Running Fire - Lindsay McKenna

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the last thing she needed.

      All the while he worked over her, his hearing was keyed to outside the cave. The tunnel systems within the mountain were both a labyrinth and an echo chamber. Glancing at his watch, he saw it was 0200. He was exhausted, but pushed through it.

      Trying to ignore how attractive Chief Mackenzie was, Kell went to work on the gash on her arm. It was then that she groaned.

      He stopped, watching her shadowed face. Her softly arched brows moved down. Her mouth—and God, what a mouth she had—closed, and then she licked her lower lip. Any moment now, Kell knew she’d start to become conscious. Her right arm lifted toward her head. He caught her hand.

      “Chief Mackenzie? You’re safe. You need to lie still. Do you hear me?” Kell leaned down, a little closer, watching her thick lashes quiver. Another groan tore out of her and her nostrils flared. Kell knew she was in pain. Probably from the wound on her arm.

      And then his breath jammed in his throat as her lashes drifted upward. She had incredibly green eyes, although Kell couldn’t tell much more than that with the deep shadows in the cavern. Her gaze wandered. They were glazed over with shock. Finally, they wandered in his direction and stopped. Kell could see her trying to think, to remember what had happened.

      Her pupils were dilated and he checked them closely. Both were of equal size and responded. Relief moved through him. If one pupil was fixed, larger or smaller than the other, it meant she’d sustained serious head trauma.

      She had beautiful eyes, the kind a man could get lost in. They reminded him of the summer-green color of the trees in Sandy Hook, Kentucky, where he had been born. Pushing his personal reaction to her aside, he said quietly, “Can you hear me, ma’am? I’m Navy Chief Kelly Ballard. You’re safe here with me.”

      Leah heard the man’s soft, Southern drawl, but she couldn’t understand what he was saying. Her head throbbed with pain and her vision was blurred. She felt white-hot heat throbbing through her left arm. The pain was overwhelming and she struggled, feeling as if trapped in a netherworld. Her vision cleared for a second. She was staring up at a man with a deeply tanned, craggy face, whose intense, narrowed gray eyes studied her. Oddly, she wasn’t frightened of him. He was dressed in SEAL cammies. Her vision blurred again. Leah shut her eyes, struggling to remain conscious. Where was she? Where was Brian? What had happened?

      LEAH FELT THE man’s calloused hand on her left arm that hurt so damn much. She felt nauseous, dizzy, and couldn’t think coherently.

      “Ma’am,” he drawled, “just be still. You took a bad bump to your head. Things will clear if you don’t struggle so much.”

      This time, she heard what he was saying. It was low in timbre. Caring. His tone calmed her frantic, chaotic mind. Her whole body hurt. Leah felt as if she’d been in a major car wreck.

      Opening her eyes, she blinked, staring up into the deeply shadowed face of the man kneeling beside her. She noticed the lines around the corners of his eyes. Laugh lines, maybe? Her mind was wandering, shorting out. He had an oval face, strong chin and large, intelligent-looking eyes. The word rugged had been created for him. He wasn’t pretty-boy handsome at all. Rather, it looked as though his face had been hewn and sculpted out of mountain rock. His nose reminded her of a hawk’s.

      It was his eyes that snagged her attention the most. Wide spaced, gray with large black pupils and a black ring outside of the iris, they also gave the impression of a hawk. Maybe an eagle. And then her gaze wandered down to his delicious-looking mouth. Leah saw a lazy smile spread across it, and she felt relief tunnel through her. As hard as this man looked, his mouth was his saving grace. It was chiseled, the lower lip slightly fuller, the corners curved naturally upward. This man laughed a lot, Leah thought. His black hair was longish, almost to the nape of his neck, his face bearded. That made sense if he was a SEAL. They always wore beards and had long hair in order to fit in with the male Muslim population of Afghanistan.

      “That’s it, Sugar,” he soothed, “just rest. You’re going to be fine. I’ll take good care of you.”

      Those last words rang in her mind. I’ll take good care of you. Leah closed her eyes, his hand cradling her left forearm as if he were holding a much-beloved child. A large hand, the fingers so long that Leah could feel their length against her upper limb. His hand was calloused and felt rough on her sensitive skin. Her mind was cartwheeling between the past and present.

      Hayden Grant, her ex-husband, came out of the blackness and threatened to engulf her. His leering features, those pale blue eyes that looked almost colorless when he was going to beat her, stared back at her.

      The man with the Southern drawl broke the hold of her building terror. He would take care of her. No man had ever done that before. Not her father. Not her ex-husband. Yet, as Leah felt herself fighting not to lose consciousness, she honed in on this stranger’s quiet, soft voice.

      “Now take some slow, deep breaths. You need oxygen. That’s it, just take it nice and easy, you’re doin’ well. We’ll get you up and over this shock you’re wallowing around in right now.”

      Leah had no way of explaining why his drawl had such a powerful impact on her, but it did. She listened to his voice, caressed by its natural warmth, and for the first time in her life she trusted a man. He was leading her out of the dark, pulling her into the light, and she desperately wanted to rid herself of Hayden’s sneering face, his colorless eyes locked on to her, coming after her, his fist cocked to strike her.

      Leah quivered, and a rasping cry lodged in her throat. And then, Hayden’s face disappeared, drowned out by the man speaking to her, calling her back to the here and now.

      Frantic, Leah struggled to hone in on his voice, trying to understand his instructions. More than anything, that physical link with him, his large hand swallowing up her forearm, was like a beacon of hope, an anchor in her world of chaos and distortion.

      “You’re coming around,” he told her. “A couple more slow breaths ought to do it.”

      Leah felt weakness steal through her even though she wanted to wake up. And then, she felt a cool, delicious cloth move across her wrinkled brow. The coolness felt refreshing against the heat of her skin. Her skin was tight and smarting, as if she’d been in strong sunlight far too long. The cloth caressed her right cheek, and then her left one. She felt the coolness encircle her neck and Leah swallowed, her mouth so dry it felt as if it were going to crack. She was suddenly so thirsty that it drove her to wakefulness.

      “Hey,” Kell called softly, giving her an easy smile, “welcome back to the land of the living. Do you understand what I’m saying?” He studied her eyes, and he could see she was starting to register his voice. As a combat medic, he knew a concussion, even a mild one, rattled a person’s brain. As she barely turned her head, his face so close to hers, he could see her eyes were a deep forest green, reminding him of the trees on the hills around his parents’ home in Sandy Hook, the dairy farm that was surrounded by the Appalachian Mountains. That midsummer green was found in the oak, elm and beech trees, identical to the shade of her breathtakingly beautiful eyes.

      Kell knew the advantage of talking slowly, soothingly, to someone who had just survived near death. He’d done it for members of his SEAL platoon over the years. Taking the cloth, he wiped away more of the dried blood along the slender column of her neck. Touch was important. It anchored a person who was disoriented and it helped them focus.

      He continued to cradle her arm because he didn’t want her trying to use it while it was open to infection. As soon as he could get her conscious, Kell would explain to her what he was going to do. Then he could get on with stabilizing the pilot.

      Leah slowly licked her lips and frowned, staring up at him. Kell would give anything to know what she was thinking. Strands of ginger hair fell across half her brow.

      He set the cloth on his ruck and with his long, spare fingers, eased the strands away from her face. Her cheeks had been

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