Crouched in the reeking kelp, she watched the doctor’s hands move quickly and confidently over the man’s body, following much the same path hers had taken so timidly a short while ago. “The only wound I could find is on his side, there-on the right,” she said when she was sure she could speak without squeaking.

Doc nodded brusquely and lifted one side of the sweatshirt Celia had spread across the man’s back. After a moment he muttered, as if to himself, “Okay…this appears to be a gunshot wound…small entrance, by the feel of it. Can’t seem to find the exit. Give me a hand here-I want you to help me roll him. Take his hips…just like that.”

Thrilled to be doing something helpful, Celia hitched forward, put her hands where the doctor told her to and braced herself.

“Okay, nice and easy now.” Taking the man by the shoulders he gently, carefully turned him. “That’s good. Great. Now, let’s see. Ah, yes. Here it is-see? Huh-damned odd place for an exit wound…”

Though she tried, Celia couldn’t see much of anything in the foggy darkness. She shivered, conscious for the first time of the chill and the damp, and the fact that she was wearing shorts and a sports bra and nothing else. Hugging herself to keep her teeth from chattering, she said, “How bad is it?”

The former doctor grunted and sat back on his heels. “Well, I suppose the good news is, it’s-as they say on television-a through-and-through. And, quite amazingly, the bullet-or whatever-doesn’t seem to have hit anything vital. On the other hand, he’s bound to have lost a good bit of blood, and floating around in the Pacific for God knows how long hasn’t done him any good, either. To put it in terms you’d understand, he’s weak from blood loss, suffering from hypothermia, probably in shock, any one of which ought to have killed him and still could. The man needs to be in a hospital, love. Now. Yesterday.” He lurched to his feet with another grunt and a groan. “You need to call-”

“No!” Celia was on her feet, too, reaching across the unconscious man’s body to clutch at the sleeve of the doctor’s robe. “No. I promised him. I promised. Look, we can-” She looked around wildly. “Okay. Here’s what we do. We carry him back to my place. You don’t have to do anything-just help me get him there, that’s all. I’ll…I’ll take full responsibility. You can show me what to do-you don’t have to touch him. Nobody will have to know-”

“Celia, darling. Sweetheart. I don’t know how to break this to you, but you’re not a doctor. Even if you did used to play one on TV.”

“A nurse,” Celia snapped. “I was a nurse, not a doctor.” Realizing that wasn’t exactly a plus, she added hurriedly, “Anyway, you said the bullet didn’t hit anything vital. Seems to me it ought to be pretty well cleaned out, after soaking in salt water for who knows how long. Salt’s good, right? And you can get me some bandages, can’t you? Some antibiotics?” She gripped his arm and shook it. “Come on, Doc-dammit, help me! Please.”

For a long five-count he continued to resist, swearing softly but vehemently. Then, shaking out of her grasp, muttering about the impossibility of saying no to a half-naked woman, he bent over and thrust his hands under the unconscious man’s shoulders. “All right-I know I’m going to regret this. But it’s for damn sure not doing him any good lying here whilst we argue about it. Don’t just stand there, pick up his feet.”

Celia hurried to comply, but discovered it was easier to say than do. Picking up his feet failed to raise the man’s butt so much as an inch off the sand. Finally, she managed to achieve her desired purpose by planting herself between his legs and hooking her arms just above the knees, then hoisting them up high enough to rest on the top curve of her hips.

“Good…Lord,” Doc gasped as they staggered back up the beach with their burden, “the guy’s heavy-must weigh one-eighty, at least.”

Celia, still trying to keep the middle third of the man’s body from dragging on the sand, had her jaws clenched tightly shut and didn’t reply. Clearly, carrying a grown man’s deadweight, even for two people, was a lot harder than they made it look on TV. She also decided she must have seriously underestimated the distance between her house and that pile of driftwood and kelp. Surely, no NFL team ever labored longer or harder to traverse a hundred yards of ground.

Still, somehow, after stopping several times on the way to grab, breathlessly cursing, at painful gulps of cold, astringent sea air, Celia caught sight of the carriage lanterns’ rusty glow through the fog. Doc, she noted, was wheezing alarmingly as he hitched himself backward up the steps leading to her deck.

“You okay?” she asked, gritting her teeth and sweating rivers in spite of the cold. “You know…it’s gonna kind of…defeat the purpose…if after all this…I have to…call 911…for you.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Doc grunted. “Just…wouldya try not to crack the guy’s backbone on these damn steps? Are you looking for a lawsuit?”

Celia snorted-and was appalled when the snort turned into laughter. Where that had come from, she had no idea-stress reaction, she supposed. Here she was carrying half of a man’s deadweight-oh, bad word choice, Celia!-in her arms, for God’s sake. A seriously wounded man, moreover, and God only knew how he’d gotten that way. What she really wanted to do right then was collapse on those steps and give in to a colossal fit of the shakes.

But, of course, she couldn’t. Wouldn’t. Not now. Not yet. She clamped her teeth together and set her jaw and from some unknown storehouse found strength to take one…more…step.

Then, miraculously, they were in Celia’s living room. In a half crouch, managing to maintain her hold on the man’s legs, she reached behind her to pull the sliding door shut, and all at once it was warm and dry and still. The surf thunder became a distant whisper beyond the glass and the fog.

“Where do you want him?” Doc’s question was a gasp.

Celia didn’t answer. The lights she’d left on in the room were low and soft, but they were enough to give her a good look, her first clear look, at what she’d been carrying so blithely, so casually. Something clenched inside her, and her body went cold from the inside out.

She whispered soundlessly, “Oh, my God…”

Out there in the dark and the fog, he’d been only…well, a body. A human being, obviously. A man, sure-but anonymous. Impersonal. Even not quite real. But now…oh God, now he had a face. An arresting face, even by the standards Celia was accustomed to-Hollywood standards-with strong bones and symmetrical features. Awake and healthy, she thought, he’d probably be a very handsome man. Though matted with sand, she could tell his hair was dark, and so was the beard stubble that covered his chin and jaws and nicely chiseled upper lip. Dark lashes made crescent shadows on his cheeks. She wondered what color his eyes would be.

The hair on his body was dark, too, and frosted with sand…clotted with sand that was mixed with something darker in two places-one low on his side, the other, larger and less evenly defined, high on his chest, above the bulge of pectoral muscle and below the collar bone. His skin must be deeply tanned, she thought, for his deathlike pallor to have turned it such a dreadful shade of gray.

He was a person. A badly hurt person. A person even she could see was in real danger of ceasing to be one, forever.

“Celia, love…” Doc prompted. There was a note of desperation in his voice.

She shook herself. “Yeah, well…I suppose…” She hesitated, chewing her lip while she tried to think. Dammit, there really was no choice. “My bedroom-”

“No way I’m climbing those stairs. Perhaps the couch? It’s going to be the floor, if you don’t make up your mind quick.”

“My bedroom’s downstairs,” Celia said shortly, nodding toward the hallway beyond the stairs. “The den-slash-guestroom’s upstairs now. I had to move after the accident.” Her lips twitched wryly. “Tough to climb stairs with two broken legs.”

“Ah. Yes. Right. Okay, fine. Lead the way.”

The doctor shuffled sideways, Celia changed places with him in a clumsy do-si-do, and together they managed to maneuver the unconscious and increasingly cumbersome body down the hallway and into the room that at one time had served her as an office, library, memorabilia storage closet and guest room. Now, the queen-size adjustable bed she’d had installed after the accident occupied a great deal of it, along with a comfortable leather armchair that had belonged to her father, a huge plasma screen TV set, and the bookcases and glass-fronted cabinets that held the things that were most precious to her-books and photographs, of course, her three Daytime Emmys, and the assortment of odds and ends, ranging from priceless to quaint to totally silly, sent or brought back to her from movie locations all over the world by her legendary parents. Only the desk and the computer, which she’d never used much anyway, had been banished.

Now, Celia hoisted her burden’s sagging midsection onto the armchair, draped his legs over the wide, curved arm and left Doc to hold up his half while she hurried to turn on lamps, remove the assortment of throw pillows and fold back the lavender velvet comforter that covered her bed.

Resisting a nervous and completely uncharacteristic housewifely impulse to tug and tuck and straighten, Celia turned and regarded the limp form draped across the chair. “I don’t know, do you think we should try to get some of the sand off of him first?” Now that the man was actually in her room, she was beginning to have serious doubts, cold-crawly-under-the-skin, lead-weight-in-the-stomach doubts, about what she’d just done.