one ache to another, trying to form thoughts, losing them. Then suddenly, hot pincers clamped his inner thigh and began slowly tearing the muscle from the bone. He heard a hoarse, agonized cry. A fellow sufferer or him? Him, he decided, dimly aware of trying to reach the source of his agony. His right arm felt as if it were nailed down, and when he tried to move it, a new pain flooded him.
Someone whom he couldn’t see said, “I’ve got it. I’ve got it.” It was an angel’s voice, melodic and female.
Small, cool hands kneaded away the anguish. The white-hot pinching faded. Ahhhhh. The relief felt magical. He was floating again, his whole being focused on the sensations aroused by those hands slowly working their way up his thigh, electrifying his flesh. A new sensation rose—literally. A roiling sea of contrasts tossed him from one extreme to another: shadows and light, heat and cold, pain and indulgence. The relief of unconsciousness and the greed of arousal beckoned with equal appeal.
Lyrical, that voice whispered in his ear again. “There. How’s that? Better? Cramp gone now?”
He tried to answer, but his tongue felt thick and unwieldly in his dry mouth. “Ungh.”
The wondrous hands vanished. He tried to bring them back, becoming aware of incapacitating weakness and muscles tight with soreness, of a dizzy head and confusion. Where was he? The unusual heaviness on his right side and in his groin weighed him down. Then he felt something brush against his lips. Ah, his erotic angel had not abandoned him. The heaviness in his groin grew more pronounced. He puckered his mouth around a small round something.
“Sip. Just a sip.”
Like honey, that voice. Cool, sweet water flowed into his mouth, and he gulped it greedily. Panting with relief, he squinted his eyes, trying to focus.
“Are you in pain? Use this.”
Something hard was pressed into his hand. He lifted his head, tried to look at the thing in his palm and got distracted by a new realization. A bed. He was in bed. But with whom? He tried to put a name, a face, a body to that voice.
“Like this.”
Slender fingers wrapped around and manipulated his own. The haze parted, and he looked up into a pretty, delicate face, one he had surely never seen before. Dark hair, a long, thick plait of it coiled beneath her ear. Soft, green eyes. The nose was almost too small, the chin almost too pointed, but the mouth… Oh, the mouth. A perfect, pink, beestung bow. A mouth waiting to be kissed. By him.
Heat pulsed in his groin, and instinctively he lifted his arm, the left one, since the right had turned to stone. The hard thing fell away, but he paid it no mind as he clasped his hand behind her head, his erotic angel with the dulcet voice and gentle touch. Straining upward and pulling down, he brought his mouth to hers. Her lips were soft and supple. They parted against his, and he used all his strength to press harder, to taste her. Sweet. So very sweet. He held on to that as long as he could, his only reality in a nightmare of torture and chaos.
Hums and squeaks swirled around him, fire and pain, need and delight. Where had he met her? What was her name, and why couldn’t he remember? Despite his best efforts, gloom eddied in the center of his mind, denying him answers and growing in rings of numbing shadow, darker, darker, until the world went black with a noisy clang.
An electronically generated bell donged in measured cadence. Merrily glanced away from the notation desk where she sat catching up on paperwork to check the alarm board. Room 18. At the thought of the patient there, color instantly bloomed in her cheeks. Royce Lawler was badly injured, movie-star handsome and dangerously seductive even when drugged out of his mind. Apparently, he had finally obtained full consciousness, poor guy.
Normally, with a patient in this much pain, Merrily would have jumped up and rushed to his aid, but this time, despite her sympathy for the man’s injuries, she hesitated long enough to look around for someone else to answer this particular call. In just the time it took to turn her head, however, she knew the search was pointless. Short-staffed as they were, every nurse was busy to the point of insanity. She was on her feet and moving before she could even tell herself that he wouldn’t remember a thing that had gone on earlier.
In her short career as an after-trauma nurse, Merrily had been groped, pinched, patted, hugged, leered at and propositioned, but she’d never been kissed like that. By anyone. Her heartbeat sped at the memory of it, the strength, the possession, the expertise. Had he sensed her awareness of him as a man rather than merely a patient? Somehow her usual cool detachment had deserted her when she’d bared his body and massaged the cramp from the thigh of his injured leg.
Cramps were a real problem with immobilized patients. The docs prescribed potassium and calcium to try to prevent them, as even an unconscious patient would try to move to alleviate the vicious pain. Lawler, however, had experienced more cramps than the average patient. He’d kept the ICU nurses hopping after his surgery until the attending physician had figured out the correct supplement levels for him. This morning’s cramp had undoubtedly been a result of the move from ICU to the floor.
Given the trauma and the drugs, Merrily told herself as she pushed through the door into his room, he could not possibly remember kissing her—or how she’d knocked over the trash can next to his bed afterward. Nevertheless, her pulse quickened and spots of color burned high on her cheeks even as she put on her most professional demeanor and prepared to assess and assist her patient. She turned toward the bed in the small, quiet, private room, then rushed forward, praying he hadn’t torn loose the stitches, dislodged the broken ends of bones or worse.
Royce gritted his teeth and mentally cursed himself. His arm shook with the effort required to brace his twisted body on his left palm, head dangling toward the floor. He was trapped by the traction device that kept his screaming right leg immobile several uncomfortable inches above the bed. The cast on his right arm and shoulder, though unwieldy, was at least maneuverable to an extent, though at the moment it weighed down on him like an anvil. Somehow the IV line tethering his left arm to the bags hanging over his head and the contraption clipped to the end of his left index finger remained intact, though his right hip felt as if it was being pulled from its socket. The nurse’s call button dangled from its cord next to the bed. He’d banged his head against it on his way down but had no way of knowing whether or not he’d managed to trigger the thing.
He’d really gotten himself into a fine mess this time, and he wasn’t thinking just about the fall he’d taken trying to reach the telephone, which some fool had placed out of his reach on the bedside table. Oh no, it was much more than that. Black memory spun through his head.
Shoving hands pitched him forward, and he fell, arms milling in cold fear. At the first impact on the sharp edges of the wooden stairs, a white hot snap in his right forearm blinded him and his right foot slipped between the open steps. Twisting, he fell forward in slow motion. Stars winked and whirled overhead. His leg wrenched, bones snapping. His shoulder and head impacted the steps in twin explosions of pain. Above him, the deck stairs loomed steep and dark, a pale figure hovering at the top. Deep, deep regret rushed through him in the instant before he died.
He’d really thought that he had fallen to his death. The same feelings he’d experienced then, pain, fear, regret, and now worry and sheer embarrassment moderated his relief at discovering that he’d been wrong. At the moment, worry surpassed all the others.
“Mr. Lawler!”
Rescue had arrived, but embarrassment beat out relief, at least temporarily, and as feet rushed toward him, rubber soles squeaking on clean floors, he closed his eyes. Arms locked around his dangling torso, small, short arms. He knew a moment of grave doubt as he felt a body crouch next to him. A woman,
