should be doing, and he agreed to come down this morning . . . is it morning yet?” She felt as if so many hours had passed, first in boredom and then in terror, that it had to be close to dawn.
“Getting close to one o’clock,” Mike answered.
Was that all? She was aghast. Dawn was still hours away.
“Eastern standard, or daylight saving?” Olivia piped up, looking puzzled.
Mike stared at her, his mouth falling open. He gave Sela a helpless look. “I don’t know. What date is it? When does the time change?”
The conversation was surreal. Sela felt as if the world had slid a little bit out of whack, or maybe this was just their reaction to shock. “I don’t know.” And did it matter? They had nowhere to go, no planes to catch, no appointments to keep.
“It’s zero five forty-seven Zulu,” Ben said, returning in time to hear their exchange. He set down the tackle box he was carrying, and flipped open the latches.
Mike nodded. “That’s twelve forty-seven to us,” he told Olivia, who nodded. She was staring big-eyed at Ben as he tore open a pack and extracted an antiseptic wipe, then positioned himself so the headlights were shining on Sela’s face and began carefully cleaning away the blood.
Sela glanced up at him. Fewer than twelve hours ago she’d been doing basically the same thing to him, though admittedly the cut on his back was much worse than anything she had sustained from the flying glass. Her face was stinging a bit, but that was all. If she’d been judging her condition by Ben’s expression she’d have thought she was dying, because he looked savage—controlled, but savage. She could have cleaned her own face much faster because Ben was taking care not to hurt her; she wouldn’t have been as gentle with herself.
Trey Foster, Harley Johnson, Bob Terrell, and about ten other men were grouped around, anger in their voices as they talked quietly among themselves, glaring at the damage done to the store, to her. It didn’t matter that the store was currently empty and useless; one of their own had been attacked, and they took it personally. Likely they were feeling guilty because they hadn’t thought ahead and Sela and Olivia—a kid!—had literally been put in the line of fire. Mike went over to join them, leaving Ben and Sela relatively isolated, with Olivia watching.
“You’re hurt because of me,” Ben said under his breath. “Damn it all, I should have thought it through. Of course the bastards were going to come after the gas, knowing this was their only chance.”
“I didn’t think anyone would really try it,” she murmured, letting him tilt her face up to better examine a tiny cut on her cheek. “Especially since I parked on top of the access to the tanks. I thought that would be enough to signal people that someone was here.”
“Gasoline is worth the risk,” he said briefly.
He touched a place on her cheekbone that had her jerking away with a surprised “Ouch!”
“Still some glass in there. Hold still.” He bent and extracted a pair of long tweezers from the tackle box, then matter-of-factly seized the sliver of glass and pulled it out. She felt a fresh trickle of hot blood down her face, which he swabbed away before applying pressure to her cheekbone.
In a night of unbelievable happenings, perhaps the most unbelievable was that his touch soothed her ragged nerves to the point she stopped shaking, stopped feeling as if her next breath would be accompanied by a panic attack. The strangest thing was that while he was blaming himself because she was hurt he wasn’t acting as if she’d been out of her depth.
She would have said without hesitation that she’d been out of her depth and she never wanted to do anything like that again, but she’d managed. She hadn’t panicked, and her worst fears had been for Olivia. One thing for certain, she’d learned from the encounter. If she ever thought she might face armed men again, she would make sure she had a bigger rifle and better cover. So perhaps she’d been deeper than she liked, but she’d still managed to stay afloat.
Lord, she hoped she never had to do anything like that again.
He put small adhesive bandages over a couple of the worst cuts, the ones that wanted to keep bleeding. “Anywhere else?”