“Jesus, he’s hurt bad.”
“I need your medical kit.”
He swung his pack off his shoulders and dug in for the kit. He handed it to her and she knelt beside Xander again, started to work.
“How bad is it?”
“Bad enough. He’s lost a lot of blood. He passed out on me before I could get a read on things, but I daresay he’s just in a faint from blood loss.”
“That hurts,” he groaned. “I didn’t faint. I can hear you fine. Tell me you’ll marry me.”
Roth chuckled under his breath. “Careful there, Samantha. He gets stubborn when he’s hurt.”
“He’s delusional and rambling incoherently.”
“Samantha,” Xander moaned. “Dad, tell her.”
She shushed him. “Xander Moon, you quit it right now. Let me do my job.”
“Your job is to cut open dead people. Ow!”
She’d pulled his jeans away from his thigh, the sucking crackling of dried blood started the wound bleeding all over again. He started to roll toward her, like he was going to embrace her, and she fought him back to the ground.
“Hold still, I said.”
She tempered her tone with a gentle palm to his forehead, brushing his hair back from his face. She leaned down and kissed him. And he passed out again with a smile on his face.
She worked on his wounds, saying prayers of thanks that he was still with her. He was hurt badly, might lose his spleen, but he would live.
The whump, whump, whump of a helicopter’s rotors became audible.
Roth touched Sam on the head.
“He must be in a bad way if he called me Dad. You take care of him. I’m going to go drop a flare so they know where we are.”
She smiled at him. “He’ll be fine. I promise.”
“If he has you, Samantha, I have no doubt of that.”
He walked ten feet away and she heard the whispering crack of the flare, then an eerie green light filled the forest.
It only took a few minutes for the helicopter to see them and start a hover, men snaking down nearly invisible lines to the ground. Roth briefed their leader and they came to Xander first.
She’d never been so happy to see a bevy of men with guns in her life.
FRIDAY
Chapter 51
Denver, Colorado
Swedish Medical Center
Dr. Samantha Owens Sam was reading in the soft sunlight flowing through the window of Xander’s hospital room when the attendant came in with a plastic tray and cheerfully sang out, “Chow time!”
Xander gave her a hateful glance. “I don’t want that. I want real food. Solid food.” He turned to Sam. “Please, Sam, tell them to quit torturing me. If I see one more bowl of broth, I swear I’m going to—”
“You’re going to what? Eat it? The broth is definitely in danger today, I can tell.” Sam stood and went to the tray, which housed a bowl of clear broth and little else.
“You’re feeling better?” the attendant asked.
“Yes,” he growled. “Tell them I want actual food.”
“I’ll see if they’ll let you have some Jell-O for dinner.”
“Oh, goody.”
“Xander, be nice to the girl. It isn’t her fault you managed to get shot in the stomach and lost your spleen and part of your colon. These things take time to heal. At least they aren’t forcing a feeding tube on you.”
“But I’m starving.”
“And that’s an excellent sign. I’ve got it from here, Eunice.”
The girl left with a grin, and Sam sat on the edge of Xander’s bed and picked up the soup spoon. “Choo-choo or airplane today?”
His face turned puce. “Samantha Natalie Owens, if you dare, I will—”
She cut him off at the pass with a kiss, which placated him enough to take the spoon from her hand and feed himself.
He was banged up, his arm in a sling, his leg propped up, the drain coming out of the wound in his stomach. He was as stoic as they came and hadn’t complained for a minute about the pain. It was the lack of food that had him griping.
He’d had a little bit of surgery to clean things up, and was already chomping at the bit to get out. The doctors promised he’d be released by the end of the weekend, assuming he continued to improve rapidly.
“You know,” he said, between gulps of broth, “you never gave me an answer.”
She narrowed her eyes at him.
“About?”
“You know what about. On the mountain, when I asked you to—”
There was a soft knocking on the door.
Xander grumbled, “Damn nurses.”
Sam glanced over her shoulder and saw Fletcher standing there.
“Fletch!”
She jumped up off the bed and went to him, hugging him hard.
“Glad to see you’re both okay. But God, you’re a mess,” he said.
Sam’s hand went to her throat, which was black with bruises. She knew how bad it appeared; she had looked at the mirror in her bag once, then quietly put it away. She’d gotten lucky. They’d both gotten lucky.