Caught In A Storm Of Passion

Her hand dropped to clutch the counter, as though she was a little dizzy. She sucked in a deep breath that just about gave him a heart attack as those creamy mounds of flesh rose above the lace-trimmed camisole. It was several seconds before he realized that while he was having some very racy thoughts, she was gaping at him with dawning horror.

“You’re Chase, aren’t you?”

For a long moment he stared at her with an odd feeling clenching his gut. It wasn’t exactly fear. Because he wasn’t afraid of anything. Not Chase Gallagher. Nuh-uh. No way. And certainly not of a city woman.

He snorted. Especially not this city woman, with her tawny hair, creamy skin and large whiskey eyes. She was going to be his brother’s sister-in-law, for God’s sake. Which made her practically family. And if there was one thing a Gallagher didn’t do it was leave family—no matter what.

“Don’t be too long,” he ordered over his shoulder. “Our lunch should be here soon, and I need to load the cargo before we leave.”

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_bcf9076e-7c0d-5edd-b623-ac0cf538fbe4)

The crash site—Moratunga Island, one hundred miles north of Tukamumu.

CHASE BECAME AWARE of two things simultaneously. The wind and the pain. The former was slashing at his face along with needlelike rain, and the latter...jeez...was threatening to explode his brains all over the inside of his skull.

He gave a rough groan and fought the urge to empty his stomach. On the bright side, pain meant that he was alive. Which was good, he mused drowsily as he began drifting off into comforting darkness. Real good. Alive meant it had all been a bad dream...

He jerked awake, his heart lurching into a dead run as his gaze flew around the cockpit and he realized something was wrong with this picture. He instantly knew it was the wrong move when pain tore through his head and the smell of burnt plastic made him gag.

Fire!

The thought had him grabbing for his harness, which he released an instant before he realized he was hanging practically upside down.

The controls broke his fall, his left shoulder taking most of the impact before he slid to the floor in a groaning heap.

Holy freaking moly!

Chase lay dazed for a couple minutes, his shoulder radiating pain and fire, his head throbbing like an open wound. Finally his vision cleared enough to recognize that there was—what the hell?—vegetation growing inside his best girl.

Either he was hallucinating or—

The storm!

Oh, yeah.

He sucked in a breath when memories rushed back. The crash.

He’d crashed his plane.

Un-be-freaking-lievable.

Muttering curses about stupid storms that weren’t supposed to change direction so fast, Chase grabbed his shoulder and sat up. His stomach instantly revolted and he froze. Okay. Note to self. No moving until the nightmare faded.

When it didn’t, he sucked in a careful breath and blinked up into the darkness, wondering why there were two mannequins hanging a foot from his face. He knew for a fact there were no mannequins on the cargo manifest.

Then he realized that he was seeing double, and that he was looking at... What the heck was her name? He squinted past the pain and caught sight of a cascade of tawny gold hair a few feet away. His heart surged into his throat as he recognized... Amelia? Dammit, his brother was going to— No, wait. Not Amelia. Evelyn—Amelia’s evil twin—and her arms, legs and hair were hanging limply from the harness.

“Eve...Evelyn?” he rasped, wondering how long he’d been out. A couple of minutes? Hours? Vaguely alarmed by her utter stillness, he cleared his throat and tried again. “Hey, Doc!”

Nothing. Not even the slightest of movements. He sucked in air, shoving down panic, and attempted to squelch the awful thought that came with the dread. His heart pounded. No, no, no! No way was the feisty doc—

“Eve! Wake up, dammit.”

Head spinning, and nausea clawing its way into his throat, Chase hauled himself upright with his good arm. The world tilted, along with his stomach, and he braced himself between the chair and the controls until the urge to vomit settled. Not only did the thought of all that cool fire being extinguished leave a bitter taste of loss in his mouth, it filled him with a sudden hollow desolation he couldn’t explain.

They’d only just met, for cripes’ sake, and he didn’t even like her. But she was his responsibility—not to mention his future sister-in-law, sort of—and the first thing he needed to do was check her vitals.

He fumbled beneath that thick curtain of tawny hair and searched for a pulse. When he found it, in the soft spot just beneath her jawline, his breath whooshed out with relief at the strong and steady rhythm.

She was alive.

With the realization dawning on him that they’d just cheated certain death, Chase reached into his shirt with unsteady hands. His fingers encountered the Saint Christopher and he pulled it out, pausing to give it a noisy, grateful kiss.

Thank God she was alive and breathing.

He was breathing too, which meant that when he checked her over for other injuries he got a little sidetracked by the sight of the long naked legs...all four of them...which any red-blooded man would have noticed. Two of the four feet were bare, and her ivory silk blouse had worked loose from her skirt, exposing a few inches of skin that suddenly seemed more erotic than if she was naked.

Which was just plain stupid. He lived in paradise, where women wore a heck of a lot less in public. Besides, he had way more important things to obsess about. Like the fact that she was still unconscious. Like the fact that he’d crashed his damn airplane...well, somewhere.

Hell! He couldn’t believe it. He’d flown these waters for almost five years without a single incident.

Shoving unsteady fingers through his hair, Chase looked around and tried to come to terms with reality. It couldn’t be a coincidence, he told himself wildly, that the day she’d practically thrown herself into his arms and then tried to head butt him to death, this had happened.

The woman was bad luck.

One he needed to avoid. Like a death plague.

Besides, she was uptight and anal—his least favorite type of woman. “The type of woman I moved thousands of miles to get away from,” he informed the unconscious woman irritably. “The last thing I need complicating my life.”

Even temporarily.

So why the hell was he so fascinated by her damn-your-hide attitude and glowing amber eyes?

Biting back a curse at his idiocy, Chase massaged his throbbing temple and ordered himself not to think about underwear. But the more he tried not to think about lace and silk, the more he recalled his first glimpse of her heart-shaped butt, encased in that tight soft green skirt, bent over the bathroom counter at Port Laurent.

It had sparked some pretty racy fantasies that had just about fried his brain. And before he’d known it his gaze had been sliding down a pair of spectacular legs more suited to a Vegas showgirl than a workaholic doctor.

He’d blamed it on testosterone and abstinence, of course.

And now possibly concussion—because the sedate little business suit would have looked perfectly respectable on anyone who didn’t have enough curves to rival the Indy 500 race track.

Obviously living like a monk made a guy think about sex even when he’d just crashed his plane. Obviously he’d hit his head really hard. Maybe he even had brain damage.

Well...hell.

Too bad Mother Nature had decided to have a little fun with him, he thought darkly, swiping at a trickle of something warm and sticky on his face. She’d fried the right engine and most of the electronics. And if that wasn’t bad enough she’d made him look bad in front of this sexy, uptight doc after he’d promised her everything was going to be okay. But it wasn’t okay, he thought morosely, looking at the vegetation invading the damaged cockpit. Not by a long shot.

Deciding to leave Dr. Eve where she was, until he’d made sure they weren’t about to slide tail-first into an active volcano, Chase pulled himself upright. The move brought him closer. Closer to the intoxicating scent of woman...closer to temptation.