He hadn’t given her enough time. Or maybe she’d said the wrong things. Either way, she’d let herself get hurt.
Again.
There was no romantic attachment this time. No broken heart. But she’d allowed pieces of herself to get involved with a man she’d never met.
Even when she closed herself off, she became attached. She was impulsive. Careless with her life. Stuck in a vicious cycle. Attachment, pain, death, repeat.
It didn’t have to end in death.
Ten years ago, she’d walked off that bridge when it seemed impossible.
Could she walk out of this desert in three days? Without water? Without a map? With no sense of direction?
Impossible.
But if she traveled at night and found shade during the day, maybe?
It wasn’t an impossible decision. She could lie here and die. Or she could try.
Rising to her feet, she hobbled back to the telephone pole. The pain in her ankle dulled by the time she gathered the lantern and the rest of her measly supplies.
The truck had headed west. There lay more desert. A black, undulating sea of sand at night. Vast and lonely, with its excruciating heat looming on the horizon.
She started walking.
CHAPTER 6
Away to the west, the sun sank toward the unreachable edge of the desert. Dusk was approaching for the third time since Rylee had arrived.
Listless, she lay on her stomach at the rear of a narrow cave, her cheek pressing against the cool limestone bedrock. She might as well have been shackled. Exhaustion, heat, and extreme thirst had held her in the same position since dawn.
If she hadn’t found this dark hole last night, she would already be dead.
By her estimation, it had been fifty-three hours since she had food or water.
Fifty-one hours in the desert.
Two full days and nights.
It occurred to her that she’d never truly been thirsty until now. It was an agony like she’d never known. Her skull squeezed around a banging, inconsolable migraine. She couldn’t produce saliva or tears. Her throat was so raw it felt as though the lining had been flayed and stretched out in the sun to dry.
In normal conditions, she could’ve lasted much longer without drinking. But the boiling heat had cut her survival rate in half.
It tormented her until all she could focus on was finding something cool to relieve her suffering. She’d spent the first night and the next day wandering the desert scrublands, searching for a puddle, discarded bottle, underground cave, anything that might contain a drop of liquid.
No luck.
She’d heard of survivalists drinking their urine. By the time she’d reached that level of desperation, she had nothing left in her body to excrete.
To escape the heat, she’d holed up in the cave all day and thought of nothing but the taste of water. Sparkling, flavored, natural spring, ice jangling, with little rivulets of condensation running down the sides. She’d give anything for a cool sip. Even a splash of hot, stagnant water would be a godsend.
Now that the sun was setting, the urge to venture out of the cave and find liquid dominated her mind. She didn’t know how far she’d already walked or how close she’d come to civilization. Everything looked the same, from the towering buttes and dry ravines to the pattern of stars overhead. For all she knew, she’d been roaming in circles.
As she lay there, ordering her boneless limbs to move, a noise sounded in the distance. Her heart took off at a gallop, and her head shot up, pounding with the boom of her pulse.
She tried to listen past the cacophony of her aches. Then she heard it. The undeniable purr of an engine, growing louder, closer.
Digging her elbows into the dirt, she crawled through the narrow space and dragged her pack behind her. When she reached the mouth of the cave, she squinted into the fading light.
There, on the hazy horizon, two headlights bobbed along the bumpy terrain.
She didn’t have three seconds to make a life-or-death decision. Frantic to be seen, she grabbed the lantern from where it’d charged in the sun, flicked it on, and thrust it into the air.
Her arm shook with the effort, her body too weak to run.
“Help!” She crawled, stumbled a few steps on her feet, tripped, and crawled again. “Help me! Here! Please, help!”
Her voice had no strength, coughing and hacking with disuse. But the motorist seemed to see her, making a beeline in her direction. She didn’t care if it was Tommy or Hannibal Fucking Lecter. If she didn’t get water soon, she was dead anyway.
The vehicle slowed, stopping some fifty feet away. As the dust settled around the tires, she made out the silver paint and the silhouette of a cowboy hat inside.
Tommy had stolen her truck again.
Rage warred with desperation. If he’d come to help her, she’d let him without hesitation. But her amicability was long gone. She had a thing about grudges, as in when she held onto one, she held onto it forever.