Christmas Secrets Collection. Laura Iding

them. A very small clearing in the dense, never-ending forest—surely, that tiny cleared space was much too small for a landing.

      She said what she was thinking, “Oh, God, Dax. Too small, too small.”

      He didn’t answer. He was kind of busy. They hurtled toward the minuscule clearing as the wind and the rain tried to rip them apart.

       Her last thought before they reached the ground was, I guess I won’t be meeting Ramón Esquevar, after all.

      With a teeth-cracking bounce, they hit the ground. Dax couldn’t keep the nose up. The propeller dug into the soggy, black earth. It dug and held, the engine screaming. Huge clods of dirt were flying everywhere.

      And the plane was spinning, spinning, the jungle that rimmed the clearing whizzing by in a circle, so fast she thought she might throw up. She heard cracking, shattering sounds. Something hit the back of her seat hard enough to force all the breath from her lungs. And then something bopped her on the back of the head.

      She cried out. And then she sighed.

      As blackness rolled over her, she knew it was the end.

       Chapter Five

      “Zoe? Zoe, wake up.” A hand slapped her cheek lightly. A delicate sting.

      And her head hurt like crazy. She groaned, reached back, felt wetness. She opened her eyes, brought her hand in front of her face. Blood, but not much. She reached back a second time, probed the injury carefully. Already a goose egg was rising.

      Goose eggs were good, she’d read somewhere, hadn’t she? If the swelling was on the outside, you were less likely to end up with a subdural hematoma, which could be bad. Very, very bad.

      “Zoe?”

      She blinked. Dax was craning toward her from the other seat. He’d taken off his headphones and his chest was bare. He held his shirt to his forehead, on the left side. The shirt was soaked through with blood.

      “Thank God,” he said. “Zoe.”

      “We’re not dead.” She spoke in awe. It was a miracle. Impossible. And yet, somehow, true.

      Dax retreated to his seat, tipped his head back and shut his eyes. He still held the bloody shirt to his head. Really, he didn’t look so good. She realized he needed help. And she was just sitting there …

      Blinking away the last of her dizziness, she went for the latch on her seat restraint. For a moment, she thought it was jammed, that somehow, in the landing, which had turned out to be something of a crash, it had been broken and stuck shut.

      Panic tried to rise. She bit the inside of her cheek, focused on the sharp little pain, and worked at the latch some more.

      A second later, it popped open.

      She was out of the seat and ripping off her white shirt without even stopping to think about it. She wadded the cotton fabric into a ball and crouched over his seat. “Dax.” She caught his chin with one hand. “Let me see …”

      He lowered his hand and she saw the deep gash at his temple—the really deep gash. Beneath all that blood, she could see the ivory luster of bone.

      And the blood? It was still flowing, lots of it, pulsing from the wound in great gouts. It ran down the side of his face, into his eyes.

      “Here. Use this.” She gave him her own shirt.

      He dropped the blood-soaked one and put hers over the wound. Through the blood in his eyes, he looked at her in her bra and shorts. A corner of his mouth twitched in the faint hope of a smile. “I’ve got you with your shirt off, and I’m bleeding too hard to do a damn thing about it.”

      “I need a first aid kit.”

      “In the floor compartment behind your seat.” He held her shirt to his head, but it was already soaking through, turning a bold, bright crimson.

      “Keep the pressure on that. Good and firm.”

      “Right.” He did as she instructed without a word of complaint, without giving her any argument. It was so unlike him to be docile. And that terrified her, brought the reality of their situation too sharply home.

      The fuselage, amazingly, remained intact. They were reasonably safe inside. But outside the battered plane, the rain kept on coming, in buckets. Lightning flashed and thunder rumbled. The windscreen was a thick, pearly spiderweb of cracks, obscuring the world beyond. And the window in Dax’s door was the same, but with a small jagged hole punched clean through it—just possibly caused by whatever had sliced his forehead open.

      However, she could see well enough out the window in her door. Too bad visibility past the window was poor. Nothing but sheets of rain and, indistinctly, a wall of green where the jungle started.

       Not now. Don’t think about what’s out there now….

      She squeezed between the seats and had to spend several precious seconds tossing supplies, suitcases and equipment back toward the baggage area. Water bottles were scattered everywhere, broken loose from the case of them they’d brought along, rolling around on the floor. But finally, she got the area cleared. She was able to get the compartment open and take out a large, black canvas-covered bag with a white cross printed on the front.

      “How you doing back there?” Dax asked. “Need help?”

      “I’m on it. Just stay in your seat and keep the pressure on that wound.” She cleared a space on one of the backseats and zipped the bag open. It was a really good kit—way beyond the basics. More like something a paramedic might carry. It even contained the necessary tools for sewing up a man’s head.

      I can do this. I took first aid. And then there was that survivalist training weekend she’d gone on once in her ongoing effort to prove to her dad that she was as good as any of the boys. They’d taught her how to stitch up a wound over that weekend. She remembered thinking at the time that she would never need to use that particular skill …

      She sucked in a breath—and shook her head, hard. No. No negative thoughts could be allowed to creep in. She knew what she needed to do. And she knew how to do it.

      Grabbing the kit, she scrambled between the front seats again. When she got up there, she set the kit, open, on the passenger side.

      “Zoe?” He sounded worried.

      “I’m right here. Keep the pressure against the wound. I know what I’m doing.”

      He made a low sound. A chuckle—or a groan? “Of course you do.”

      She smiled at that. Even now, with a gash the size of Texas on his forehead, he could manage to both tease and reassure her at the same time. She found the butterfly bandages and gazed at them longingly. If only they would do the trick.

      But the wound was too deep. Maybe they could help to hold the edges together while she stitched him up.

      She still wore her fake engagement ring. During the crash, the stone had scratched up the fingers to either side of it. She was clearly the lucky one. A few bruises, some scratches. A goose egg on the back of her head. No gash so deep the bone showed—and really, they were both lucky.

      Lucky simply to be alive and in one piece. She had to remember that.

      She yanked off the silly ring and shoved it into a pocket of her shorts. Then she rubbed disinfectant on her hands and laid out what she was going to need: the butterfly strips, tweezers, more disinfectant, sterile gloves, absorbable thread, scissors, the creepy little curved needle, the dressing she would use after, along with a tube of antibiotic ointment—and extra gauze. There was nothing to dull the pain of what she was about to do to him. Nothing stronger than acetaminophen—wait.

      There was codeine. She almost kissed the little bottle