From under her lashes, she watched as he leaned back on his heels and yanked a phone from his pocket. He dialed without looking, then spoke in a low voice. Was he doing it for her benefit? Maybe to keep her from worrying? She thought maybe he was.
After a few moments, he dropped the phone from his mouth and said to her, “Sit tight for one second, okay? I’m not going anywhere.”
He stood up and strode away. Panic threatened, but she fought it. She could still hear his feet sloshing over the wet ground, and only a heartbeat passed before he came back into view, dangling a white, mostly shredded purse from his fingers. He spoke into the phone again, this time loudly enough for her to hear.
“She’s got a bag here. Just gonna make sure she knows I’m opening it.” He held out the purse, and she blinked her assent.
“Okay,” he said. “No medical card and no driver’s license. But I’ve got a Port Moody Public Library card. Name on the card is Celia Poller. That’ll have to do.” There was a pause. “Okay. Yeah. I have to. See you as soon as you can get here.”
He hung up, then crouched down beside her again, his dark hair plastered to his forehead. “Miss Poller? Celia?”
She turned the name over in her head. Was it familiar? She honestly wasn’t sure, but she had a feeling she should lay claim to it. She blinked again.
“Okay, Celia. If you had to get into a car accident right here, right now, then I’d call you about as lucky as can be under the circumstance. My name is Remo DeLuca, and I’m a paramedic with BC Ambulance Services.” He paused and met her eyes before he went on. “What I’d like to do is keep you very still. Unfortunately, I can’t do that right now. There’s a downed power line just over there, and with the way the puddles are growing, we’re right in range for a solid electrocution. So, Celia...I need your consent to go outside of normal protocol.”
As if to punctuate his statement, a flash of lightning and an accompanying boom ruptured the air.
And she blinked as hard as she could.
* * *
Ten minutes earlier, Remo would’ve said the storm overhead suited his mood perfectly. A twelve-hour shift on a Friday night was pretty much his least favorite thing. He didn’t know if he’d ever been so thoroughly glad to have a workday over with. A recent new article in the Vancity Gazette claimed that EMT service wasn’t what it should be. As a result, rowdy drunk calls and calls about broken washing machines and calls about heart attacks all got an equal amount of attention. The former two both got in the way of the latter—the ones for people who actually needed his help.
Now, though, his sour thoughts had pushed themselves to the far corners of his mind. The immobile woman on the side of the road commanded his full attention. He could tell she was near shock. Unaware of her surroundings and oblivious to the danger that skirted the edge of her body. Adding to the problem was the part he hadn’t told her about. The other local EMTs were tied up at a house fire, and he was going to have to wait at least fifteen minutes for the backups to arrive. Her slate-gray eyes were fixed on him and him alone, full of both hope and fear. He didn’t want to let her down.
“Another quick second, all right?”
He gave her shoulder a quick squeeze, then pushed to his feet. His eyes flew over the scene, filtering out the things he already knew were there—the devastated car with its crushed front end, the cracked pole and the downed wires—in search of something he could use as a stretcher. As easy as it would be to scoop up the pretty blonde and carry her out of harm’s way, he knew better. He couldn’t see any external afflictions, and he suspected—based on instinct, mostly—that distress was what kept her from moving rather than an injury, but experience and training had taught him not to rely on gut alone. Some of the most heinous injuries were invisible to the naked eye. So what he needed to do was keep her as still and straight as possible.
Then he spotted it. The car’s windshield, sitting on a patch of grass a few feet away. It was miraculously intact, and he suspected that somehow, the impact had dislodged it and sent it flying. It might even have been the thing that saved the woman’s life. With the windshield missing, she’d had a clear path out the vehicle. He could almost picture the sequence of events.
Incredible.
Remo glanced down at her. Did she have any clue just how lucky she’d been? He doubted it. Not at the moment, anyway.
With a disbelieving head shake, he slipped off his glasses, wiped them with his T-shirt, then stuck them back on his face and headed up the road. There, he positioned himself in front of the glass. He bent down, closed his hands on the slippery edges and lifted. It came up with surprising ease, and it took him only a second to get it stable enough to cart it back over to Celia. Careful to keep it from hitting the ground with any kind of force, he eased it down beside her. Then he took a breath, pushed his knees as flat as they would go, stiffened his arms and positioned the windshield against her body.
“Okay, Celia. Here we go.”
Moving as slowly as he could and being extra cautious in keeping her head and neck stable, he inched the glass underneath her. In spite of the rain, he could feel sweat beading along his forehead and his upper lip. He ignored it. By the time he got her into position, he couldn’t see a damned thing. He was dripping, his glasses were completely fogged up, and the sky had darkened even more. Breathing heavily, he dragged the windshield and its passenger out of range of the sizzling power lines, then knelt down beside the makeshift gurney.
“You still with me, Celia?”
She blinked, then inclined her head. He was relieved to see that she was no longer frozen, but he still didn’t want to take any chances.
“Try not to move around,” he cautioned with a smile. “Hard to say if anything’s broken, and I’d like to retain the role of hero for a little longer.”
One corner of her mouth tipped up and she breathed out. His relief was short-lived. As quickly as her little show of amusement came, it left. Her whole face drooped and her eyes dropped shut.
Damn, damn, damn.
Remo dragged his hands up and clasped Celia’s face. She was cold.
Because it is cold out here, he told himself.
He clasped her wrist and pressed his head to her chest. Her pulse was strong and steady, and her breathing was slow and even, and that was something.
“Did you faint on me, Celia?” he murmured, brushing her hair back from her face.
He leaned back and studied her for a second. Her skin had a hint of a tan, but mostly it was a connect-the-dots palate of freckles.
More than pretty.
She had that clean-faced, granola-girl feel that made it easy to picture her hiking up the side of the Grouse Grind. Remo liked it. Which made him sigh and question his sanity.
“Obviously even more tired than I thought,” he said.
Checking out a girl—a patient...sort of—was very low on his list of priorities. Right below the washing machine emergencies. Remo gritted his teeth and told himself to stop before he even got started. Except as soon as the self-directed order made its way into his mind,
