Pursuit by Elizabeth Jennings Page A

it come more sharply into focus.
    Matt looked down at the woman in his arms.
    She is so fucking beautiful.
    Her hair was matted, lying in clumps that were still slightly wet with the ocean’s salt water, looking darker than usual because of the damp. Matt knew that once it dried, her hair would return to the silvery platinum that looked like moonlight in the sun. She was still very pale, though not that terrifying bloodless wax color she’d had when he’d fished her out of the water. Her soft lips were slightly rosy now, not a cyanotic blue. The cartilage of the nostrils was no longer pinched and transparent. For a heart-stopping, horrifying moment on the sand, he’d thought she’d died. She looked almost normal now, tired and wrung out, to be sure, but normal.
    Matt studied her features, though he didn’t really need to. By now her face was hardwired into his brain, he’d thought and dreamed of her so much.
    He’d never been this close to her before, able simply to look his fill. He’d never held such a beautiful woman in his arms. Anyone who looked like that was in the movies or already married, usually to some rich guy who could afford the best. A woman like Charlotte was completely unavailable to someone like him. Most women had physical flaws; they were only human, after all. Makeup and hair covered a lot of defects. Once a woman was even just a little over on the pretty side of the scale from absolute dog to gorgeous, she used those mysterious arts women were somehow born with to fluster the eye and make you think she was even more beautiful than she was. He’d woken up many a time next to a woman who’d seemed like a looker in the darkness of a bar simply because she’d acted like one, only to find out in the morning that the looks were tricks of light and makeup and behavior.
    No tricks here, none at all. Charlotte didn’t have any makeup on and from what he’d seen in her bathroom, didn’t even seem to own any except a lone tube of lipstick. She didn’t dress to allure, and she wasn’t a flirt.
    Her beauty was all hers: fine features, good bones, perfect skin. Nothing short of death could wipe it out.
    Death. Matt frowned. She’d come pretty close to it twice. She’d have drowned this afternoon if he hadn’t got to her in time. And the bullet wound—pure blind luck there. An inch to the left and it would have shattered her shoulder bone, an inch to the right would have nicked the aorta, causing her to bleed out in about four minutes. Any lower, and the bullet could have pierced the heart, which would have dropped her stone dead. Like him, she’d cheated death.
    If she had died of her bullet wound, had been in the cold ground for months, would he even be here today?
    Maybe not.
    Matt thought about it long and hard in the quiet of the night, while she lay in his arms, fast asleep, breathing so lightly the blanket didn’t move.
    He had been so sick at heart the day he’d arrived in San Luis. He hadn’t died in Afghanistan, and he hadn’t died in the hospital. He’d fought to live with every cell of his being, with every painful breath he took. He’d fought death as if it were his personal enemy, throwing everything he had at it, unwilling to concede defeat. But that day, the day he’d arrived in San Luis, he’d seriously considered swimming out to sea, as far as his strength could carry him, knowing he could have no hope of swimming back. He loved the ocean, always had, and it was fitting that he would simply let the ocean take him. For the first time in his life Matt had contemplated suicide that day. Just ending it. It wouldn’t have been hard at all.
    Not even in the hospital had Matt lost hope. Every day had brought a small, minor victory, one step at a time away from death until he was finally released.
    Being away from the hospital environment for the first time had scared the shit out of him. Hospitals were prosthetic environments, designed to make up for what the human body had