Christmas Cowboy Duet Read online

  Liam was just about to get back on the road home when something—a gut feeling, or maybe just some stray, nagging instinct—made him look down into the rushing waters flooding the basin one last time.

  That was when he saw her.

  Saw the woman.

  One minute she wasn’t there at all, the next, a half-drowned-looking woman, her shoulder-length brown hair plastered to her face, came shooting up, breaking the water’s surface like a man-made geyser, her arms flailing about madly as they came into contact with nothing but the air. It was obvious that she was desperately searching for something solid to grab on to.

  The woman was drowning.

  He’d only witnessed such abject panic once before in his life. Then it had been on the face of a friend who had accidentally discharged a pistol and missed his head by an inch, or less. The horror of what could have happened had been visible in his friend’s shaken expression.

  This time the horror of what could be was on the face of an angel. A very desperate, panicky, wet angel.

  Before he had time to assess if this waterlogged angel was real or a mere figment of his overactive, overwrought imagination, Liam leaped out of his truck and came flying down the rest of the incline. There was no time to think, to evaluate and make calculated decisions. There was only time to act and act quickly.

  Which he did.

  Without pausing, he flung off his jacket because it would keep his arms too confined and from the little he had time to assess, he was going to need all the upper-arm power he could manage to summon. Leaving on his boots and hat, Liam dived into the water.

  * * *

  SHE WAS GOING DOWN for the last time.

  Four, she’d counted four. Four times she’d gone down and managed to somehow get back up again, desperately gasping for air.

  Her thoughts were colliding wildly with one another. And she was hallucinating, Whitney was sure of it, because she’d just seen someone plunging into the water to rescue her.

  Except that he wasn’t real. This area was deserted. There was no one around, no one to rescue her.

  She was going to die.

  Suddenly, Whitney thought she felt something. Or was that someone? Whatever it was, it was grabbing her by the arm, no, wait, by the waist. Was she being pulled up, out of the homicidal waters?

  No, it wasn’t possible.

  Wasn’t possible.

  It was just her mind giving her something to hang on to before life finally, irrevocably drained out of her forever.

  Just a figment of her imagination. This rescuing hero she’d conjured up, he wasn’t real.

  And very, very soon, Whitney knew she wouldn’t be real, either. But right now, she could have sworn she was being roughly dragged up out of the water.

  Where was the light? Wasn’t she supposed to be going toward some kind of light? Whitney wondered. But there was no light, there was only pressure and pain and the sound of yelling.

  Did they yell in heaven?

  Or was this the Other Place? She hadn’t been an angel, but she wasn’t bad enough to land in hell.

  Was she?

  But being sent to hell would explain why something was beating against her, pushing on her ribs over and over again.

  * * *

  “C’MON, DAMN IT, breathe! Breathe!” Liam ordered, frustrated and fearful all at the same time. The woman wasn’t responding.

  Damn it, Brett was the one who should be here, not him, Liam thought as he continued with his chest compressions. Brett would know what to do to save this woman. He just remembered bits and pieces of CPR, not from any sort of training but from programs he’d watched on TV as a kid.

  Still, it was the only thing he could think to do and it was better than standing helplessly by, watching this woman die in front of him.

  So he continued, almost on automatic pilot. Ten compressions against the chest, then mouth to mouth, and then back to compressions again until the dead were brought back to life.

  Except that this woman—whoever she was—wasn’t responding.

  He was losing her.

  The thought made him really angry and he worked harder.

  Liam began another round, moving faster, pushing harder this time. He fully intended on continuing in this manner until he got some sort of a response from the woman he’d rescued from the water. Granted she’d looked more dead than alive when he’d pulled her out, but when he put his head against her chest, he was positive that he’d detected just the faintest sound of a heartbeat.

  It gave him just a sliver of hope and he intended to build on that.

  * * *

  IT CAME TO HER in a blurred, painful haze: she wasn’t dead.

  Dead people didn’t hurt.

  Did they?

  Whitney hadn’t given much thought to reaching the afterlife. She’d always been far too preoccupied in getting ahead in the life that she had on earth. But she felt fairly certain that after transitioning to the afterlife, pain and discomfort were no longer involved, certainly not to this degree—and she was definitely experiencing both.

  Big-time.

  After what seemed like an absolute eternity, Whitney came to the realization that she wasn’t inside of some dark abyss—or hell. The problem was that her eyes were shut. Not simply shut, it felt more as if they were glued down that way.

  With what felt like almost superhuman effort, she kept on struggling until she finally managed to pry her eyes open.

  Focusing took another full minute—her surroundings were a complete blur at first, wavy lines that made no sense. Part of her was convinced that she was still submerged.

  But that was air she was taking in, not water, so she couldn’t be underwater any longer. And what was that odd, heavy pain across her chest that she kept feeling almost rhythmically?

  And then she saw him.

  Saw a man with wet, medium blond hair just inches away from her face—and he had his hands crisscrossed on top of her chest.

  “Why...are...you...pushing...on...my...chest?” The raspy words felt as if they had dragged themselves up a throat that was lined with jagged pieces of glass.

  They weren’t any louder than a faint whisper.

  Liam’s head jerked up and he almost lost his balance, certainly his count. Stunned, he stared at her in surprise and disbelief.

  It worked! he thought, silently congratulating himself. She was alive!

  He’d saved a life!

  “I’m giving you CPR,” he told her. “And I guess it worked,” he added with pride and no small sense of satisfaction. He felt almost light-headed from his success.

  “Then...I’m...not...dead?” she asked uncertainly. It took Whitney a second to process this influx of information on the heels of the panic that had enveloped her.

  The last thing she clearly remembered was being thrown from the car and sinking into dirty water.

  “Not unless I am, too—and I wasn’t when I last checked,” he told her. He’d actually saved a life. How about that? Right now, Liam felt as if he could walk on water.

  It took him a minute to get back to reality.

  The woman he’d rescued was looking at him with the widest green eyes he’d ever seen. She tried to sit up only to have him push her back down again. Confused, disoriented, she looked at him uncertainly.

  “I don’t think you should sit up just yet,” he told her. She wanted to argue with him, but the energy just wasn’t there. “You almost drowned. Why don’t you give yourself a couple of minutes to recover?” he suggested tactfully.

  “I’m...fine...” she insisted.

  She certainly was fine, Liam couldn’t help thinking. Even looking like a partially drowned little rabbit, there was no denying that this woman was strikingly beautiful. No amount of wet, slicked-
back hair could change that.

  Still, Liam didn’t want her trying to run off just yet. She could collapse and hit her head—or worse. He hadn’t just risked his own life to pull her out of the rushing waters only to have her bring about her own demise.

  He continued to restrain her very gently.

  “I just saved your life,” Liam told her patiently. “Humor me.”

  The rains had obviously stopped and the waters, even now, were trying, ever so slowly, to recede. Within a couple of hours or so, it would be as if this had never happened—except that it had and an out-of-towner had almost died in it.

  Talk about being in the right place at the right time, he mused. He was grateful now that band practice had run a little over. If it hadn’t, he would have passed the basin when the rains hit and he would have never been there to rescue this woman.

  “Okay.” Whitney gave in, partially because she felt about as weak as a day-old kitten and partially because she was trying to humor the cowboy who had apparently rescued her. “But just for a few minutes,” she stipulated, her speech still a little slow, definitely not as animated as it normally was.

  Whitney tried to move her shoulders and got nowhere. Whoever this man was, he was strong. Definitely stronger than she was, she thought.

  She’d never trusted strangers—but this one had saved her life so maybe a little trust was in order.

  “Does this kind of thing happen often?” Whitney asked warily. Because if it did, she couldn’t understand why anyone would want to live here.

  Why not? her inner voice mocked. You live in the land of earthquakes. One natural disaster is pretty much like another.

  Her expression remained stony as she waited for the cowboy to give her an answer.

  “No, not often,” Liam assured her, removing his hands from her shoulders. “But when it does, I guarantee that it leaves one hell of an impression.”

  The woman was trying to sit up again, he realized. Rather than watch her digging her elbows into the ground to try to push herself up, Liam put his hands back on her shoulders, exerting just the right amount of pressure to keep her down.

  The look she gave him was a mixture of exasperation and confusion.

  “Why don’t you just hold on to me and I’ll get you into a sitting position,” Liam suggested.

  Having no choice—she was not in any shape to outwrestle him and she suspected that out-arguing this gentle-spoken cowboy might be harder than it appeared—Whitney did as he proposed.

  With her arms wrapped around his neck, Whitney was slowly raised into a sitting position. She realized that she was just a few feet away from what had been angry, dangerous waters a very short time ago, not to mention her final resting place.

  The scene registered for the first time. The man beside her had risked his life to save hers. Why?

  “You dived into that?” she asked in semi-disbelief.

  Liam nodded. “I had to,” he replied simply. “You weren’t about to walk on water and come out on your own. What happened?” he asked. “Did the water overwhelm you?” Then, before she could answer, he added another basic question to the growing stack in his head. “Why weren’t you swimming?”

  She was about to lie, saying whatever excuse came to mind, but then she stopped herself. This man had risked his life in order to save her. She owed him the truth.

  “I don’t know how,” she murmured almost under her breath.

  Liam stared at her, still not 100 percent convinced. “Really?”

  Her very last ounce of energy had been summarily depleted as she had devoted every single ounce within her to staying alive in the swiftly moving waters. If it hadn’t been, she would have been annoyed at his display of disbelief.

  “Really,” she answered wearily.

  “Never met anyone who didn’t know how to swim,” he commented.

  “Well, now you have,” she answered, trying her best to come around enough to stand up.

  Since the torrents had abated and she was now sitting on the ground, utterly soaked, Whitney looked around the immediate area.

  That’s when it finally hit her. She wasn’t overlooking it. It wasn’t anywhere in sight.

  “Where’s my car?” she asked the man who had rescued her.

  Liam looked at her a touch uncertainly.

  “What car?”

  Chapter Two

  “What do you mean ‘What car?’” Whitney asked, bewildered as she echoed her rescuer’s words back to him. “My car.”

  The events of the past few minutes were far from crystal clear in her mind, however, amid the lashing rains and the tumultuous rising waters in the basin, Whitney was fairly certain that her car hadn’t sunk to the bottom of the threatening waters. She and the car had gone their separate ways, but she was sure that she’d been thrown from the vehicle as it was raised up, not pushed down.

  Liam shook his head. “I didn’t see any car,” he told her honestly. “All I saw was you.”

  “But I was in a car,” she insisted. “At least, I think I was.” She looked at him, struggling to keep her disorientation and mounting panic contained. “How do you think I got out here?”

  Liam had done very little thinking in the past few minutes, mostly reacting. He was still reacting right now. Saving a life was a heady feeling and it certainly didn’t hurt matters that she was a knockout, even soaking wet.

  He shrugged in response to her question and hazarded a guess, his expression giving nothing away.

  “Divine intervention?” It was half a question, half an answer.

  “No, I was driving a car,” Whitney retorted, then took a breath. Her nerves felt as if they were systematically being shredded. “A pearl-white Mercedes,” she described. There couldn’t be any other cars like that around, she reasoned, not in a town that was hardly larger than a puddle. “A sports car,” she elaborated. “I wound up being thrown from my car because I couldn’t get the top up once that awful deluge started. Don’t you people get weather warnings?” she asked, frustrated. She’d always been in control of a situation and what she’d just been through had taken that away from her.

  She didn’t like feeling this way.

  “Sometimes,” Liam answered, although he had a feeling that wouldn’t have done her any good. The woman would have had to have her radio station set to local news and he had a hunch she would have been listening to some hard-rock singer.

  Her story about being thrown from her vehicle was completely plausible. There was no way she would have been out here without a car or at least some mode of transportation.

  But if that was the case, where was her car? Had it gotten completely filled with rainwater and wound up submerged? If so, it would turn up once the floodwaters receded. Unless the turbulent basin waters had succeeded in dragging it out to the gulf.

  In either case, the car she was asking about wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

  Just for good measure, and because the woman appeared so utterly distraught, Liam looked around the surrounding area again.

  Slowly.

  Which was when he saw it.

  Saw the car the woman had to be asking about. The topless white vehicle wasn’t lying mangled on the side of the newly created bank, but it might as well have been for all the use she could get out of it in its present position.

  How was she going to take this latest twist? he couldn’t help wondering.

  Only one way to find out, Liam decided, bracing himself. “Is that your car?” he asked, pointing toward the only vehicle—besides his own—in their vicinity.

  Hope sprang up within her as Whitney looked around. But she didn’t see anything that even resembled her gleaming white vehicle—

  Until she did.

  Whitney wasn’t aware of her mouth dropping open as she rose to her feet
and walked toward her car, moving like someone in a trance—or more accurately, in a very bad dream.

  “Yes.” Her voice was barely a whisper and she felt numb all over as she stared at the Mercedes 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.