Up Close and Dangerous by Linda Howard Page A

of those instant ice packs, but she was hesitant to use it. “I don’t know. If you weren’t already a little shocky, if the cold wasn’t already a problem, I wouldn’t worry. But an ice pack on your head will cool you all over, and I don’t want to do that.” She chewed on her lip a moment, thinking. “On the other hand, pain causes a shock to the system, too. If the effect’s going to be the same, why make you go through the pain?”
    “I vote for less pain.”
    She got the ice pack from the kit, read the directions, and began kneading the plastic tube. The pack wasn’t large enough to cover the entire cut, but if she positioned it just right she could get it over most of the swelling, and over the scalp where the laceration was deepest. When the pack was so cold she could barely stand to hold it, she cut some gauze from the roll and covered the cut with a single layer, then gently placed the ice pack on top of the gauze.
    He sucked in his breath at the cold. She imagined it made his head hurt like blue blazes, but he didn’t complain.
    “While that’s doing its thing, I’m going to clean some of this dried blood off you. Bet you’d like to open your eyes, huh?”
    She kept up a running commentary as she opened a pack of her premoistened, aloe-treated wipes, extracted one, and set to work around his eyes. Dried blood, she discovered, wasn’t easy to remove. A washcloth, with its rougher surface, would have worked better. Blood was caked in his eyebrows and eyelashes, two areas where she couldn’t scrub; she didn’t want to cause the cut to begin bleeding again so she had to be gentle around his eyebrows, and she couldn’t scrub around his eyes even if he hadn’t been cut. So she swabbed away, and when the towelette was completely red, she put it aside and got a fresh wipe.
    When she glanced back at him, the new wipe in her hand, his eyes were slitted open and he was watching her. The pale bluish-gray color of his irises was startling in contrast with the darkness of his lashes.
    “Well, hello. Long time no see,” she said.
    Another of those faint smiles quirked his mouth. Slowly, as if moving his eyes hurt, he looked around as much as he could while lying flat on his back and not moving his head at all. When he looked past her and saw the mangled plane, his eyes widened a little and he said, “Holy shit.”
    “Yeah, I know.” She definitely agreed with the sentiment. The fact that they were alive and all in one piece, though not completely without damage, was a bit startling when compared to the structural hit the plane had taken. She handled the shock by not looking at the big picture, instead focusing on the details of survival and the tasks ahead of her. Details, by definition, were little things. She could handle the little things, one by one.
    Gradually she worked her way down his face, behind and in his ears, down his neck, over his shoulders and chest. Even his arms and hands were bloody. She kept him covered as much as possible, uncovering one section at a time and re-covering it as soon as she had it clean. His pants were bloody, too, but they could wait until he could manage for himself, she thought. The first layer of clothes she’d laid over him were already stained; the blood had dried, and there was nothing she could do about that. She did need to get his feet clean and in dry socks, though, to ward off frostbite.
    Moving down to the bottom of the heap, she folded the clothes back, worked his bloody shoes and socks off, and as quickly as possible cleaned and dried his feet. Cleansed of the rusty stains, they were white with cold. Bracing herself against the shock, she raised the hems of her multiple shirts and shifted forward so his feet were against her stomach. They were so cold she shuddered at the contact but didn’t jerk away. She began chafing his toes through the layers of cloth. “Can you feel this?”
    “Oh, yeah.” There was a deep note in his voice, a sort of subtle