Free In Rides Trouble by Julie Ann Walker Page B

a thousand little pieces.
    Looking at him lying there, so still and pale without the bright vigor that usually animated him, made her more scared than she’d ever been in her life—which was saying something considering mere moments before she took a header off the side of an oil tanker.
    Just when she was about to press a finger to his carotid to check for a pulse, his gray eyes fluttered open and lasered in on her. He lifted his good hand to rub at the swelling lump on the side of her cheek where her face had introduced itself to the Hamilton ’s steel hull.
    “Are you okay?” he rasped.
    Are you okay…
    He was bleeding profusely, undoubtedly concussed, and that arm was certainly dislocated if not broken, and he was asking her if she was okay.
    God love the man. She certainly did…
    Hiccupping on the tears clogging her throat and running down her cheeks, she managed, “Thanks to you I am.”
    He blinked at her, then frowned.
    “You’re crying.” He said it like one might say, I believe in unicorns , with a heavy dose of incredulity.
    “Yep.” She wiped her runny nose on her forearm—gross, but she was without another option. “I do that sometimes.” Way more often than she’d ever admit to anyone, especially him.
    “Don’t.”
    “You can’t tell me whether I can or can’t cry, Frank. Geez . ” Although, she was so glad to see him awake and talking, she couldn’t quite imbibe the comment with her usual level of sarcasm.
    “Nothing to shed tears over, woman,” he told her, wincing when she lifted the gauze to check on his cut. The bleeding had slowed. Angel handed her another pad, and she pressed the fresh gauze to his forehead. “You lived, didn’t you?”
    “I’m not crying over my near face-plant into the ocean, you big, dumb dill-hole. I’m crying because you scared me to death when you fainted.”
    His lips twisted. “Men don’t faint. I just…I…uh…lost consciousness.”
    “God, whatever,” she huffed, but inwardly she was smiling.
    It didn’t matter that he was determined to keep their relationship on a strictly professional level. It didn’t matter that most times she irritated the ever-lovin’ hell out of him and he had no qualms about letting her know it. It didn’t even matter that he kept a girlfriend up in Lincoln Park. What mattered, all that mattered, was that he was alive. Because she couldn’t stand the thought of a world without him…
    “My point is,” she continued, smoothing some hair back from his forehead, reveling in the fact that she was able to touch him like she’d always dreamed of doing, even if it was only because he’d been knocked silly and didn’t have all his faculties about him, “you went nose first into the deck and were out for nearly thirty seconds. That combined with the fact that you look like a piece of meat that’s been through the garbage disposal frightened me. And yes , when I get really frightened, sometimes I cry. Just deal with it.”
    He blinked at her for several seconds like he was having trouble focusing. “No need to be scared for me. Imokay.” He crushed the last two words together as he struggled to sit up.
    Testosterone. God save her.
    “No, no.” She laid a palm on his uninjured shoulder. “Just be still.”
    “Can’t,” he said, pushing past her restraining hand and into a sitting position. “Hafta finish the mission. Hafta get going.”
    “It’s finished,” she assured him. “You saved us.”
    “Yeah.” He shook his head like a dog shakes off water, dislodging the gauze pad and causing little drops of blood to splash across her tank top. “Sorry ’bout that,” he said as he pushed to a wobbly stand—as if a little blood on top of all the grease and grime was anything to worry about. No amount of washing was ever going to get her tank top and shorts clean again. The only logical future for the garments was an up close and personal introduction to an incinerator. “But now we’ve got to ghost it out