Had he read her mind, or had she spoken out loud? She didn’t know and didn’t care, all she hoped was that he was right and they were going to be okay.Being plastered against him, she’d picked up on a faint Spanish accent. No wonder he was able to speak to her in the native language, he’d obviously lived there long enough to pick up an inflection when he spoke English.
After a few more seconds the earth stopped moving. How safe would the building be now? And what about Ophelia, Juanita, Frederico, the other staff, and all the patients? How many of them were hurt even more now?
How many had survived the quake only to lose their lives during an aftershock?
Defeat threatened to weigh her down, but she didn’t allow it to sink her though. People needed her and she would make sure that she did everything she had to do to help them.
She made to move, but the arms around her tightened, and for the first time since the stranger showed up, a flicker of fear ignited in her belly. Her earlier feeling of being safe disappeared. “Let me go,” she demanded.
“I will in another couple of seconds.” No sooner had he finished speaking, a crash sounded close by and dust flew into the small space.
Marie closed her eyes against it and held her breath, knowing that if he had let her go, then she might havebeen hurt. Or worse, from whatever had fallen outside of their hiding place.
“Now it’s okay to move.” His arms dropped from around her and Marie scrambled to her feet and stepped out, gasping when she saw what was left of the shared office area.
Where there’d once been a wall, now stood a gaping hole, and she could see into the street where the building across from the hospital was nothing but a mass of cement blocks and wooden beams. The desk where she’d taken refuge during the first quake was in pieces as parts of the wall had fallen in. If she’d hidden beneath it this time, she would be dead.
All around her there was nothing but devastation. Marie couldn’t move. Couldn’t make her feet take the necessary steps to get out of the room. If this space looked this bad, what did the rest of the building look like?
Was there anything left?
“Come on, we'll do this together.” The stranger’s soft voice sounded beside her, and she looked over at him.
“Who are you?” She couldn’t keep referring to him as the stranger in her mind. She needed a connection. A link that she was alive and this wasn’t aThe Sixth Sensescenario.
“My name is, is—umm, Samuel.”
Marie didn’t miss the hesitation before he said his name, and she knew she should care, but she had more important things to worry about than Samuel giving her a fake name. “Thank you for saving my life, Samuel. I’m Marie Hughes. I’m a doctor here.”
She held out her hand and his big one took it. A tingle of awareness flitted through her veins. “Pleased to meet you, Marie.” He rolled the “r”, again giving credence to him speaking Spanish for a while.
Marie wished that they were meeting under different circumstances, because there was something about him that intrigued her.
Whoa, her reactions to this man were bouncing all over the place, like a bouncy ball, impossible to grasp.
She moved a little further away from him. What she needed to do was keep her cool. Keep all her focus on the task at hand—triage the situation and move forward.
“Where’s my basket?” she muttered as she surveyed the mess around her. She spied it on the ground by the door to the storage cupboard. It must have fallen when she’d moved away from Samuel.
Picking it up, she grimaced to see it hadn’t fared well from being squashed between them, but it would have to do, there weren’t too many other options to carry their–now even more limited–supplies.
“Do you have everything you need?” Samuel asked, and gently took the basket from her.
“No. What I need is for a building not to be collapsing around my ears. To have top quality equipment, so I can give all the injured the care they need. Can you help me with that?” Marie knew her response was irrational. It wasn’t as if Samuel had thrown a grenade in the building. Mother Nature had thrown a fit, and they were the collateral damage from it. “Sorry,” she said immediately. “I shouldn’t have reacted that way to a simple question.”
Beneath the bushy beard, Marie detected a hint of a smile, and she wished that she could see more of it. “All good. I’m not offended. But the question remains. Is this enough supplies? Do you have any more?”
Marie appreciated the grace he was giving her. Pushing down her emotions and reactions to everything that had happened in the last thirty minutes, she pulled her professional cloak around her. It was time for her to be Dr. Marie Hughes. People needed her help and she was going to give it to them.
Chapter Two
Isaac Warner lookedat the American woman in front of him, seeing the moment when she donned the necessary armor to handle whatever injuries she was about to be faced with. He’d seen her around the small Guatemalan town he’d been staying in for the last three months after moving from Alaska. Eventually the cold had gotten to him and he’d needed a change. This was another place where he became someone other than himself. Now he was Samuel Rodrigo and he lived in San Carlion, Isaac lived nowhere. At this rate he had no idea who Isaac Warner was anymore. It had been so long since he’d been his real self.
All he had to do was hang on for a few more months, and then when enough time had passed, he could reclaim his life back in the United States.Although, what that life looked like was anyone’s guess. He wasn’t going to go back to the DEA, that was for sure.
That was the least of his concerns right now. He may not be able to provide the kind of care that Marie had been trained for, but he could stitch up minor cuts and bandage injured limbs. He could give her another set of hands in what was going to be a chaotic few hours.
“You ready to go?” he asked, as Marie added a couple more packets of bandages to the pile in the basket. They were dusty, and he could see that a couple of the protective wrappers had slight tears, but considering that there weren’t many options, not to mention resources, she would have to use everything available to them.
