Sexy as Sin (Sinful, Montana Book 3) Read online

  Wait. Rafe and Jace. The names hung there like constellations in the whirling dark behind his eyes. There was a pattern, but he couldn’t see it. Reaching for it was too hard, and he was so cold.

  Noise, then. Another voice, alarm in it, and the good voice went away. He was groping in the freezing dark. Something soft settled over him, and he cried out. It hurt. It hurt.

  “It’s a blanket,” somebody said. “You’re cold.”

  “Hat,” he tried to say. “Hat.”

  “You want a hat?” It wasn’t the good voice. “I can give you this.”

  “No. Her. Red . . . girl. Hat. Water.”

  “I have water,” the good voice said, sounding more like the wind again, and not like prickly sawdust. “Brett. I have a hat. I’m fine. I’m good.” The hand was around his again, and he held on and tried to breathe. “Do you want to hear more? Do you want me to talk to you?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Talk. What came . . . next.” The pain was trying to send him away, and he held on to her and kept himself here. It was too hard, and he had to do it anyway. He had to hold on.

  “This part isn’t happy.” Her voice arrived and receded like waves on a shore, and there was danger. Bad danger. A shark, and the water. He wanted to tell her to hurry, that she was in trouble. He wanted to grab her, and he couldn’t. The waves would get her, too, and pull her under. There was a noise like a fly buzzing, or a mosquito. A noise you couldn’t drown out. Wailing. Bad. “There was a plane crash,” she said. “They’d gone to a conference in Cairo, then on to Tamanrasset, in Algeria, for a weekend before they came home. It was their twentieth anniversary. They loved each other first, you see. They hadn’t known they’d have me. I was a surprise. So they took their chance to get away, and on the way back to Cairo . . .” The hand around his shook, and he held it tighter. “The plane crashed. One survivor. Not my parents. I woke up, and they were gone, and they wouldn’t come back. And then I was in Australia. Here. Home was gone. Start again.”

  He wanted to tell her he knew, to tell her it was all right, that you always had to start again, but there were more voices. Hands, too, touching him. Hurting him. He cried out and started to shake, and that hurt more, and the hand was gone.

  You could never hold on long enough, hard enough. You always had to let go. And it hurt too much. Like it would kill you, but it never did.

  Rest in peace.

  You never got to rest, though. You were still here, and you had to be strong.

  There was something touching the back of his hand, something else, not the girl, and then a pain there like a pinprick. How could he feel that when the red pain from his leg was everywhere, chewing him up, breaking his bones? It didn’t make sense. He needed to make it . . . make . . . sense.

  Darker, and he was falling again, going away. The constellations behind his eyes wobbled and faded, and everything went dark.

  Too much noise. The people in the next room were talking and rattling things, trying to wake him up. He wanted to wake up, but he couldn’t.

  He knew it was a nightmare, but he kept falling back into it again anyway. He was falling, trying to grab hold of something, anything, and unable to, knowing that when he hit the ground, he’d die, and so would the girl. She didn’t have water. He was trying to get her water, but he couldn’t.

  After that, he wasn’t falling anymore. He was diving under the waves, trying to pull the girl up, but he kept running out of air. Her hand kept slipping out of his grasp. She was stuck, and he couldn’t pull her up.

  Her hand was so cold. He couldn’t hang on. If he didn’t hang on, she’d die. Her hand was gone, and he couldn’t find it.

  He was crying. No. You couldn’t cry. You had to save the girl.

  Wake up. Be strong.

  He tried, but it was hard. His head was so fuzzy, and his thoughts kept sliding away from him.

  Finally, he got his eyes open. His cheeks were wet. He had cried, then. This wasn’t good.

  Dim light. A ceiling. Wrong ceiling. Fluorescent lights. He never did those. Hotel, then. Oh. Australia. He was in Australia. Wasn’t he?

  He hurt, and he couldn’t move. He must still be asleep. Still in the nightmare.

  Wake up.

  Start again. Start from here. Two sentences, six syllables, repeating in his brain as they did every morning, and it was morning.

  That’s right. That was how you started. You write your own story. He remembered that, too.

  Something was wrong. His brain wasn’t working right, even though he was awake. Wasn’t he? Why couldn’t he think? He started to panic, and pulled himself back. He held on, because that was what you did. You held on.

  He turned his head. It hurt, but the hurt was far away, like the thoughts. There was some kind of machine there, on a stand. Lights and numbers, going in and out of focus. The sides of his bed were high. Holding him in. Trapped.

  Hospital bed. And he was tied down. He couldn’t breathe, but he could hear his breath, so he must be breathing. The back of his hand had tubes in it, and he had something in his nose. He felt with his other hand, ripped the tube out, and stared at it. What were they putting into him? Why?

  He had to get out of here. He sat up, and the pain woke him all-the-damn-way. He gasped out loud, shut his mouth and cut the sound off, fell back again, and tried to breathe. Something started to beep much too loudly by his ear, like he’d set off an alarm by trying to escape, and he jumped at the sudden piercing sound, then cried out again at the stabbing flash of pain.

  Leg. That was what hurt, and what was trapping him. It was heavy, and he couldn’t move it. He was caught, and he couldn’t make the pain go away. He couldn’t even control it. He couldn’t think. He could always think, but he couldn’t.

  The beeping kept on, merciless, and he tried to shut his ears and couldn’t do that, either. He heard a rustle to his right and turned his head fast.

  The girl who’d been curled in the recliner by the bed jumped up, tripped over her blanket, and fell against the bed, and Brett sucked in another hard breath. Wow. No. Don’t. He was awake, though. He had to be awake, for it to hurt that much. Fuzzy and in pain, but awake.

  “You’re not dead,” he said. His voice was hoarse, like he’d been yelling. He’d better not have yelled. Not as bad as crying, but close. Whatever they did to him, he wasn’t crying, and he wasn’t yelling. Not anymore.

  “What?” she asked. “Of course I’m not dead. That wasn’t me falling off that rock, mate. What’s beeping, though? What’s wrong?” She was still tripping over her blanket, and he laughed. “Are you laughing at me?” she demanded. “Seriously?” She was laughing now, too, though. Maybe he wasn’t . . . kidnapped, or whatever. “What the hell,” she said. “Go ahead and laugh. I reckon you’ve earned it. Bloody hell, Brett. What a fright you gave me. Would that thing stop beeping? Hang on. Why don’t they post a notice telling you what to do about that? How does that help anybody heal? Must drive the patients barking mad.” She was muttering, tossing the blanket onto the chair, peering at the machine at his side, then charging out of the room. In her white shirt and black pants, which were familiar, surely. Her feet were bare, though, and her copper ringlets moved with her as if they had a life of their own.

  Why was she here? He couldn’t remember her name. He could always remember names, but he couldn’t remember hers. Bad sign. He knew where he was, though. He was in Australia, and he was in a hospital. This was not good.

  She came back into the room a minute after he’d figured it out. “The nurse is coming. Meanwhile, I don’t care if I’m not meant to touch this. There must be a way to switch the noise off.” She studied the machine, then pushed a button, and the piercing beeps mercifully ceased. The silence was like an amplified heartbeat, and you could feel the vibration of it. She let out a breath. “Much better. How are you feeling?”

  “Like I want a drink.” He did his best to smile. His best wasn’t great. “Of water.” He tried to piece this together some more, but could
n’t.

  “Let’s see.” She went over to a sink and came back with a plastic cup, a bent straw sticking welcomingly out of the top. He took it from her, gulped the water down, and felt marginally less fuzzy.

  “Good morning. Awake at last, eh?” The middle-aged woman came in talking. Brunette ponytail, pink scrubs, stethoscope. Nurse, he guessed. She checked the machine. “Your IV needs switching out. And here.” She picked up the plastic tube from the bed, pulled the loop over his head, and stuck the prongs into his nose before he could protest. “We need to keep your oxygen levels up. You’re getting a fair dose of narcotics, which can depress your breathing.” She had hold of his wrist now, was looking at her watch.

  “What?” He tried to sit up, and there was that breath-stealing jolt of pain again. “No. Turn it off.”

  “Hold still for me.” He didn’t, and she set his hand down and said, “You’ve got a button, see?” She put it into his hand, the one without the IV. “Press it when it first starts to hurt. Don’t wait. You can’t get too much. Pain keeps you tense, and tense bodies don’t heal as well. Let’s get your pulse now.” She picked up his other hand again.

  “Where’s the doctor?” he asked. “What’s wrong with me? I don’t want drugs. I don’t need them.” He tried to fight down the panic, but it wasn’t easy. It was warring with the fuzz-brain. Also, he was feeling . . .

  Oh, no. Just no. The sweat popped out on his forehead and upper lip like it had been summoned, and he tried to swallow.

  “Bathroom,” he managed to get out.

  “Oh, love.” The nurse laughed, then started typing something into the computer on the stand. “You’ve got a catheter in, no worries. Or do you need a bedpan? Are you feeling the urge to move your bowels?”

  He groaned. “Bathroom,” he said again. “Please.”

  The girl—the one with the hair—uttered a choked exclamation, grabbed something off the table, and held it for him. Not a moment too soon, because he was retching into the blue plastic bag, his body jerking, and oh, damn it to hell. That hurt. The plastic smell kept making him retch again, a never-ending cycle. It was horrible.

  He finally sat back, gasping for real now, no control possible, his eyes squeezed shut. When he opened them again, the girl was holding the cup with its straw for him and saying, “Smaller sips this time, maybe.”

  He sipped. Cautiously. “When I want to . . . impress a girl,” he told her, wishing he sounded much steadier, “I usually don’t . . . vomit on her. Tell me I didn’t . . .” Oh, no. The nausea was coming back. He closed his eyes. “Cry.” He was going to do it again. Wonderful. And Do you have the urge to move your bowels? Talk about your romantic phrases.

  The girl went away, came back fast, and wiped his face with something wonderfully damp and cool while she asked the nurse, “Can you give him something for the nausea? It can’t be good for him. It hurts him.”

  “About to ring the doctor and ask,” the nurse said, mercifully carrying away the blue bag and tossing it into a bin marked Biohazard. He was a biohazard? “I’ll be back.”

  Be polite. It was important, and it helped. “Thank you,” he said, and the nurse smiled and said, “No worries.” That was good, then.

  He didn’t watch her go. “Stalling,” he told the redhead in the steadiest voice he could manage. If he held very, very still and breathed in through his nose, the sickness receded a tiny bit. If you focused on something else, things didn’t feel as bad. He’d learned that a long time ago. “I think . . . I cried.”

  “I think,” the redhead said, wiping his face some more, “it hurt.”

  He closed his eyes again. “I did, didn’t I? I cried. Wonderful. Why are you here? And . . . what happened? When? What . . . day is it?”

  She sat down in the recliner again, and he wished she’d hold his hand. He had a tube in his nose. He had a needle in his arm. He had a catheter. Yes, definitely a shining moment.

  “Saturday,” she said. Sounding cheerful again. Rainbows and unicorns, and her name was Willow. His brain still worked, then. Thank God. He could do without his leg. He couldn’t do without his brain. “You broke your femur yesterday,” she said. “Falling off a rock. Fairly spectacular, the break and the fall. That’s the bone you don’t want to break in your leg, or so the doctor said. You’re an overachiever. I’m guessing that’s not news. You also scared me to death, so cheers for that.” Now, she did take his hand. “Thanks for not dying.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said. Focus. Adjust. All right, breaking your thigh bone wasn’t great, and he had a meeting in Portland on Monday with the bank that he was going to miss, but life was all about . . . adjustments. Maybe he could . . . conference call . . .

  His hand jerked in hers, and he jolted awake. “What? Sorry.” He was wearing a hospital gown, he realized. He was falling asleep. He had a bag of urine hanging from his bed. Not a good look at all. “How did I . . . what did I do? I fell? Tell me I was saving you. I don’t have a . . .” He was trying to fall asleep again. Better than vomiting into a bag. Barely. Or needing a bedpan. “I don’t have a good feeling.”

  How, Willow wondered, could he still look so . . . adorable? Blue-and-white-print hospital gown, dark stubble on his jaw, his dark hair mussed, and his leg encased in white dressings. Looking strong, because he could never look anything else, but so worried, too, that he hadn’t been strong enough. She smiled, and his expression turned apprehensive as he said, “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said hastily. “You may be a bit cute, that’s all.”

  He closed his eyes again. “I’m guessing I didn’t save you.”

  “Well, no. But you did worry about me, so . . . good on ya?”

  He frowned. Great eyebrows. Thick, dark, and relentlessly straight, as determined as he was, underneath the smooth exterior. The normally smooth exterior. “You needed water,” he said. “You were shaky. Sweating. It was hot. And you were wearing those same clothes.”

  “Well, yes,” she said. “All of the above. I’m lovely, hey. I rode with you in the ambulance, though, and I’ve been here ever since. I didn’t know who to call, and nobody else did, either. Who to tell about you. And I didn’t want you to—” She stopped.

  His gray eyes, which had gradually been sharpening despite the opiate cocktail being pumped into him, fixed on her. “What?” he asked. She shook her head, tried to breathe through a suddenly too-tight chest, and he pressed her hand and asked again. “Willow. What?”

  “I didn’t want you to be . . . alone. When you woke up. And I didn’t want you to die.” She tried to laugh, and couldn’t quite manage it. “Silly, isn’t it? We think if we’re there, we somehow have magical powers. That we can hold the person here.”

  “You did.” He was, somehow, back to “steady and strong” again. “You did hold me here. I remember. Thanks for that. It was too much, though. The day. The night, too, and what about your job?”

  “I could be a wee bit tired, yeah.” She tried to smile again. “I also had to pretend to be your girlfriend in order to stay with you, so don’t tell. I’ll go into work now, though. My partner could be a little unhappy. Business partner,” she hastened to add. “You threw a wrench into everybody’s day. Your own partners were pretty fussed. I’m guessing you’ll get flowers.” He made a face, and she laughed. “What? Flowers are for girls? You like them. You told me so.”

  “I did?” He tipped his head back on the pillow and groaned. “What did I say? Exactly? Besides the crying.”

  “Nothing. You said nothing.” Something in her twisted hard. That endless day, and the night. Too many close calls, and too many reminders. “You asked me to talk to you. You held my hand. You were strong, Brett. You were brave. You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “Hey.” His hand tightened around hers again. Not asking for comfort this time. Giving it. “I’m all right. I remember now. Something about your parents. Something sad, wasn’t it? I remember a sad story.”

  She smiled. It felt pretty wobbly. �
�It was all a long time ago. You asked me for my story, so I told you the sad bits. My life is rainbows and unicorns now, though, remember? Also glitter.”

  “Yeah.” Black-lashed gray eyes steady on hers. “I remember that, too. I wish you’d go home, though, and get some sleep.” Another press of her hand, like he could transfer his strength to her, and like he wanted to. Exactly the way he’d felt holding her on the beach. “But if you want to come back later on, we could watch a movie or something. Have a date, if you’re being my girlfriend. It’s morning now, right?”

  He didn’t say anything about her entanglement, and neither did she. You couldn’t exactly cheat with a man who couldn’t get out of his hospital bed, and whose reaction to moving was to vomit. This was her good turn, that was all. He didn’t have anybody in Oz, he’d helped with her shark-rescue, and he might have fallen because she’d distracted him. It was only kind. “Yeah. It’s just after eight. You’ll be getting breakfast soon, surely. I’ll only be an hour late, and that’s not too bad.”

  “But then,” he said, “there’s that bonus you earned for our day.”

  “I did?”

  “Oh, yeah.” He smiled. The grin of a tired, dirty, endlessly confident pirate. White teeth, dark scruff of beard, mussed hair, and broad shoulders, his smooth veneer all the way gone, and every bit of him sexier for it. “Popsicles? Rescue services? You get a bonus for that. Every time.”

  It was the fifth or sixth time he’d woken up. He’d lost count. He normally never lost count of anything, so it was annoying. He forgot the annoyance, though, when he saw who’d walked in.

  No black pants and white shirt this time. She wasn’t wearing that dress with not much front and even less back, but he wasn’t going to be complaining. “I can tell you with absolute certainty,” he said, “that you’re the best thing that’s walked through that door today.”