Free Up Close and Dangerous by Linda Howard

parts trade places, and the physical awareness float out there in the ether? The one thing he didn’t want to happen, right now, was for the two to merge, but at the same time he knew he couldn’t let himself drift any further away.
    Hearing her voice gave him something to focus on, helped keep him from floating away into darkness. He knew he was hurt and he even knew why, though he was fuzzy on how. He’d crash-landed the plane, evidently successfully since they were both alive. He remembered the engine inexplicably quitting, and he remembered trying to get the plane to the tree line so the vegetation would help cushion the impact. That was it; nothing about the actual crash at all. His next memory was of his head feeling as if someone had used a baseball bat on it—hell, his entire body felt like that—and nothing making sense except Mrs. Wingate calling his name.
    He had to concentrate hard to hold on to the thread of what she was saying, and sometimes his thoughts drifted and he’d lose touch, only to be brought back by a sharp question or a jab of pain. Sometimes every word was crystal clear; sometimes they were just sounds that he knew were supposed to mean something but didn’t. There was no clear line of demarcation between what was real and what wasn’t, and he floated in that no-man’s-land.
    Now she was touching him. That, at least, was real, because he could feel her. He was vaguely surprised; she didn’t want to speak to him, but she’d touch him? Strange. She’d covered him with something, he didn’t know what, but it felt nice and heavy. Then she’d lain down beside him, put her arms around him, and begun briskly rubbing his chest and arms. A faint warmth began to seep into him.
    The warmth, as faint as it was, felt great. What also felt great was her breast against his arm, which he guessed proved that, even if he was half dead, a man was still a man and a breast, any breast, was always worthy of attention. Lulled by the comfort of both breast and warmth, he began drifting to sleep.
    His relaxation shattered when his entire body suddenly tensed and shook. He’d been cold before, teeth-chattering, body-shaking cold, but had experienced nothing like this. Shudders racked his entire body, clenched every muscle, rattled every bone. He shook so hard he thought he might break his teeth, and clenched them together. Mrs. Wingate tightened her hold on him, murmuring something he couldn’t understand. After a few minutes the convulsive shaking stopped and, exhausted, he felt his muscles go limp.
    He’d barely relaxed when another spasm seized him.
    He didn’t know how long the excruciating spasms lasted, just that they were agony, and he was helpless to control them. She stayed right there the whole time, holding him, stroking him, talking to him. He fastened onto the sound of her voice as if it were a lifeline, even though most of the time he couldn’t understand what she was saying, because as long as he could hear her that meant he wasn’t dead. His own body was trying to kill him, but to hell with that. Fuck dying. He didn’t intend to give up, though he was so exhausted giving up would be easier than battling through this.
    He just wanted to rest for a while. Sleep. But even during the brief periods when the shaking stopped and he could relax, he couldn’t sleep because she kept talking. At some point his brain reconnected and the words made sense again. “—good,” she was saying. “You’re shivering, and that’s good.”
    Shivering? She called these brutal, muscle-locked spasms shivering ?
    In a moment of clarity he managed to say “Bullshit.”
    He heard a low sound that was almost like a laugh. Mrs. Wingate, laughing? Maybe he was hallucinating.
    “No, it is good,” she insisted. “It’s your body generating heat. I know I feel warmer, now. Even my feet aren’t as frozen.”
    He did a laborious mental inventory of his body. Maybe she was right. He couldn’t say he was toasty,