel awkward. I’m trained for this, but I’m guessing this is your first major incident.’
She nodded. ‘I’ve never even been to hospital.’
‘Never?’
She grasped at the normal topic of conversation. ‘Not counting my birth.’
‘Are you super-healthy or just super lucky?’
‘A little of both. And it helps when your parents won’t let you lift so much as a box without assistance.’ The same as every man she’d dated. ‘It’s hard to hurt yourself falling out of a tree when they are all off-limits. And streams. And streets.’
‘Protective, huh?’
‘You could say that.’ Or you could say her parents were competitive and bitter after their divorce and neither of them wanted to give the other the slightest ammunition. ‘They both went a bit overboard in protecting me.’ She’d grown up thinking that was normal. ‘It wasn’t until I left home that I realised other kids were allowed to make mistakes.’
‘How old were you when you left home?’
‘Twenty-two.’
‘So you get points for taking the initiative and getting out of there?’
It hadn’t been easy to break away from both of them so, yeah, she did get points.
But then she lost them again for leaping out of the frypan into the fire with a nightmare like Way ne.
‘Anyway, it’s just as well my parents aren’t here to see this,’ she joked. ‘They’d have me locked up for ever and never let me leave the house.’ Or they’d have each other in court trying to score points off me.
‘Give them credit for getting you this far in one piece,’ he murmured.
She laughed, and then winced at the pain. ‘If you don’t count the broken leg and dislocated shoulder. And the bruised sternum.’
‘Don’t forget the gash on your forehead.’
Really? Her hand slid up and followed the trail of stickiness down to her lashes. That explained the stinging in her eyes earlier. Lord, what must she look like? Black and blue and with the fine white powder from three airbags all over her? She wanted to check in the mirror, but that just smacked of way too much vanity. And it was too close to publicly declaring her interest in whether or not Sam was looking at her as her … or just as a person to be rescued.
‘Here …’ he said, curling between the seats again and bringing his face closer to hers. He efficiently swabbed at the superficial cut with a damp medicated wipe, and then fixed the two sides of the wound together with butterfly tape. Then he gently swabbed up some of the dried blood that ran down over her brow. Aimee stole a chance to breathe in some of his air.
‘You’ll be back to beautiful in no time,’ he said.
The temptation to stare at his eyes close-up was overwhelming, but it seemed too intimate suddenly so she shifted her focus lower, to his lips, before forcing them away for something less gratuitous. Which was how she ended up staring at a freckle just left of his nose while he ministered to her wound.
Freckle-staring seemed suitably modest.
Awkwardness tangled in amongst the awareness suddenly zinging between them, and she struggled for something harmless to say. ‘I can honestly say that’s the first time anyone has ever said that to me. Especially by the dying light of a glow stick.’
A deep frown cut his handsome face immediately as he seemed to realise that the iridescent emergency light had dimmed to something closer to a sickly, flickering candlelight. He stared at it as though he couldn’t quite believe he’d failed to notice, then disappeared into the back to rummage in his bottomless kit.
‘It’s got nothing to do with the colour in your cheeks,’ he said, snapping a second glow-stick to activate the chemicals inside, and reaching forward to place it next to the first. Las Vegas light filled the car, and for a heartbeat the tree outside the windscreen, but the graduated darkness beyond it that didn’t show a hint of ground.
Aimee swallowed hard.
‘Look at how you’re handling yourself,’ he said. ‘You’re very calm, under the circumstances.’
She captured his eyes in the mirror. ‘It just means I’m good at denial. It doesn’t mean I’m not afraid.’
He stilled, and the intensity in his gaze reached right through the glass of the mirror and twisted around her lungs, preventing them from expanding. ‘I’m not leaving you, Aimee.’