Blackwolf's Redemption by Sandra Marton Read Free Book Online

have done? The doc couldn’t make it out this far any more than he could do the trip in reverse. Trees would be down, roads buried under sheets of water. The creek that ran between the ranch and the highway would make the stream they’d crossed heading out of the canyon look like a puddle.
    There was an emergency chopper in Bozeman but it couldn’t fly in this stuff.
    “Okay,” he muttered.
    Forget the medical help. A man did what he had to do, he thought again, and he got started. It was a short list, but a vital one.
    He turned up the thermostat as high as it would go. The burner kicked in with a throaty roar. Start a fire in the fireplace. Fire sucked warm air out of a room, but with the Cummings woman lying where she was, she’d get the best of the heat coming up through the registers and from the hearth.
    Now he needed towels. And blankets. Tea. Honey. A kettle of boiling water.
    Keeping busy was good. He felt purposeful, less aware of the woman as an unwanted intrusion and more as a problem to deal with. He’d always been good at handling problems.
    Handling people was different.
    Linda had thrown that at him, toward the end, and he hadn’t even tried to refute it.
    He checked the woman again, then went swiftly through the house, collecting a bunch of oversized bath sheets, an armload of blankets. A fast stop in the kitchen to put the water on to boil.
    Back to Sienna Cummings.
    Already, simply from being indoors, wrapped in the quilt, heat coming up and the fire going, she looked a little better. More color in her face. Less labored breathing. She was still shivering, though. Not a good sign. He knew it could indicate that her temperature was not just low but still dropping.
    He had to warm her, and fast.
    “Miss Cummings. Can you hear me?” He squatted beside the couch, took her wrist, checked her pulse. A little thready but nothing too bad. “Come on,” he said briskly. “Open your eyes.” He leaned closer, spoke louder. “Look at me,” he ordered.
    And she did.
    Her eyes opened. Her gaze met his…and slid right on by.
    He cupped her chin, spoke her name sharply, gave that up and went for a light slap across her face.
    Still nothing. Time to move on to step two.
    “I’m going to undress you,” he told her. “Get you out of those wet clothes. Okay?”
    She murmured something he couldn’t understand. It didn’t matter. If he left her like this, wet and chilled, she’d die.
    Working quickly, he looped an arm around her shoulders. Sat her up. Her head fell forward; her face tucked itself against his throat, just as when he’d found her on the mountain. Her breath was soft and warm; the whisper of it sent a shudder of awareness through him.
    Just a natural reaction, he told himself, what happened when air fanned over your skin.
    He slipped his hand under the back of her T-shirt, pushed the wet fabric up as far as it would go. Her skin was cold, almost icy, against his palm.
    It was not a good sign.
    He should have gotten her into dry clothes right away instead of wasting precious minutes thinking about not wanting this kind of responsibility.
    Quickly but carefully, he shifted her in his arms, sat her up, held her there when she started to slip back against the couch cushions. He worked the T-shirt up over her belly. The skin there was slightly warmer: that was good. The natural instinct of a healthy body was to keep vital organs warm.
    The skin there was smooth, too. The fact registered somewhere in the back of his mind. It had nothing to do with getting her out of the wet shirt, but he was aware of it. Just part of his head taking inventory of her condition, he told himself briskly, as he dragged the drenched cotton up and over her breasts.
    Getting her arms out of the sleeves wasn’t easy, but at last he tugged the shirt over her head and tossed it aside.
    And, damn, she was beautiful.
    No bra, which he’d already figured. Uptilted nipples, which he’d figured, as well. But not their color.