by Lucy Ryder
Frankie doesn’t need a hero…
But can she fight her attraction to Nate?
Paramedic Frankie Bryce is finally over her crush on her late brother’s best friend, former navy SEAL Nate Oliver—but he returns to their hometown acting as if she’s still the wild child teenager he has to protect (he promised her brother he would!). Frankie’s all woman now, and definitely doesn’t need rescuing! Trouble is, this super-sexy hero is impossible to ignore…
This time the kiss lasted longer than those first furious seconds and, completely against her will, Frankie found herself kissing him back.
Tentatively at first and then… Wow.
He was warm and solid against her, radiating heat and the kind of strength she needed to keep her knees from wobbling and dumping her at his feet. Was in fact keeping her upright with his big, hard body.
Someone moaned—she was pretty sure it was her—the sound so breathy and needy she might have cringed if she’d had the capacity to do anything more than respond, feel and…oh, God…make another muffled sound in the back of her throat. Every thought, every protest stripped away—along with her resistance.
The instant her mouth softened against his, he broke away, drawing back far enough to mutter a string of curses. Even before she managed to fill her lungs, Frankie’s first thought was: What the heck just happened?
She finally sucked in air and opened her eyes, her body absorbing the hard press and heat of his, her mind struggling with the fact that he’d…that he’d…
“Wha—?” she croaked, then snapped her mouth shut before any more embarrassing sounds emerged and he realized that she was speechless. That the woman who usually had an answer for everything had been rendered speechless by a kiss.
By Nate’s kiss.
Dear Reader,
Frankie Bryce doesn’t need or want a hero. First, she’s quite capable of rescuing herself—thank you very much—and second…well, let’s just say that heroes tend to have a very short lifespan. At least that’s Frankie’s take on things and, after her brother dies in action, she isn’t about to lose anyone else she loves.
Besides, heroes tend to think that everyone needs saving, and Frankie doesn’t. Really. Despite her wild and rebellious past, she’s now a responsible member of the Port St. John’s medical rescue team with a bunch of advanced diplomas after her name. She’s all grown up and the very last thing she wants from former Navy SEAL turned MSRT Commander of the USCG Nathan Oliver is to be one of his projects, let alone a promise he feels honor-bound to keep.
So what does she want from Nate? Well, she’s not sure exactly, but being someone’s responsibility isn’t it. Frankly, with his oh-so annoying stubborn masculine superiority and sexy badass attitude, it isn’t a surprise they rub each other up the wrong way. Especially when he’s bound and determined to see her as his best buddy’s wild and reckless kid sister.
So, thanks but no thanks. Absolutely no heroes welcome.
Frankie and Nate’s story is filled with action and drama, sexy badass boys, fiery independent heroines and a touch of heartache thrown in for good measure.
I hope you’ll love their story as much as I loved writing it.
Happy reading,
Lucy
RESISTING HER COMMANDER HERO
Lucy Ryder
Books by Lucy Ryder
Harlequin Medical Romance
Rebels of Port St. John’s
Rebel Doc on Her Doorstep
Resisting Her Rebel Hero
Tamed by Her Army Doc’s Touch
Falling at the Surgeon’s Feet
Caught in a Storm of Passion
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As always, to my family. Especially my daughters Kate and Ash. You are, and always will be, everything to me.
Praise for Lucy Ryder
“There is a nice balance of medical jargon and human emotion…a quick read with enough action to keep it interesting.”
—RT Book Reviews on Rebel Doc on Her Doorstep
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
EXCERPT FROM HEALED BY THE SINGLE DAD DOC BY ANNIE CLAYDON
CHAPTER ONE
“LOWER THE BASKET!” yelled paramedic Francis Abigail Bryce into her headset over the whop-whop-whop of the helicopter hovering a hundred feet overhead. Wind and rain lashed at the ledge on which she was crouched, shielding the fallen climber.
If she slipped it was a long way down and probably wouldn’t end well. It wasn’t exactly how she’d envisioned spending her Friday evening but when word had come through from the rangers’ station earlier that a climber had fallen, Frankie had been dispatched to the scene.
Further up the coast from the large seaside town of Port St. John’s on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state, heavy rains had caused a huge landslide and rescue teams were busy digging out survivors. With the storm wreaking havoc on the Juan de Fuca Strait, rescue personnel were stretched to the limit.
Frankie had returned with a few of the injured and then been the lucky candidate in the wrong place at the wrong darn time. Now, instead of providing emergency medical care at the site of the slide, she was clinging to a slick ledge only a few feet wide and a couple hundred feet from certain death because a group had thought it smart to go climbing in torrential rain.
She looked down into the guy’s youthful face and shook her head. Probably a student on spring break, she thought. EMTs were always busy this time of the year, rescuing kids from their own ambitions.
“Hang in there, handsome,” she yelled, aware that in the fifteen minutes she’d been there, he’d been slipping in and out of consciousness. She suspected a ruptured spleen and she’d already wrapped his leg in an inflatable compression cast.
Concerned about what was taking so long, Frankie looked up as a deep voice in her ear warned, “Heads up,” and the next instant a large figure dropped onto the ledge. Dressed in a red and black jumpsuit and wearing a half-face helmet with comms mouthpiece, he looked like a huge bug from an alien world.
Frankie didn’t need to see his eyes to know who it was. The hard, masculine jaw and the unsmiling line of his sensual mouth would have been a dead giveaway even if the hair on the back of her neck hadn’t stood up like a freaked-out cat.
Nathan Oliver. The man who’d been back for months without at least letting her know he was home.
What the hell was he doing here? Wasn’t he some super-secret commander of the Maritime Security Response Team or something? Unless her patient was a terrorist, or a foreign national in the country illegally—which Frankie doubted—she was pretty sure a member of the nation’s deployable operations group stationed at Port St. John’s wouldn’t normally be part of search and rescue.
Then again, maybe the landslide and current conditions in the strait had put all coasties on call, including the MSRT. And, yeah, wasn’t it just peachy that he had to be the one dropping from the sky?
Unhooking his line from the chopper, he gave a couple of hand signals to the pilot above before his safety line disappeared into the lashing rain.
With her he
art in her throat, Frankie ruthlessly squelched the urge to reach out and grab him before rotor wash blew him off the ledge. Or maybe before she gave him a little shove over the edge herself.
Okay, fine, so maybe she was tempted for about a nanosecond, but even though Nathan Oliver was the last person she wanted to see, she didn’t want him to die either.
They’d meant too much to each other—once.
Besides, balanced on the rocky ledge and sure-footed and powerful as a mountain lion, Nate was more than capable of rescuing them both. He’d been a Navy SEAL before transferring to the Pacific North West unit of the US Coast Guard as Lieutenant Commander of the MSRT. Granted, the present conditions probably weren’t the worst he’d experienced, but even he couldn’t walk up sheer cliffs in this weather.
He dropped to his haunches beside her and she felt the sweep of his penetrating gaze. The resultant shiver, she told herself, was from being soaked through and freezing. It couldn’t be that he still affected her.
That ship had sailed a lifetime ago and Frankie didn’t make a habit of repeating her mistakes. Especially the very public ones that had devastated not only her pride but also her heart.
She saw his mouth form words that looked like, “You okay?”
But instead of replying, she yelled, “Where’s the basket? He’s going into shock.”
He pointed skyward and she looked up to see the rescue litter swinging wildly in the gusting wind as it descended toward them. Nate barked out an order to the chopper and the pilot edged closer to the cliff face. But instead of controlling the swing, it caused the litter to spin.
He rose to his feet in one smooth move and stretched out a long arm to snag it. Almost in slow motion, Frankie watched as it abruptly shifted in the wind. She opened her mouth to yell a warning as the medevac litter flew through the air toward him.
He saw it coming too late to get out the way and it clipped him on the side of his helmet, sending him staggering backward toward the edge.
Time slowed and stretched, narrowing into an endless tunnel of pure horror as Nate fought to regain his balance. Then his foot slipped and in that split second before he went over, his gaze caught and held hers.
In that timeless instant, all the wild conflicting emotions she’d managed to suppress for twelve long years exploded through her, blinding her to everything but him.
Everything but the need to keep him from disappearing from her life forever. And before she realized she was moving, Frankie rose and leapt for him in one desperate move.
She reacted. As she always did.
Fear gave her strength and speed and before she could even process her actions, her icy fingers closed around his harness. Her momentum sent her thudding into him and Frankie wrapped her legs around him like a vice as they shot off the ledge.
Through the frantic yelling in the comms, she heard him curse as his arms enveloped her like banded steel. Her line went slack and for one awful moment she thought they were headed for the bottom of the gorge. She sucked in a breath, tightened her grip and pressed her face into Nate’s throat, thinking stupidly that maybe it wasn’t such a bad way to go.
Wrapped around his big tough body and with his uniquely potent masculine scent filling her lungs, Frankie could think of a dozen worse places to be.
It was the closest she’d been to him in twelve years. The closest she’d been since the night of her eighteenth birthday, the night he’d completely humiliated her in front of half the town.
He’d been around forever and as well as she’d thought she’d known him, she couldn’t have known how much he’d changed or that he’d lost friends on his last mission. He’d looked the same—although bigger, harder and fitter—and acted the same as the boy she’d known her whole life. And if she’d noticed the closed-off expression in his eyes, the tight line of his mouth and jaw that night, she’d put it down to typical male arrogance and the fact that he was a member of the nation’s elite fighting force, mixing with a bunch of wild immature teenagers all because she’d begged him to come to her party.
She should have known better than to try to measure up to all the women in his life. To him she’d always just been his best friend’s kid sister; wild, reckless—always wanting to tag along.
Besides, she’d never measured up, to him or to her brother Jack. At least not in her parents’ eyes. Jack had been their golden child and Nate, popular, sporty and incredibly smart, was like their second son. They’d excelled at everything and it had been daunting, living in their shadow.
The birthday incident had been humiliating and she’d said things that filled her with guilt and shame whenever she thought about them. She’d lost him that day…and then seven years later she’d lost Jack in a mortar attack.
Her champions. Her own personal superheroes.
Frankie’s heart squeezed. And now she and Nate were heading for the bottom of the gorge and she’d never get the chance to prove that she’d—
The safety line abruptly snapped taut, halting their graceful pendulum arc into empty space; halting the wild, regretful thoughts flashing through Frankie’s mind. The next instant they were headed straight for the unforgiving rocky surface of the cliff face.
She tensed, because this was going to hurt.
Nate tried to turn, probably to take the brunt of the impact, but Frankie was attached to the safety line and the collision was hard enough to force the air from her lungs…and Nate’s big warm muscular body between her thighs.
Stars exploded behind her eyes. Whether they were from the jolt to her skull or his hard, tough body, Frankie wasn’t sure. But it was enough to rattle loose her good sense and cause some seriously inappropriate thoughts to flash through her mind, sending heat exploding through her body.
Nate Oliver was still the hottest man she’d ever known. The kind of hot that made women think inappropriate thoughts even while dangling hundreds of feet in the air by a slender nylon rope, and one wrong move away from falling to their deaths.
“Don’t look down,” he ordered. “And for God’s sake don’t let go. Not yet.”
Of course Frankie didn’t listen. Craning her neck, she looked down and then promptly wished she hadn’t when a distressed squeak escaped without permission. All she could see beneath her was a dark cold emptiness. Vertigo abruptly clamped queasy fingers around her throat and her belly churned.
“Dammit, Frankie,” Nate growled in her ear. “I said don’t look down.”
She wanted to tell him that he wasn’t the boss of her but her breath was lodged in her throat and she could only gasp.
Oh, God. How mortifying. Inside, Fearless Frankie—Port St. John’s former wild child—was freaking out.
“I’m going to let you go,” Nate said calmly, and it took a couple of beats for his words to register.
When they did, she snapped, “No!” and tightened her grip on him. No way was he letting go.
“Just enough to free my hands and feet,” he explained quietly. “Then I’m going to crab-walk us to the ledge. Okay?”
She wanted to say no, but she knew it would take a little strain off the safety line and keep it from shearing off on the rocky outcroppings.
She really, really didn’t want that to happen.
She looked up at the suspended medevac litter, which was now hanging motionless a few feet to her left.
Go figure.
Gritting her teeth, she nodded jerkily, tightening her grip on Nate’s harness. Her thighs clenched around him until they ached, and all she could think was, Thank God for all those squats and lunges I’ve been doing lately.
“Good girl,” he murmured, and she wanted to snort because she was about as far from being a good girl as they were from the ground. He eased his grip until all that kept him from succumbing to the law of gravity were her arms and legs.
He murmured into his comms and then with his feet planted flat against the cliff face, he began to move them toward the ledge.
It couldn’t have been more than a m
inute since Frankie’s spectacular leap off the edge but her muscles had begun to shake and she didn’t know how much longer she’d be able to hold on.
Beneath Nate’s jumpsuit, muscles bunched and flexed, giving her a few more inappropriate thoughts. Thoughts that might have freaked her out if she hadn’t been closer to death than she liked. Frankly, in the circumstances, she figured she was allowed.
Besides, it had been so long since she’d had inappropriate thoughts of any kind that she might as well enjoy them. They were the closest she’d had to actual sex in forever.
Finally, the tension on her harness lessened and Nate straightened, big feet planted shoulder width apart.
After a couple of beats he said, “You can let go now, Francis,” the dry tone as much as his use of the hated name bringing her head up. The first thing she saw was his mouth, beautifully sculpted and much too tempting.
Tearing her gaze away, she looked up into eyes as dark and fathomless as the death they’d just escaped. Sometime in the past couple of minutes—probably while she’d been having those hot thoughts—he’d lifted his visor and the warmth in his usually unreadable gaze stunned her.
“You okay?” His mouth was barely an inch away and all it would take was one tiny move from her and—
Spooked, Frankie flashed a quick look to the left and saw they were once more on the ledge. Her patient, wrapped in a silver emergency blanket, was a few feet away, waiting for her to get her act together.
“I’m fine,” she croaked, her throat desert dry and tight with tension while adrenaline still pumped through her at their near disaster.
Eager to put a little distance between them, Frankie released the stranglehold she had on him and slid to the ground until all that connected them were her fingers still locked on his harness.
“Francis.”
She opened her mouth in a snarled protest but it gave her the impetus she needed to let him go. She might have pushed away from him if they hadn’t been perched on a narrow, slick ledge and she hadn’t just taken a decade off her life with that one daring leap.