Santiago's Convenient Fiancée

by Annie O'Neil

  And then—she blinked.

  Ah...so he wasn’t alone here. She felt it, too.

  “Huh.”

  He heard the sound—an instinctual response to disbelief—come from her throat, but her lips hadn’t even parted. Just pushed forward in a disapproving moue that disappeared as she pulled her lips in on themselves and swallowed whatever words were roiling around her mind.

  Santi fought his own features, trying to maintain his best neutral face when all he wanted to do was grin.

  His first chink in her Gaelic armor.

  He wasn’t a flirter and this sure as hell wasn’t flirting, but—electricity was hard to ignore. The automated voice of the AED broke through the static in his head. Verbal sparring would have to wait. He watched as her eyes flicked to the monitor at the sound of the electric charge making the connection.

  A thin flat line.

  Her fingers shot down to Diego’s carotid artery and, as if she was an angel delivering the healing touch...beep, beep, the flat line re-formed into the graphic mountainscape that was a beating heart. It was a far cry from a match to the Rocky Mountains—more like the rolling hills of South Dakota—but with a bit of luck and a stint in the hospital he’d get there. The triumphant glint returned.

  “Guess you’d better get away up that hill for a backboard, then.” She jutted her chin toward Joe. “It’s my partner’s last day. We don’t want the old fella slipping a disk or anything, now, do we?”

  “Watch it, girlie. I still have plenty of time to file a grievance against you and get you shipped back to where you came from,” Joe cautioned, as he all but proved her point by performing the stretch and twist only a stiff back could bring.

  A jag of discord took hold of her features and just as quickly was lifted away with a bright smile. There was a story there. But she hid it well, cleverly tucking it away behind a sharp wit and a winning smile. Miles better than his go-to scowl.

  “That’d be about right, Joe. Picking on a poor wee girl fresh off the boat from Ireland. Now, quit your faffing about and get me another dose of epi, would you?”

  Santi’s eyebrow lifted in an amused arc. At five feet and a splash of something extra, this woman—“Murphy”—would’ve struggled at a standing-room-only stadium concert. But he had little doubt she was head and shoulders above your average crowd.

  “Hey,” he asked as he pressed up from the ground, “what’s your name, anyway?”

  The smile she was refusing to give him morphed into a smirk as she raised a finger and double-tapped her name tag.

  Murphy.

  So that’s all he was getting.

  He felt his lips peel into a full smile as he took the steep incline in a few long-legged strides. They’d board up Diego then away she’d go...

  Meeting this enigmatic woman was no doubt going to fall into the brief encounter catalog of his life, but he could feel the moment elbowing into the happy memories section. Suffice it to say the department wasn’t very big, but the unexpected jolt of affirmation that he was still a red-blooded male was a reminder that some parts of life were definitely worth living.

  * * *

  “Here you are, mija.”

  Saoirse reached out both hands to take the iced glass, loaded to the brim with a freshly whizzed margarita. With salt. It was a take-no-prisoners cocktail and about as well deserved as end-of-day drinks got.

  “Your parents named you well, Ángel!” She gave the bartender a grateful smile. It had been a lo-o-o-ng day. New Year’s Day celebrations seemed to have lasted two weeks in Miami. One of their patients had only been adorned in a swirl of glittery tinsel. Didn’t he know it was bad luck to leave his decorations up so long? Or take quite so many little “magic” pills? It was one way to start the New Year with a bang. His girlfriend had looked exhausted.

  “Murph!”

  She looked up, scanning the growing crowd, eyes eventually landing on her friend Amanda waving to her from the entryway to the patio, arm crooking in a get your booty over here now arc. She took a huge glug of the margarita, convincing herself it was to make sure the drink didn’t spill as she wove her way through Mad Ron’s Cantina to the picnic-table-filled, blue-tiled garden area already overflowing with well-wishers for Joe. She’d been lucky when she’d landed him as a mentor in her work-study program. The guy had seen it all. Not to mention the fact that, forty years on, an ambulance had helped him accrue a vast pool of friends. The place was heaving.

  “Hey, girl! What took you so long?” Amanda gave her one of those American half hug things she was growing to like. Irish people weren’t huggy like this, but after the day... No. Make that the year she’d had? The blossoming friendship was a much-needed soul salve.

  “I wanted to stop by the hospital to check on a patient.”

  “Oh? Bit of a hottie, was he?”

  Saoirse snorted. Mostly to cover up the fact it had been the roadside stranger she’d been hoping to see, not the tattoo-covered vet they’d saved.

  “Not so much. But he’d been out a long time—cardiac arrest—and I wanted to see what his recovery was like. Curiosity. Never seen a guy make it through who’d had over twenty minutes of compressions.”

  “You did that? Twenty minutes?” She blew on her fingers in a color-me-impressed move.

  “Don’t be mad!” Saoirse waved away the suggestion, trying to shake the mental image of Mr. Mysterioso’s very fine forearms as she did. She had a thing for forearms and his had launched straight to Number One on the Forearms of the Week list. Not that she actually kept a list or anything. She blinked away the image and forced herself to focus on Amanda. “No mad compressions for me. I would’ve stuck my magic electric shockers on him straight away.” She made her best crazed-scientist face to prove it was true.

  “You’re such a diligent little paramedic, aren’t you?” The verbal gibe was accompanied by an elbow in the ribs.

  Saoirse jabbed her back and laughed. “Hey! Don’t be shortist!”

  “As long as you promise not to be tallist!”

  They clinked glasses with a satisfying guffaw. Amanda towered over Saoirse and rarely missed a moment to comment on her friend’s diminutive stature. Just about the only person in the world who could.

  A swift jab of pain shot through her heart at the memory of her fiancé—ex! Ex, ex, ex! Ex-fiancé resting his head on top of hers. To think it had made her feel safe! What a sucker. She shook off the scowl the memory elicited and replaced it with a goofy smile when she saw Amanda’s questioning look. The woman had laser vision right into her soul. “Wouldn’t it just be my luck to come across the lippiest desk nurse in the whole of Miami?”

  “Not everyone’s prepared to take all your blarney, Murph. Fess up. Why were you really at the hospital? Don’t tell me you’re a margarita behind the rest of us just because of quizzical interest. You got exams coming up or something?”

  Saoirse avoided the light-saber gaze her friend was shooting at her and took another thirst-quenching glug, a shiver juddering through her as the ice hit her system.

  “Oh. My. Word.” Amanda’s eyes were well and truly cemented across the heaving garden. Saoirse’s shoulders dropped. Phew. Dodged a bullet. Looked like eye candy had saved the day.

  “Three o’clock,” Amanda murmured. “Tall, dark and too freakin’ sexy for the word sexy. I’m going to get a cavity in my eye from the sweetness of this man. Murph—what’s better than sexy?”

  Mr. Mysterioso popped into her head and quite a few words jostled for pole position. “Edible? Scrumptious? Lip-lickingly perfect? Luscious?”

  Hmm...there was a bit of a food theme going on here. Couldn’t have anything to do with the perfect caramel color of the knight in shining motorcycle gear’s forearms, could it?

  “Luscious,” Amanda repeated, her voice all soft and swoony. Was she remembering s
he was happily married?

  “Three o’clock?” Saoirse had to at least take a glimpse. Looking never hurt, right? It was the feeling part that hurt—and she wouldn’t go down that stupid, heart-crushing path again.

  Her eyes flitted from face to face, none of them fitting into the knee-weakening territory Amanda’s stranger clearly dominated. “I can’t see him!”

  “Get up on the picnic bench, then.” Amanda didn’t wait for Saoirse to protest, all but lifting her up and aiming her toward the entryway. “You’ve got to get a look. This guy could fill up a calendar all by his lonesome. Then they’d have to make up some more months just for fun... Can you imagine it? Mr. Yes-Ma’am-uary!” She gave a military salute before giving Saoirse an additional prod to hurry her up on her quest to steady herself on the bench seat.

  “For crying out loud, Amanda. Quit your pushing, will you? I can get on the bench by myself—Oh...”

  They said lightning never struck twice. But that had been disproved. And today was blasting another hole in the theory.

  “You see what I mean?”

  Did she ever? And when Saoirse’s eyes connected with the object of their evaluation...she needed to get down from the bench. Quick smart.

  “He’s all right. I’ve seen better.” Saoirse jumped down and took another spine-juddering slurp of her icy drink. Her jets needed cooling. Big time.

  “You’ve gone mental.” Amanda’s jaw all but dropped in disbelief. “The man rocks it!”

  “Rocks what exactly?” Saoirse went for a dismissive snort and ended up cough-choking. Awesomely sexy. Not.

  Okay. So she didn’t really need to ask the question because she knew exactly what he rocked. And it wasn’t just her boat. He was rocking her tummy. Which was currently doing some sort of loopy ribbon-twirling fest thing with the half of margarita it had inside it. He was rocking her heart. Which seemed to have kicked up a notch—or seventeen—in the pace department. Her entire nervous system was experiencing a takeover as if he were playing a goose-bump xylophone along her arms...then down her back and in a sort of heated swirl around her—

  “Uh.” Amanda pressed a hand to her friend’s forehead. “Are you sure you weren’t at the hospital to make sure you aren’t going clinically insane?” She drew out the last word just to make super sure Saoirse knew her friend thought she was nuts. “How on earth are we ever going to find you a hot boyfriend to marry in the next two months if your taste in men is so weird as to not find that amazing specimen of a man...?” Her hand shot out in a pointy gesture and made contact. With a chest. A chest Saoirse had already had the good fortune to stare at for some length of time earlier that day.

  Amanda’s jaw dropped again.

  “Miss Murphy. We meet again.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  YOU KNOW HIM?

  That’s what Amanda’s wide-eyed look said. And then she said it out loud for good measure.

  “Ha!” Saoirse barked. “No.”

  Saoirse’s eyes darted between her friend and Mr. Mysterioso. This was awkward. Why wasn’t the earth being kindly for once and swallowing her up in a freak sinkhole incident? Now would be a pretty good time for Mother Nature to intervene if she was ever going to show her largesse. She hadn’t bothered when her fiancé had left her standing at the altar like a complete and utter ninny in a ridiculous meringue of a dress... Well...it had rained a lot so it had masked the tears, but Hop to it Mummy Nature—now’s your chance to make things right!

  “Santiago.”

  He stretched his hand forward toward Saoirse, who ignored it, and then to Amanda, who—after exclaiming how fun it was that he was a lefty—took it, gave it a stroke with her other hand to check for a ring and shook it in slow motion, all the while mouthing to Saoirse “You know him?”

  “Santi, if Santiago’s too much of a mouthful.”

  The comment was aimed directly at her. And elicited some images that would’ve sent a nun straight to the burning flames place.

  Saoirse drained her glass. It wasn’t ladylike and rocketed a brain freeze straight to the neurotransmitters that would’ve helped her with witty rebuttals, but...tough. Mr. Created-for-Calendars here had made an impact and she’d been working long and hard on the impenetrable fortress built around her heart, not to mention her—ahem—golden triangle. Or whatever it was called these days. For crying out loud! It was feeling a bit too much like there was some sort of fireworks display going off in her heavily ignored girlie parts.

  “And you are...?”

  She could hear Santiago speaking again. Santi-ahhhh-go... Of course he’d have a gorgeous name to go with his gorgeous everything else.

  Why couldn’t she speak?

  “I’m Amanda and Miss Mutey-Pants here is Sear-shuh.” Amanda valiantly stepped into the fray with a perfect mimic of Saoirse trying for the billionth time to get people to pronounce her Gaelic name properly. It wasn’t that hard. And right now she wished she could tell her friend it was actually pronounced Sear-shut up, Amanda!

  Santiago turned the full beam of his smile onto Saoirse, clearly enjoying her very obvious discomfort. And that wasn’t just the fact she had to tip her chin way up to meet his amused grin. It had been a right old comedy of errors when the pair of them had boarded up Diego and tried to get him up the embankment to the ambulance.

  “You all right after this afternoon’s workout?”

  Oh! It appears someone does a little bit of mind reading on the side.

  “I think it’ll be safe to say Joe is more than happy to be throwing in the towel today.”

  “You held your own.”

  Flatterer.

  “What? Coming up on the rear, with you pulling him up one-handed like? I don’t think so.” She might not want to like him, but the man deserved all the credit on that one. Diego would be wearing a toe tag in the morgue right now if Santiago hadn’t swooped in to the rescue. There weren’t many folk who would leap off their motorcycles—and, yes, she’d ogled the mint condition road bike, envied it and just for a teensy-tiny second imagined Santiago straddling it—all to come to the aid of a man who most of the world had forgotten about. There was definitely a heart somewhere underneath that big expanse of a chest that was working the plain black T-shirt he was wearing. She tipped her chin to the side as if it would help her see him in a white shirt. Yup! That would look nice, too. Caramel skin rocked all colors of the just-the-right-amount-of-tight T-shirt world.

  “We got there in the end.” Santiago’s eyes didn’t leave her, one of his teeth dragging across his full lower lip in slow motion...just as it had earlier in the day when she’d been very obviously staring at his...er...attributes.

  Stop staring at his lips. You are no longer in the kissing business.

  Saoirse feigned a “whatever” eye roll just to pull her eyes away from his mouth and ended up stopping in midroll when his dark-lashed eyes caught her own with a teasing wink. He knew her game. She could feel it straight down to her tightly laced mental bodice.

  “Saoirse’s name means liberty,” Amanda quipped, clearly feeling left out of the staring contest.

  “And justice to all?” Santiago asked, his eyes taking a quick side trip to Amanda then straight back to Saoirse’s, all the while doing their jolly best to unnerve her.

  For all the flaming rainbows in Ireland. Were those flecks of gold in his coffee-brown eyes? Nah... Had to be all the fairy lights laced around the walled patio’s palm trees. No one had gold flecks in their eyes. Except for tigers. And lions. Best leave the bears out of it because there was nothing grizzly about the man standing in front of her, waiting for a response to his clever quip.

  “I told you. It’s Murphy. Murph if you get tired halfway through.”

  She received a lightly arced eyebrow and a suggestion of a smile in response.

  Why did everything they
said to each other seem to have a sexy, satin-sheets connotation? She briskly turned to Amanda. “I need a drink. Shall I get you anything when I’m at the bar?”

  “Same again.” Amanda wiggled her near-empty margarita glass, delighted to have a little me time with Mr. Luscious. Saoirse hesitated for a second. Happily married herself, Amanda had matchmaking down to a fine art. Especially given Saoirse’s...how to put this exactly...little bitty visa problem. The one she didn’t really want to think about ever but had to, given the high-speed tick-tock of that old life clock. Her advanced work-study degree to shift from NICU nurse to paramedic was running out and just thinking about heading back to Ireland turned her palms clammy.

  Even so...she gave Santiago a sidelong glance. Poor mite. He wouldn’t know what had hit him. Give Amanda five minutes alone with a man and she would have the rest of his life planned out, whether he saw it coming or not.

  Ping!

  Mr. Luscious blinked.

  Uh-oh.

  Had they just done that connect-eyes, mind reading thing again?

  “How ’bout I give you a hand? The crowd’s pretty wild in there.” Santiago turned to join her, much to Amanda’s delight.

  “I’m all right, thanks.” Saoirse bristled. Talk about a rock and a hard place. She might be short but she wasn’t some helpless female who needed a big strong man to help her carry a couple of drinks. On the other hand, if she left him alone with Amanda it was highly likely they’d find themselves hand in hand on the beach, their bare feet being lapped by the waves as some new age minister united them in eternal marital harmony. She shrugged. This was pretty much a no-win situation. “Do what you like.”