Kitabı oku: «Resisting Her Commander Hero»

CHAPTER ONE

“LOWER THE BASKET!” yelled paramedic Francis Abigail Bryce into her headset over the whop-whop-whop of the helicopter hovering a hundred feet overhead. Wind and rain lashed at the ledge on which she was crouched, shielding the fallen climber.

If she slipped it was a long way down and probably wouldn’t end well. It wasn’t exactly how she’d envisioned spending her Friday evening but when word had come through from the rangers’ station earlier that a climber had fallen, Frankie had been dispatched to the scene.

Further up the coast from the large seaside town of Port St. John’s on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state, heavy rains had caused a huge landslide and rescue teams were busy digging out survivors. With the storm wreaking havoc on the Juan de Fuca Strait, rescue personnel were stretched to the limit.

Frankie had returned with a few of the injured and then been the lucky candidate in the wrong place at the wrong darn time. Now, instead of providing emergency medical care at the site of the slide, she was clinging to a slick ledge only a few feet wide and a couple hundred feet from certain death because a group had thought it smart to go climbing in torrential rain.

She looked down into the guy’s youthful face and shook her head. Probably a student on spring break, she thought. EMTs were always busy this time of the year, rescuing kids from their own ambitions.

“Hang in there, handsome,” she yelled, aware that in the fifteen minutes she’d been there, he’d been slipping in and out of consciousness. She suspected a ruptured spleen and she’d already wrapped his leg in an inflatable compression cast.

Concerned about what was taking so long, Frankie looked up as a deep voice in her ear warned, “Heads up,” and the next instant a large figure dropped onto the ledge. Dressed in a red and black jumpsuit and wearing a half-face helmet with comms mouthpiece, he looked like a huge bug from an alien world.

Frankie didn’t need to see his eyes to know who it was. The hard, masculine jaw and the unsmiling line of his sensual mouth would have been a dead giveaway even if the hair on the back of her neck hadn’t stood up like a freaked-out cat.

Nathan Oliver. The man who’d been back for months without at least letting her know he was home.

What the hell was he doing here? Wasn’t he some super-secret commander of the Maritime Security Response Team or something? Unless her patient was a terrorist, or a foreign national in the country illegally—which Frankie doubted—she was pretty sure a member of the nation’s deployable operations group stationed at Port St. John’s wouldn’t normally be part of search and rescue.

Then again, maybe the landslide and current conditions in the strait had put all coasties on call, including the MSRT. And, yeah, wasn’t it just peachy that he had to be the one dropping from the sky?

Unhooking his line from the chopper, he gave a couple of hand signals to the pilot above before his safety line disappeared into the lashing rain.

With her heart in her throat, Frankie ruthlessly squelched the urge to reach out and grab him before rotor wash blew him off the ledge. Or maybe before she gave him a little shove over the edge herself.

Okay, fine, so maybe she was tempted for about a nanosecond, but even though Nathan Oliver was the last person she wanted to see, she didn’t want him to die either.

They’d meant too much to each other—once.

Besides, balanced on the rocky ledge and sure-footed and powerful as a mountain lion, Nate was more than capable of rescuing them both. He’d been a Navy SEAL before transferring to the Pacific North West unit of the US Coast Guard as Lieutenant Commander of the MSRT. Granted, the present conditions probably weren’t the worst he’d experienced, but even he couldn’t walk up sheer cliffs in this weather.

He dropped to his haunches beside her and she felt the sweep of his penetrating gaze. The resultant shiver, she told herself, was from being soaked through and freezing. It couldn’t be that he still affected her.

That ship had sailed a lifetime ago and Frankie didn’t make a habit of repeating her mistakes. Especially the very public ones that had devastated not only her pride but also her heart.

She saw his mouth form words that looked like, “You okay?”

But instead of replying, she yelled, “Where’s the basket? He’s going into shock.”

He pointed skyward and she looked up to see the rescue litter swinging wildly in the gusting wind as it descended toward them. Nate barked out an order to the chopper and the pilot edged closer to the cliff face. But instead of controlling the swing, it caused the litter to spin.

He rose to his feet in one smooth move and stretched out a long arm to snag it. Almost in slow motion, Frankie watched as it abruptly shifted in the wind. She opened her mouth to yell a warning as the medevac litter flew through the air toward him.

He saw it coming too late to get out the way and it clipped him on the side of his helmet, sending him staggering backward toward the edge.

Time slowed and stretched, narrowing into an endless tunnel of pure horror as Nate fought to regain his balance. Then his foot slipped and in that split second before he went over, his gaze caught and held hers.

In that timeless instant, all the wild conflicting emotions she’d managed to suppress for twelve long years exploded through her, blinding her to everything but him.

Everything but the need to keep him from disappearing from her life forever. And before she realized she was moving, Frankie rose and leapt for him in one desperate move.

She reacted. As she always did.

Fear gave her strength and speed and before she could even process her actions, her icy fingers closed around his harness. Her momentum sent her thudding into him and Frankie wrapped her legs around him like a vice as they shot off the ledge.

Through the frantic yelling in the comms, she heard him curse as his arms enveloped her like banded steel. Her line went slack and for one awful moment she thought they were headed for the bottom of the gorge. She sucked in a breath, tightened her grip and pressed her face into Nate’s throat, thinking stupidly that maybe it wasn’t such a bad way to go.

Wrapped around his big tough body and with his uniquely potent masculine scent filling her lungs, Frankie could think of a dozen worse places to be.

It was the closest she’d been to him in twelve years. The closest she’d been since the night of her eighteenth birthday, the night he’d completely humiliated her in front of half the town.

He’d been around forever and as well as she’d thought she’d known him, she couldn’t have known how much he’d changed or that he’d lost friends on his last mission. He’d looked the same—although bigger, harder and fitter—and acted the same as the boy she’d known her whole life. And if she’d noticed the closed-off expression in his eyes, the tight line of his mouth and jaw that night, she’d put it down to typical male arrogance and the fact that he was a member of the nation’s elite fighting force, mixing with a bunch of wild immature teenagers all because she’d begged him to come to her party.

She should have known better than to try to measure up to all the women in his life. To him she’d always just been his best friend’s kid sister; wild, reckless—always wanting to tag along.

Besides, she’d never measured up, to him or to her brother Jack. At least not in her parents’ eyes. Jack had been their golden child and Nate, popular, sporty and incredibly smart, was like their second son. They’d excelled at everything and it had been daunting, living in their shadow.

The birthday incident had been humiliating and she’d said things that filled her with guilt and shame whenever she thought about them. She’d lost him that day...and then seven years later she’d lost Jack in a mortar attack.

Her champions. Her own personal superheroes.

Frankie’s heart squeezed. And now she and Nate were heading for the bottom of the gorge and she’d never get the chance to prove that she’d—

The safety line abruptly snapped taut, halting their graceful pendulum arc into empty space; halting the wild, regretful thoughts flashing through Frankie’s mind. The next instant they were headed straight for the unforgiving rocky surface of the cliff face.

She tensed, because this was going to hurt.

Nate tried to turn, probably to take the brunt of the impact, but Frankie was attached to the safety line and the collision was hard enough to force the air from her lungs...and Nate’s big warm muscular body between her thighs.

Stars exploded behind her eyes. Whether they were from the jolt to her skull or his hard, tough body, Frankie wasn’t sure. But it was enough to rattle loose her good sense and cause some seriously inappropriate thoughts to flash through her mind, sending heat exploding through her body.

Nate Oliver was still the hottest man she’d ever known. The kind of hot that made women think inappropriate thoughts even while dangling hundreds of feet in the air by a slender nylon rope, and one wrong move away from falling to their deaths.

“Don’t look down,” he ordered. “And for God’s sake don’t let go. Not yet.”

Of course Frankie didn’t listen. Craning her neck, she looked down and then promptly wished she hadn’t when a distressed squeak escaped without permission. All she could see beneath her was a dark cold emptiness. Vertigo abruptly clamped queasy fingers around her throat and her belly churned.

“Dammit, Frankie,” Nate growled in her ear. “I said don’t look down.”

She wanted to tell him that he wasn’t the boss of her but her breath was lodged in her throat and she could only gasp.

Oh, God. How mortifying. Inside, Fearless Frankie—Port St. John’s former wild child—was freaking out.

“I’m going to let you go,” Nate said calmly, and it took a couple of beats for his words to register.

When they did, she snapped, “No!” and tightened her grip on him. No way was he letting go.

“Just enough to free my hands and feet,” he explained quietly. “Then I’m going to crab-walk us to the ledge. Okay?”

She wanted to say no, but she knew it would take a little strain off the safety line and keep it from shearing off on the rocky outcroppings.

She really, really didn’t want that to happen.

She looked up at the suspended medevac litter, which was now hanging motionless a few feet to her left.

Go figure.

Gritting her teeth, she nodded jerkily, tightening her grip on Nate’s harness. Her thighs clenched around him until they ached, and all she could think was, Thank God for all those squats and lunges I’ve been doing lately.

“Good girl,” he murmured, and she wanted to snort because she was about as far from being a good girl as they were from the ground. He eased his grip until all that kept him from succumbing to the law of gravity were her arms and legs.

He murmured into his comms and then with his feet planted flat against the cliff face, he began to move them toward the ledge.

It couldn’t have been more than a minute since Frankie’s spectacular leap off the edge but her muscles had begun to shake and she didn’t know how much longer she’d be able to hold on.

Beneath Nate’s jumpsuit, muscles bunched and flexed, giving her a few more inappropriate thoughts. Thoughts that might have freaked her out if she hadn’t been closer to death than she liked. Frankly, in the circumstances, she figured she was allowed.

Besides, it had been so long since she’d had inappropriate thoughts of any kind that she might as well enjoy them. They were the closest she’d had to actual sex in forever.

Finally, the tension on her harness lessened and Nate straightened, big feet planted shoulder width apart.

After a couple of beats he said, “You can let go now, Francis,” the dry tone as much as his use of the hated name bringing her head up. The first thing she saw was his mouth, beautifully sculpted and much too tempting.

Tearing her gaze away, she looked up into eyes as dark and fathomless as the death they’d just escaped. Sometime in the past couple of minutes—probably while she’d been having those hot thoughts—he’d lifted his visor and the warmth in his usually unreadable gaze stunned her.

“You okay?” His mouth was barely an inch away and all it would take was one tiny move from her and—

Spooked, Frankie flashed a quick look to the left and saw they were once more on the ledge. Her patient, wrapped in a silver emergency blanket, was a few feet away, waiting for her to get her act together.

“I’m fine,” she croaked, her throat desert dry and tight with tension while adrenaline still pumped through her at their near disaster.

Eager to put a little distance between them, Frankie released the stranglehold she had on him and slid to the ground until all that connected them were her fingers still locked on his harness.

“Francis.”

She opened her mouth in a snarled protest but it gave her the impetus she needed to let him go. She might have pushed away from him if they hadn’t been perched on a narrow, slick ledge and she hadn’t just taken a decade off her life with that one daring leap.

“You good?” he asked again, ducking his head to look into her eyes. He must have been reassured because he didn’t wait for her to reply. “Help me secure the PEP so we can get off this ledge.”

Frankie shook her head even though she knew he meant the patient extrication platform. Sucking in a shaky breath to still the churning in her gut, she shoved all her messy emotions aside and got her head in the game. She had a patient who needed her undivided attention and the litter swaying gently just over their heads was waiting to airlift him to the closest trauma center.

Everything else could wait. Including her freak-out because no way was anyone witnessing that.

Within minutes, they’d transferred the student to the backboard and strapped him into the litter. Nate then reattached the hoisting strapline and with a hand signal from him, Frankie’s patient rose into the air. She watched as hands reached out to snag the litter and pull it aboard the chopper before expelling the breath she’d been holding.

Litter rescues occasionally went bad but, despite the rocky start that had almost cost Nate his life, this one had gone relatively smoothly. But she wanted to be off the ledge before something else went wrong. Before she lost the tight grip on her emotions.

She wasn’t looking forward to climbing back the way she’d come either. Her arms and legs shook, which would make the ascent a little tricky even though the rangers at the top had set up a standing body belay and would take most of her weight as she “walked” up the cliff face.

She’d wait until Nate left with the chopper before attempting the ascent for fear of completely humiliating herself any further.

Out of the darkness the hoisting strapline appeared again and Frankie let out a tiny relieved breath. Any minute now she’d be free to fall apart without an audience.

She watched Nate catch the metal connector clip and murmur something that she couldn’t quite catch. Now would be a good time for Fearless Frankie to regain control, she thought, because smartass and cocky was way better than cowering, trembling and freaked out.

She gave a cocky grin and quipped, “So long, soldier,” adding a snappy salute for good measure.

“It’s sailor, not soldier,” he growled, as he unclipped her line and gave it a quick tug.

“What are you doing?” she snapped in outrage, making a grab for it, but it was already out of reach as the rangers above reeled it in. She turned on him with a snarled “Are you insane?” but he ignored her, snapping her onto his harness capture strap. Of course, she tried to stop him but he brushed her hands aside with a quick impatient flick and hooked them both to the hoisting line.

Eyes on hers, he wrapped his arms around her and said, “Trust me.”

The words had her heart lurching as the truth landed like a punch to the solar plexus. God, she did. Didn’t want to...but did.

“No,” she lied, but he must have read the reluctant truth in her eyes because he said, “Bring us in, Boom,” and the next instant they were airborne.

Frankie swallowed as they swung away from the ledge. She didn’t like the feeling of being suspended in a sea of blackness while wind, rain and rotor wash lashed at them from every side any more than she liked being vulnerable.

To anyone...let alone this man.

She’d tried it once and he’d devastated her, stomping on her tender heart with his size thirteen tactical boots. It was the last time she’d allowed her feelings to show.

“I’ll get you for this, soldier,” she warned through clenched teeth and squeezed her eyes closed against the overwhelming pull of the man pressed intimately against her.

Gone was the cocky, handsome boy who’d treated her with all the indulgent impatience of an older sibling. In his place was a man whose powerful cocktail of tightly coiled testosterone and simmering pheromones was even more treacherously compelling.

Even the expression in his eyes was different—sometimes intense, sometimes brooding but always distantly watchful.

This Nate might look like an older, hotter and harder version of the boy she’d once loved but somewhere along the line he’d acquired a darkness that made him more than dangerous, more than lethal, to women everywhere.

Over the sound of the chopper she heard him yell, “You falling asleep there, spider girl?”

Her eyes popped open and she looked up to see the red and white fuselage looming closer. A couple of visored men watched and controlled their ascent, reminding Frankie of a movie she’d seen about alien abduction.

“No,” she muttered. “I’m pretending I’m on a beach in Hawaii.”

He must have heard because his mouth kicked up at one corner and before she could fully grasp the sudden transformation, hands were reaching for them, pulling them in. The instant she felt the capture strap release, Frankie scrambled over to where a crewman was tending her patient and wondered what she thought she was doing, because she had a feeling that getting sucked into Nate Oliver’s force field again...would be an unmitigated disaster.

Fortunately, she was too smart to let that happen. Way too smart.

Her patient’s eyes were open but he appeared dazed and disorientated. “Focus on me, handsome,” she yelled over the noise of the engine, and quickly freed his arm to set up an IV. “You hang in there, okay?”

Looking up briefly to gauge their ETA, she noticed several pairs of eyes on her and became aware of the grins.

Frowning, she looked around and caught sight of Nate’s expression and by the firm unsmiling line of his sexy mouth, he wasn’t happy. But then again—apart from that flash of wry humor—unsmiling seemed to be his default expression.

At least when it came to her.

Her belly clenched.

“What?”

“Yowza, lady,” a crewman yelled, his wide toothy grin and smooth cheeks all she could see beneath the bug helmet. “You saved Sammy in the most awesome move I ever saw. Ever think of joining the circus?”

Sammy? she thought with a frown. Who the heck is Sammy?

Thinking maybe they were talking about her patient, Frankie drawled, “I’m allergic to rings,” laughing when she was rewarded with confused looks. She shook her head. “Never mind.”

No way was she explaining that one. She’d decided a long time ago that marriage wasn’t for her and guys seemed to think all a woman wanted was a wedding ring and a white picket fence.

Determinedly pushing aside unpleasant thoughts, Frankie willed the chopper to move faster through the air. The sooner they arrived at the hospital, the sooner her patient could be rushed into surgery. And she really needed to escape this inexorable pull Nathan appeared to still have on her double-X chromosome.