Liam shook his head. “I didn’t see any car,” he told her honestly. “All I saw was you.”
“But I was in a car,” she insisted. “At least, I think I was.” She looked at him, struggling to keep her disorientation and mounting panic contained. “How do you think I got out here?”
Liam had done very little thinking in the past few minutes, mostly reacting. He was still reacting right now. Saving a life was a heady feeling and it certainly didn’t hurt matters that she was a knockout, even soaking wet.
He shrugged in response to her question and hazarded a guess, his expression giving nothing away.
“Divine intervention?” It was half a question, half an answer.
“No, I was driving a car,” Whitney retorted, then took a breath. Her nerves felt as if they were systematically being shredded. “A pearl-white Mercedes,” she described. There couldn’t be any other cars like that around, she reasoned, not in a town that was hardly larger than a puddle. “A sports car,” she elaborated. “I wound up being thrown from my car because I couldn’t get the top up once that awful deluge started. Don’t you people get weather warnings?” she asked, frustrated. She’d always been in control of a situation and what she’d just been through had taken that away from her.
She didn’t like feeling this way.
“Sometimes,” Liam answered, although he had a feeling that wouldn’t have done her any good. The woman would have had to have her radio station set to local news and he had a hunch she would have been listening to some hard-rock singer.
Her story about being thrown from her vehicle was completely plausible. There was no way she would have been out here without a car or at least some mode of transportation.
But if that was the case, where was her car? Had it gotten completely filled with rainwater and wound up submerged? If so, it would turn up once the floodwaters receded. Unless the turbulent basin waters had succeeded in dragging it out to the gulf.
In either case, the car she was asking about wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
Just for good measure, and because the woman appeared so utterly distraught, Liam looked around the surrounding area again.
Slowly.
Which was when he saw it.
Saw the car the woman had to be asking about. The topless white vehicle wasn’t lying mangled on the side of the newly created bank, but it might as well have been for all the use she could get out of it in its present position.
How was she going to take this latest twist? he couldn’t help wondering.
Only one way to find out, Liam decided, bracing himself. “Is that your car?” he asked, pointing toward the only vehicle—besides his own—in their vicinity.
Hope sprang up within her as Whitney looked around. But she didn’t see anything that even resembled her gleaming white vehicle—
Until she did.
Whitney wasn’t aware of her mouth dropping open as she rose to her feet and walked toward her car, moving like someone in a trance—or more accurately, in a very bad dream.
“Yes.” Her voice was barely a whisper and she felt numb all over as she stared at the Mercedes in utter disbelief. Her beautiful white vehicle appeared to be relatively intact—but there was one major problem with it.
The white sports car was caught up in a tree.
“What’s it doing up there?” she cried, her voice cracking at the end of her question.
None of this seemed real to her, not the sudden deluge coming out of nowhere, not the fact that she had almost drowned in water that hadn’t been there minutes earlier and certainly not the fact that her car now had an aerial view of the area.
“By the looks of it, I’d say hanging,” Liam replied quietly.
“Can’t you get it down?” she asked him. She hadn’t the faintest idea on how to proceed from here if he gave her a negative answer.
As she looked up at him hopefully, Liam gave her a crooked grin. “I might be strong,” he told her, “but I’m not that strong.” Having said that, Liam took out his cell phone. Within a second, his fingers were tapping out a number on his keypad.
“Are you calling AAA?” she asked.
Again, Liam smiled. He was calling the only one everyone in the area called when they had car trouble, Forever’s best—and only—mechanic.
“I’m calling Mick,” he told her. “He might be rated AAA, I don’t know, but he’s been a car mechanic for as long as I’ve known him and he’s pretty much seen everything.”
Maybe it was because her brain was somewhat addled from its underwater adventure, but the fact that this cowboy was calling some hayseed mechanic didn’t exactly fill her with confidence or sound overly encouraging to her.
Whitney took a step closer to the tree and to her dismay, she realized that she’d lost one of her shoes during her brief nonswim. That left her very lopsided. The fact only registered as she found herself pitching forward.
The upshot of that was she would have been communing—face-first—with the wet ground if the man who had initially pulled her out of the water hadn’t lunged and made a grab for her now, grabbing her by the waist.
“Are you okay?” Liam wanted to know, doing his own quick once-over of the woman—just in case. His arm stayed where it was, around her waist.
She wanted to say yes, she was fine. She’d been trained to say yes and then pull back, so that she could go back to managing on her own. But training or not, she still felt rather shaky inside, the way a person who had just come face-to-face with their own mortality might.
Given that state of mind, in a moment of weakness, Whitney answered him truthfully, “I don’t know yet.”
Turning so that he was facing her and the incline, he indicated his truck. “Why don’t you sit down in the cab of my truck while we wait for Mick to get here? Or, better yet, I could take you to the clinic in town if you want to be checked out.”
“Clinic?” she repeated with a slight bewildered frown. “You mean hospital, right?”
“No, I mean clinic,” he replied. “If you want a hospital, I could take you,” he said, then warned her, “but the closest one is approximately fifty miles away in Pine Ridge.”
He was kidding, right? Were the hospitals around here really that far apart?
“Fifty miles away?” Whitney echoed, utterly stunned. “What if there’s a medical emergency?” she asked.
Fortunately, they had that covered now—but it hadn’t always been that way. The residents of Forever had gone some thirty years between doctors until Dan Davenport had come to fill the vast vacancy.
“It would have to be a pretty big emergency to be something that Dr. Dan and Lady Doc couldn’t handle,” Liam told her.
Very gently, he tried to guide her over to his truck, but the petite woman firmly held her ground. She had to be stronger than she looked.
Dr. Dan. Lady Doc. She felt like Alice after the fictional character had slid down the rabbit hole. For a second, Whitney thought that the cowboy was putting her on, but there wasn’t even a hint of a smile curving his rather sensual mouth and not so much as a glimmer of humor in his eyes.
He was serious.
What