My Heart Stopped When I Saw Her Trapped On The Flooding Sands — What Happened Next Changed Me Forever

Part 2

My fingers locked around her fragile wrist like an unbreakable manacle of solid iron.

I did not give her a chance to slip, hesitate, or second-guess the violent movement.

I planted my boots firmly in the stirrups and hauled backward with one tremendous, desperate heave of my entire body.

I dragged her clean out of the freezing, dragging water and pulled her directly across the front of my saddle.

Her sodden, heavy pale skirts streamed gallons of freezing seawater over my boots and the horse’s flanks.

Her freezing cheek pressed hard against the rough wet wool of my heavy riding coat.

I wheeled the exhausted gray horse around immediately before the current could sweep his legs out from under him.

The brave animal, finally freed from fighting the absolute deepest part of the deadly channel, found solid footing on a hidden, shifting sandbar.

He lunged desperately forward, throwing his massive weight toward the distant, hazy line of the shore.

The dark brown water chased us all the way back, licking greedily at his hooves like a starving, frustrated animal.

We rode out of the rising tide just as the deepest channels flooded completely, turning the flats into a violent sea.

I kept the shivering, half-drowned woman clutched fiercely against my chest, shielding her from the biting wind.

I did not loosen my tight arm from around her slender waist by so much as a single inch.

Finally, the gray’s iron horseshoes struck the firm, dry shingle at the absolute foot of the stone seawall.

The screaming boy who had first raised the alarm was openly weeping now, wiping tears from his dirt-streaked face.

A knot of anxious fisherfolk had gathered on the wet stones, raising a ragged, breathless cheer as we miraculously broke through the breaking surf.

Someone ran blindly up the dirt road toward the village to fetch dry blankets and hot tea.

I paid the gathering crowd absolutely no heed whatsoever.

I swung down from the exhausted, panting horse with her still secured tightly against my chest.

She could not have stood on her own even if she had desperately tried.

I carried her straight up the steep, wet stone slipway without breaking my stride.

The entire village knew my face as the brooding, forbidding local landowner who kept entirely to himself and rejected all company.

They had never seen me let anyone near my sprawling, lonely estate on the hill.

But right now, my face was bent over hers in a soft, fierce way no one had ever witnessed before.

“You are safe,” I murmured to her low and steady, repeating it over and over like a protective, desperate prayer.

“You are safe.

I have you.

You are completely safe.”

She was shaking too violently from the bone-deep cold to formulate any kind of verbal answer.

But her frozen fingers had not let go of the front lapels of my soaked coat, and I had not asked her to.

I carried her all the way up the steep hill to my great, empty house overlooking the treacherous estuary.

I stood dripping in the grand hallway, watching the worried servants wrap her in thick wool blankets before the roaring hearth fire.

Would the water ever truly release its hold on me, or had I only borrowed her from the tide?