the hell was he supposed to know? he answered his own question. He was a pilot, not a damn doctor.
Should he slap her, see if that would rouse her? He started to, then stopped before his hand could complete the movement. It seemed highly presumptuous to strike a woman he had just met.
Cold water might do the trick. That’s how they did it in Hollywood, anyway. He stepped gingerly over her prone form to reach the sink in the small kitchen area and found a clean drinking glass in the dish drainer next to it. After filling it quickly with rusty-looking water from the tap, he turned back toward her.
And caught his first sight of her back.
He growled a raw expletive, the water glass nearly slipping from his hand. What the hell had she done to herself? The cotton of her shirt was soaked with what looked like fresh blood and it seemed to stick to her back in spots. If that was as painful as it looked, no wonder she had passed out. She needed medical attention and she needed it now.
Before he could find the phone to dial the emergency number, she stirred again. This time she started to roll to her back. The pain must have stopped her because she moaned and froze at an awkward angle.
“Easy now,” he murmured. “Let’s just roll you to your stomach.”
Grace Solarez whipped her head around at his voice, her eyes wide with disoriented panic. “Who…” The single word seemed to sap her energy because her eyes closed and for a moment he thought she had passed out again until they fluttered open again. “Who are you?” she finally asked.
“Jack Dugan. Remember? Right before you decided to take a header on me, I was trying to explain why I was here.”
The confusion faded a bit from her dark eyes. “You have my picture,” she whispered. “What have you done with it?”
She tried to prop herself up but he laid a hand on the hot skin of her forearm to stop her. “Easy. I don’t think you ought to be moving around too much right now. Here’s your picture. I haven’t done anything with it. It’s just like you left it.”
He pulled the photograph from his shirt pocket and handed it to her. She gazed at it for a moment, then clutched it to her as if he had just handed her a briefcase full of diamonds.
“Thank you.” Her voice was even huskier than before. “I have others, but this…this is my favorite.”
The raw emotion on her face made him shift uncomfortably. “No need to thank me. I’m just returning what belongs to you. Now why don’t you tell me what you did to yourself. Is it a cut?”
Her cheek rubbed against the ugly carpet in what he took for denial. “Burn,” she murmured. “Tried to put something on it but I couldn’t reach the whole thing. Think it’s infected.”
“How did it happen?”
She closed her eyes again. “Car exploded. Couldn’t run fast enough.”
His heart seemed to stutter in his chest as he stared at her. She did this to herself pulling his Emma out of the crash? He reached blindly for her hand and squeezed it tightly. “We need to get you to a hospital.”
Grace lifted her head, the panic back in the flaring of her pupils. Her hand fluttered in his like a tiny butterfly trapped in a net. “No! No hospital!”
“You’re hurt. You need medical attention.”
“No hospital. Promise!”
She seemed so agitated, he didn’t know what else to do but agree. “Fine. Whatever you say. Settle down now, ma’am, or you’re going to make that thing start bleeding again.”
But he was speaking to the walls of her dingy little apartment, he realized. Grace Solarez had headed back into the ozone.
He bit out the kind of oath that would have earned him a sharp rap on the knuckles with a wooden spoon if Lily had heard it. What was he supposed to do now? He had an unconscious woman on his hands with God knows what kind of injury. And not just any woman, either, but the one who appeared to have risked her life—who had sustained an incredibly painful injury—to rescue his daughter from a burning vehicle.
He couldn’t possibly leave her in this dump of an apartment by herself, not when she was in this kind of pain. And he had just given his word he wouldn’t take her to the hospital.
Lily. Lily Kihualani could take care of her. He seized on the idea with vast relief. She was always looking for somebody else to mother and with her nursing background, she would know just how to treat a burn like this one.
And if she didn’t, he’d make her find out.
It was only after he had carried Grace Solarez out of her apartment, laid her carefully in the back seat of the Jaguar and pulled out onto the highway back toward the ferry and home that he realized, with a grimace, that he hadn’t been able to answer a single damn question about Grace Solarez.
She awoke to agonizing pain.
“Shhh little keiki,” a voice as comforting as the sea murmured in her ear. “Hush now. Stay still.”
Someone was taking a hot poker to her back and she was supposed to just lie here and take it? Yeah, right. Forget it, sister. She tried to rise but strong arms held her in place.
“How much longer is this going to take, Lily?” A deep male voice asked. It sounded familiar but she couldn’t see anything past the floodlights of pain exploding behind her eyelids.
Her head throbbed at the effort but still she tried to place the voice. She had a fleeting, strangely comforting memory of a sun-bronzed stranger with a sweet smile and eyes the pure, vivid green of new leaves.
He’d given her back Marisa. She frowned. That was impossible, wasn’t it? Marisa was dead, had been gone for a year. No one could bring her back. No one.
“It’ll take as long as it takes,” the sea-voice answered. “No more, no less.”
“I think she’s coming back to us. She’s going to hurt like hell when she wakes up.”
“You think I don’t know that? That there’s one nasty burn.”
“Can’t you give her something to take away the pain?”
“What do you think I am, some kind of miracle worker?”
The other voice was like waves crashing against the rocks now. Listening to it made her head ache as if she were stuck in a room full of pounding hammers.
“I’m not a doctor,” it went on. “I said take her to the hospital. Would you listen to me? No! She stays here, you said. She don’t want no hospital. Okay then. You want me to fix up the wahine, I fix up the wahine. But I don’t need you yappin’ at me.”
“Sorry.”
“You better be. Now hold her still while I put the ointment on.”
Fire streaked down her back again as cruel hands rubbed the raw skin of her back. Grace fought to hold on to consciousness but the pain was too great, screaming and clawing at her.
