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That isn’t an answer. I open my mouth to tell him so, but a scream from outside cuts me off.

Holt leaves before I can even turn around.

Down at the creek, a tour group in matching visors clusters by the wooden fence that runs along the bank. A woman is clutching the top rail, her face white.

The creek is running high and fast and muddy brown, the way water looks after a big storm upstream. A branch in the current has caught a little yellow boot.

“Molly!” the woman screams. “Molly!”

A little girl, maybe five, is in the water past the fence. She must have slipped through the gap beneath the bottom rail to see the ducks. The current tumbles her once, and her head goes under.

Holt doesn’t slow down. He vaults the fence one-handed and goes straight into the creek. The water surges up around his thighs, and it doesn’t even rock him. He scoops Molly out, one huge hand under her back and the other cradling her head, and carries her up the bank to her mother in four long strides.

I grab the radio Prue just gave me and thumb it to channel two. “Prue, it’s Wren. Child in the creek at the visitor center. She’s out. We need the medics.”

“On it,” Prue says.

I herd the tour group back and grab the first-aid pack by the door. By the time I reach Holt, he’s kneeling on the grass with Molly in his arms, soaked to the waist. Even on his knees, he’s eye level with her mother.

“Hey, Molly. Look at me,” he says, low and calm. “That’s it. Keep going. Get it all out. I’ve got you.”

She coughs up half the creek and cries, which I’m pretty sure is a good sign. He checks her breathing and her pulse and asks where it hurts, fast, without ever seeming rushed. Those hands are the size of dinner plates, and he handles her like she’s spun sugar.

I pass him a dry fleece and a foil blanket. He wraps her up without looking away from her face.

Molly peers up at him from inside the fleece. “You have big teeth.”

“I do,” he says, very serious.

“I like them.”

His mouth seals over his tusks.

The medic truck crunches up the gravel a minute later. Holt hands over to the medics, then stands and steps aside. Molly’s mother grabs his wrist with both hands. “Thank you. Thank you, I didn’t even see her go under.”

“She’s okay,” he says gently and eases his arm free. “That’s all that matters.”

Now that the drama’s over, the tour group drifts closer to get a better look at him. Phones come out. Right behind me, a man grabs his friend’s sleeve and whispers, “Deb, it’s a real one.”

I hear it, and from the way Holt’s ears flatten against his head, so does he. He steps back off the path into the ferns, drops his shoulders, and turns his face away, like he’s trying to fold himself into a smaller shape. He can’t, of course. Then he walks up the bank, dripping, like he just took out the trash.

I stand there with the empty first-aid pack. If he’d been ten seconds slower… I don’t let myself finish that thought. He saved that little girl’s life, and then he got stared at like a zoo exhibit for his trouble.

I know that move. I did it in the mirror this morning with my concealer and my bun. I spent seven years in a band, the last six months toning down my look for our label, so I know how it feels to make yourself smaller so other people are comfortable.

That might be my chance to get close to him. We have more in common than he thinks.

And those hands? I have deeply unprofessional thoughts about those hands. Focus, Nicholls.

I catch up with him at the trail junction. “Holt.”

He stops and looks back.

“That was incredible,” I say. “You didn’t wait for anyone to thank you.”

“Didn’t need it.”

“Well, thank you anyway.” I tuck a strand of purple hair behind my ear. “For the record, those tourists weren’t only staring at you. Most people need ten minutes before they decide I’m alarming. You beat me by nine.”