Prognosis: Romance

He quickly discovered it wasn’t quite the same being here by himself. He’d had a pleasant day, but when he’d realized he was surrounded by families and groups of teenagers, he had become aware of his solitude. He was well accustomed to spending time alone and was content with his own company for the most part, but he supposed he’d become a bit spoiled by belonging to a tightly-knit group for the past three years—the first time in his almost thirty years he’d felt that close to anyone.

Maybe that was part of the reason he’d been so entertained watching the attractive Shannon and her family. Safely camouflaged behind the lenses of his dark glasses in his shady nook, he’d watched them play since they’d descended on the beach almost an hour earlier. At first he thought she might be the mother of some of the redheaded kids, but he’d since decided none of them were hers.

“Hey, Karen,” she called to the woman with the book. “Tell my lazy brother to wake up and come play with us. Come on, Stu, get in the water.”

The man dozing on the towel grumbled.

“Come swim with us, Daddy,” the little boy Shannon had been tossing called out.

Stu sat up with exaggerated reluctance, stretching and yawning. At the water’s edge, the toddler tripped and fell face-first into the wet sand, resulting in a wail that got everyone’s attention. His mother righted him quickly, dusting off his chubby little legs and splashing water to divert him from his cries. “He’s okay. Just startled him,” she said.

Reassured, the others again started badgering Stu to join them in the water, everyone looking his way and laughing now.

James glanced idly past Shannon. Out by the buoys in the deeper water, the blue air mattress bobbed on the wake of a passing ski boat. Just as he straightened in his chair to look more closely, he saw a small red head emerge beside the floating mattress, then go beneath the water again, one hand flailing above the surface.

Tossing his sunglasses aside, he leaped from his chair. Dashing past the startled mother and toddler, he dived into the water just beyond where Shannon stood, striking out for the mattress with long, distance-eating strokes. He’d been out there earlier and he knew the water was a good twelve feet deep at the buoy line.

He heard someone scream behind him. Heard a woman yell, “Kyle!” Heard a splash and sensed someone following him through the choppy water, but his focus was on the empty float and the spot where he’d last seen the boy.

Drawing a deep breath, he ducked beneath the surface, peering into the sediment-filled lake water and seeing nothing. He came back up for a quick gulp of air, then went back under, swinging his arms wide in hope of finding…

There. His fingers closed around wet skin. A flailing leg caught him in the stomach hard enough to make bubbles escape his mouth. Ignoring the pain, he grabbed hold of hair and skin and kicked upward, hauling the boy with him.

He gasped for air. Then released his breath in a sigh of relief when he heard the child in his grasp coughing and sputtering.

“Kyle!” Shannon swam up to them, her expression horrified. “Are you all right?”

The boy was trying not to cry, but not succeeding very well. “I fell off the float,” he said, his words broken by racking coughs as James supported him. “I swallowed some water and I choked and I couldn’t start swimming.”

“Let’s get him on the float and tow him in,” James suggested, his arms still wrapped around the boy’s chest as he treaded water for both of them.

Shannon nodded and looked toward the bank. “He’s okay,” she shouted toward the crowd that had gathered to watch anxiously from the beach. “We’re bringing him in.”

Bobbing in the water, she grabbed one end of the rubber float. “I’ll steady this while you get him on it.”

James nodded and looked at the boy, who had almost stopped coughing but began to look a little ill. “You’ll be fine, Kyle,” he assured him. “I’m going to hoist you onto your mattress, okay? Can you help steady yourself?”

Kyle nodded weakly. “I can swim,” he muttered, clinging to what little pride he had left. “I just choked on some water.”

“That happens sometimes,” James replied matter-of-factly. “Okay, on three. One, two, three.”

With the final count, he lifted the kid up and onto the mattress. While Shannon kept the float from tilting, Kyle grabbed the edges to keep his balance until it stopped rocking. Confident the boy wouldn’t fall off again, James took hold of the rope attached to the top and struck out for the shore with Shannon swimming steadily on the other side of the mattress.

Leaving all the other kids on the shore, herded over by the woman who’d been reading earlier, Stu waded out to meet them as soon as their feet touched solid ground. Well, James’s feet touched. Being several inches shorter, Shannon had to swim a little farther before she could stand.

“You okay, Kyle?” Stu asked the boy.

“I’m okay, Uncle Stu,” Kyle murmured, looking both weary and mortified.

The mother of the toddler thrust her youngest child into the other woman’s arms and dashed out to knee-deep water to clutch Kyle as Stu lifted him off the mattress. “You’re okay, baby? You’re sure you’re okay?” she asked, patting him down as though looking for injuries.

“I’m okay,” Kyle repeated, squirming. “Geez, Mom, don’t call me ‘baby’ in front of everyone.”

Now that her fears were somewhat relieved, fear turned to anger. “I told you not to go out that far. What were you thinking?” she scolded.

The boy’s pouting lips were turning blue and he was beginning to shiver as his own emotional reactions flooded through him.

“You should probably get him out of the water and wrap him in a towel,” James advised. “Don’t want him to go into shock.”

The calm advice brought everyone out of their panic-driven paralysis. Stu carried the boy to shore, where his mother grabbed a large, thick beach towel imprinted with cartoon superheroes and wrapped him snugly inside it. The non-related bystanders who’d gathered to gawk wandered back to their own pursuits, leaving the family gathered around Kyle.

“Kyle drownded,” one of the younger kids said in awe.

“He didn’t drown,” Shannon said firmly. “He just came much too close.”

Turning to James then, she gazed up at him with liquid green eyes. “I don’t want to think about what might have happened if you hadn’t been here. We thought we were watching them all so carefully.”

The faint tug of familiarity nagged him again. Had he seen her somewhere before? She gave no sign of recognizing him.

“It’s easy for kids to slip under the radar,” he replied, thinking of the cases he’d seen in the emergency room when he’d done his pediatrics rotation last year. Many of the children brought in there had been injured when their adult supervisors had turned their backs only for a few moments.

Scooping her wet red hair away from her face, she grimaced. “We weren’t careful enough,” she said in self-recrimination. “Kyle really does swim well, and I guess we—I—thought he was okay on his float. I didn’t realize he’d drifted so far out, or that he would fall off and be too startled to remember his swim training.”

Drawing a deep, unsteady breath, she stuck out her dripping right hand. “I’m Shannon Gambill. Thank you for saving my nephew.”

He wrapped his fingers around her hand. The feel of wet skin to wet skin was as pleasurable as it was somewhat unsettling. “James Stillman. It’s nice to meet you, Shannon.”

Shannon had been aware of the man watching her while she’d played with her nieces and nephews. Not in a creepy sort of way—and she had well-developed creep-dar. He looked like a man who was using a day off to do some rather heavy reading, judging from the size of the book he’d perused. Maybe just escaping from drudgery for a few hours. She liked to go off on her own sometimes to recharge her batteries and think in blessed solitude. She’d assumed he was doing something similar since he didn’t seem to be accompanied by anyone.

Her older sister, Stacy, finally stopped hovering over Kyle to thank his rescuer. With typical exuberance, she threw her arms around James’s middle, saying, “Thank you so much for saving my son. You’re a true hero.”

Shannon was rather amused by the “hero’s” dumbstruck expression. It was obvious he wasn’t accustomed to being embraced by tearful strangers. Somewhat awkwardly, he patted Stacy’s shoulder, then carefully disentangled himself.

“Anyone would have done the same,” he assured her in a self-conscious mumble. “I just happened to notice the boy was in trouble.”

Her green eyes shining, Stacy shook her red head stubbornly and gazed up at him with an unsteady smile. “You were amazing. The way you just dived in and swam out there to save him… You should be given a medal or something.”

James’s cheeks were rather pink now. He glanced at Shannon as if begging for rescue, himself.

Smiling, she took pity on him, stepping forward to nudge her sister gently back a few inches. “This grateful mother is my sister, Stacy Malone. The twins are her oldest daughters, Briley and Baylee. You’ve met her son Kyle, of course, and the little one is Sammy.”

Stacy reached out to clutch James’s arm again. “I wish my husband, J.P., was here to thank you, too. He’s working today, so he couldn’t join us, but I know he’d want to express his gratitude for what you did for our family.”

James cleared his throat. “Um—”

Pushing his emotional sister aside, Stu stepped up to take her place, extending his right hand to James. “Stu Gambill—Stacy and Shannon’s older brother. It’s nice to meet you, James.”

Looking relieved by Stu’s matter-of-fact tone, James shook his hand. “The pleasure is mine.”