warm hand reached over and covered hers. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I do know that Nick’s a good man.”
Really? She’d thought her mother had been a saint, too, until a couple of months ago.
“So you know everything about him, do you?” Nick hadn’t seemed all that thrilled to find out he’d fathered a child after a one-night stand. And he’d never mentioned whether or not he’d been married to someone else at the time he’d slept with her mother. Please let it be no. She didn’t want that hanging over her mother’s memory, as well.
Everything inside her was so jumbled right now. She didn’t know what to do or think. Her world had ceased making sense the moment she’d peeked inside that shoebox.
What was the big deal, anyway?
Nick had just had a one-night stand. Okay, well, she’d had a one-day stand. So who was she to judge anyone?
Luke’s eyes hardened, and he let go of her hand. “No, I don’t know everything about him, but I can tell you he once saved a self-destructive dumbass from himself.”
She tried to work through what he meant. Who...
Before she could finish her thought he dragged a hand through his hair and blew out a rough breath. “This dumbass owes him one. Big time.”
Oh...oh!
She caught his hand, the same way he’d caught hers a few minutes earlier. “You’re talking about yourself.”
He wrapped his fingers around hers, holding her in place and sending crazy tingles skittering up her arm. And that slow, sexy smile was back full force. “Which word gave me away, Kate? Self-destructive? Or dumbass?”
“Neither.” She was about to lay herself bare before him, and she had no idea why. “It was the talk about owing him. You’re not the only one who does. I owe him, too. For my very life.”
CHAPTER FOUR
WHY THE HELL had he said anything?
Driving back to the hotel after their meal, he cursed himself for revealing so much. She’d already been warming up to the sparkly image of Nick he’d tried to paint, without needing any additional props. So why had he admitted to owing him?
The second he’d seen the confusion in her eyes, heard the raw vulnerability in her voice, he’d been lost. He’d kept up his crusty, uncaring shell through the rest of the meal, but his insides had turned into a gloppy, gooey mess. Like a marshmallow held a little too close to the fire.
Kate didn’t owe Nick. Not the way he did. Yeah, his friend may have donated a few thousand sperm to the making of her, but that had been a rash, spur-of-the-moment act. What the man had done for him had been far different. Luke had been awake long enough after his injury to hear brief snatches of a heated argument between Nick—who’d been an army medic at the time—and someone else, their accents placing them as English.
“He’ll die, if we don’t clamp those vessels right now...”
“...give me a few more minutes here.”
“...lose the leg, but save his life...”
“...get your bloody hands off my patient, and give me some room!”
“...Americans would rather have him back alive than in a body bag.”
The second Luke’s eyes had opened again, and he’d spied the familiar walls of a field hospital, his hands had gone straight to his leg. The sense of relief that had swept through him when his fingers had met thick wads of bandages—instead of empty air—had been enormous. Until he’d seen the actual damage and heard the grim prognosis.
He hadn’t been out of the woods, and his leg, even if it could be saved in the long run, would never be the same.
Well, the appendage was still with him, but he wondered sometimes if the trade-off had been worth it.
Even as he thought it, his hand came off the stick shift of his car to massage the twisted muscles, but he stopped short. Kate didn’t know exactly how Nick had saved his life. For all she knew, he’d simply kept him from doing anything stupid. No reason for her to know the literal truth.
She hadn’t said much as she’d finished her meal and he’d paid the bill. They’d simply talked about Nick’s original injury, about why it had flared up after all these years, and what had needed to happen during surgery to give him a shot at a normal life.
He turned a corner, heading toward her hotel. This was it. It was probably the last time he’d ever see her, if he was smart. He’d done what Nick had asked, there was no reason to prolong the inevitable. He glanced over at her and frowned. Her head was against the headrest, eyes closed.
Was she sleeping? He looked at the road, and then back at her. Her throat worked a couple times.
No, she wasn’t asleep.
Oh, hell. Surely she wasn’t fighting back tears. The sooner he got her back to...
A car from one of the lanes of oncoming traffic suddenly shifted for no apparent reason, its trajectory forming a weird serpentine shape as it drifted farther into their lane. It was coming right toward them!
“Hold on.” Luke jerked the steering wheel hard to the left to avoid hitting it head on, the tires of his little car striking the curb hard and bumping up onto it. He braked, glancing into the rearview mirror just as the other vehicle passed them, creeping into the wrong lane yet again. If the idiot didn’t gain control, he was going to...
The squeal of tires and the awful crunching sound that followed said the worst had indeed happened.
Luke swore and pushed a button to turn on his hazard lights. “Are you okay?”
“Fine, but... Oh, no!” Kate’s eyes were now wide open, her head craning to look behind them.
Grabbing his cell phone from the clip on his belt, he dropped it in her lap. “Dial 999. Tell them we need an ambulance and that there’s a doctor at the scene.”
Not waiting for her reply, he leaped from the car and half skipped, half sprinted toward the accident scene, trying to override his pain threshold with gritted teeth. Damn it!
He tried to mentally separate the rubberneckers from those involved in the crash. Hell. Not good.
Three cars. No, four.
And there was smoke pouring from one of the vehicles, preventing him from getting a good look at its occupants. He headed toward that one first, seeing someone stagger from the driver’s side and collapse onto the road a few feet away. If the smoke was obstructing the view of cars still coming toward them, the already bad accident could turn catastrophic.
He yelled to one of the bystanders, “Can you try signaling a warning to cars that are headed this way?”
He reached the victim who’d fallen, a young male, and crouched down, his leg screaming as the muscles contracted too quickly. He ignored the pain, noting the trickle of blood from the man’s mouth was due to a busted lip and not from
