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 kind of a place was this?
“So, do you want to go?” Liam prodded.
“Go? Go where?” Whitney asked. Her light eyebrows came together in what looked like an upside-down V.
“To the clinic,” Liam repeated patiently. If she couldn’t keep abreast of the conversation, maybe he should just take her to the clinic even if she didn’t want to go. He sincerely doubted that she could offer any real resistance if he decided to load her into his truck and drive into town. And it would be for her own good.
“No, I’m okay,” Whitney insisted. “A little rattled, but I’m okay,” she repeated with more conviction. “And I’ll be more okay when my car is taken down out of that tree.”
Looking over her shoulder to see if she had finally convinced him, she found that the cowboy had walked away from her. The next moment, he was back. He had a fleece-lined denim jacket in his hand that he then proceeded to drape over her shoulders.
“You look cold,” he explained when she looked at him warily. “And you’re already chilled. Thought this might help.”
Her natural inclination to argue subsided in the face of this new display of thoughtfulness. Besides, she had begun to feel a cold chill corkscrewing down along her spine. The jacket was soft and warm and given half a chance, she would have just curled up in it and gone to sleep. She was exhausted. The next moment, she was fighting that feeling.
Whitney smiled at the cowboy and said, “Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it,” he responded, then extended his hand to her. “I’m Liam, by the way. Liam Murphy.”
Whitney slipped her hand into his, absently noting how strong it felt as she shook it. “Whitney Marlowe,” she responded.
Liam’s grin widened. “Pleased to meet you, Whitney Marlowe,” he said, then added, “Sorry the circumstances weren’t better.”
Whitney laughed softly to herself. “They could have been worse,” she told him. When he looked at her quizzically, she explained, “You might not have heard me in time and then I would have drowned.”
What she said was true, but he had learned a long time ago not to focus on the bad, only the good. “Not a pretty picture to dwell on,” he said.
“Nonetheless, I owe you my life.”
The grin on his face widened considerably. If she really felt that way, he could take it a step further. “You know, in some corners of the world, that would mean that your life is now mine.”
“Oh?” The single word was wrapped in wariness. “But this isn’t ‘some corner of the world.’ This is Texas,” she pointed out. “And people don’t own other people here anymore and haven’t for a very long time,” she added just in case
