Chapter 11

CHAPTER 11

G iving Zoe some privacy to consider the information she'd just pulled out of her brain and the question she'd asked, Connor stirred the chicken and dumplings, moving the pot slightly away from the center of the stove. He opened the little door on the side of the stove and set the pan of biscuits inside to bake.

"That smells pretty good," Zoe said from the bed.

"Biscuits will be about twenty minutes. Gives us some time to do things first," he said returning to the bed and pulling back the covers.

"Hey!" Zoe said, immediately stiffening in defense.

He paused and held his hands up. "Relax, I think before you eat, you might want to head into the bathroom again, maybe wash up a little, because I'm going to need to reset that leg and it's going to hurt. We do that first, get you fed, and then you might sleep some more. It will be dark soon."

"If you reset it first, maybe I can walk to the bathroom on my own?" she said with a hopeful look.

A negotiator. He suspected she was also someone who liked to be in charge. Well, too bad. This was his home. She was injured, under his care. Only one of them was going to be in charge right now and it wasn't her.

"Nope," he said, scooping her back into his arms once more, relishing the feeling this time. "We reset it and let the leg rest and start healing. Maybe you can bear weight on it tomorrow. Maybe."

Zoe sent him a pouty look, but draped her arm around his shoulder once more, this time laying her left hand into her lap, right against his chest. "I guess I don't have much choice."

"No, you don't."

After depositing her on the toilet again—slightly less embarrassed with the panty thing—he strode to the door, pausing to say over his shoulder. "Call when you're ready to head back to bed."

Out in the hall once more, he caught his breath and walked slowly up the hall. The last thing he wanted for her to realize how holding her discombobulated him by hearing him hightailing it out of there.

"That woman is dangerous," he muttered as he walked back into the front room.

Duke lifted his head, tilting it sideways.

"Don't look at me like that. We found her on a ledge with a bullet hole in her shoulder and a singe mark on her head where she got winged. When I get her back here, I find her armed with a gun." He put another log in the stove and moved the burnt logs and embers with the poker. "The most dangerous part of her is those long legs." He heaved a sigh. "And I'm going to have to make one of those hurt."

While Zoe was in the bathroom, he pulled his laptop out of the desk near the far window. He checked to see that it was charged fully and tried to bring up the internet. As he suspected, there was no connection. Something that happened every time a heavy storm went through the area. They were lucky the electricity hadn't gone down under the snow. Of course, he had a generator for such an emergency and just finished servicing it in preparation for this winter, but it was nice not to have to use it, if he didn't need to.

He shut the door to the stove and hung up the poker. "You want to go out?" he asked Duke, who jumped to his feet, tail wagging. "Okay," he said, opening the door, "but stay close."

Duke bounded out the door into the snow. Leaving the door slightly ajar so he could hear if Zoe called for him, he stepped out onto the porch to watch the hound jump around in the snow like a dolphin playing in the ocean. The cold air felt good, cooling some of the desire that had shot through him when he carried Zoe once more. At least this time it wasn't quite as startling. He'd been ready for it and could control his response. Hopefully, tomorrow she'd be able to walk at least some and he wouldn't have to carry her anymore. Though if he was honest with himself, he'd miss holding her in his arms.

"Connor!" Zoe called from the bathroom.

Shaking off the odd feelings, which weren't going to lead to anything, he stepped back inside, closing the door behind him.

When he walked into the bathroom, she was standing on her good leg, holding onto the pedestal sink and had her panties already pulled up. His gaze met hers and noted the pink in her cheeks.

"I managed to wiggle them up," she said.

"Choosing not to comment on that revelation, he came to stand in front of her. "You ready?"

She nodded, lifting her arm around his shoulder as he slipped his arm around her back and the other under her thighs. The entire trip back to the bed, she kept her face looking forward, as if she was still embarrassed, probably because she didn't like to be dependent on him. He had the feeling she didn't like depending on anyone, much less a stranger.

When he got her back to the bed, he was very careful about setting her back on it this time. She started to pull the quilt over her legs and he stopped her. "Keep the left one out."

This time she lifted those deep blue eyes full of apprehension to him. "We really have to do this?"

He stared at her, reading the little bit of fear in her face. "I know you don't want to hurt more, but if we do it now, we can stabilize it better and give you a chance to walk on your own. I don't know how long we'll be here. You don't want me to carry you every time you want to go in the bathroom, do you?"

"No." She sounded like a petulant teenager, but she arranged the covers, so only her left leg stuck out and the quilt was up to her chest. With a heavy sigh, she relaxed. "You're right. The sooner you fix my leg, the sooner it can heal and I can start walking on it."

He walked over to the door and whistled.

Duke barked in answer and came running up the path he'd shoveled and shook himself on the porch before coming in.

"Settle," Connor commanded, and the hound took his spot near the stove once more.

Then Connor laid the clean cloth strips on the bed near Zoe's legs, along with the two straight boards he'd cut earlier to the length of her knee to thigh. With his tactile knife he cut the old strips of his old t-shirt away from the makeshift splint and deposited them in a pile on the floor by his feet. Steadying her leg beneath the calf, he eased both tree limbs from either side of the leg and let them join the pile of cloth.

"How're you doing?" he asked, looking up to study her face. Her eyes were closed, her lips pressed together in a tight line. The white-knuckle grip she had on the edge of the quilt spoke volumes to the amount of pain she was experiencing.

"Keep going," she said through gritted teeth.

Tough. The lady was definitely that.

He ran his free hand up her calf to the spot he believed the fracture had happened. "Feels like it's still in alignment."

She nodded, but didn't say anything more.

Continuing to hold her leg with one hand, he slid five strips of cloth beneath it from her knee to her ankle. Then he gently laid her leg down on top of it, bracing his hip against her foot to keep it at almost a ninety-degree angle to her leg. He pulled a clean sports sock on her foot and made sure it went all the way to her knee.

"Mmmm," she moaned with a little hiss at this action.

"Sorry," he said and once more positioned her leg and foot in the proper alignment.

Next, he set the two wooden slats up against the inside and outside of her leg, securing it by tying the cloth strips in place, beginning with the one directly at the spot where the break was, then the bottom and the top, and finally the two strips flanking the center one.

Lastly, he took a very long strip of the former sheet and wove it through other strips, starting on the inside of her leg.

"What is that for?" she asked.

Pausing, he met her eyes, that were damp from unshed tears, but her face didn't seem to be in as much anguish. "We've stabilized it from twisting, but I think if we anchor everything from your knee to your heel, you'll be better able to bear weight on it. What do you think?"

She gave a slight nod to her head and a shrug. "Makes sense to me. Did you learn all this medical stuff in the Army?"

"Yep," he said.

Going back to weaving, he worked the cloth in and out of the strips, around the heel and arch of her foot and back up the outside of the split. Then he took his tactical knife and made slits in the ends of that strip and securing each one to the top of the strip circling her upper leg just below her knee.

Finished, he stepped back to consider his handiwork. "That looks better than the other one. How's it feel?"

She wiggled her toes. "Not too bad." Then she rotated her foot and lower leg slightly inward. "It hurts less when I do that."

"Good. Hungry?"

"I am," she said with a genuine smile.

Something inside him relaxed. He'd caused her pain, necessary as it was, but it was brief. It had been a long time since he'd helped someone else. Yes, he trained search and rescue dogs to help strangers in times of need or catastrophe, but this was different. This was…personal.

"Good," he said, picking up the cloths and wood at his feet. He tossed them into the trash—the sapling logs too freshly cut to use as firewood—and washed his hands. "Biscuits should be ready."

"It smells delicious."

"Trust me. Mrs. Bailey is one heck of a cook, so as long as I don't burn the meals, they usually taste as good as they smell."

He grabbed a dishtowel his grandmother's mother made out of old flour sacks, back in the nineteen-thirties when the sacks were made out of printed material for the women to recycle into clothes or household items, and pulled the pan of biscuits out to set on the table his grandfather made as a young husband. Figuring it would be easier to eat in bed from a soup bowl as opposed to a plate, he retrieved two from the cupboard and began dishing them up the creamy chicken and dumplings with peas concoction. Then plated the biscuits, splitting them open and adding butter to them.

Reaching for the honey he paused and looked over his shoulder to find her staring out the window. This time she didn't have that faraway look like she did when her memory was filling itself in.

"Honey?" he asked.

She blinked and turned to look at him oddly confused as if he'd used the word as an endearment. "Pardon me?"

He held up one of the jars of locally harvested honey he'd picked up on his last trip to town. "Honey on your biscuits?"

"Uhm, sure."

He drizzled a healthy amount on all of them, figuring she could use both the glucose and supposed healing properties honey would give her. Taking the large plank he'd used earlier, he laid it on her lap once more with a fresh glass of water. Then he set the bowl of dumplings on the plank and handed her a spoon. Once he set the plate of biscuits on the board, he retrieved his own bowl and sat on the chair next to the bed to eat, snatching one of the biscuits to set on the edge of his bowl.

"Oh, we're sharing them?" she asked.

"Wasn't planning on letting you have all five," he said, taking a bite out of the one he'd taken. "Maybe two, if you're lucky."

She laughed—not a silly schoolgirl giggle, or a snorting one like his cousin Donna, no this was slightly husky and felt like a hit of Kentucky bourbon in the middle of a cold night—before sliding the spoonful of creamy chicken concoction into her mouth. "Oh, my God, that's good."

"Told you so."

They ate without talking, the only sound breaking the silence was the occasional moan of appreciation from Zoe. She didn't eat just two biscuits, snatching the last one before him. He didn't mind, since watching her lick the honey from her fingers while he sipped his coffee was the most erotic thing he could remember seeing.

"May I have some more water?" she asked, holding her glass out to him.

"Sure," he said, taking the glass over to the sink, happy to have a little distance between them so he wouldn't ask if he could lick her fingers, too. While he was there, he checked the back of another package of ibuprofen to see she could take two more since it'd been almost six hours since the last time.

"Here you go," he said handing her the packet and water, then cleared away all the dishes. He put them in the sink, turned on the water and squeezed in some dish soap. Then he went over to put some food in Duke's bowl and added the last little bit of gravy from the dumplings on top.

"Dinner," he said, and Duke loped over to eat his meal.

Connor went to the sink and began washing the dishes.

"So, you were an Army Ranger?" Zoe asked from behind him.

He paused a moment in scrubbing the plate. "Yes." He wasn't surprised she'd figured out he wasn't just in the army, but was a ranger—the hardest division, with the toughest and most highly trained soldiers. Again, he was reminded that she might have some amnesia, but she wasn't stupid.

"Makes sense," she continued. "Carrying me, unconscious, down a mountainside and cross-country…how far was it?"

"About a mile," he said over his shoulder as he went on to wash the pots.

"You carried me a mile?"

He shook his head. "No, built a travois. Like a stretcher with long handles."

"Oh, I've seen those in paintings." The way she said it made him smile. It was another memory for her, benign and nothing to do with what had happened to her. "Very ingenious of you," she said. "Then you get me back here and treat my wounds. I'd say, if I was going to get shot and hurl down a mountainside, I was very lucky you were here to rescue me."

He froze, his hands still in the now lukewarm dishwater. "I'm not a hero."

"You are to me."

Counting back from twenty, he let the water out of the sink, dried his hands on the dishtowel and slowly turned to face her. He needed to set her straight and make sure she knew exactly who she was trapped in this cabin with. It made him angry. Angry that he had a past he could never escape. Angry that his life had been torn to shreds from one stupid act. Angry that he now had to share his shame with her. But most of all, he was angry that he couldn't be a hero to her.

"I'm not a hero," he said slowly to get her focused on him. "I'm an ex-con."