Free Catch Me by Lorelie Brown Page B

chest.
    Free of her awkward burden, Sandie swam away.
    “Swim, damn you,” he shouted.
    She only clutched him tighter. “I can’t.”
    He shook his head and flicked his hair out of his eyes. “Of course. Of course you can’t. That makes perfect sense.” He flipped her about, until her back pressed against his chest. His arm banded her ribs in a painful pinch across her already burning chest and he began swimming them to shore. “Just kick.”
    She obeyed, desperate to do anything she could to help them out of danger.
    “Not like that,” he snapped. “Up and down.”
    She changed the way she was kicking and they sped along much more quickly. Still, it seemed an eternity until Collier’s feet hit ground and he adjusted his grip from her ribs to her waist. Her toes found rocks a moment later, and they staggered out together.
    They flopped down on the bank, Collier panting at her side. Her breath sawed painfully in and out of her lungs, and her entire body shivered with the certainty death had come calling. The sun beat down on them, but a breeze scattered goose bumps over her skin. She used her still-bound hands to sluice water from her face.
    She coughed and turned her head to spit muddy river water into the grass. “Is this where I get to tell you I told you so?” Her voice was raw and hoarse and her throat burned.
    After a long pause, he laughed, a rough, underused sound. “Yes. Yes, it most certainly is.”
    She tried to lift her head but it had suddenly become entirely too weighty for her neck. “Good…Glad you finally saw sense.”
    He sat up. Looming over her, his shadowy silhouette blocked out the sun. “Damn, Maggie, I’m sorry.”
    She wiped her shaky hands over her face. There was a small possibility that not all the water on her cheeks came from the river. She sniffled. “’S all right. All’s well that ends well, I suppose.”
    He ran a hand over his head, leaving tracks in hair darkened to brown by the water. “It’ll end well enough if we find the horses.”
    Another cough racked her. “As long as she’s not injured, Sandie won’t be far.”
    “Jameson as well.”
    She squinched her eyes against the corona of light surrounding him. “Jameson? Your horse is named Jameson?”
    He shrugged. “It seemed as good a name as any. I bought a bottle of Jameson and when I came round I’d apparently won him in a hand of poker. So it was either Jameson or Straight Flush.”
    Pushing to a seated position proved nigh on impossible. Her stomach muscles were too weak and she couldn’t use her hands after all. He grabbed her by the shoulders and helped her up.
    His black vest hung open, his shirt near transparent from its dousing. Every nook and cranny of his solid body became an enticing shadow of suggestion. His bottom ribs arched over a flat stomach bisected by muscle. The intimate view was shocking in a way that sent her insides fluttering and made her even more lightheaded.
    Her lungs took another tumble in her chest as she looked down at herself, afraid of what she’d find. But though her own shirt was see-through at the shoulders, her corset and chemise protected her from too much embarrassment. She plucked the sodden cloth away from her torso anyhow.
    “Between the two choices, Collier, I will grudgingly admit Jameson is the better selection.”
    “I think you can call me Dean by now. Especially considering what we just survived together.”
    She slanted a look at him though she kept her face turned down. The embarrassment she’d avoided a moment ago inexplicably assaulted her now, heating her cheeks and making her ears tingle. “Don’t you mean considering what you just put us through?”
    His mouth loosened into that near-smile he’d shown before and his eyes warmed from ice blue to something similar to the sky just after dawn. “Yes. What I just put us through. I’m a man who can accept when he’s wrong.”
    The first full-blown grin since this entire ordeal started spread across