Page 94 of Heart of Danger
Was beating.
Was he hallucinating? He couldn’t feel anything under the heels of his hands but that other sense, the one that allowed him to feel, touch her heart with his phantom hand, it felt a pulse, a sharp electric jerk.
Catherine’s back arched again as if under the patches but she wasn’t wearing patches. She arched, coughed, her head turned.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” Nick yelled, backing away, hands up.
“What?” Jon yelled from the cockpit.
Nick was white. “She’s…Catherine’s…”
“Alive!” Mac screamed. He pulled her up and into his arms, held her tightly and cried, great gulping raw sobs, crying so hard he couldn’t breathe but he didn’t need air, all he needed was Catherine, alive once again in his arms.
Something brushed against his scar. Her hand. It stroked him once, then fell weakly. “Mac,” she whispered, the sound barely audible above the raw sounds coming from his chest. “I love you.”
“Oh God!” His throat was so tight he couldn’t speak, couldn’t get the words out.I love you toohe screamed in his mind but she couldn’t hear him.
She slumped in his arms in a faint.
They rode into Haven like that, Catherine held tightly in his arms, his hand over her back, feeling her heart beat. Her precious, precious heart.
Beating.
TWO WEEKS LATER
MOUNT BLUE
“Did you eat?” Mac asked anxiously, closing the door behind him. He walked across the room and sat down across the table from her.
She should be asking him if he’d eaten. He’d lost tons of weight these past days. At least that was what it seemed like to Catherine. She’d been in a coma for ten days and had woken up only four days ago. Pat and Salvatore had kept her hydrated and she’d been on a parenteral feed course and a glucose drip so when her eyes opened, she felt…refreshed. As if she’d slept for a very very long time and was now awake.
Mac had looked like a human wreck. He’d been sitting by her bedside when her eyes opened and later Stella told her he’d left her side only to go to the bathroom the entire ten days.
He hadn’t shaved and he had barely eaten and he certainly hadn’t showered in those ten days.
When she opened her eyes and saw his face, with a beard beginning to grow mountain-man bushy, red-rimmed eyes, new hollows under his cheeks and new permanent lines, she’d smiled then frowned at the big fat tears running down the sides of his face. He’d ignored them totally and simply smiled at her and said, “You’re back,” in an unused voice that cracked.
That had cracked her heart wide open and it hadn’t closed since.
She’d gotten her strength back quickly, no thanks to Mac, who was against her doing anything more strenuous than lifting a fork to her mouth.
She was in her room and had finished off some of Stella’s food which had been arriving in industrial quantities. Mac had been called away because in the ten days he’d been offline a lot of things had happened. At first, Catherine had had to pry him away from her with bolt cutters and a crane but slowly he was persuaded that she wasn’t going to die on him if he disappeared for an hour or two.
The thing was, she felt great.
She knew, intellectually, that she’d received a lethal shock and that her heart had stopped. But she couldn’t remember anything about it. The last thing she remembered, they’d been racing to the helo with four very sick men in back, then they were in the helo and then nothing until she woke up in the Haven infirmary.
But it was theoretical knowledge, not knowledge she kept in her heart or even in her body. She felt a little weak and a little lightheaded but that was all.
Actually, she felt something else. It was too soon to tell and there were no pregnancy tests here on Haven but there was an unmistakeable glow inside her. A hidden bubble of light and joy and the faintest tendrils of life. It made her hum with delight.
Mac narrowed his eyes at her. “Was the food that good?”
“Fabulous.” She pushed her plate across to him. “Try it yourself. You need to put on weight. You look awful.”
He winced. “I’ve never been handsome, honey. If that’s what you want, you’re with the wrong guy. However, if you do find that guy, I will bust his pretty face to a pulp so you might as well stick with me.”
She grinned. “Eat.”
