Page 51 of Risk It All
Her leg muscles burned, the thigh-high water turning her attempted run into a nightmarishly slow slog. To her relief, he had a grip on a larger rock protruding from the surface, and he was struggling to regain his feet.
He’ll be fine, she assured herself as she fought the current to get close enough to help him stand.Wet, but fine.
Just as she stretched out a hand, a heavy surge of water hit him, knocking him back. To Cara, it seemed as if he fell in slow motion, his head bouncing off the rock that he’d been clinging to. He went limp and dropped into the fast-running water.
Without pausing to think, she jumped after him, desperately reaching out, trying to grab an arm or a foot or even a handful of clothes—anything she could use to keep him from being carried away from her. She landed chest-first in the quickly flowing water, the icy temperature stalling her lungs and her brain. Her arms moved too slowly, and Henry’s limp form was carried out of her reach as the current sucked her down below the surface. She struggled to get her feet under her, but the raging water twisted her body until she was battered and unsure which way was up.
Stunned by the intense cold, she was helpless as the river carried her downstream. The only thought that kept her from panicking completely was that she was being swept in the same direction as Henry. There was still a chance she could save him.
Her arm brushed a hard surface, and she pushed off it. Her lungs strained with the need for oxygen, and she shoved herself toward what she hoped desperately was the surface. When her head broke through the water, the air cold on her wet cheeks, she sucked in a rasping breath that sounded like a sob. The river rocketed her downstream as she strained to keep her face out of the frothing water. Her shoulder hit a rock dividing the current, sending her spinning off to the side. She knew she had to get out of the water if she was to be of any use to Henry. Every bit of her skin was numb from just her short immersion, and she couldn’t feel her fingers.
The cold erased her ability to think, and panic threatened to take over as the river churned around her. Icy water slapped her in the face, stealing her breath.Henry. Save Henry.She clung to the thought, repeating it over and over until the panic retreated just enough for her to get her bearings. A glimpse of the far bank gave her a target, and she forced her numb arms to swim. Propelling herself toward a protruding rock, she wedged herself against it as she gasped for breath.
The current hammered against her as Cara fought to get her feet underneath her. She stood, surprised to find that the water only came to her waist. When she’d been mostly submerged, the river had felt endlessly deep. She slogged through the water to the bank, stumbling over slippery rocks and the uneven riverbed, the current maliciously trying to shove her back down, but somehow she managed to keep from falling in again.
When she finally reached the bank, her body begged her to collapse, but she knew she was Henry’s last chance at survival. She ran downstream alongside the river as she scanned the water, hunting for a glimpse of him.Why did he have to wear black?she wondered desperately, trying to see beneath the white foam churned up by the speeding water hitting rocks and other submerged obstacles. In her panic, she resolved to make him wear blaze-orange clothing from this point on…if he wasn’t already gone.
Stop!she ordered as she ran faster, the heaviness of her soaked boots feeling like an anchor. She was tempted to take them off, sure that she could get to Henry faster without them, but she didn’t want to stop even for the few seconds needed to remove them. Instead, she set her jaw and pushed her legs to go faster despite the waterlogged weights attached to her feet.
A not-quite-right flash of color caught her attention, and she realized that she’d almost run right past Henry. The water tumbled over him, the white froth and reflected sunlight disguising his submerged form. Splashing into the river, she ran toward him, her breathing rough and uneven from her frantic sprint. It was deeper here than the point where they’d tried to cross, the water reaching her waist, then higher. The current shoved at her legs, trying to make her tumble over, and she automatically braced herself as she reached into the freezing water and grabbed onto Henry.
A huge wave of relief crashed over her at the feel of him in her grip. She finally had a hold on him, and her fingers tightened. She was determined not to let the river snatch him away from her again. Her joy at reaching him was quickly flattened by the realization that she couldn’t move him, and paralyzing fear filled her again.
He wasn’t getting any oxygen, but Cara couldn’t think about him drowning or she wouldn’t be able to function. Instead, she shoved down her rising panic and forced herself to look at things in a logical, step-by-step manner.
“Okay,” she said out loud, the high pitch of her voice nearly sending her into a helpless flurry of terror again. “Okay, okay, okay. Why won’t you move?”
Feeling along the length of his body, not letting herself think about how still and cold and lifeless he seemed, she realized that his hip had gotten wedged under the protruding lip of a boulder. The current had pushed a thick waterlogged branch up against his other side, trapping the lower half of his body against the rock.
With numb, shaking hands, she shoved the branch, fighting the weight of the pressing water until the wood was caught by the current and carried past the other side of the rock. Once that was gone and Henry was no longer caught against the side of the boulder, his body began shifting away from her.
“No, you don’t.” She caught his leg, clutching too hard since she couldn’t feel her fingers, and there was no way she was letting him go again. Hand over hand, she worked her way up his body until she could grab underneath both of his arms. Water pounded against them, the force of it even stronger now that it was pulling at both her legs and Henry’s huge, inert form.
She hauled him backward, the water providing buoyancy now that he was no longer caught. Knowing he had to get oxygen, praying he wasn’t already too far gone to save, she moved so quickly that she overbalanced and fell back in the water with a splash. The water surrounded her body, the painful cold of it numbing all the skin it touched almost instantly. The current threatened to drag her farther downriver, but she fought against its strong pull.
Keeping her grip on Henry made regaining her feet awkward, but she wasn’t about to let him be carried away from her again. She finally managed to stand, her muscles aching from the effort of holding him, and she backed toward the bank. This time, she went slow enough to control her movements, even though her brain was screaming at her to run, to get him out of the water as quickly as she could.
“Slow is fast,” she muttered under her breath, hardly able to spare the oxygen needed to make words. “Fast is slow, and slow is fast.”
Step by backward step, she dragged Henry to the edge, water coursing off both of them as the river grew shallower until the pebbles covering the bank crunched and shifted under her boots. She dragged him as far out of the water as she could manage, but he became heavier and heavier with no water to help support him. His feet were just an inch from the swirling water when she conceded defeat and eased his upper body to the ground.
His stillness was terrifyingly obvious now that he was out of the river and the current wasn’t moving his limbs. Frantically searching the corners of her mind for a long-ago lesson on how to help a drowning victim, Cara tried to turn him onto his side. When he didn’t budge, she sat on the ground next to him, placed the soles of her soaking-wet boots against his side, and pushed with her legs until she was able to leverage him up and over.
Water streamed from his nose and mouth, and his skin was a bluish-pale that made even his tan skin look wrong.He looks dead.The thought was there before Cara could push it away, but she clenched her teeth and refused to believe it. It was so wrong that Henry—always so strong and protective—was lying on the bank, completely helpless. He was her wall, protecting her from all possible dangers, but now he couldn’t even breathe for himself. Her jaw set.
After all the times he’d rescued her, now it was her turn to save him.
After all they’d gone through, all the brushes with death they’d survived, she wasn’t about to let him accept defeat because of a poorly placed rock and some cold water. With a final shove, she turned him over onto his back and then scrambled to kneel next to him. She tried to check for a pulse, but her fingers were so numb that she couldn’t even feel his skin, so she rested her head on his chest to listen.
He was too still and quiet, making her heartbeat so loud that she couldn’t hear anything outside her own body. Sitting up again, she tilted his head back, pinched his nose shut, and mentally thanked Molly for making them take a first-responder course when they’d started their business.
She blew a breath into his lungs, let it escape, and then did it again, her brain throwing unwanted comparisons to how it felt when he kissed her versus the cold, unresponsive mouth under hers now. It was almost a relief to move to chest compressions, the regular rhythm of the heel of her hand against his sternum allowing her to blank her brain of anything but counting.
Shifting back to his head, she gave him two more breaths, and then moved back to chest compressions. Back and forth, mouth to chest to mouth again, her motions became both a blurred rush and an excruciatingly slow crawl. It was between the seventh and eighth chest compression when she heard a choking noise and froze, her locked hands hovering above his previously motionless chest—a chest that was now heaving with the effort to cough.
Grabbing his arm, she helped him roll to his side, amazed and tentatively ecstatic when he did most of the work himself. As he hacked and choked and expelled what looked like the whole river’s worth of water from his lungs, she couldn’t stop rubbing his arm and back and side—everywhere that muscles tensed and moved when they’d been so limp and lifeless just a few moments ago.
Best of all, he opened his eyes, and his dazed expression quickly firmed into his normal Henry-ness. That was when Cara burst into relieved tears.
