A Billionaire's Redemption - By Cindy Dees Page 0,75
bare hands, he ripped away the remaining bits of glass.
His heart stopped as he glimpsed Willa. She was as white as a ghost and slumped in her seat belt like a rag doll. Oh, God. He lunged forward, reaching for her throat. Have a pulse. Have a pulse. Have a pulse.
There. A faint bump against his fingertip under her skin. Alive!
He put his weight on the edge of the window frame to reach for the seat belt release and the entire car lurched ominously. He froze, swearing. The trees that her car rested upon were perilously small saplings, and they were bent over badly under the weight of the car. He noted with dread that there were no more trees beyond them. The cliff dropped off more sharply beyond this one spot that the tree roots held tenuously in place.
He eased his weight more gently onto the car frame and the trees creaked ominously. Swearing, he reached under Willa for her seat belt. It was twisted, and with her entire body weight resting on it, not about to release. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his trusty Swiss Army knife. Opening the main blade quickly, he sawed at the nylon webbing holding Willa in place.
While he did so, he visually checked her for obvious wounds or broken bones. There was a fair bit of dried blood on her face, but he’d seen enough facial cuts around the oil rigs to know they bled a lot. None of her limbs looked to be lying unnaturally, or bent where they shouldn’t be. Internal injuries would be the real killer, of course. But a tiny spark of hope lit in his gut.
The seat belt gave way all at once and Willa nearly fell out the passenger window before he could grab her under the armpits. The car jerked hard and one of the saplings snapped in half. Crap. With that tree gone, it would throw all that much more weight on the remaining trees. They could all fail at any second.
He backed out of the car fast, relieved to get his weight on the ground, as steep and slippery as it was. He dragged Willa awkwardly through the windshield. Her shirt tore on a piece of metal and the loud tearing sound startled him.
She stirred faintly, and flapped her arms feebly. He nearly lost his grip on her as the car lurched again, the sapling under the engine cracking and giving way in slow motion.
Crap, crap, crap. Sitting on his rear end on the steep slope, he dragged Willa up and over the engine block of her ruined car. Another sapling gave way with a loud, sudden crack like a gunshot.
Hugging Willa against him, he lay down entirely, her body on top of his. He was able to let go of her long enough to lash the rope around her, looping it under her armpits in a makeshift navy loop. The car shifted beside them, rolling slowly onto its roof as branches snapped one by one in a stately progression toward oblivion.
He pushed against the loose shale with his heels, moving himself and Willa a few inches up the steep slope. Again. A few more inches. He grabbed the rope above Willa’s head with one hand and heaved hard as he pushed with his feet. That gained them a full foot. The car flipped over quickly below them then. It rolled from its roof onto the passenger side, perched there for a breathless moment, and then plunged over the edge, swallowed by the yawning abyss below.
Crashing noises followed by ominous silence marked the end of Willa’s car. The cliff loomed above them, and only a thin length of nylon stood between the two of them and the same fate as her car.
It was a tortuously slow journey up the cliff. Stones rolled out from under his feet and dug into his back painfully as he made his way back up the slope with Willa sprawled on top of him. His arms ached, then burned like fire, then went numb and heavy under the strain of hauling both of them up the mountain, inch by agonizing inch.
It gave him plenty of time to think about what would have happened to her if he hadn’t come back to look for her again. Plenty of time to ponder his life without Willa, with only a hole in his heart where she used to live. Plenty of time to make peace with the fact