Heroes are My Weakness by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Author:Susan Elizabeth Phillips [Phillips, Susan Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Romance, Contemporary, General, Contemporary Women
ISBN: 9780062106117
Google: Od9uAwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00H7LT5II
Publisher: William Morrow
Published: 2014-08-26T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

THEO STEADIED HIMSELF AS A monster wave crashed over the bow of the Val Jane. He’d grown up on sailboats and been out on more than a few lobster boats. He’d experienced summer squalls, but never anything like this. The big fiberglass hull pitched into another trough, and an exhilarating rush of adrenaline surged through him. For the first time in what seemed like forever, he felt totally alive.

The lobster boat reared up on the swell, hung there for a moment, then plunged again. Even in the boat’s heavy orange Grundens foul weather gear, he was bone-deep cold. Salt water trickled down his neck, and every exposed patch of his skin was wet and numb, but the shelter of the pilothouse didn’t tempt him. He wanted to live this. Gulp it in. Sop it up. He needed this pump of his pulses, this rip of his senses.

Another mass of water towered before them. The Coast Guard had radioed that the missing fishing trawler, the Shamrock, had lost power after its engine flooded, and that there were two men aboard. Neither would last long if they were in the water, not with these frigid ocean temperatures. Even survival suits wouldn’t protect them. Theo mentally reviewed everything he knew about treating hypothermia.

He’d backed into EMT training while he was researching The Sanitarium. The idea of being able to work in crisis situations stimulated his writer’s imagination and eased his growing sense of suffocation. He’d begun his training over Kenley’s objections.

“You need to spend your time with me!”

After he was certified, he’d volunteered to work in Philly’s Center City, where he’d dealt with everything from tourists’ broken bones and joggers’ heart attacks to inline skating injuries and dog bites. He’d driven to New York during the hurricane that had hit the city so hard to help evacuate Manhattan’s VA hospital and a Queens nursing home. One thing he’d never done, though, was treat men who’d been fished out of the North Atlantic in the dead of winter. He hoped that it wasn’t already too late.

The Val Jane came upon the Shamrock suddenly. The trawler was barely afloat, listing heavily toward starboard and pitching on the ocean like an empty plastic water bottle. One man clung to the gunwale. Theo couldn’t see the other.

He heard the grind of the diesel engine as Ed worked the Val Jane closer, even as the powerful waves tried to drive the boats apart. Darren and Jim Garcia, the other crew member Ed had chosen for tonight’s mission, struggled on the icy deck in their efforts to secure the sinking fishing trawler to the Val Jane. Like Theo, they both wore life jackets over their foul weather gear.

Theo caught sight of the panicked face of the man barely holding on to the gunwale, then glimpsed a second crewmember, who was motionless and tangled in the lines. Darren was beginning to tie a safety line around his own waist so he could board the sinking boat. Theo scrambled toward him and pulled the line away.

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