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“Pardon?”
“Open your legs.”
“How much brandy have you had, Mr. Landry?”
“Do it.”
“Why?”
“So I can get mine between them.”
Without giving her another chance to argue, he slid his hand between her thighs and raised her injured leg. He wedged his knees between hers, then gently lowered her right leg to rest on top of his. “There. Keeping it elevated will help relieve the pressure. It’ll also keep me from jostling it in the night.”
She was too flabbergasted to fall back to sleep immediately; too uncomfortably aware of his nearness. And there was something else keeping her awake: a nagging guilt.
“Cooper, did you know any of the other men?”
“Those on board the plane? No.”
“The men in the front two seats were brothers. While we were weighing our luggage, I heard them talking about getting their families together for Thanksgiving in a few weeks. They were going to show them the slides they’d taken this week.”
“Don’t think about it.”
“I can’t help it.”
“Yes, you can.”
“No, I can’t. I keep asking myself why I’m alive. Why was I allowed to live? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“It doesn’t have to make sense,” he said bitterly. “That’s just the way it is. It was their time, that’s all. It’s over, forgotten.”
“Not forgotten.”
“Force it out of your mind.”
“Is that what you did?”
“Yes.”
She shuddered. “How can you be so unfeeling about another human life?”
“Practice.”
The word affected her like a hard slap on the cheek. It had been cruelly delivered to shut her up, and it did. But it didn’t stop her from thinking. She wondered how many of his buddies Cooper
had seen killed in Vietnam. Dozens? Scores? Hundreds? Still, she couldn’t imagine ever becoming inured to death.
She’d had practice dealing with it, but not to the extent that he apparently had. It wasn’t something she could block out, dismiss, by an act of will. When she thought about her losses, she still ached.
“My mother died of a stroke,” she told him quietly. “Her death was almost a relief. She would have been severely incapacitated. I had a week to prepare myself for it. But my brother’s death was sudden.” Cooper wouldn’t care to hear about any of this, but she wanted to talk about it.
“Brother?”
“Jeff. He was killed in a car wreck two years ago.”
“No other family?”
“Only my father.” She drew a gentle breath. “He was the man I was with at the lodge. The one I said goodbye to. Not a sugar daddy. Not a lover. My father.”
