had to tighten her hold on him, because the way he grunted and swayed made her think he was about to.
It took ten more very long minutes to get halfway to the cabin's front door. At this rate, she wondered if they'd get across the threshold by Christmas.
At five foot eight, Murphy McKenna wasn't short, yet she felt tiny and slight compared to this man's ruggedly built frame. A shiver coursed down her spine. This time, she wasn't entirely sure it had anything to do with the cold.
The man stopped, forcing her to stop as well. Angling his head, he glanced down. The bottom of his chin scraped the top of her head.
Murphy's heart skipped a beat when she glanced up, and found herself ensnared by his iridescent blue eyes. His breath was coming fast and hard, it looked misty on the moonlit air; she felt the warm puffs of it sear her upturned cheeks, her mouth. Both tingled in response.
She swallowed dryly. Her right arm was wrapped around his waist, her side and hip taking on as much of his weight as she could. Her left hand, she noticed only now, was splayed casually over his chest. Even through the padding of his jacket, she felt the beat of his heart pounding a strong, steady rhythm against her abruptly over-sensitive palm.
He leaned toward her. She grunted as she planted her feet in the snow and took on still more of his rock-solid weight. It wasn't the unwieldy burden she though it should be.
“Are you all right?” she asked, concerned. “You're not going to fai—pass out again, are you?”
He hesitated, as though even he was unsure of the answer. Squaring his broad shoulders, he shook his head. “Not if I can help it.” Tearing his gaze from hers, he again focused on the front door. On a goal that seemed, even to Murphy, to waver several miles away instead of the few feet it actually was. “Let's keep going.”
MURPHY STOOD in the doorway to her nephew's bedroom, her attention rooted indecisively on the stranger.
His brawny body was sprawled over the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle bedspread covering the bottom bunkbed. That the man was laying on a bunkbed at all, no matter what the print on the bedspread, looked incongruous and more than a little comical.
She had to give the guy credit; true to his word, he hadn't fainted again…until she'd eased him onto the bed. Then he'd gone belly up.
It was going to take more than a fistful of snow to bring him around this time. Again, she thought that was just as well.
It was time for the hard part. Time to muster her courage and take a look at his injured leg.
Murphy suppressed a groan. No matter how much she stalled, she couldn't avoid it forever. The stranger said he'd been in an accident. He was obviously bleeding. A lot. Since he was unconscious, and probably wouldn't be of much help even if he wasn't, the chore of stopping the bleeding fell to her.
What was the saying from that stupid cartoon her brother loved? Happy, happy, joy, joy.
Such was the price of being a good Samaritan. There was partial compensation in knowing she'd done what had to be done. She'd gone back for the man when she could have driven away. On that score, her conscience was clear. When push came to shove, she'd taken the only course of action she could live with.
That course of action, however, was double edged. It also carried with it a heavy weight of responsibility.
Her unspoken, yet nevertheless real, obligation to this man didn't end with going back for him. Or even with her somehow managing to get him into the house, sheltered from the storm. Oh, no, she wasn't that lucky.
That had been the easy part.
The hard part was still ahead.
Did she have the stomach—never mind the resolve and skill!—to staunch the bleeding in the man's thigh? Maybe. One thing she didn't have was the tools.
Packed in the trunk of her car was a first-aid kit that she'd never used. Murphy was only sketchily acquainted with its contents. There was a rudimentary emergency care pamphlet, but if she remembered correctly, the booklet was only twelve pages long.
She doubted Johnson & Johnson had gone into detail about what to do when one encountered a stranger in the middle of a blizzard who'd been in a car accident and was bleeding to death.
Still, profuse bleeding was profuse bleeding, right? Every emergency handbook worth its copyright covered that.
The man grunted.
Murphy's gaze snapped to him. His face was alarmingly pale. The hollows under his cheekbones were more pronounced. His lips were thinned, rimmed white, and his sandy brows were furrowed in a pain-pinched frown. His breathing was still ragged, but a bit more even. As far as she could tell, he was still out cold.
With a sigh, she turned on her heel and left not only the room, but the house. In less than a minute she returned with the first-aid kit in one hand and, draped over the crook of her other arm, a loudly purring Moonshine.
The latter was deposited on the living room sofa, the former she carried with her over to the phone. She picked up the receiver, held it to her ear. The dial-tone buzzed in her ear.
That was the good news. It took less than half a minute for a husky-voiced male operator to assure Murphy that a rescue team would indeed be sent out. The bad news, he said, was that in this storm there was simply no way to tell how long it would take the rescue workers to reach the cabin.
Still, knowing help was on the way made her feel better.
Murphy brought the first-aid kit into her nephew's bedroom. She flipped the wall switch. The combination light-and-brown-wicker-and-wood, five-blade ceiling fan overhead bathed the room in a soft white glow. That, mixed with the vibrant blues, greens and yellows of the pillowcase beneath the man's sandy-blond head, made his face look even paler.
He moved.
Murphy's gaze narrowed as she watched him drag the tip of his tongue over his lips. The muscles in her abdomen convulsed, and she chastised herself for the inappropriate reaction even as her attention traced the broad shelf of his shoulders, his flat stomach, lean hips, lower…
A whimper trapped in her throat.
The cartoonish pattern on the bedspread was no longer visible; it was obscured by dark, wet bloodstains.
Her stomach flip-flopped, and her fingers tightened around the white plastic first-aid kit. Her knees threatened to buckle as her mind raced backward to the last time she'd seen this much blood…
No, she was not going to think about that! Not now. She couldn't. Instead, she'd concentrate on stopping the man's bleeding as best she could until the rescue workers arrived. Until then she wouldn't allow herself to concentrate on anything else.
Murphy jerked her gaze from the bloodstained bedspread, her stomach churning. Her mouth set in a grim, determined line, she closed the bedroom door and slowly approached the bed.
Chapter 3
Murphy's Law #3: Just when things are looking up…
HE COULDN'T breathe.
There was a tightness in Garrett's chest that felt like a steel fist had clamped around his heart and lungs, squeezing the breath out of him. His eyes were closed; the inside of his eyelids felt like they'd been scrapped with sandpaper. As for the agony in his thigh…he didn't want to think about that.
He cracked one eye open. Had his throat not felt so dry and tight, he might have screamed.
Something was sitting on him.
Something big.
Something hairy.
Something that's brick-red nose was only a fraction away, and that's big blue eyes were only a scant bit farther.
Whatever it was, it was staring at Garrett intently.
With effort, Garrett traced the tightness in his chest to the weight of the creature lying