Caught In A Storm Of Passion. Lucy Ryder
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he sucked in a careful breath and blinked up into the darkness, wondering why there were two mannequins hanging a foot from his face. He knew for a fact there were no mannequins on the cargo manifest.
Then he realized that he was seeing double, and that he was looking at... What the heck was her name? He squinted past the pain and caught sight of a cascade of tawny gold hair a few feet away. His heart surged into his throat as he recognized... Amelia? Dammit, his brother was going to— No, wait. Not Amelia. Evelyn—Amelia’s evil twin—and her arms, legs and hair were hanging limply from the harness.
“Eve...Evelyn?” he rasped, wondering how long he’d been out. A couple of minutes? Hours? Vaguely alarmed by her utter stillness, he cleared his throat and tried again. “Hey, Doc!”
Nothing. Not even the slightest of movements. He sucked in air, shoving down panic, and attempted to squelch the awful thought that came with the dread. His heart pounded. No, no, no! No way was the feisty doc—
“Eve! Wake up, dammit.”
Head spinning, and nausea clawing its way into his throat, Chase hauled himself upright with his good arm. The world tilted, along with his stomach, and he braced himself between the chair and the controls until the urge to vomit settled. Not only did the thought of all that cool fire being extinguished leave a bitter taste of loss in his mouth, it filled him with a sudden hollow desolation he couldn’t explain.
They’d only just met, for cripes’ sake, and he didn’t even like her. But she was his responsibility—not to mention his future sister-in-law, sort of—and the first thing he needed to do was check her vitals.
He fumbled beneath that thick curtain of tawny hair and searched for a pulse. When he found it, in the soft spot just beneath her jawline, his breath whooshed out with relief at the strong and steady rhythm.
She was alive.
With the realization dawning on him that they’d just cheated certain death, Chase reached into his shirt with unsteady hands. His fingers encountered the Saint Christopher and he pulled it out, pausing to give it a noisy, grateful kiss.
Thank God she was alive and breathing.
He was breathing too, which meant that when he checked her over for other injuries he got a little sidetracked by the sight of the long naked legs...all four of them...which any red-blooded man would have noticed. Two of the four feet were bare, and her ivory silk blouse had worked loose from her skirt, exposing a few inches of skin that suddenly seemed more erotic than if she was naked.
Which was just plain stupid. He lived in paradise, where women wore a heck of a lot less in public. Besides, he had way more important things to obsess about. Like the fact that she was still unconscious. Like the fact that he’d crashed his damn airplane...well, somewhere.
Hell! He couldn’t believe it. He’d flown these waters for almost five years without a single incident.
Shoving unsteady fingers through his hair, Chase looked around and tried to come to terms with reality. It couldn’t be a coincidence, he told himself wildly, that the day she’d practically thrown herself into his arms and then tried to head butt him to death, this had happened.
The woman was bad luck.
One he needed to avoid. Like a death plague.
Besides, she was uptight and anal—his least favorite type of woman. “The type of woman I moved thousands of miles to get away from,” he informed the unconscious woman irritably. “The last thing I need complicating my life.”
Even temporarily.
So why the hell was he so fascinated by her damn-your-hide attitude and glowing amber eyes?
Biting back a curse at his idiocy, Chase massaged his throbbing temple and ordered himself not to think about underwear. But the more he tried not to think about lace and silk, the more he recalled his first glimpse of her heart-shaped butt, encased in that tight soft green skirt, bent over the bathroom counter at Port Laurent.
It had sparked some pretty racy fantasies that had just about fried his brain. And before he’d known it his gaze had been sliding down a pair of spectacular legs more suited to a Vegas showgirl than a workaholic doctor.
He’d blamed it on testosterone and abstinence, of course.
And now possibly concussion—because the sedate little business suit would have looked perfectly respectable on anyone who didn’t have enough curves to rival the Indy 500 race track.
Obviously living like a monk made a guy think about sex even when he’d just crashed his plane. Obviously he’d hit his head really hard. Maybe he even had brain damage.
Well...hell.
Too bad Mother Nature had decided to have a little fun with him, he thought darkly, swiping at a trickle of something warm and sticky on his face. She’d fried the right engine and most of the electronics. And if that wasn’t bad enough she’d made him look bad in front of this sexy, uptight doc after he’d promised her everything was going to be okay. But it wasn’t okay, he thought morosely, looking at the vegetation invading the damaged cockpit. Not by a long shot.
Deciding to leave Dr. Eve where she was, until he’d made sure they weren’t about to slide tail-first into an active volcano, Chase pulled himself upright. The move brought him closer. Closer to the intoxicating scent of woman...closer to temptation.
He quickly lurched out of reach, telling himself it was a good thing he was over women like her.
A real good thing.
* * *
Eve surfaced slowly, aware of a gang of vindictive road workers using power drills inside her skull. She frowned and tried to shift away from the excavation, but the move sent pain stabbing through her.
Oh...ow! What...what the—?
Carefully drawing in a shallow breath, she took stock, wondering where she was, why she couldn’t remember...and why the heck someone was sitting on her chest. Then something cold and damp touched her head, right where it hurt. She gave a distressed moan and lifted her hand to swat feebly at the annoyance.
“G’way,” she mumbled crossly, shivering when a trickle of cold water made its way down her throat.
“Keep still,” a deep, familiar voice ordered, sending a bolt of something that felt like panic through her body.
Her eyes and mouth flew open, with the intention of giving him a piece of her mind, but the words froze in her throat when she found the hunky sea god close. Very close...and wet. As if she’d invaded his ocean kingdom and he was holding her hostage.
Yikes.
Every thought promptly flew right out of her head.
It was like déjà vu.
Or more like déjà dead.
She moaned softly on realizing that every part of her hurt. Even her eyes, which she narrowed against the light.
“Oh, great,” she rasped hoarsely. “I should have known. I’m dead, and the pilot from hell isn’t done torturing me.”
A spark of amusement briefly lit his storm-gray eyes, along with a look of what couldn’t possibly be concern and wild relief. Could it? And why hadn’t she noticed before how long and thick his dark lashes were?
Annoyance replaced the amusement, momentarily distracting her from the wet cloth he pressed to her pounding head. She tried evading it, but he gently cradled her head and turned her toward him.
“Keep still,” he muttered irritably. “I had to move you before I could check for internal injuries.”
“Isn’t that my line?” she rasped, gasping when he hit a particularly tender spot. “Ouch!” She grabbed his hand, her fingers barely fitting around the brawny wrist as she attempted to hold him off. And when she discovered that all she could do was cling weakly as he carefully dabbed the area, she grimaced.
Oh,