Marie Ferrarella - Christmas Cowboy Duet

Throwing caution to the wind, he pushed down on the accelerator. The truck all but danced down the remainder of the incline in what amounted to a jerky motion. He had a death grip on the steering wheel as he proceeded to scan as much of the area around him as humanly possible.

Liam saw that the basin had completely filled up with rainwater. Something like that was enough to compromise any one of a number of people, even those who were familiar with this sort of occurrence and had lived in and around Forever most of their lives.

The water could rush at an unsuspecting driver with the speed of an oncoming train. Sadly, drownings in a flash flood were not unheard of.

With his eyes intently focused, Liam scanned the area again.

And again, he saw nothing except brackish-looking water.

“Maybe it was just the wind,” Liam murmured under his breath.

He knew that there were times when the wind could sound exactly like a mournful woman pining after a missing lover.

If Brett were here with him, his older brother would have told him to get his tail on home.

Stop letting your imagination run away with you, Brett would have chided.

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.