“It’ll take both of us.”
She sat on the edge of the cliff, turned and eased herself down, Coburn spotting her with a hand to her back. She knelt beside the gray-faced little boy, forcing herself to ignore how high they were over the rocky shore. Using her fingertips, she found the source of the bleed and pressed down hard to stem the flow. It was the femoral artery. A major one. Not good.
“Take off your shirt,” she ordered Coburn. “I need to bind the wound.”
When he didn’t respond immediately, she flicked her gaze up to him. He was staring at all the blood. “Coburn,” she bit out under her breath, “I need binding material now.”
Her husband emerged from his trance, tearing his shirt down the front. He shrugged it off and started ripping it in strips. She grabbed the first one and bound it around the little boy’s thigh to stop the bleed. An agonized cry escaped James. “More,” she ordered Coburn. “Give me as many as you’ve got.”
She glanced at the little boy’s chalk-white face, worried he was going to go into shock. “James,” she said softly, “did you know I’m a doctor? That I put people back together again?”
His lips trembled but he didn’t acknowledge her. “So you’ve hurt your leg,” she told him gently. “It isn’t anything we can’t fix. We just need to get you to a hospital so we can do that. You’ll get to ride in a helicopter. Won’t that be fun?”
His weak nod was a good sign. She reached for the strips Coburn handed her. “I’m going to tie your two legs together to stop them from hurting so much. Can you be brave for me?”
He nodded on a little sob. She set her jaw, knowing it was going to be painful for him, and went to work. It was her job to be immune to the little boy’s tears, but his terrified wails as she stabilized his broken leg against the other tore at her heart. They were hundreds of yards above a rocky shore. His leg had been spouting a waterfall of blood. She got it.
She secured James’s legs. Coburn climbed up on the cliff so Arthur could come down and talk to James with her until they heard the whir of the helicopter blades. She climbed up on the cliff then, so the ambulance crew could get the little boy on a stretcher and pass him up onto solid ground.
It wasn’t until everyone was securely on firm ground and James was being loaded into the ambulance that her knees buckled. Coburn caught her, sliding an arm around her waist.
“I’m terrified of heights.”
“I know.”
The raw emotion in his gaze brought tears dangerously close to the surface.
“You are insanely brave, Diana Grant.”
She didn’t feel brave. She felt very close to the edge, too much emotion attacking her from every direction.
The ambulance crew secured James. Arthur stepped into the back to go with them. Coburn bundled her into the car and drove down the mountain. Diana looked out the window and thought about what could have happened. That little boy could have taken a wrong step and...
“It didn’t happen.” Coburn flicked her a sideways glance. “You can’t live your life in what-ifs.”
“Is that what you think I do?” she asked quietly.
“Until you decided to drop yourself into war-torn Africa, yes. That was a departure.”
It had been. She sat in the car when they pulled into the driveway of the cottage, in a complete state of inertia. Coburn opened the door and reached down to scoop her out of the seat. She didn’t argue, merely rested her head on his chest as he let them into the cottage, carried her upstairs and deposited her on the floor of his suite’s bathroom while he turned on the steam shower. She looked down at her dress. It was so stained with blood it might as well have been red, not blue.
She reached around to unzip her dress, but her hands were shaking too hard to accomplish the task. Coburn moved behind her and brushed her hands out of the way. The whisper-soft touch of his lips against the sensitive skin between her neck and shoulder sent a shiver down her spine. “You were a goddamned superhero tonight.”
She shook her head. “It’s my job.”
The rasp of her zipper raked across her heightened senses. “It’s not your job to walk out on ledges when you’re terrified of heights to save a little boy. You didn’t even blink.”
Another shudder vibrated through her. “I was so terrified something would happen and we would plunge into the water.”
“But it didn’t stop you.” He pushed her dress off her shoulders, his hands coming up to cup her breasts while his mouth returned to that spot that drove her crazy. “I have never been so proud of anything or anyone than I was of you tonight.”