And very, very soon, Whitney knew she wouldn’t be real, either. But right now, she could have sworn she was being roughly dragged up out of the water.
Where was the light? Wasn’t she supposed to be going toward some kind of light? Whitney wondered. But there was no light, there was only pressure and pain and the sound of yelling.
Did they yell in heaven?
Or was this the Other Place? She hadn’t been an angel, but she wasn’t bad enough to land in hell.
Was she?
But being sent to hell would explain why something was beating against her, pushing on her ribs over and over again.
* * *
“C’MON, DAMN IT, breathe! Breathe!” Liam ordered, frustrated and fearful all at the same time. The woman wasn’t responding.
Damn it, Brett was the one who should be here, not him, Liam thought as he continued with his chest compressions. Brett would know what to do to save this woman. He just remembered bits and pieces of CPR, not from any sort of training but from programs he’d watched on TV as a kid.
Still, it was the only thing he could think to do and it was better than standing helplessly by, watching this woman die in front of him.
So he continued, almost on automatic pilot. Ten compressions against the chest, then mouth to mouth, and then back to compressions again until the dead were brought back to life.
Except that this woman—whoever she was—wasn’t responding.
He was losing her.
The thought made him really angry and he worked harder.
Liam began another round, moving faster, pushing harder this time. He fully intended on continuing in this manner until he got some sort of a response from the woman he’d rescued from the water. Granted she’d looked more dead than alive when he’d pulled her out, but when he put his head against her chest, he was positive that he’d detected just the faintest sound of a heartbeat.
It gave him just a sliver of hope and he intended to build on that.
* * *
IT CAME TO HER in a blurred, painful haze: she wasn’t dead.
Dead people didn’t hurt.
Did they?
Whitney hadn’t given much thought to reaching the afterlife. She’d always been far too preoccupied in getting ahead in the life that she had on earth. But she felt fairly certain that after transitioning to the afterlife, pain and discomfort were no longer involved, certainly not to this degree—and she was definitely experiencing both.
Big-time.
After what seemed like an absolute eternity, Whitney came to the realization that she wasn’t inside of some dark abyss—or hell. The problem was that her eyes were shut. Not simply shut, it felt more as if they were glued down that way.
With what felt like almost superhuman effort, she kept on struggling until she finally managed to pry her eyes open.
Focusing took another full minute—her surroundings were a complete blur at first, wavy lines that made no sense. Part of her was convinced that she was still submerged.
But that was air she was taking in, not water, so she couldn’t be underwater any longer. And what was that odd, heavy pain across her chest that she kept feeling almost rhythmically?
And then she saw him.
Saw a man with wet, medium blond hair just inches away from her face—and he had his hands crisscrossed on top of her chest.
“Why...are...you...pushing...on...my...chest?” The raspy words felt as if they had dragged themselves up a throat that was lined with jagged pieces of glass.
They weren’t any louder than a faint whisper.
Liam’s head jerked up and he almost lost his balance, certainly his count. Stunned, he stared at her in surprise and disbelief.
It worked! he thought, silently congratulating himself. She was alive!
He’d saved a life!
“I’m giving you CPR,” he told her. “And I guess it worked,” he added with pride and no small sense of satisfaction. He felt almost light-headed from his success.
“Then...I’m...not...dead?” she asked uncertainly. It took Whitney a second to process this influx of information on the heels of the panic that had enveloped her.
The last thing she clearly remembered was being thrown from the car and sinking into dirty water.
“Not unless I am, too—and I wasn’t when I last checked,” he told her. He’d actually saved a life. How about that? Right now, Liam felt as if he could walk on water.
It took him a minute to get back to reality.
The woman he’d rescued was looking at him with the widest green eyes he’d ever seen. She tried to sit up only to have him push her back down again. Confused, disoriented, she looked at him uncertainly.
“I don’t think you should sit up just yet,” he told her. She wanted to argue with him, but the energy just wasn’t there. “You almost drowned. Why don’t you give yourself a couple of minutes to recover?” he suggested tactfully.
“I’m...fine...” she insisted.
She certainly was fine, Liam couldn’t help thinking. Even looking like a partially drowned little rabbit, there was no denying that this woman was strikingly beautiful. No amount of wet, slicked-back hair could change that.
Still, Liam didn’t want her trying to run off just yet. She could collapse and hit her head—or worse. He hadn’t just risked his own life to pull her out of the rushing waters only to have her bring about her own demise.
He continued to restrain her very gently.
“I just saved your life,” Liam told her patiently. “Humor me.”
The rains had obviously stopped and the waters, even now, were trying, ever so slowly, to recede. Within a couple of hours or so, it would be as if this had never happened—except that it had and an out-of-towner had almost died in it.
Talk about being in the right place at the right time, he mused. He was grateful now that band practice had run a little over. If it hadn’t, he would have passed the basin when the rains hit and he would have never been there to rescue this woman.
“Okay.” Whitney gave in, partially because she felt about as weak as a day-old kitten and partially because she was trying to humor the cowboy who had apparently rescued her. “But just for a few minutes,” she stipulated, her speech still a little slow, definitely not as animated as it normally was.
Whitney tried to move her shoulders and got nowhere. Whoever this man was, he was strong. Definitely stronger than she was, she thought.
She’d
