Hawaiian Medic to Rescue His Heart

by Annie O'Neil

  It had taken a Herculean effort for Zach not to notice that the few swigs of mai tai Lulu had taken as Dutch courage had made her a bit more...erm...pliable in the physicality department. She’d been the one to fall into his arms during the trust exercise. But, rather than doing it the old-fashioned way, she’d somehow twisted and whirled herself in the air so that she’d landed in his arms like a damsel in distress.

  Well... A damsel who had then leaped out of his arms and paraded round the stage shouting, “That’s how we roll!”

  Now they were turned back to back, their wrists bound with some sort of rubbery rope. It wasn’t very flexible, and allowed very little room for maneuver. The audience was shouting all sorts of options. Dislocate a shoulder. A thumb. Shred what little dignity they had and give up now.

  All options Zach felt it wise to table.

  Lulu turned her head away from the crowd, her hair brushing against his cheek as he turned to her. She whispered up to him, “Follow my lead, okay? I’ve got this.”

  He gave a quick affirmative noise, hoping she knew what she was talking about. Spending the rest of the evening tied to Lulu, who was already wriggling against his butt like a supercharged sexy Easter bunny, was going to be his biggest challenge yet. The last thing he needed was to get a hard-on in front of Hawaii’s finest.

  Mind over matter, he told himself on a loop. Mind over matter.

  “Crouch down,” Lulu said. “I’m going to have to climb over you.”

  “What?”

  “Or maybe slip under you,” she said, already lowering herself down so that he had no choice but to follow. “Not sure yet.”

  He felt her body press hard against his, then pull away. With a quick grunt and a tug on his hands, he felt Lulu do something like a somersault in the limited space between them. Their bound wrists were pressing into her chest...his back was still toward her. If he had the flexibility he thought he could slide her under his legs along with his bound hands.

  He stretched his arms out and brushed what he was pretty sure was her breast—much to the merriment of the audience. The next thing he knew, Lulu was up on tiptoe, walking over his head. The audience was going insane with cheers and laughter—until he ducked down and pulled back, sliding her legs along his chest until she lost her balance, landed in a straddle on his lap, with their tied hands high above them.

  He felt every single centimeter of her body as if they were both completely naked. Her body heat met and married with his. Her breath fell in short, hot, puffs upon his mouth, just as he was sure his breath was landing on hers. Their eyes met and clashed. Both of them were frozen in one of those moments that communicated one solitary thing: desire.

  She felt so good. Legs tucked round his hips... Her hips cinching with his... Breasts pushing into his chest, the taut tips of her nipples making it clear that she wanted him as much as he wanted her...

  More than he ever had before, he wanted to throw away his dumbass rule book that made women off-limits. He wanted to forget about the Will they? Won’t they? energy that had been running through him like adrenaline these past few weeks and open up his heart and his body to it all. He wanted to forget about the search and rescue games and spend the next three days in his room—or hers...it didn’t matter. He wanted them to pour themselves into one another as if they were each molds that would make the other whole. He wanted to show her every level of pleasure he knew how to bring to a woman and explore all the others he had yet to learn.

  Something about the way all the blood was rushing below his waistline told him that Lulu Kahale could wring him dry if she set her mind to it.

  Somehow—miraculously—they both became aware of a countdown. Makoa and Kiko were still in deep discussion, their position unchanged. The audience was shouting a charged, “Five! Four! Three!”

  “You okay with a bit of wrist burn?” Lulu asked, her lips brushing against his as she spoke.

  It was the most erotic request for guaranteed pain that he’d ever received. “Yes.”

  She blinked, as if absorbing the deeper meaning of his assent—I trust you—then abruptly twisted her hands and yanked them free of the binding.

  She leaped up in the air, hands held high, and danced around her brother and Kiko—who, seconds later, did a quick up-and-over arm-twist, as if they were performing a 1950s Lindy Hop, then faced one another, folded their hands together and slipped off the bands. Effectively achieving the required result without wanting to immediately have sex with one another.

  The crowd went wild.

  Zach rose and gave a red-faced bow, pleased for Lulu that they’d won, but hoping he could find the nearest exit—and fast. He didn’t need congratulatory slaps on the back, or the celebratory mai tais already being called for at the Tiki Bar, or even the supersize T-shirt he and Lulu were meant to wear together, to prove they were the reigning champs of the team-building challenges. No. He needed a cold shower.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “YOU DISAPPEARED FAST last night.”

  Lulu tried to make her tone and expression as neutral as possible. Zach was sitting at a table for one. If that didn’t scream Back the hell off, she didn’t know what did.

  She nodded at his table when he took a sip of coffee instead of answering. “May I join you?”

  “Please,” he said, his tone much clearer than hers had been. It said, Sure. You can sit down. But don’t expect loads of chitchat.

  A shiver swept down her spine—and not because it was cold. This was the Zach Murphy she’d met on day one. The one who’d grounded her. The one who did everything by the book.

  He was also the one she had thought was about as sizzling hot as a man could get, but was as much of an option for her on the dating front as a lemur.

  Right then and there she realized she’d let all those barriers she’d kept up slide away. They’d kissed. She’d told him she thought about him naked. She’d climbed all over him as if he was her personal climbing wall and straddled him in front of the entire search and rescue corps.

  And now it looked like he had made a decision. Not today, buttercup. Not ever.

  Okay, then... If he wanted to be Mr. Rule Book again, she would focus on the fact that they were meant to be winning these games for the Oahu Search and Rescue crew today. She was a big enough girl that she could set aside the mountain of hurt that had weighted her chest when she’d seen him sneak out of the bar last night without so much as wishing her sweet dreams.

  “You okay?” She pulled up a chair, plonked down her plate and took a bite of scalding-hot scrambled eggs, too proud to let him know they were burning the roof of her mouth. It helped relocate the pain in her heart, so...useful, really.

  “Never better,” he said.

  “Liar,” she countered.

  He looked across and met her eyes.

  His irises were the same color as the sea about a mile away from shore during a storm. Dark blue, fathomless and a bit overwhelming.

  She swallowed. Had she messed up everything last night by commandeering that final game instead of genuinely acting like a team member? Screw it. Teams needed leaders, and she’d led them to victory last night. She had even slept in that stupid T-shirt they’d awarded them, feeling the ache of loneliness at all the space in it that would’ve been filled by Zach if only she was normal and actually knew how to date someone.

  They ate in silence for a few minutes, until she couldn’t stand it anymore. They had the games to focus on, and if there was anything in the air between them that needed to be cleared they had about twenty-seven minutes to clear it before the first whistle blew.

  “What’s really going on?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Not important. Let’s just focus on the games.”

  She bridled. “We can’t focus on the games if you’re going to be wandering around with a cloud over your head the entire time.”


  “I’m not—” He stopped himself and held up his hands, took a breath and regrouped. He looked her straight in the eye and, in the same guilty way he might’ve told her he had forgotten to fill out the Health and Safety forms for the weekend, said, “I wanted to have sex with you last night.”

  Lulu did a double take. She had, too. But she certainly wasn’t going to confess as much to him. Unless... Would it make it easier if they both knew they wanted the same thing?

  “Me, too.”

  He looked at her. Really looked at her. “We’ve been dancing round this like...like dancers,” he finished lamely, tipping his head into his hands. He gave that gorgeous chestnut hair a scrub, then looked back up at her. “I can’t think about anything else. It’s driving me nuts.”

  “Me, too!” A smile bloomed on her face and her heart felt about a thousand times lighter. “I mean, this is totally not like me. I don’t normally kiss the boss on training hikes.”

  Zach’s lips twitched. “But you do mention thinking about them naked?”

  “No.” She swatted at the air between them and put on her How very dare you? face. “That’s for special people,” she said primly.

  “Special people who also happen to be your boss and as a result are in a very difficult position?”

  She tipped her head into her palm and made herself consider things from his angle. New job. New state. New life. Trying to set things up for his boy. Still on a probationary contract. A horny-as-hell colleague who kept pouncing on him.

  No. It wasn’t an ideal scenario.

  Hardly believing she was proposing the idea, she tapped his plate with her fork to get his attention. “I could quit,” she said.

  “No.” He instantly dismissed the idea. “No, you couldn’t. I doubt you could even breathe without doing this job.”

  “Good point... But I like being a paramedic. I could do that full-time.”

  He laughed. “This isn’t some weird team-building exercise, is it? Figuring out how we rearrange our lives so we can have sex?”

  “No,” she said, suddenly feeling the gravity of what they were really talking about.

  Did they trust one another enough to be that close? Knowing there was a risk that it might all fall apart one day or...worse...that she might fall so head over heels in love that one day she’d have absolutely no control over the limits of how far she’d go to keep him safe?

  She pressed her lips together, then released them. “I guess it’s about deciding whether or not we want to change enough to break our own rules.”

  He sat back, threw his cloth napkin on top of his empty plate and considered her. “I know what some of your rules are and I seem to tick a lot of your don’t-ever-go-there boxes.”

  “True.”

  “So...” He held his hands open. “If you haven’t broken them for anyone else, why would you change them for me?”

  Because she was pretty damn sure she was falling in love with him.

  Instead, she said, “I’m beginning to wonder if all the rules and regulations I’ve imposed on my emotional life are holding me back professionally.”

  What a cop-out of an answer.

  Unsurprisingly, he frowned. “What do you mean?”

  She screwed her face up tight, then plumbed a level of honesty she rarely accessed. “I thought I wanted your job. Really, really wanted it. Not just so I could earn enough to buy my house. Your house,” she swiftly corrected, making it clear it wasn’t a dig, “And not just for the kudos. Or for proving to my brothers that I’m every bit as good as they are. Which, obviously, I am.”

  She gave a self-deprecating snort and then, seeing Zach’s change of expression, made herself dial back the defensiveness.

  Zach nodded for her to continue.

  “The higher-ups even interviewed me for it, but they saw what I didn’t.”

  “Which was...?”

  “I would hate doing your job.”

  They laughed, and unnecessarily Zach asked, “Why?”

  “It requires something I don’t have.” When he didn’t say anything she filled him in. “i dotting...t crossing... I don’t do those things.”

  Zach feigned being affronted, then the part of him that was unbelievably good at his job caught up with him and he conceded, “Your skills do lie outside the office.”

  No offense taken, she pushed on, feeling this conversation was one they shouldn’t let go of. “Exactly. So I have to find a way to be content, knowing I’m not perfect.”

  His soft smile shifted into a frown. “No one’s perfect.”

  He wasn’t giving her an ego-boost. He was making a confession.

  “There’s a lot you don’t talk about, isn’t there?” she said carefully. “Some vein of hurt you don’t ever want to tap into again?”

  In that instant she saw that she’d hit on the truth. He had been hurt. Badly. Straight down to the marrow. And he never ever wanted to feel that type of pain again.

  One of her grandmother’s old Hawaiian sayings popped into her head. “Love is like a cleansing dew.”

  She had no idea if there was a future for her and Zach, but what she did know was that she cared enough for him and his son to throw herself in front of the proverbial bus for them. Which was both terrifying and exhilarating.

  She put her hands on her pounding heart and said, “You can talk to me. What happens on the Big Island stays on the Big Island.”

  He huffed out a laugh. “I thought that was Vegas?”

  She made a dismissive noise. “A girl can keep secrets wherever she pleases.”

  He shook his head and laughed, but then, to her surprise, he began to talk.

  He talked about his ex-wife. How they’d met at a fire at a warehouse where some film crew had been doing a fashion shoot. She and a couple of the other models had been trapped. It had been scary. He’d had to carry her out over his shoulder and down a ladder to safety.

  “Just like in the movies...” Lulu whispered, not exactly jealous of his ex, but wondering how on earth she could have ever walked away from someone who made her feel as safe as Zach could.

  The relationship had grown from there. Zach and a couple of his colleagues had been asked to appear in a photo shoot. She’d asked him out. Actively pursued him from the sounds of things. So at least she had some brain cells.

  Zach huffed out a laugh and brandished a ring-free hand. “But, as you can see, it didn’t work out like in the movies. Not the kind with happy endings, anyway.”

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “Harry happened,” he said plainly.

  * * *

  Zach felt the shock of his blunt pronouncement as profoundly as Lulu seemed to. Her jaw literally dropped open and the hairs on her arms shot to attention.

  Normally this would be the moment when the Lulu he’d come to know would hammer him with a thousand questions. She liked to know the details about everything.

  It was something he hadn’t originally noticed about her. His first impression had been that she was foolhardy. Reckless. But in actual fact, she calculated risk and response with lightning-fast accuracy.

  He could see in her eyes that she felt the weight of what he was doing. Entrusting her with access to the darkest moments in his life.

  A surge of empowerment replaced any anxiety he’d felt about laying himself bare to this woman. He wanted her to know the whole story. Know the whole man. If they were really going to explore this energy surging between them they both needed to know the truth. And the truth was he was a wounded warrior doing his damnedest to build a new life for his son.

  So he continued to talk.

  He told her that this was only the second time he’d put into words the real reason behind the failure of his marriage. That the first time had been when he and Christina had had that all-night, final, harrowing fight over who got to d
ivorce who and why.

  “If we hadn’t had Harry, would we be having this conversation?”

  In the end, he’d wished he hadn’t asked. He’d already known the answer. Hearing it had felt like being filled with boiling oil. It had incinerated everything he’d believed to be true about love.

  Even though they’d both known what had happened to Harry had been down to a mistake at the hospital—a cruel, critical loss of oxygen—she’d blamed Zach for Harry’s disability. It was his job. His exposure to “unnatural elements.” It had already crippled his father, she’d mocked. How long would it be before it did the same to him?

  It was the same job that had brought them together, that had saved her life, and countless others during his career with the NYFD.

  In that moment he’d seen their marriage for what it had always been. A photo opportunity. A photo opportunity that couldn’t be sustained if their son was in the picture. And that simply hadn’t been an option.

  Lulu, despite the warm caramel color of her skin and the heat of the early-morning sun, had turned ashen.

  But, as if the story was a raging torrent long held back against the weakening walls of a dam that had finally burst, he kept on talking.

  He’d never hated anyone or anything before. But he’d hated Christina at that moment. His entire world had turned black and white. There were two camps. Those who loved Harry and those who didn’t. Which meant there were a lot of people in the wrong camp.

  It had brought out a darkness in him that had both terrified him and fueled his rage. How could anyone reject their child? Let alone a gorgeous little boy who, through no fault of his own, faced more of life’s hurdles than most?

  He’d forced himself to imagine carrying that rage around with him for the rest of his life. Acknowledged how all-consuming it would be. How it would color absolutely everything. And as the words she was hurling at him had blurred into a high-pitched whisper-scream he’d had an epiphany.

  Though every word she spat at him was laced with venom, she was whispering so as not to wake Harry. There was something in that seemingly arctic heart of hers. A tendril of affection for her son. He saw her anger for what it really was. Fear.