difficult to see more than a few feet above his face. The cold white flakes caught on his eyelashes. He blinked them away. The bells had gone silent. The ice pick had stopped its stabbing. A sigh of sweet relief escaped him.
Someone was beside him in the snow. The blonde. She was on her knees, looking down at him, bending closer. Her nose was as red as her cheeks with the cold. She smelled good. Fresh. Clean. Her breath, across his face, was warm and sweet.
As if it had happened long ago, he recalled her fury and the shattering dishes, the way she’d told off that tour bus driver named Bill. Now she wasn’t angry, though. Now she just looked worried.
Worried and…kind. He thought, She’s good. A good woman. I could use a good woman in my life.
Whatever his life was…
A hell of a mess he was in here, on his back in a blizzard, without a name, without any idea of who he was or where he’d come from, dressed for a much warmer place than the Sierras in a snowstorm.
She touched him, laying her mittened hand on the side of his face. He felt the warmth of her through the wool. “I’m sorry…”
He frowned at her. “Sorry?”
“For threatening you with that platter.”
“Oh, that. ‘S nothing.”
“I should have seen you were hurt. But you came out of nowhere…”
“Didn’t mean…scare you…” His lips felt strange and thick. They didn’t want to talk.
“I’ll call and get help.” She started to rise.
He grabbed her arm to hold her with him. “No. Stay.”
“You need a doctor.”
“Stay.”
She sighed and touched his face again. “Oh, you poor thing.”
“I look…bad, huh?”
Her soft eyes, gold-flecked green, grew softer still. She asked in a gentle whisper, “What’s happened to you?”
“I wish I knew,” he heard himself mutter, with effort. “Tell me. Your…name?” His tongue wasn’t working any better than his lips. Each word took form with tremendous difficulty.
“Tessa. Tessa Jones.”
He repeated, “Tessa. Nice. Like it…”
The woman said something else. But he didn’t hear her. He shut his eyes and let the strange white world and the big, kind-eyed clean-smelling woman drift away from him.
Chapter Two
The stranger’s strong grip on Tessa’s arm loosened and then dropped away.
A low cry of distress escaped her. Oh dear Lord, was he dead?
She ripped off a mitten and touched the side of his throat. The skin was cool beneath her fingers. His face had a grayish cast. But there was a pulse. She felt it beating, steady and true, against the pads of her first and middle fingers. And when she bent her head so her cheek was near his mouth, she felt his breath. Slow. Warm.
Alive.
His breath was sweet. But his jacket reeked of alcohol. Strange. But not the issue.
Help. Getting the man help. That was the issue.
She jumped to her feet. Thick snow whirled around her. She longed for a cell phone. But she rarely carried hers with her in town. No point in it. In North Magdalene, the mountains messed with the signals and a cell worked intermittently, at best.
She stared down at the man again. It seemed wrong to leave him alone in the snow, but what else could she do? Try and move him to the warmth of the house?
No. They always said it wasn’t safe to move the badly injured, that you should wait for the EMTs.
Swiftly, she struggled out of her heavy jacket. Kneeling again, she settled it over the top of him, tucking it close. “I promise,” she whispered, smoothing his snow-dusted black hair off his forehead, careful not to touch the angry-looking gash there. “I’ll be right back…”
Again, she jumped up. That time, she made for the house, racing as fast as she could through the deepening snow. Inside, Mona Lou, her aging, deaf bulldog, and Gigi, her skinny, white, shorthaired cat, were sitting side by side in the front hall.
“Woof,” said Mona Lou.
“Reow?” asked Gigi.
She dodged around them, headed for the wall phone in the kitchen, pulling off her mittens as she went.
Silence greeted her when she put the phone to her ear. She jiggled the hook. Nothing. A snow-laden tree branch had probably taken down a line somewhere. And judging by the look of the storm out there, the PG&E crews would be a while getting to it. She couldn’t count on it coming back on any time soon.
What now?
She hustled to her bedroom, her dog and cat at her heels, and grabbed the cell she’d left by the bed. She tried 9-1-1. Nothing happened, except a pair of short beeps a few seconds later that meant the call had been dropped before it ever connected. She tried again.
No good. So all right. She would have to move the unconscious stranger herself, after all. Somehow.
And quickly. The snow was coming down so fast and thick now, it was going to be hard to see two feet in front of her face out there. At least her Subaru wagon had all-wheel drive. She would have to get the stranger into it and take him to the clinic herself.
Somehow…
Sled, she thought. She had a small one, a gift from her dad years and years ago, propped up on the enclosed front porch. She put her mittens back on, whispered, “Wish me luck,” to Mona Lou and Gigi, and grabbed another jacket. She got a wool blanket from the closet and snatched her car keys from the key rack in the kitchen. As ready to face the near-impossible challenge as she was likely to get, she rushed back out the way she had come, only pausing to command Mona Lou, “Stay.”
The dog couldn’t hear much, but she picked up expressions and body language. She dropped to her haunches with a disgruntled whine.
On the porch, Tessa grabbed the sled and hoisted it under her free arm. The porch door bumped shut behind her as she emerged into the storm.
Lucky she’d put her purple coat on the man. The wind was blowing so hard, the heavy-falling snow swirling and eddying. She would have had to spend several precious minutes walking in circles until she stumbled on him—if not for the bright purple quilted fabric wrapped around his chest.
Muttering unheard apologies for moving him, she managed to hoist his head and torso onto the too-short wooden slats. She tucked the coat around him tighter and wrapped the blanket around the coat and under his legs. He didn’t look comfortable, not in the least. His poor head
