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CHAPTER THREE
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
