Buch lesen: «The Rescue Doc's Christmas Miracle»

PROLOGUE

WERE IT NOT for the strong shopping bags protecting her clanking purchases, Penelope Davenport would never have made the walk back to her darkened motel, if the brisk, sometimes sideways shuffle she’d been doing through the gusting wind and sheets of rain could be called a walk. Whatever it could be called, it was better than her flying had been today.

Deep in the pit of her belly, she still felt the plummeting sensation triggered two hours earlier when the early autumn storm she’d been trying to outrun had caught them despite her best efforts, and a microburst had tried to slam her flying ambulance into the ground.

She still didn’t know why they hadn’t crashed.

Altitude had been on her side. And the storm’s sharp down-blast of wind had probably only caught them at the edge. Luck no doubt could be credited with making her jerk the stick in the correct direction, tilting them out of the wind to where she could level out and avoid killing them all.

The energy, a terrible need to just keep moving, had stayed with her too. If she stopped now, her bones might burst from her skin.

Yes, she’d kept Baby in the air.

Yes, she’d been given clearance to fly between storms.

And they’d gotten their patient to a Schenectady hospital for treatment, even if they’d had to divert an hour’s flight north to do it.

But she still felt responsible for such a near miss. Not only had there been almost death, but her partner, Dr. Gabriel Jackson, couldn’t even treat their patient at the new hospital, having no privileges there. On top of that, he got a ruined night not doing whatever he’d planned on doing, and he was stuck in a powerless motel without supplies.

Precisely how she’d ended up hiking to a strip mall during the height of a line of storm cells for stranded-at-a-lousy-motel-during-a-power-outage supplies.

Anything to make it better. For her. For him...

There had been attraction between them from the jump. A chemical thing that sometimes made them look too long, and sometimes required she remind herself what they were and should be to one another. Professional. Coworkers.

The first week they’d worked together had been peppered with awkwardness only eased when they actively treated a patient. In the confines of the chopper, even though it maintained a mild hospital-like antiseptic scent, she’d babbled her way to every destination because the act of talking helped her keep from thinking too much. To keep from noticing the light cologne he wore with its hints of ginger. To block out that vibrating awareness that filled up the spaces between them.

But with all the crazy bouncing around in her head, none of that would matter tonight. They were just going to hang out, eat some liquor store sausage and cheese sampler, drink wine, play cards, and talk. Him for once, rather than her filling up the space. He knew more about her than she did about him.

A blast of wind flattened her into the side of the motel just as she’d reached the awning-covered walk that should’ve gotten her out of the rain. Another ten or so doors, and she’d be inside, and safe, and she could roll up in the bedspread like a burrito to get warm.

Dying of pneumonia from how wet and cold she’d become after all that? Yeah, that’d suck. Gabriel would probably find the biggest horse pills with which to save her life, just to punish her for having gone out in a freaking monsoon.

He’d do it all while being sedate and so handsome it was like a big cosmic joke. Of course he would have to look like that—jaw that still looked like geometry even with the beard he kept short enough she wasn’t sure it was technically a beard, or just some long, perfectly groomed stubble. The best-looking men were always the least attainable.

They’d never spoken about it, never made a move, but there had come to be an understanding between them. Conversations that began with proclamations of the benefit of having such a great partner to work with didn’t need many lines to read between. The way he would sit away from her during work meetings, always on the other side of the conference table. She knew what interest looked like in a man’s eyes, and she’d seen it there, so his distancing techniques said everything else.

Just as she reached his room, she felt the bag with the wine start to tear, and captured the bottle with her thigh against the hollow metal door. Knocking with her elbow was all she could manage.

“It’s me!” A sudden clap of thunder drowned her out. Not exactly the entrance she’d planned. Then again, she hadn’t really planned much beyond go to the store and make tonight better. In the back of her mind she held on to have a great time as her final objective, because it was at least statistically possible.

If he was moving in there, she couldn’t hear anything over the rain.

“Hurry up, I think it’s going to rain!” Ha-ha. See, she still had a sense of humor, before her untimely passing from hurricane-induced pneumonia.

Another blast of wind smacked her in the back and wrapped her completely saturated hair around her face. It stuck like a furry squid.

She opened her mouth to curse the door down—if she had to dig out her own key for the room next door it was all over. But as she began considering the logistics of juggling her tearing bags, the door opened. Before he could say anything, before he could yell at her for this exercise in ridiculousness, she grabbed her slowly shredding bag of wine by the rip and darted inside, the rest of her loot in swinging bags presently cutting off her circulation at the elbows.

“You think it’s going to rain?” he said, like he couldn’t tell a joke when he heard one. Because his mood was apparently so foul he couldn’t even picture a reason to be in a good one. “Are you nuts? You walked somewhere in this? You look like you just got pulled out of the Hudson.”

Laughing a little, she swung the bags up onto his table. “It was only about half a mile. I think. I don’t know. I’m better at judging distances from the air, less good at it from the ground. Though since I’ve only been flying a couple years and been on the ground the rest of my life, you’d think it’d be the opposite.”

For a normal person, it probably would’ve been, but Penny had learned young to judge distance by how far she’d be able to walk or roll her wheelchair. It was more a can-I-make-it-that-far? measuring system than something with math and numbers. Being now able to easily walk a mile, or whatever, in the pounding rain was something to celebrate. Not that he needed to know all that. It certainly wouldn’t help put him into a better mood. He might even start fussing over her health—like her family still did on occasion, even though she’d been in remission for years.

“Niagara Falls is coming off the roof.” Even though Gabriel’s words were complaints, his tone had taken on that sardonic lilt that let her know that even in the dark he was shaking his head and saying words he really didn’t expect to mean anything to her. Might even be rolling his pretty brown eyes.

“Yep. But what was I going to do, call a cab to go the equivalent of a few blocks? Rain’s not going to kill me.” She hoped. But, goodness, she needed to warm up. Which...she didn’t have a plan for. No spare clothes.

“Your teeth are chattering,” he noted.

“I don’t know how you can see anything in here, it’s dark.”

“I can hear them clacking.”

She clamped her mouth shut to control the noise and finished piling her dripping bags on the table so she could dig out the candles she’d purchased. Candles meant fire, meant light, and especially some kind of heat.

“I know you’re trying to be nice.”

“I am,” she chirped, felt her voice wobble with her involuntary jaw wobbling, still determined to give Dr. Grouchy a better evening than the universe had conjured for either of them. Finding the matches and grabbing one of the candles, she created fire. And light. “Saw a strip mall on the way here with one of those cheapo general-store places beside a liquor store.”

Clack. Clackity. Clack. She gritted her teeth until her jaw tensed and felt more under control. She kept the rest of it short. “Got supplies. You could play along, pretend you’re someone who doesn’t hate f-fun. M-might s-surprise y-you.”

The last several words stuttered out and she gave up trying to pretend. She was cold. During her brisk walk in the downpour she’d stayed more or less warm. Standing around made the chill seep into her, and life become decidedly less livable.

Outside the storm continued to rage, and when a gust blew against the side of the building, she looked over and noticed Gabriel was in his underwear.

Gabriel was in his underwear.

How had she missed that?

Putting the candle down, she smooshed her wet hair back from her face, where it was obviously obstructing her vision, and looked at him. Beneath his carefully zipped flight suit he’d been hiding all that?

Even as dark as the room was, she could see the definition of abs in his rich, brown skin. Wide, solid shoulders. Hip flexors. Good God, the man had chiseled hip flexors.

Which would be something she could spend time appreciating as soon as she got warm.

“Did you get something dry to wear in that?”

“Would be wet if I had. But I think you have the right idea.”

She fumbled for her zipper, fingers suddenly stiff and wooly, and failed to sufficiently grab the tab to draw it down three times in succession. Her fingers just slid right off the end when she pulled. A mild sound of alarm was all it took to set him into motion, and suddenly he was in front of her, taking over.

Under any other circumstances, she might hesitate to strip down to her undies with the partner she’d been actively trying to ignore her attraction to, but him peeling the sodden, freezing material down her arms at least provided an excuse for the wash of goose-bumps she knew were as much to do with him undressing her as her looming hypothermia. When he knelt to help her with the boots, she put her hands on his shoulders, and immediately wanted to mash her whole body against his. The man was hot, in every sense of the word.

At least that fear that had been pitting through her was gone now. She wasn’t feeling...all that hesitant anymore either. “How do you feel about underwear hugging? You, me, mashed together. You’re giving off heat like a space heater and I really like that about you right now.”

“I’m a normal temperature. You’re just cold. It doesn’t have to be freezing temperatures to get hypothermia. You know that.”

Yes, she did.

Despite the irritation lingering in his voice, his touch was gentle. Large, strong hands cupped the back of each leg as he helped ease her clothing off.

Beneath her suit, she generally dressed for comfort. That meant white cotton bikinis and a snug strappy tank top. Being endowed with modest curves had advantages, one being the ability to skip confining undergarments, especially under such unstructured clothing as a flight suit.

She puffed as he stood back up and she had to clamp her arms to her sides to keep from flinging herself at him. “Yell at me later.”

“I will. After you’ve had a shower and warmed up.” And he sounded like he meant it.

Gabriel pulled her back sometimes, providing a special kind of stoicism that balanced her out. She was used to some measure of grumpiness when she did something he found dumb, but after the day they’d had the idea of him yelling at her made her stomach churn.

“Do you hate me?” The words erupted from her mouth before she could give them a proper spin around in her head, and even though she’d just told him to yell at her later.

“Hate you?” He shook her sodden flight suit out and draped it over the other chair, then looked back down at her, his still handsome scowl flickering in the light of the candle. “Why on earth would I hate you?”

“Because I almost crashed us. I couldn’t... I couldn’t outrun it. I thought... But then the wind...” She faltered around, and suddenly the words caught up with her emotions, and she knew she was crying by the hot rivers on her frigid cheeks.

“You did outrun it,” he said, his voice gentle. One strong arm wrapped around her, propelling her toward the bathroom. “You got us here. It was supposed to go south of us. Everyone said so.”

Everyone said so. She nodded, squeezing her eyes tightly shut to stop that horrifying leaking. But it wasn’t enough. Several big, gulpy breaths later, she gave up and turned to fling her arms around his waist.

Everywhere their skin touched, she grew warmer. The firm wall of his chest under her cheek, the strong arms that immediately came around her wrapped her in heat.

She needed comfort, to know that her partner, a doctor who treated her—the only Davenport at Manhattan Mercy without the title—like an equal, still had faith in her.

“You won’t be afraid to fly with me after this?”

Her underthings were wet, she realized as she felt his skin start to cool, or at least stop feeling quite so warm through the soaked material. She was getting him wet.

“I won’t. We’ll talk about that later, but right now you need to get in the shower,” he said, his mouth against the crown of her head. “Who knows if the water will stay hot for long, and you’ve stopped shaking.”

“It wasn’t raining that hard when I left,” she muttered. The colder she got, the less intelligent her foray into the blistering rain seemed. No matter how good her reasoning at the time.

You’ve stopped shaking. His words swam up to her as he wrapped his arms around her hips and lifted, then walked into the darkened bathroom to deposit her right in the tub.

People stopped shaking when they warmed up, or when they got too cold and their bodies gave up shaking to get warm.

He adjusted the water quickly, then stepped in with her, positioning her under the spray so that the almost too hot water hit the back of her neck, then her head, and once it had had a few seconds to cascade over her, he turned her by the shoulders so that her back came against his chest, and the water warmed up her front side.

She shivered again for a couple seconds, and then relaxed back against him, her head on his shoulder, and her hands seeking his on her hips to drag his arms back around her waist. Standing under the spray, in their underwear...

“This went a lot different in my head.”

“Did you sing and dance your way through the rain in your head?”

“No, the rain didn’t factor in. I just thought, get the wine, get some food, get candles, cards, munchies... Talk to Gabriel and give him a good night to make up for whatever you had planned at home.”

“I had nothing planned.” His mouth was at her ear, and the words should’ve taken the edge off somehow, but she found herself spinning to face him instead.

Probably her third dumb idea of the day, but, unlike the first two dumb ideas, she just didn’t care.

It was dark, the candle left in the other room, but as she pulled the tank top over her head she heard his breathing hitch. He couldn’t see anything as with the lights out the small, interior bathroom was little more than a cave, even with the door open to a slightly less dark room beyond. But he felt her skin when she pressed forward. Lifting her arms and rising on tiptoe, she didn’t stop, although she satisfied that urge to mash herself against him, and still didn’t stop when his head dipped to meet her kiss.