Christmas Cowboy Duet

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.

The last thing she clearly remembered was being thrown from the car and sinking into dirty water.

“Not unless I am, too—and I wasn’t when I last checked,” he told her. He’d actually saved a life. How about that? Right now, Liam felt as if he could walk on water.

It took him a minute to get back to reality.

The woman he’d rescued was looking at him with the widest green eyes he’d ever seen. She tried to sit up only to have him push her back down again. Confused, disoriented, she looked at him uncertainly.

“I don’t think you should sit up just yet,” he told her. She wanted to argue with him, but the energy just wasn’t there. “You almost drowned. Why don’t you give yourself a couple of minutes to recover?” he suggested tactfully.

“I’m...fine...” she insisted.

She certainly was fine, Liam couldn’t help thinking. Even looking like a partially drowned little rabbit, there was no denying that this woman was strikingly beautiful. No amount of wet, slicked-back hair could change that.

Still, Liam didn’t want her trying to run off just yet. She could collapse and hit her head—or worse. He hadn’t just risked his own life to pull her out of the rushing waters only to have her bring about her own demise.

He continued to restrain her very gently.

“I just saved your life,” Liam told her patiently. “Humor me.”

The rains had obviously stopped and the waters, even now, were trying, ever so slowly, to recede. Within a couple of hours or so, it would be as if this had never happened—except that it had and an out-of-towner had almost died in it.

Talk about being in the right place at the right time, he mused. He was grateful now that band practice had run a little over. If it hadn’t, he would have passed the basin when the rains hit and he would have never been there to rescue this woman.

“Okay.” Whitney gave in, partially because she felt about as weak as a day-old kitten and partially because she was trying to humor the cowboy who had apparently rescued her. “But just for a few minutes,” she stipulated, her speech still a little slow, definitely not as animated as it normally was.

Whitney tried to move her shoulders and got nowhere. Whoever this man was, he was strong. Definitely stronger than she was, she thought.

She’d never trusted strangers—but this one had saved her life so maybe a little trust was in order.

“Does this kind of thing happen often?” Whitney asked warily. Because if it did, she couldn’t understand why anyone would want to live here.

Why not? her inner voice mocked. You live in the land of earthquakes. One natural disaster is pretty much like another.

Her expression remained stony as she waited for the cowboy to give her an answer.

“No, not often,” Liam assured her, removing his hands from her shoulders. “But when it does, I guarantee that it leaves one hell of an impression.”

The woman was trying to sit up again, he realized. Rather than watch her digging her elbows into the ground to try to push herself up, Liam put his hands back on her shoulders, exerting just the right amount of pressure to keep her down.

The look she gave him was a mixture of exasperation and confusion.

“Why don’t you just hold on to me and I’ll get you into a sitting position,” Liam suggested.

Having no choice—she was not in any shape to outwrestle him and she suspected that out-arguing this gentle-spoken cowboy might be harder than it appeared—Whitney did as he proposed.

With her arms wrapped around his neck, Whitney was slowly raised into a sitting position. She realized that she was just a few feet away from what had been angry, dangerous waters a very short time ago, not to mention her final resting place.

The scene registered for the first time. The man beside her had risked his life to save hers. Why?

“You dived into that?” she asked in semi-disbelief.

Liam nodded. “I had to,” he replied simply. “You weren’t about to walk on water and come out on your own. What happened?” he asked. “Did the water overwhelm you?” Then, before she could answer, he added another basic question to the growing stack in his head. “Why weren’t you swimming?”