“Is this your way of convincing me to accept your help?”

“You don’t need convincing. I’ll give you this. You’re the first blind person I know who would willingly walk into the wilderness with no idea of where she was going. I can’t decide if that makes you brave or an idiot. I’ll get back to you on that.”

“Don’t bother. I was fine.”

“You were lucky. You could have fallen and cracked open your head or been bitten by a snake.”

“I would have preferred a snake to you.”

She heard him get off his saddle.

“Now you’re just talking sweet to make me like you,” Nick said. “Here.”

He handed her a bottle of water. She took it and un-screwed the top. The liquid was cool and sweet on her dry throat.

“I wouldn’t drink too much of that all at once,” he told her.

She ignored him and kept drinking. She finally stopped, took a step, then bent over and threw it all up. Her insides twisted, forcing her to retch and gag. She coughed and did her best to catch her breath.

“Not the brightest bulb,” he murmured.

“Shut up,” she said with a gasp.

“Drink it slow and this time it’ll stay down.”

Humiliation joined the heat of the sunburn. She sipped cautiously.

“See?”

He sounded smug, which made her want to hit him. But she’d already tried that and it hadn’t worked at all.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you back.” He took her free hand and led her over to his horse. “I’ll get on and pull you up behind me.”

“Or you could walk and I’ll ride.”

“Do you think that will happen?”

She saw blurry movement, then heard him settle in the saddle.

“Give me the water,” he said.

She passed it up to him, then found the stirrup with her hands and put her left foot in it. He grabbed her arm.

“One, two, three.”

On three, he pulled her as she pushed off the ground. For a second, there was an uncomfortable sensation of moving through nothing, then she settled behind his saddle, on the horse’s rump. He pressed her bottle of water into her hand.