Death is Forever

she bent over him. The enforced intimacy of the contact made her feel weak. She tried to think of Cole as a man who needed help rather than as a powerful, nearly naked warrior whose thighs she was kneeling between. Then she saw his wound and forgot about what he was or wasn’t wearing.
    “It always looks worse than it is,” Cole said, seeing the pallor of Erin’s cheeks.
    “But the blood—”
    “I saw your pictures of the whale hunt. You had to be ankle deep in blood to get those shots.”
    She remembered shooting roll after roll of film and then being violently ill. Afterward she’d reloaded her camera and gone back to work.
    “I threw up all over the place,” she said as she pressed a cold cloth against the wound, stopping the slow oozing of blood.
    “You do and you clean it up, honey. Blackburn’s First Rule of Housekeeping.”
    Glancing up, she saw his amused gray eyes and wondered how she had ever thought they were bleak or cold.
    “Right,” she said. “No throwing up. Besides, you’re smaller than a whale. Barely.”
    She caught the flash of his smile as she bent over him once more.
    “Hurt?” she asked, increasing the pressure.
    “What do you think?”
    Her smile turned upside down. “It hurts.”
    The back of his index finger brushed lightly down her cheek. “I’ve felt a lot worse.” His breath came in as she shifted the cloth. “I’ve felt better, too,” he admitted wryly. “Burns are the worst for pain.”
    The pronounced tendency to tremble, which was the result of adrenaline and anxiety, faded from Erin’s hands as she worked. While Cole held the compress in place, she started cleaning up the muscular length of his leg.
    “Well, no one can say you aren’t a red-blooded American male,” she muttered as she rinsed out the washcloth for the fifth time. “Hairy, too.”
    He laughed.
    She tried to smile, but it didn’t work. Soon she would have to clean the wound itself. No matter how gentle she was, it would hurt him.
    “Just what I thought,” he said, lifting the compress to check. “Shallow and messy. No big deal.”
    “How can you tell?” she asked through clenched teeth. “You can’t even see all of it.”
    “I know how it feels when something cuts muscle and grates on bone. This didn’t. But if it bothers you that much, I’ll get in the shower and clean it up myself.”
    She paused in the act of turning on the hot water in the sink and looked at Cole. The bathroom light poured over him, outlining every ridge of muscle, sinew, and bone. He literally filled the alcove where the toilet was.
    “There’s no way something could draw blood on you and not cut muscle,” she said, wringing out a hand towel in the hot water with quick, angry motions, hating what she would have to do next.
    “You slap that over my thigh and I’ll turn you over my knee,” he warned.
    “Try it, big man, and you’ll end up on the floor.”
    “Feeling feisty, are you?”
    Her hands paused. He was right. The knowledge that she had come through violence intact was fizzing slowly through her, dissolving through years of fear, changing them, changing her. Part of her felt she could take on any man and throw him ten times out of ten. Common sense told her she was insane even to think about it. She let out a long sigh.
    “First time on the winning side?” he asked.
    She nodded.
    He smiled crookedly. “Don’t let it go to your head. If a hit had been ordered, we’d be facedown in the sand. You should have run like hell when I told you to.”
    Shaking her head in silent disagreement, she knelt between his powerful legs. Her hair gleamed in shades of mahogany and copper and gold as she moved. His breath came out in a rush as the warm towel draped tenderly over the wound. Her hands worked slowly, gently, carefully, cleaning the angry furrow.
    “I mean it, honey. You should have run,” he said quietly, stroking her gleaming hair with his hand. “It’s the first rule of self-defense.”
    “You should have taken your own advice.”
    “It didn’t apply to me. I wasn’t defending myself.”
    Her breath came in. “I know. You were defending me.”
    Beneath his palm her head turned. He felt the warm touch of her kiss against his hand in the instant before she rose to rinse the towel under the faucet once more.
    She wanted to thank Cole for defending her but didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t sound hopelessly naïve and foolish. He’d fought for her when she’d been helpless. She