Every Breath She Takes (38 page)

“Almost…didn’t get here…in time…”

“Ssshh.”

“Vision…didn’t believe.”

“It’s okay, Cal.”

“S’why you came…right? Save Marlena?”

She was crying now. A hot tear fell on his chest.

“Yes, that’s why I came. But please, save your breath.”

And why she stayed on after he closed the guest ranch. Not for him. Not for what they shared together. For Marlena, to save her from Harvey…

His torpid mind came back to the puzzle. Why would Harvey want to kill Marlena? Why’d he try to kill Lauren? If he wasn’t feeling so stoned, so dizzy, he might be able to put it together.

Then the dizziness broadened, deepened, widened. It was a black void sucking at him.

“So sorry.”

He wanted to say more, but he had no breath left. He was sorry he hadn’t believed her. Sorry he couldn’t stay with her now. Sorry she didn’t love him the way he loved her.

Then he let the blackness claim him.

Lauren’s heart stopped. She felt for his pulse. It was there, but thready. Then she noticed his color, which had taken on a bluish hue. Crushing down panic, she tipped his head to one side and gasped. The veins of his neck were grossly distended.

Mediastinal shift.

Two words, but they ripped the lid off her panic.

Jesus.
The pressure of the air inside his chest was forcing all the structures—heart, blood vessels, trachea—to one side. With sickening certainty, she knew his lungs were collapsing as his chest hyperexpanded. She imagined the great blood vessels kinking, cutting off the blood supply to his heart.

Minutes. That’s all he had. If she couldn’t relieve the pressure within a few minutes, he’d be dead.

What he needed was a trauma team to get a chest tube into him. What he had was her, and she had nothing to work with.
Nothing.
Dear Lord, her life for a large-gauge needle!

Think.

She was going to lose him and she hadn’t even told him she loved him.

The knife.
She could use it to pierce the chest wall to let the air escape. She could use her fingers as a valve…

The knife—where had she dropped it? She eased Cal back onto the ground and raced to where she’d found the knife, the spot where she’d been standing when she’d seen Cal go over the cliff. The sun had sunk so low, she had to search the grass on hands and knees. Ragged sobs tore at her throat.

There! Her hand struck something hard. Yes! The knife.

She scrambled back to Cal’s side. Oh God. He was cyanotic. His neck veins were distended, his trachea deviated.

“Lauren?”

Lauren glanced up to see Marlena weaving toward her, hand to her bloodied face.

“Jesus, is that Cal?” She stumbled forward. “Omigod, Cal! What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s dying. If I don’t get a chest tube into him right goddamned now, he’s going to die of traumatic arrest.”

Marlena fell to her knees. “Jesus! Fix him!”

“I’m trying, dammit.”

Trembling, she ran her fingers over his chest, locating the second intercostal space. Okay, midclavicular line, and
in
.

“Jesus! You
stabbed
him! I thought you were trying to save him!”

Ignoring Marlena, Lauren inserted her pinkie finger into the space to hold it open and felt the rush of air. His color improved immediately, as did the neck vein and trachea. She pictured everything unkinking, the mediastinum settling back, venous supply to the heart restored.

“Is he okay now?”

“Well, he’s not going to arrest this very minute, but we have to get him help. You’re going to have to ride back and get me an air ambulance.”

“I can do better than that.”

Marlena leapt to her feet and ran to Sienna. Lauren saw her digging in Cal’s saddlebags. With a triumphant cry, she held something aloft. A phone!

“A cell phone?” Lauren didn’t dare hope. “Will it work way out here?”

“Not a cell phone. A satellite phone. Cal always carries it. And you bet your ass it’ll work.”

Marlena placed the call. When she got the emergency dispatcher, Marlena gave them their location, then held the phone to Lauren’s ear to let Lauren run down the emergency. An air ambulance was on its way, the dispatcher assured her. Then she patched in a trauma specialist. After hearing that she was in a field with no materials from which to build a chest drain and no means to sterilize anything, he advised her to just stand by.

Both women were cramped and trembling by the time they heard the helicopter approaching. And when the chopper hovered overhead and Lauren felt the downdraft from its rotors tearing at her hair, she thought it might just be the sweetest thing she’d ever felt.

Cal opened his eyes and knew just where he was.
Recovery room. His old home away from home.
He moved experimentally and winced.
Bull musta stomped me good this time.
Funny, he didn’t remember losing his seat, hitting the ground. Then memory surged back.

He tried to sit up. A nurse appeared immediately, her hands cool as she urged him back down.

“Welcome back, Mr. Taggart.”

“Lauren,” he croaked through a parched throat.

“She’s waiting for you up on the ward.”

“Is she all right?”

“Cuts and bruises and an extremely sore throat. She was very lucky.”

Lucky, all right. Lucky she wasn’t dead because he’d doubted her. Lucky his intuition had overruled his reason. “How’d I get here?”

“You were airlifted off the ridge.” The nurse checked his vitals. “And the only reason you lived to make it here was because Dr. Townsend gave you an emergency thorocostomy.”

He blinked. “Thoro what?”

“You had a tension pneumothorax—air leaking into the pleural space with every breath. That caused mediastinal shift, which is a true emergency. You’d have died out there if she hadn’t used a knife to open your chest wall and let all that air out.”

Jesus. “Lauren did that?”

“Yep.” The nurse stuck a thermometer into his ear and removed it when it beeped. “How are you feeling, by the way? The anaesthetist was quite alarmed. That sedative they gave you for the chest tube was supposed to just mellow you out, not send you to dreamland.”

“No head for it,” he muttered, trying again to sit up. “Take me to Lauren.”

“Patience, Mr. Taggart.” She eased him back down. “You’ve got another fifteen minutes before we move you anywhere.”

Fifteen minutes?
He couldn’t possibly wait that long.

A split second later, an orderly came to move him. Hell, he must have drifted off. He might have dozed off again on the way to the room, but with the bed rolling, he had to keep his eyes open to combat nausea. Pain he could handle. He’d walked on a broken leg and ridden bulls with his jaw wired up, but give him a little sedative and he was out of it. If he’d been halfway aware, he’d have told them to stick to just the local.

As soon as his bed emerged from the elevator, Lauren appeared beside him.

“Hey,” she said, walking along.

“Hey, yourself.” Cal thought he was ready to see the bruising, but he wasn’t. Her lip was split, and both sides of her face
were bruised and swollen. It made him weak to see the blood trapped beneath her smooth skin. Remembered fear gripped his gut. “You look like hell.”

She laughed. “Thanks. So do you. How do you feel?”

“A lot better than I did the last time I saw you. If it weren’t for the damn sedative, I’d be good as new.”

That wasn’t quite true. He still couldn’t say more than a few words without drawing breath, but that would come soon.

“You’re lucky you got a sedative at all.” They were rolling through the corridor now. “I’m afraid I didn’t have one on hand when I opened your chest with a pocketknife.”

Her tone was teasing, but her voice broke on the last words.

“Guess I musta scared you back there.”

“Scared doesn’t even touch it.”

“You scared me too. I could have died when I saw that bastard whaling on you…”

“You almost
did
die, Cal. If you had…”

They’d reached a bright private room. To his frustration, Lauren let go of the bed rail and backed off to allow the orderly to position the bed. Then a new nurse, this one younger and prettier, moved in on him to take his vitals.

“You’ve got a chest tube, Mr. Taggart, but they didn’t have to operate,” she explained. “No bleeders or big lacerations. Your lungs should re-expand and heal nicely on their own,” she said.

“Thanks.”

“The doctor will be up to see you later today, and you’ll be seeing me regularly for the next few hours.”

“I’ll look forward to it.” He gave her what he hoped was a killer smile. “But could I have a word with my friend now?”

The nurse gave him a look that said he was in no condition to flirt, but she was smiling when she turned to Lauren. “Keep it short, would you? He needs his rest.”

“Of course.”

“So where were we?” he asked when the nurse had left. “Oh yeah, the part where you and Marlena waited around on that ridge for Harvey to get there instead of hightailing it home.” He couldn’t project his voice as loudly as he’d have liked, but the fear in his gut added bite to the words.

“Believe me, I tried to convince Marlena that we should run or hide, but she wound up convincing me that we couldn’t.” Her voice wavered. “If Harvey’d missed his chance this time, he would have just tried again. Unless he made a move on Marlena, she would never have believed me.
No one
would have believed me. He could have lured her out again at will.”

A sudden dizzy nausea swept over Cal, and he gripped the raised bed rail to try to combat it. “
I
believed you.”

She shot him an incredulous look.

“Okay, so it took me a while, but I came around. That’s why I turned back.” Damn, he was tired, and it was getting harder to focus with the room spinning like that.

“You turned Sienna around on the
possibility
I was right,” she corrected. “But what if Marlena and I had fled or hidden? What if Harvey had come and gone? What if you got there and found nothing? Would you still have believed me?”

Dammit
. Cal fought the desire to flat-out lie. “Probably not.”

“See? We had to make him show his hand. Until he did, no one would truly believe me, which means Marlena would never be out of danger. What was I to do? Stay forever to babysit her?”

Stay forever?
No, not that. He felt a twinge in his chest that had nothing to do with his chest tube. She had a life to go back to. Mission accomplished. She probably wanted to leave right now. In her mind, she was probably already there, taking up the reins of her practice again.

The thought made him want to weep. His throat tightened warningly. Mortified at his weakness, he squeezed his eyes shut. “You know, I think I might be too tired for this after all.”

He didn’t have to open his eyes; he heard the consternation in her voice. “Oh, Cal, I’m so sorry. I said I wouldn’t keep you long. I didn’t think. I’ll go now.”

“Wait.” He opened his eyes to find his request had stopped her at the door.

Let her go, man. Do the decent thing.

Are you crazy? Don’t let her leave!

“Don’t leave without coming back to see me, okay?”

She seemed suddenly tired herself, her shoulders drooping. Even from across the room, even groggy from the sedative, he could see her beautiful eyes were troubled. The moment stretched out until he wondered if she was going to answer him at all. Was she in that much of a hurry to be shot of him? Or worse, could she see how badly he needed her to stay? Was she wondering how to keep it from getting awkward?

“Yeah,” she said at last, smiling gently. “Yeah, I’ll come back before I go. Now get some rest.”

Rest
. He watched the door swing shut behind her, then closed his eyes again. He might sleep, but there would be no rest.
She
was his rest, his heart, and she was leaving.

Lauren’s eyes burned as she pushed blindly into the hall. Blinking, she glanced around, then strode toward the elevators.