Sanctuary Island (13 page)

He stilled, the hard planes of his angular face softening ever so slightly. “Ella…”

“Save it,” she told him, picking her way through the marsh and leaving him behind, along with every drop of joy she’d taken in the beauty of the day. “I don’t need your pity.”

“Will you take my apology?”

She didn’t stop moving. If she stopped walking, she’d have to face him, and somehow she wasn’t quite ready for that. “Only one way to find out.”

“Ella. I’m sorry. I hate when people make assumptions about me—I shouldn’t have done it to you. Not today, and not when we met.” The quiet sincerity in his simple words melted the angry lump in her throat.

The problem was that without anger as a shield, Ella was all too aware of just how much this whole conversation meant to her. She cared way too much about what Grady thought of her. She needed to get control of this spiraling need, this awful vulnerability.

She slowed enough to allow him to catch up with her. “Apology accepted. If you tell me what assumptions people tend to make about you.”

The least he could do was put them back on some sort of even footing, she reasoned. Except when she glanced over her shoulder, ready to make a mood-lightening joke about how he was the one falling behind now, Grady wasn’t even looking at her.

He stared out over the field toward the water, every muscle in his lean, rangy body tensed. His brows drew together, a troubled frown tugging at his mouth, but instead of baring his soul and his vulnerabilities, he bolted past her.

He took off for the beach at a dead run, his long legs eating up the distance as Ella’s heart jumped into her throat.

Shading her eyes, she watched him cut a path through the grass and emerge onto the strip of sandy beach about fifty feet in front of her.

Ella squinted. There was something happening down there, the tall grass waving jerkily. Did he need help?

She pushed herself into motion and took off after him, moving as quickly as she could with her heart pounding out a sharp, staccato rhythm.

For such a peaceful, sleepy little island, Sanctuary was turning out to be a thrill a minute.

*   *   *

Gritty pebbled sand ground into the knees of Grady’s jeans as he dropped down beside the heaving mare.

She snorted nervously, rolling her eyes to track his approach. Her dappled gray flanks were flecked with foam, the distended mound of her belly straining with contractions.

“What’s wrong with it?” Ella gasped from behind him.

He spared her a quick glance as she hit the grass line and froze as if one step onto the beach would trap her in sucking quicksand.

Ella’s face was pale with worry, and maybe a little fear. He hadn’t missed the way she kept her distance from Voyager when Merry introduced herself. Ella was afraid of horses.

Well, she was going to have to get over it in a hurry. “She’s in labor. The wild mares come down to the beach to foal.”

“So this is normal.” Relief throbbed through Ella’s voice. “Surely she knows what she’s doing, right? Instinct takes over?”

“Normally, yeah.” Grady passed his hands over the horse’s sweaty side, feeling the heat rising from the dark patches of hair even through the thin leather of his gloves. “But I think something’s wrong here. Her hind muscles are all relaxed, as they should be, but that means things should be moving really fast by this point, and nothing much seems to be happening. I can see a hoof, but it’s not…”

He ducked down to check the progress of the foal’s emergence from the birth canal and swore under his breath.

One hoof instead of two. Not good.

Ella swayed and her skin went from parchment-white to faintly green. That was enough to convince Grady not to give her a play-by-play of what was happening at his end of the struggling mare.

Adrenaline poured into Grady’s system, speeding his heartbeat and narrowing his focus. “I left my cell phone in the Jeep. Do you have yours with you?”

When she nodded, he recited a number and asked her to call it. “We need help. Tell the guy who answers to get down to the west end of the cove, south side of the watering hole, as fast as he can.”

Ella pulled herself together pretty well, Grady noted with approval. Her fingers only trembled a little as she obeyed his instructions to the letter.

But at the end of her conversation with Ben, she nodded at something he said and held the slim black phone out to Grady.

“He says he’s on his way, but he needs to know what’s happening. He might have to talk you through assisting the mare.”

Her eyes were as big as dinner plates. Grady could relate—he wasn’t exactly qualified for this, and the idea of screwing it up and letting anything happen to this mare or her foal sent chilly fingers of anxiety skittering down his back.

Snagging the phone from Ella’s hand, Grady barked, “Ben, come on. I know I’m kind of the boy who cried wolf here, but this time it’s serious.”

“I believe you.” Ben was doing that soothing thing with his voice, where he got extra super calm to combat the drama and chaos around him. Even recognizing the tactic for what it was, Grady felt his shoulders loosening.

“But it’s going to take me a while to get out there; I’m up at Windy Corner now, so at least half an hour. I need you to be my eyes. What do you see?”

Having a clear mission settled Grady’s nerves more than anything else could have. Using brief, terse sentences, he described the width of dilation he was seeing, and the worrying appearance of just one of the foal’s little hooves. He’d been around enough equine births to know that wasn’t optimal.

Ben’s sigh confirmed it. “Yeah, sounds like the foal is going to need to be turned in the birth canal. Can you tell how long the mare has been in labor?”

“She’s pretty sweaty and exhausted. Barely twitched when I touched her.”

Which was another hint that something was wrong, because as much as Grady loved the wild horses of Sanctuary, as much as he’d appointed himself their protector, he kept his distance. The horses weren’t tame pets—they were truly wild animals, unused to human contact. This was the closest he’d ever been to any of them.

“Once the foal first appears, the rest of the birth should only take about half an hour. Sounds like she’s been working a lot longer than that, which isn’t good—if she gets too tired … Listen, here’s what I’m going to need you to do.”

Ben got brisk and businesslike, going through the list of things that had to happen immediately, if not sooner, and Grady snapped to attention. It was exactly like gearing up for a rescue. He memorized every last instruction, visualizing the actions that would be required and not allowing himself to dwell on the possible negative outcomes.

Ben paused, then said, “Grady. We need to keep things as clean and sanitary as possible. You’re going to have to take off the gloves. Maybe your overshirt, too, or at least roll up the sleeves to above the elbow. Can you do that?”

Darkness encroached on his vision, tunneling the world down to the glaring bright spot of the task ahead.

He’d be exposed. All those scars, the living memory of pain and terror, and Ella would see it all, and she’d get that look, that pitying horror-struck look …

“Grady!”

He blinked at the bark of his best friend’s voice in his ear, and swallowed down the nightmare. The mare moved under his hands, straining hopelessly against a contraction, and Grady reached for the inner core of peace he’d found with the horses before.

It didn’t matter what Ella saw or how she looked at him after. He’d do it, because he had no choice. He couldn’t let this mare suffer, or take the chance that the foal might suffocate before it ever had a chance to breathe the clear island air.

His voice was a painful rasp in his throat, but he forced the words out. “Get here, Ben. I’ll do my best, but—”

“I’m on my way. You’ll be fine,” Ben promised, then hung up.

Grady stared at the silent phone in his hand for a long moment, wishing he could hate Ben for making promises there was no way he could be sure would come true. But since Ben was one of the few friends Grady had managed to make after his accident, he knew he’d end up letting it go.

Ella took a tentative step closer to the mare. “How can I help?”

Light pushed back some of the darkness dragging at Grady’s heart and mind. Even though Ella was scared, here she was, her chin tilted up and a determined glint in her blue eyes.

“The foal is twisted in the birth canal—the mare’s not going to be able to push him out on her own.” Tamping down the fear of failure, Grady kept his voice firm and matter-of-fact. “I’m going to have to physically locate the foal’s other leg and pull him into position. Hopefully she’ll be able to take it from there.”

He could see the gulp of her swallowing down her nerves even from across the expanse of the mare’s rounded belly. “That sounds … messy.”

Grady had to grin. “Don’t worry, city mouse, any mess will be getting all over me, not you. But I’m going to need you to hold her head, keep her quiet and still while I work. If she decides to freak out and stand up while I’ve got my arm inside her up to the elbow, we could both be in trouble.”

“Wow. Better you than me.” She wrinkled her nose, pulling a grossed-out face, but Grady caught the hint of a smile curling her mouth. Warmth washed through him at the realization that she was doing her best to break the tension.

“Just don’t faint,” he told her.

Ella waved an airy hand and folded down to kneel beside the mare’s head. “No worries. I’ve never fainted in my life.”

Grady sincerely hoped this wasn’t an instance of there being a first time for everything.

Especially since she’d be confronted with worse things than the miracle of life in a second, here.

Any minute now, Grady was going to have to quit stalling, strip off his gloves, roll up his sleeves, and expose his scars to the open air and the sight of another human being for the first time in five years.

The mare groaned, a drawn-out, exhausted expulsion of air that shoved Grady into action.

He couldn’t think about it. He couldn’t watch for Ella’s reaction when she saw the ruin of his hands and arms. He just had to rip off his protective coverings, like tearing off a bandage, and keep moving.

Holding his breath, Grady ground down on his back teeth and took off his gloves.

CHAPTER 13

Thin and white, raised in some places, puckered in others, the scars patchworking the skin of Grady’s large, square hands stole Ella’s breath and every scrap of her attention.

And he didn’t stop with the gloves. Moving stiffly, almost mechanically, he unbuttoned the cuffs of the green flannel shirt and shrugged it off his shoulders.

Ella’s gaze traced the marks of his injury up his strong wrists and over the tensed, corded muscles of his forearms. The scars stopped below his right elbow, but on the left side, they kept going, a vicious, slashing pattern of violence that disappeared under the short sleeve of his cotton undershirt.

“I know they’re ugly, but if you’re going to pass out, try not to fall on the mare.”

Her eyes snapped to his. The hard-jawed face was shadowed with a wariness that hurt Ella’s heart. Grady appeared braced for some theatrical fit of horror.

And she did feel horrified, but not because the scars were so ugly. They weren’t pretty … but what caught at her chest and stole her breath was the amount of pain they represented. Imagining what he must have suffered to cause scars like that tightened a vise around her chest.

She wanted to deny it, tell him the scars weren’t ugly, but she knew he wouldn’t believe her. Just by looking at him, she could tell he was poised on the verge of a total shutdown.

Her reaction to these scars meant something to him. And even if it was only that he’d clearly been hiding them for a long time, Ella still felt the full weight of responsibility bearing down on her next words.

The last thing Grady Wilkes wanted was her pity.

Lifting her chin, she leveled him with a stern look. “I already told you, I don’t faint. Now come on, focus. This horse needs our help. What can I do?”

The lines at the corners of his eyes smoothed out. In fact, Ella saw a lessening of tension in his entire face, down his neck and into the line of his shoulders, making him suddenly look both younger and more vulnerable than she’d ever seen him.

Grady blew out a breath, stirring the burnished gold lock of hair that fell boyishly over his forehead. “Okay, you kneel down and hold her head. Keep her from moving around too much.”

Trying not to think about what was going to happen, or how close she now was to the mare’s large teeth, Ella dropped to her knees and placed tentative hands on the horse’s sweat-flecked hide.

“You can do this,” she muttered, half to Grady and half to herself. When he nodded once and pressed his lips together firmly, Ella braced herself for something disgusting.

Grady crouched behind the mare, muttered something under his breath that sounded like “in and up”—
oh no
—and before Ella could do more than curl her hands loosely around the horse’s head to stop her thrashing, Grady had one arm inside the mare up to the wrist.

After a tense thirty seconds that felt more like an hour—and Ella could only imagine how the poor horse felt—he gasped and twisted his torso, exerting steady pressure as he pulled backward away from the animal in time with her contraction.

The mare’s nostrils flared, her large head heavy and warm in Ella’s lap. Ella found herself stroking the velvety soft nose and humming nonsense words as Grady sat heavily on the sand and propped both arms on his raised knees.

With a quick glance at Ella, he grabbed his flannel shirt from the ground and used it to wipe at his right arm. “I found the other leg and got the foal repositioned. I think she’s going to be okay now.”

Peering down the length of the horse’s shivering body, Ella couldn’t really see anything. Which, actually, was fine with her.

She didn’t need to see what was happening to know that nature had taken over, and things were moving quickly.

“We need to stick close and monitor her,” Grady said, his low, wrecked voice causing a strange clenching tightness in Ella’s body.