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“Chad,” she said on a gasping breath when at last he let her pull her mouth free, “we were so worried. We saw a news report and it was terrifying. Then we got a call from a government official in Venezuela that you’d been hurt, but that’s all we knew. He could barely speak English.” She paused to suck in air. “I’ve been staying with your parents since you—Anyway, they didn’t want me to come, but I had to see you. I had to know how you were, to be with you. Snow was everywhere and I had to”
“I know all about it.”
His simple statement arrested her verbal acrobatics. Until now, she hadn’t stopped to consider how he had known to meet her. “You kno”
“I called home about two hours ago. Dad told me how you took them all on, fighting hell and high water—or snow as it were—to come to me.”
She flushed in embarrassment. “You may have lost a very good pilot. I’m sure he’ll resign after the scene I caused at his house. He didn’t want to bring me, and I—”
“Dad recited your monologue word for word. Gil will never live it down that he let a five foot five blue-eyed brunette intimidate him.” He chuckled and she gloried in the sound of his deep laugh. How she’d missed it!
She touched the locks of his hair that straggled over the bandanna. “What happened?”
He settled his arms around her waist. “Nothing dramatic. This is a damn thick coat,” he digressed on a grumble. “I was a good way off when that tank blew. Instinctively, like everyone else, I dived for cover. I landed in a ditch the wrong way and snapped my leg.”
“The others who were injured?”
“Are still in the hospital.”
“Chad, of course,” she cried, pushing away from him. For the first time, now that the initial impact of finding him alive had been absorbed, she realized that he had been injured. “What’s the matter with me? You shouldn’t be here. You should have stayed in the hospital, too.”
“That’s what the chief nurse kept telling me. She tried to give me pills, which I refused, a sponge bath, which I refused, and I certainly refused to undress. I’ve never seen a woman so bent on getting a man out of his pants.”
“Just what type was this nurse?” Leigh asked, her eyes narrowing in mock suspicion. “The cute, crisp, and vivacious type?”
“No, the ugly, crisp, and militant type,” he said, hobbling on his one good foot until he had secured the crutch under his opposite arm. “Come on,” he said, easily maneuvering himself toward the parked El Dorado despite his injury. “Sorry, but you’ll have to carry your own bag and you’ll have to give me a rain check on carrying you over the threshold.”
Rapid questions were interspersed with her labored breathing as she trotted along behind him, her bag hoisted over her shoulder by its strap. “Where are we going? Did you drive here by yourself? Can you drive? Whom does this belong to? What are we going to do?”
“In order: to the nearest hotel, yes, yes, a Flameco employee who happens to owe me a favor, and that’s a stupid question.”
“But your leg,” she objected, sliding into the front seat. “It probably needs treatment.”
“You’re the best medicine I can think of for whatever ails me.” He stashed his crutch on the back seat, started the motor, and then leaned across the seat to kiss her soundly. His eyes beamed into hers. “I’m entitled to one wedding night, and even if this isn’t Cancun, prepare yourself for a honeymoon.”
* * *
“I was so frightened,” Leigh confessed.
They were lying on the plush bed in the bridal suite of the Warwick Hotel. Leigh would gladly have settled for more modest accommodations, but Chad had insisted that they honeymoon in style. The staff at the check-in desk would have something to talk about for years, Leigh supposed. Expecting a couple fresh from their wedding, their surprise had known no bounds when the Dillons had arrived with suspiciously little luggage. The groom looked like the survivor of a motorcycle gang war, the bride was dressed in jeans, turtleneck sweater, and lynx coat. But Leigh was confident the austere staff had never seen a happier wedding couple than Mr. and Mrs. Chad Dillon.
“But you dropped everything, didn’t let anything or anyone keep you from coming to me,” Chad said now. “When I talked to Dad and he told me you were flying in tonight, I couldn’t believe it. And yet I could. I’ve told you from the first that you were the bravest woman I’d ever met.”
She toyed with the dark hairs on his chest. Her giving him a sponge bath, he’d consented to willingly. And since turn about is fair play, he had had the pleasure of standing her in the tub and washing her, too. Now they were stretched out naked on the wide bed, engulfed in the romantic ambiance of a room built and decorated solely to create such a mood.
“It wasn’t bravery that got me here. It was love. I wanted to come to you.”
He trailed a loving finger down her nose to the corner of her mouth and teased it. “Even after I left you on your wedding day?”
“You had to. I know that now. I knew it then. Forgive me for behaving the way I did, saying the things I said.”
“You had every right.” He tugged at the hair wrapped around his fist until she lifted her face to his. His mouth moved over hers purposefully, parting her lips, penetrating with his tongue. Before he was finished, he brushed light, adoring kisses across her lips. “I had resigned even before we got married.”
She stared at him in wonderment, her heart beating wildly. “You… you resigned?”
“Yes. Remember when I told you we were training new recruits? I had already resigned then under the condition that I would help train someone to take my place. I had asked to have a month’s leave to get married—I planned on an extensive honeymoon, you see—but when this fire happened and they could see it was a beauty, they knew the new guys weren’t ready for it. The one partially trained was in traction.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before you left?” Then she was filled with contrition. “I didn’t give you a chance to explain, did I?”
