Caron Todd - Into the Badlands

“Hang on. I’ve got you.” His voice was kind. That was new. He’d sounded different in Australia—edgy, intense. He untangled his legs from hers and his arms came around her again as he helped her sit up. “You’re chilled through.” He pulled a blanket from his backpack and wrapped it around her shoulders. Her skin tingled where he touched her.

She heard James’s anxious voice behind her. “Are you okay, Sue?”

“I’m fine.” She hadn’t expected to feel like this. It was as if no time had elapsed since the Australian quarry ended. She felt twenty again, bowled over by the most charismatic man she’d ever met, and too inexperienced to figure out how to handle it.

“I’m sorry we were so long getting to you,” James said.

“That’s okay.” An odd cloud around her muffled everything. She closed her eyes, willing it away. If it were just the two of them, just herself and James, she’d be all right.

“It took a while to organize the kids and get the tent poles,” he continued. “It’s amazing how similar all these hills look when there’s a person you want to find in one of them. We climbed several—didn’t we, Alex?—till we found the right one.”

Alex. So he and James were already friends. Bonding quickly in a crisis. She didn’t want James to like this man. “Are Matt and Melissa all right?”

“Safe and sound. Everybody’s back at the camp, except Matt. Diane took him to town so the doctor could have a quick look at him.”

“Diane was here?”

“She showed me the way to the bonebed,” Alex explained. “We got there at the same time as the kids. She was alarmed when they told us you were down a sinkhole. She said you’re afraid of the dark.”

It was true, but an embarrassing thing to hear said aloud.

“I should introduce myself—I’m Alexander Blake.”

“Yes.”

Her vague answer provoked an exchange of worried glances between the two men. Susannah wondered why Blake had come to the quarry and why Diane had agreed to bring him. She edged closer to James. “Trust Matt to find a sinkhole.”

James grinned. “I’ll bet he could find one anywhere. Like those pigs that nose out truffles.”

Susannah meant to smile. Instead, she started to cry. She stopped right away, but a few tears were there for Blake to see. He sat back on one heel, leaning an elbow on one bent knee, looking at her assessingly. What was he thinking? That she was a lot of trouble? That she was a mess? That she’d really screwed up the day, running off in a snit and needing to be helped out of a sinkhole?

“I don’t like the look of this,” he said to James. “She seems dazed and emotional. That could indicate a head injury.”

“I didn’t hit my head.”

“Are you sure?” His voice was gentle, warmer than the blanket. “Sometimes when things happen quickly, dangerous things, the mind can’t handle all the information at once. You could hit your head and not be aware of it at first.”

“I’m sure I didn’t.” Was her behavior so odd that only a head injury could explain it? Susannah tried to pull herself together. She’d wanted to meet Blake while she was at work over a prize hadrosaur skeleton or busy at her desk, on her territory, on her terms. Not like this.

“I suppose it’s shock, then,” he said. “It’s no wonder, after the evening you’ve had. I’d like to check you over before you move around too much, just to be on the safe side.”

He reached into his backpack again and brought out a first-aid kit, then scanned her body from head to toe. He’d never really seen her before, not even when she’d put on blush and lipstick before heading to the quarry each day all those years ago, but he was taking a good look now. Now, when dust and sand clung to her, and her ankle was puffed up like a huge white slug. He didn’t seem to recognize her. Not so great for the ego, on the one hand, a relief that her fiasco of a summer had slipped his mind, on the other.

His long, tanned fingers curved around her hands, turning them over to expose abrasions inflicted by the rope. “It’s probably best to leave those alone for now. There’s not much bleeding. Let’s have a look at your arm.”

Alex unfastened the top two buttons of her blouse and eased the cloth away from her shoulder. “Ouch,” he said quietly, when he saw the bruises that reached toward her neck. “I doubt anything’s broken, or you wouldn’t have been able to climb the rope as far as you did. I’ll fasten a sling to take the pressure off your shoulder. James, would you wrap a tensor bandage around her ankle? Figure eight. Right over the shoe for now.”

He was taking charge, just as expected. James ran the science camp; James knew the canyon. If anyone was going to get bossy, it should be James.

“It’s a long walk out of here,” Alex said. “Good thing we brought the truck.”

“You brought the truck?” That news jolted Susannah out of her daze. For years she’d protected the delicate fossils that might lie just under the surface. Now Blake had threatened them his first day on the job. “Think of the damage you’ve done!”

He seemed surprised by her outburst. “We thought you might be hurt.”

“And you are,” James pointed out.

Susannah looked past the two men and saw the roof of the pickup’s cab at the base of the hill. If it had been just one path, two tire tracks from the bonebed to the hill, at least the damage would have been limited, but James had said they’d taken a few wrong turns looking for her. Who knew what specimens they’d crushed under those tires…a juvenile hadrosaur, a nesting site, a clue to the dinosaurs’ extinction…

Still, they had a point. She couldn’t have walked all the way back to the parking area.

Leaning on James, she pushed herself up, putting her weight on her uninjured foot. Alex rose, too, keeping a steadying hand under her elbow. Susannah was tall, accustomed to being as tall as many of the men she met, but when she turned to thank him, she found she was looking directly at his stubble-covered chin. She had to tilt her head to look into those steady blue eyes. Steel-blue?

Almost as a reflex, she felt for her backpack. When she realized she didn’t have it, she glanced toward the sinkhole.

“Did you leave something down there?”

“My backpack…”

Before she could add that she didn’t really need it, Alex had pulled on a pair of leather work gloves and eased himself down between the tent poles. Dangling from one hand, he gripped the rope with the other and disappeared. Moments later, she saw his hands on the poles again. He easily swung himself up onto the ground, her backpack hanging from one shoulder. “Cold and nasty down there.”

“It could have been worse.”

He nodded. “You could have had some dangerous company. Now we’ll get you to the doctor and then home. A couple of pain pills and bed sound good?”

“I’d just as soon skip the doctor.”

“You could wait and see how you feel tomorrow, but I think it’s safer to go tonight.”

She knew he was right. What if something were broken, rather than sprained? The main thing was getting some distance from Blake. Once they got to the road, he and James could go their own ways, and she could get to the hospital by herself. Then, after a good night’s sleep, she would turn back into a thirty-three-year-old scientist who was perfectly capable of handling anything life threw at her.

“HAD A RUN-IN with a tyrannosaurus, did you?” Bob Smythe made a variation of the same joke every time someone from the museum came in with injuries.

“If you think I look bad, you should see the T-Rex.”

The doctor shone a flashlight in Susannah’s eyes. “Headache? Nausea? Faintness?”