A Hero to Hold

by Linda Castillo

  She was halfway down the hall when the bathroom door swung open. John stepped out wearing nothing but a towel and a grin. Hannah’s heart fluttered once, then promptly dropped into her stomach. The sight of him damp from a shower and smelling of piney woods and soap shouldn’t have left her head swimming, but it did.

  “Morning.” His biceps flexed as he scrubbed a navy blue towel over his hair. “How are you feeling?”

  Hannah wasn’t sure which of them was more surprised, but she definitely knew who was more uncomfortable—and it wasn’t John. He seemed to be right in his element standing half-naked before her with damp flesh and that wide chest.

  “Sorry ’bout the towel.”

  Heat rose in her cheeks when she noticed the way the towel in question rode low on his hips. Her first instinct was to look away, but she didn’t want him to know she was rattled, so she kept her gaze steady on his. “No problem.”

  “Any luck with your memory?”

  “No.”

  “I made coffee. Decaf for you.”

  “Great.” The urge to let her gaze roam was strong, but she resisted. The last thing she needed to know was that John Maitland had one of the most magnificent male bodies she’d ever laid eyes on.

  “I fixed breakfast,” he said.

  “I…smell it.” She didn’t have the heart to tell him the smell of food held as much appeal as a pair of moldy socks.

  “I figured you could use it.” He gestured in the general direction of her abdomen. “Eating for two, and all.”

  If he hadn’t looked so damn good standing there in that towel, she might have told him all she wanted were a few crackers. Her stomach was feeling temperamental at best this morning. But Hannah was too flustered to conjure up a response that was even remotely intelligent.

  “I’ll just get dressed,” he said after a moment.

  Her legs nearly went weak with relief. “Good idea. I’ll just…be in the kitchen.” Cautiously she eased around him and made a beeline for the kitchen.

  John hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d said he fixed breakfast. He’d cooked enough food to feed the entire Rocky Mountain Search and Rescue team. The man obviously knew his way around the kitchen. A plate heaped with pancakes warmed on the stove. Perfectly cooked bacon strips drained on a paper towel next to a bowl of fruit. The rinds of several oranges sat near an electric juicer, its pitcher full of fresh juice. The sight should have had her mouth watering. Unfortunately, her stomach had other ideas.

  Searching through the cabinets, she found a glass, filled it with water and took a cautious sip. Not sure if her stomach was going to cooperate, she set the glass on the counter and started toward the pantry to search for crackers. A sheet of paper lying next to the juicer caught her attention. She read the heading. “Pregnancy: The First Trimester.” She stared at the print, realizing from the date at the bottom of the page that John had already been on the computer that morning at a health site on the Internet.

  “I didn’t know if you wanted milk or juice, so I bought both.”

  She started at the sound of his voice and spun.

  “There’s a grocery just a few miles down the road,” he said. “You were asleep. I picked up a few things.”

  He’d changed into a pair of faded jeans, a charcoal flannel shirt and hiking boots. The cap he wore was black with the RMSAR emblazoned at the crown. Eyeing her, he entered the kitchen and went directly to the refrigerator and withdrew a gallon of milk, took it to the small table and poured two glasses.

  “Actually, I was hoping for some crackers or dry toast,” she said.

  “Got that, too. I hope whole wheat is okay.”

  “Fine.”

  He strode to the toaster and popped the button down. “I bought organic eggs. I thought maybe a cheese omelet would be a good source of protein and calcium.”

  The thought of eating eggs—organic or otherwise—made her stomach pitch. “John, I appreciate all this…” She tried not to look at the eggs he was breaking into a stainless bowl. “But I’m not really hungry this morning.”

  “You’ve got to keep up your strength, Red.”

  “No, really, I’m—”

  He proceeded to break the yolks and whisk. “I could add some mushrooms or tomatoes if you like.”

  One look at the slimy concoction in the bowl, and Hannah lost the battle with her stomach. Dignity forgotten, she put her hand over her mouth and ran for the bathroom.

  * * *

  John stood at the counter with the whisk in his hand, staring after her for a full minute before realizing what had happened. Damn, he should have realized she was looking a little green around the gills. But he’d thought her paleness had more to do with lack of food than nausea. He hadn’t even checked her pupils to see if maybe the nausea was from the concussion.

  He shouldn’t have overlooked something so obvious. Not John Maitland the medic. But he knew it wasn’t the medic that had screwed up. John Maitland the man knew damn good and well why he hadn’t gotten any closer to her this morning—because of that blasted kiss. Well, both kisses actually. Every time they got within shouting distance of each other, one of them ended up making a mistake and dragging the other one into it.

  Chiding himself for not being more observant, he left the kitchen and headed for the bathroom down the hall. He stopped outside the door and knocked quietly. “Hannah? You okay?”

  “Go away.”

  The toilet flushed. Compassion kicked through him at the sound of her being sick. He hated it that there was nothing he could do to help. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know you were sick.”

  “Yeah, well, welcome to my pregnancy.” The toilet flushed again.

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Get rid of those eggs.”

  As badly as he felt, he couldn’t help but smile. “Right.”

  He heard the water in the sink run. An instant later, the door opened. Her face was damp with water, two shades too pale, and framed by strands of wet hair. She shouldn’t have looked sexy, but she did.

  “Don’t say anything about food,” she said.

  “I won’t.”

  “Especially eggs.”

  “No problem.” He shoved his hands into his pockets. “Anything else?”

  “Do you think you could come up with some dry crackers?”

  Something went soft in John’s chest at the sight of her porcelain features framed by that tangle of red hair. It may have been uncombed, but he still wanted to run his fingers though it. “You’re pale,” he said.

  “I’ll be fine as long as you don’t start talking about bacon and eggs, okay?”

  He smiled. Damn, he was even starting to like her when she was grouchy. “How about a glass of ice water with those crackers?”

  “Deal.”

  Forgetting about his self-imposed rule not to touch her, he took her face in his hands and leaned closer.

  She stiffened. “Wh-what do you think you’re doing?”

  “Checking to see if your pupils are dilated. That okay with you?”

  “Oh. Well…” He felt her relax. “Are they?”

  “No.” He released her and let his hands drop. “That’s good.”

  “So, I feel like death warmed over because I’m pregnant not because I tumbled down the side of a mountain. Like that makes a lot of sense.”

  He grinned. “Sorry, Red, but that’s about the size of it.”

  “How long does morning sickness last?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Well, you’re a medic,” she said. “And I saw your reading material on the kitchen counter.”

  Reading material? John winced inwardly. Shoot, he must have left the articles he’d downloaded and printed in the kitchen where he’d been reading as he cooked.

  “You know, the article titled ‘Pregnancy: The First Trimester.’ It may have been presumptuous of me, but I figured it was about pregnancy.”

  “Oh, that one.” Not sure why it embarrassed h
im having her know he’d been reading up on the subject of pregnancy, he gently took her hand and started toward the living room. “Have a seat, and I’ll bring you the crackers.”

  A few minutes later, he joined her with a plate heaped with dry crackers and a few orange sections. He set the ice water on the table next to her. She was still too pale for his liking, but at least the sickly cast was gone.

  “This might interest you.” He set the article on the coffee table. “I don’t know much about pregnancy, so I went out to a health site and downloaded and printed it.”

  “Thank you.” She reached for the articles.

  “Crackers first, Red.” Taking a cracker from the plate, he handed it to her along with the glass of water. “You can read after you eat.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Oh, for Pete’s sake.”

  “You didn’t have dinner last night. You need to eat.”

  She took a bite of the cracker. “When I was sick this morning. The nausea…it was familiar to me.”

  “You’ve been sick before,” he said.

  Her eyes met his. In their brown depths, John saw a flicker of hope. “Yes, I remember being sick.”

  “That’s great, Red. I mean, not about you being sick, but that you remember. That’s terrific.”

  “I think it’s happened to me a lot during this pregnancy.”

  He looked down at the half-eaten cracker in her hand. “Did you remember anything else?” he asked carefully.

  “Not really. Just what I recalled in the dream last night.”

  John didn’t miss the tremor that ran the length of her when she mentioned the dream. He’d heard people scream before. In the course of his career, he’d heard them scream in pain, in surprise, in fear and in anger. But he would never forget the sound of Hannah’s scream or how it had sent him bolt upright from a deep sleep. She hadn’t been simply afraid. She’d been terrified.

  She finished the first cracker, and John handed her a section of orange.

  “You know,” she began, “I’ve been so caught up in what’s going on with me, I just realized I don’t know anything about you.”

  He couldn’t tell her she didn’t know anything about him by design. He didn’t talk about his past. The John Maitland he’d been back in Philly no longer existed.

  “What do you want to know?” he asked.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Philadelphia.”

  She smiled. “I knew it was somewhere in the northeast.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Your accent.”

  “Accent?” he scoffed. “I don’t have an accent.”

  “You give words that end with the ‘a’ sound an ‘er’ sound. And you clip your words.”

  “I do not clip my words.”

  “Do, too. And you call me Hann-er.”

  “Hannah,” he said.

  She laughed. “You did it again.”

  John feigned annoyance and rolled his eyes. “Did not.”

  “Okay John-from-Philadelphi-er.”

  “You’re giving me a hard time about my accent.” He grinned. “I can’t believe it.”

  “So, what brought you all the way from Philadelphia to Colorado?”

  The question shouldn’t have stopped him cold, but it did. John told himself it was a natural progression of curiosity. Innocent small talk. He’d heard the question a hundred times—and he’d answered with the same lie a hundred times. But no matter how many times he told it, the lie never got any easier.

  “The job.” He hated that he couldn’t meet her gaze. Couldn’t look into her guileless brown eyes and think of Philly. “And the mountains,” he added as a half-truth. “I saw the Rockies when I was a kid, and they moved me. I knew I’d live here one day.”

  He wondered how she would react if she knew the truth—if she knew about the darkness in his heart, if she knew whose blood ran thick in his veins. John assured himself the relationship would never go that far. After all, John Maitland the Untouchable didn’t get close to people. He kept them on a need-to-know basis, and most people just simply didn’t need to know.

  The pager clipped to his belt chirped. He looked down, saw the number, felt the familiar rush of adrenaline.

  “What is it?” Hannah asked.

  “There’s a call out—”

  “Call out?”

  John started toward his canvas bag of gear next to the door. “All the team members of RMSAR wear pagers. When a call comes through Dispatch, we get paged. I’ve got to go out for a few hours.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “It snowed in the higher elevations last night. There’s probably been an accident.” As much as he’d wanted to get out from under her line of questioning, only then did John realize he wasn’t quite comfortable leaving her alone. Logic told him she would be all right here without him. But the part of him that was a man and feeling protective didn’t like the idea that he could be wrong.

  “You’ll be safe here,” he said, lifting his parka from the coat tree.

  “Of course, I will.” She nodded enthusiastically, but John didn’t miss the quick flash of uncertainty in her eyes. He didn’t blame her for being uneasy.

  “No one followed us. No one knows you’re here.”

  “Really, I’m okay. I mean, I’ve got Honeybear to protect me, right?”

  John grinned. Oh, yeah, he was starting to like her just fine. “Hold that thought, Red. And make yourself at home. I’ve got to go. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

  CHAPTER 10

  The call turned out to be serious multivehicle accident with critical injuries that entailed two trips to Lake County Hospital and took more than four hours to clear. Even through the adrenaline and stress of two litter extractions and one resuscitation, John still hadn’t been able to get Hannah off his mind. Worse, for the first time in his career, he hadn’t been able to keep his focus. His timing had been off during the extraction. Luckily, he hadn’t made a mistake, but several times he’d seen the cool looks he was getting from Buzz—and knew the older man knew why.

  John knew stashing Hannah at his cabin for safekeeping wasn’t the smartest thing he’d ever done. If he wanted to be truthful about it, keeping her there was probably downright stupid. So why had he offered? Why couldn’t he stop thinking about her? And why in the hell couldn’t he wait to get home?

  The questions taunted him as he hauled his canvas equipment bag out of the Jeep and started toward the cabin. He still didn’t have the slightest idea what he was going to do about her. He couldn’t turn her out on the street. Not when she was pregnant and alone and obviously in trouble. His best option—the smart thing to do—would be to take her to another women’s shelter. The problem was, John wasn’t feeling particularly smart when it came to this woman.

  Digging out his house key, he unlocked the door. The first thing he noticed was her scent. An intriguing mix of sweet and earthy with subtle undertones of woman. The next thing he noticed was the music. Classic rock and roll streamed into the living room from the kitchen and rattled all the windowpanes along the way. That she liked rock and roll made him smile.

  Something had changed since he’d walked out that morning. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but the cabin seemed…different. Alive with the essence of woman and all the subtle nuances that made a house a home. For the first time in a long time, John felt like he’d come home.

  Shoving aside the wayward thought, he silently closed the door behind him. A fire blazed in the hearth. A little too much wood, not stacked just the way he liked, but the living room was toasty warm. The magazines he’d tossed haphazardly on the floor were neatly stacked next to the sofa. Normally, Honeybear would have come bounding out about now, and they’d have a friendly tussle on the rug. But the dog was nowhere in sight.

  Where was his dog? Where in the world was Hannah?

  Doing his best to ignore the rise of alarm, John set his bag next to the door and walked toward the kitchen. From the hall he could see that the
light was on. The music grew louder as he neared the doorway, an old Eric Clapton number about a woman waiting for another love. Pausing in the hall, he peered into the kitchen, and felt his heart stumble in his chest.

  Hannah stood in the center of the room locked in an awkward dance with Honeybear. With his oversize paws on her shoulders and his tail moving back and forth at a hundred miles an hour, the dog looked like he was having a pretty good time. Smiling, Hannah sang along with the lyrics, shuffling her feet in time with the beat.

  John stared, mesmerized and unexpectedly charmed by the sight of her dancing with his dog. She was wearing one of his T-shirts over a faded pair of jeans. The T-shirt was three sizes too big, but the material flowed over her like fine silk. Her hair was pulled into a ponytail, but several unruly strands curled around her face. She looked lovely and happy and innocent—all the things he wasn’t—and the spike of lust came so sharply, his mouth went dry.

  An instant later Honeybear spotted him and barked, and the spell broke. Hannah’s gaze snapped to John’s, a small sound of surprise escaping her. Honeybear dropped to all fours. She stepped back from the dog. “I didn’t hear you come in.” Glancing self-consciously down at her T-shirt, she brushed off a clump of dog hair. “He jumped up on me, and the music was on, so I just…”

  “Decided to dance with him?” John grinned.

  “Well…” She smiled back.

  He knew he shouldn’t go to her, shouldn’t touch her, shouldn’t torture himself with that kind of temptation when he knew it would only lead to trouble. But the urge was too strong to fight. He’d been waiting for this moment all day, he realized. He tried not to think about what that meant in terms of how serious the situation had become.

  He was across the room before he even realized he was going to move. “I was about to cut in. I hope you don’t mind.”

  She broke into laughter. “You probably think I’m a loon.”

  “I think I’m jealous of my dog.”