LITMIR.BIZ

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head held high. Looks weren’t everything. Besides, she hadn’t been shot yet, so perhaps dying in a scrappy skirt and T-shirt ensemble wouldn’t be an issue.

      She kept her eyes glued on the young man. A late teen at best. On the cusp of the rest of his life. He deserved a fighting chance to make some new decisions. Take a fresh path. And she was going to be the one to give him the chance. Then the pandilleros would free her, liberate her father, and everyone could get on with their lives.

      Scarface shouted at her and then at another one of his hombres as the roar of a motorboat cracked through the thick night air. She heard the word médico somewhere in there, so thought the best thing to do was to keep on walking.

      Finally! They were getting the hint. She was trying to help. And maybe the boat was the island version of an ambulance.

      The waves were just beginning to shift the sand around the boy. She pulled off her light cardigan and moved his hands away from the wound without too much effort. His strength was clearly fading. She sucked in a sharp breath. The bullet had entered the lower region of his right shoulder. His breathing was jagged. She pressed her fingers to the pulse line on his throat. Accelerated.

      Diagnoses flew threw her mind. Pneumothorax? Chest wall tenderness? Only an X-ray would give a proper read on the situation, but if that bullet had nicked the boy’s lung on entry there was every chance he was suffering a hemo-pneumothorax. A potentially lethal combination of air and blood filling the chest cavity.

       “Me llama, Isla.”

      He stared at her with glazed eyes and said nothing.

      She silently berated herself. It didn’t matter if he knew her name or not. What mattered was whether or not she could stop the bleeding and keep him breathing. The frightened look in his eyes sharpened her resolve to help him. Her heart twisted inside her chest as it hit home just how fortunate she had been as a child.

      Okay, her parents had been away on research trips for the bulk of her childhood, but she’d had her grandmother. She’d known her parents would try their best to get home for holidays. They’d make a huge event out of her birthdays. She’d been clothed, fed, and she’d always known she was loved.

      It was why she’d vowed to become such a solid rock for her father when her mother had died. She knew half of his world had been torn away from him that day and, like her grandmother before her, she was going to be there for him. Reliable. Dependable.

       Boring.

      She gave her head a shake. Boring or not, she had a patient.

      “Isla,” she repeated, pointing to herself. “No hablo Española.”

      Obviously. She’d hardly be prattling on to him in English if she was fluent in Spanish.

      He said nothing.

      “I’m here to help.”

      She did her best not to look horrified when she tore a bit of his shirt away to examine the open wound the bullet had made. You didn’t get this sort of injury at her “humdrum fuddy-duddy” general practice on Loch Craggen. The worst she’d seen since she’d taken over from Old Doc Jimmy MacLean was an accidental impalement when a pitchfork-throwing contest had gone wrong.

      She pressed her cardigan to the wound and as gently as she could turned the young man on to his side, so she could see if the bullet had come out the other side. No.

      That scenario came with its own set of complications. Her mind whirled back to her first posting after med school. A central Glasgow A&E department. The gunshot and stabbing victims there had the entire Imaging Ward at their disposal. X-rays to locate the bullets. CT scans to check for symptoms, and any indication of vascular damage or unstable vital signs.

      The only thing she wouldn’t need here was an MRI. If that bullet was close to any vital soft tissue structures Magnetic Resonance Imaging was the last thing you wanted with a metal bullet inside you.

      She pressed her fingers to the young man’s carotid artery. If he loses more blood...

      She gave her head a short, sharp shake. His pulse was still there. He was obviously a fighter. Good. He was too young to die and, judging by the impressive array of ink on his arms, and the fact he wasn’t wearing the sanctuary uniform, she had a feeling that if he lost his life on her watch things might not pan out so well for her father.

      She was mentally kicking herself for not bringing her medical kit on the trip. The only useful things she had back at the bungalow were an extra-large box of tissues, the small bottle of tequila she’d spied on her father’s bookshelf and so far refused to let herself pinch, and her ever-present pair of tweezers.

      She might be boring, but her eyebrows were perfect. Not to mention the fact she could pull a sliver out of a little boy’s knee faster than you could say boo.

       What she wouldn’t give for a wound-packing kit.

      What this kid needed was a hospital. And blood. An IV line chock-full of antibiotics. An X-ray and a chest tube to get the air out of his chest cavity and into his lungs.

      As if on cue, a medium-sized motorboat roared into the isolated cove. A gabble of response burst from all the men who had been closing in round Isla.

      When she clapped her eyes on the man at the helm of the high-tech boat—a man with inky dark hair, bone structure that would put a supermodel to shame and body language that belonged solely to an elite group of alpha males she’d never even dreamed of seeing in real life, let alone meeting on a tropical beach—one thing and one thing only popped into her mind: You’re not to be trusted. Not by a long shot.

      * * *

      Diego took in the scene as quickly as he could. Eight men circled around something or someone on the beach. The reason he’d been called, no doubt. Paz “Cruzito” Cruz. Axl’s youngest son.

      The pointlessness of it all clouded his heart.

      A young man shouldn’t be risking his life so another could slurp down raw turtle eggs in a pint of beer.

      Axl told them they were brave. Revolutionaries. Taking what was rightfully theirs.

      Cowards. That was what they really were.

      Cowards with guns threatening an already poor nation with civil unrest.

      He jumped out of the boat in one fluid motion, the warm sea water saturating his trousers up to his thighs. He pulled the motorboat up to the shore by a thick rope, which he tossed to one of the younger men. He threw his keys to another. They knew the consequences if anything happened to his boat.

      Prison. For the lot of them.

      But as it stood turning them in wasn’t on the agenda. Saving a life was.

       “Dónde está Cruzito?”

      The men parted and there he was. The son of Noche Blanca’s head honcho. Bleeding out on the beach over a handful of worthless cracked turtle eggs. They would’ve brought him maybe ten dollars. Twenty if he was lucky. Hardly the “big pull” he knew the kid was trying to reel in to win his father’s approval.

      He’d met him before. Cruzito was no career criminal. He was a boy trying to make his father proud the only way he knew how. The sooner he learnt that winning his father’s approval was nigh on impossible, the better.

      Diego bit back the telling-off the seventeen-year-old deserved. He’d save his life first. Then he’d give him a telling off. And hand him over to his father for an even bigger one.

      His eyes traveled to the pair of hands pressing a blood-soaked wodge of fabric onto the gunshot wound. A woman’s hands. Delicate. Pale skin. Creamy white and soft as silk. His gaze slid up her arms and widened when he reached her face.

      His heart slammed against his rib cage so hard it punched the air straight out of his chest.

      She

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