Take My Breath Away...

No response.

She patted her palm firmly against his cheek. “You’re going to be all right.”

At least she was praying he would be.

Reaching for his hand, she drew it onto his chest and covered it with her own. Not an easy job. His palm was much larger than hers, his fingers long. They might have belonged to an artist, a pianist perhaps, except the backs of those long fingers were callused.

And they were cold. So was she. The draft of air she’d felt when she’d first entered the room was growing more frigid by the second. Glancing around, she spotted the open window and scrambled up to close it. Then she returned to her knees beside the injured man and took his hand again. Squeezing his fingers, she raised her voice. “Can you hear me?”

His eyelids fluttered. She noticed for the first time how dark his lashes were, how long.

“Come on. Open your eyes.”

He did. For an instant, as his gaze locked on hers, the punch of awareness and the flare of heat in her belly stole her breath away.

She’d seen this man before. He’d been in her father’s office on the day after Thanksgiving. And he’d had the same effect on her then. Even through a glass wall, even at a distance of twenty-five feet, she’d felt the impact of his gaze like a punch. He’d made her lose track of everything.

“Cur …?”

The sound was little more than a gasp. Cur? It made no sense to Nicola. But it allowed her to shove the memory away and focus her attention on the injured man. She drew in a breath and felt her lungs burn.

“Head … hurts …” His fingers linked with hers and tightened.

This time when she met his eyes, she checked to see whether or not they were dilated. They weren’t. Even in the dim light from her flashlight, she could distinguish clearly between the pinpoint of black at the center and the cloudy gray of his irises.

Then his lids drifted shut.

“Does it hurt anywhere else?” she asked. She had to find that out. And it was much safer to concentrate on that task than on what she’d just felt. Or what she’d felt that day in the FBI office.

But in the three months since it had happened, she hadn’t been able to rid her mind of the memory. From the moment she’d walked into the office she’d been aware of him, but it hadn’t been until his eyes had met hers that he’d registered fully on her senses.

And he’d registered fully all right. She was sure the impact might have been caught on a Richter scale—if there’d been one handy. Part of what she was feeling, she’d recognized—that tingling sensation that always told her something was just … somehow right.

But it had made no sense and it had never before made her feel as if the ground were dissolving beneath her feet. Not that she’d been able to feel her feet. All she could feel was him. And she’d wanted to feel more of him. Heat, glorious waves of it, had washed through her system. Every cell in her body had melted and yearned.

And when he’d risen to his feet in one fluid movement and taken a step toward her, she’d nearly run to him. Right through glass walls like some kind of superhero. The impulse had been so baffling, so totally insane, so verging on the irresistible that she’d finally found the strength to drag her gaze away from him.

And she couldn’t, she wouldn’t let him affect her that way again. Closing her eyes, she pulled in air, felt the burn in her lungs and then exhaled, and breathed in again.

Mental list time. When she opened her eyes, she checked the cut first and saw that the bleeding was slowing. After replacing the square of cloth, she slipped her fingers behind his head to check the back. The instant she touched the bump, he winced and made a sound.

So he’d suffered a double whammy to his head. No wonder he was woozy. Shifting her coat aside, she ran her hands on a quick journey from the back of his neck, down his arms. When he neither winced nor yelped again, she drew her palms from his shoulders to his waist, then from his hips down those long, long legs. The man was one solid wall of muscle.

And she still wanted him. There was no mistaking the heat that had flared to life deep inside of her as she’d run her hands over him. No controlling it, either. She knew what she was feeling. She wasn’t stupid, so she’d pegged it the first time she’d seen him. Lust. Pure and simple. And incredibly intense.

Whoever believed that lightning couldn’t strike twice was dead wrong. But wherever the lust had come from, it could just go back there. She had a job to do—a possible thief fleeing down a mountain, an injured man who was sliding into shock and two statues of St. Francis. Her plate was currently full.

She glanced down to where her hands still rested on his ankles. First step—she had to stop touching him. Releasing her grip, she was about to get to her feet when a sudden thought occurred to her. When she’d patted him down, she hadn’t felt a wallet. But she checked his pockets just to make sure. She located a cell phone, but nothing else.

Had Gabe Wilder taken this man’s wallet? Why?

She glanced back at his face. His eyes were closed now, and he looked even paler. She had questions, but he was in no condition to answer.

Fishing in her coat pocket, she located her cell and tried again.

Nothing.

Then she stared at the time. Nearly nine-thirty. Rising, she glanced around the small room and spotted the landline on a counter. There was no dial tone when she lifted the receiver. Even if she’d been able to call 911, it would take help some time to arrive. So she was on her own.

Grabbing some candles she found next to the phone, she lit them. Then she located a pile of linen towels and mopped up the water around his head and shoulders. Finally, she dropped to her knees and took his hand again. It was so cold. “It’s all right,” she murmured. “You’re going to be all right.” As if to reassure herself of that, she lifted her square of T-shirt again and checked the cut. It was clean and not very deep. “You probably won’t need stitches, and the bleeding has nearly stopped.”

And she doubted he heard a word she was saying. But when she tried to pull her hand away, his grip tightened again—as if she were his lifeline.

“Statue …” he murmured.

“It’s still here,” she said.

“Both …?”

“They’re both here.” Curious about how much he’d seen, she leaned closer. “What happened?”

He didn’t answer her this time, and a second later his hand went limp in hers. She felt the instant surge of panic and shoved it down. The steady rise and fall of his chest beneath their joined hands assured her that he was still with her.

For the moment.

“It’s going to be all right. It’s going to be all right.” And it was. It had to be. Step number one was to get him warm.

Shivering, she slipped back into the jacket she’d discarded earlier and buttoned it up; then she tucked her coat around him again. There had to be something in the closet that she could use to keep him warm.

Behind the first door she opened, she found choir robes hanging on hooks. Though they were a different color, they reminded her of the robe that St. Francis wore in the sculpture. She thought of the statue’s special prayer-answering powers. In spite of the fact that she’d tried praying to him once before without much success, she decided to give him a second chance.

“Help me keep him safe and well until I can get him medical attention,” she murmured. Then she started pulling robes off their hangers.

GABE STRUGGLED TO FIND his way to the surface again. He’d done it once, hadn’t he? Or had he just dreamed that he’d seen Curls leaning over him?

Focus.

His thoughts were spinning like little whirlpools—just out of reach. There was something important, something he needed to take care of. The statue … the effort it took to remember had pain stabbing his head again.

Okay. For a moment, he gave up, letting himself drift. And he saw her again.

Curls.

The moment her image took shape in his mind, his headache eased, and the memory slid into place. He let himself drift with it. He’d been at the St. Francis Center shooting baskets, and he’d sensed someone watching him. Not his friends, Nash and Jonah, who never made it to the center until noon. And sure enough, there she’d stood in the small garden beside the basketball court, her hands wrapped around the narrow poles in the wrought-iron fence. She’d looked like a prisoner. Perhaps that’s what had appealed to him, what had triggered a sense in him that they were kindred spirits.

Because at that time, he’d felt like a prisoner, too, trapped in promises that he wasn’t sure he wanted to keep. He’d stood beside his mother’s bed holding his father’s hand as they’d both sworn their vows. He’d promised to never follow in his father’s footsteps, and his father had promised to give up his lifelong profession.

But the promise hadn’t done his father much good. Raphael Wilder had been falsely accused and convicted, and he’d died shortly after in prison.