The Burning Point (39 page)

He helped her to her feet. "Real luck would have been to avoid being flattened like a bug on a windshield in the first place."

She stumbled a little when she put weight on her left leg, but moved without apparent pain. Maintaining his grip on her arm, he said, "You're a magnet for trouble."

"Some of us are just talented. I've always believed in getting into my work."

The remark produced a rumble of relieved laughter. These were men who knew how close disaster could be on any job.

Donovan said to Kate, "I know you eat rebar for breakfast, but I'm still taking you to the hospital for a check up."

"Not necessary. Besides, you haven't the time. The schedule on this project is too tight."

Chuckling, Glazer stepped into the room. "A woman after my own heart. But just to make me and my insurance company happy, let me take you to a walk-in clinic near here for a quick examination. Then I'll drop you by your hotel. Anyone who has been buried alive deserves the rest of the afternoon off."

Kate exhaled roughly. "I must admit that I'm ready to call it a day."

Donovan would rather have taken her himself, but this made more sense. "All right, but call right away if there are any complications."

"There won't be. By the way, I was checking that beam when the ceiling fell. It's double width, which will affect your calculations."

He shined his flashlight on the chasm in the ceiling and saw that she was right. "I'll look for others." He had to smile. Kate was Sam's daughter to the core.

Gil Brown lingered after Kate and the others left. "She your girlfriend, Donovan?" Donovan?"

"Ex-wife."

"Maybe you should do something about the 'ex' part of that."

Donovan pulled off his hard hat and ran tense fingers through his matted hair. "Yeah. Maybe I should."

∗ ∗ ∗

Glazer called later on his car phone to say that Kate's clinical examination had revealed no serious injury. When he'd dropped her off at their hotel, she had declared her intention to have a bath and a nap, not necessarily in that order. There was no reason for Donovan to continue worrying about her.

Nonetheless, he wrapped up his work as early as possible. Atlanta was packed to the gills with a homebuilders' convention, so they had ended up in a small luxury hotel in a bridal suite that was so expensive he was picking up half the cost personally rather than billing it to PDI. As a bridal suite it didn't even have two bedrooms, but the sofa in the living room opened into a bed. He'd slept there the previous night while Kate took the bedroom.

What the suite did have was lots of lace and mirrors. When they'd checked in the day before, they had both laughed about the candy box decorations. Tonight Donovan stalked through the elaborate living room like a twitchy tiger. No sign of Kate, so he quietly opened the bedroom door, expecting to find her sleeping.

The lace-canopied bed was rumpled but empty. Frowning, he glanced around. The bathroom door was closed, and a low rumble emanated from inside. He tapped on the door. "I'm back. You're taking advantage of the whirlpool?"

The rumbling stopped. "You bet. Feels very good on sore muscles. Could you do me a favor?"

"Sure. What do you need?"

"There's a split of red wine in the mini-bar. Would you open the bottle and bring it in, please?"

Before his imagination could get too wild, she added, "I'm decent. Relatively so, anyhow."

Wondering what the devil that meant, he went to the mini-bar. Apparently there had been two splits of wine, because an empty bottle of chardonnay sat on the bar. He took the little bottle of zinfandel from the refrigerator, twisted off the cap, and opened the door to the spacious bathroom.

He was met by a cloud of warm, fragrant air, but that wasn't what stopped him dead in his tracks. "Relatively" decent meant Kate was lying back in the pink tub, hair clipped on top of her head and immersed in bubbles.

Technically she was visible only from the tops of her shoulders up--but knowing she was naked under a shimmering layer of foam made his mouth go dry.

There were shadows under her eyes, but she still looked delectable. "I hadn't realized quite how quickly a whirlpool generates foam if bubble bath is added," she said. I can't run the jets for more than a couple of minutes at a time."

He inhaled rose-scented air. Intoxicatingly feminine and romantic. "This hotel definitely gives honeymooners their money's worth."

"I suspect that most of the guests are parents who hire a baby-sitter for the night and come here for a romantic getaway."

He poured the wine, concentrating on her glass. Studying the amount of creamy flesh revealed by the bubbles would have been an exercise in pure masochism.

He was about to retreat when he noticed an abrasion on her right cheek. "I thought you weren't hurt."

"Only a brush burn. That and some bruises are the sum total of my injuries. Pretty amazing." She reached for the wine glass, iridescent foam trailing from her arm.

He tried not to notice the way the movement exposed half her right breast. "Did the clinic give you a sedative? If so, you probably shouldn't be drinking."

"They said to take ibuprofen. Very low-tech."

"Well--don't fall asleep in here."

His hand was on the doorknob when she said hesitantly, "How about getting yourself a drink and joining me?"

She just wanted to talk out her nerves after the accident. He could handle that. "I'll get a soda."

When he was safely outside the bathroom, he unbuttoned his shirt and used it to wipe perspiration from his face. He felt as if he'd just spent a night in the tropics.

He unlaced his boots and kicked them aside, sending his socks after them. After filling a glass with ice from the bucket she'd left on the bar, he poured himself a ginger ale and returned to the bathroom.

She took a sip of her wine. "Any idea why that chunk of ceiling fell on me? It really shouldn't have."

He sat on the floor with his back against the door, one knee drawn up. "I took a look after you left. Old termite damage had badly weakened the rafters. The shock waves from the loader were the last straw. Sheer bad luck that you were underneath when gravity won."

"Any accident you can walk away from doesn't count as bad luck."

"You've had more than your share of accidents in your short history with PDI. I should ban you from all job sites."

Instead of flaring up at him, she said, "You've had plenty accidents and near-misses, haven't you? I remember a couple from when we were married, and even then I suspected you weren't telling me everything because you didn't want me to worry."

He smiled wryly. "I should have known I wasn't fooling you."

"What was your most dangerous accident?"

The bubbles had declined to just above the level of her nipples. He looked away. "Turn the whirlpool on to raise the suds level, and I'll tell you about it."

Coloring, she hit the button that activated the jets. He practiced multiplication tables to distract himself until she turned the whooshing waters off again. Since a cautious glance showed bubbles up to her clavicles, he let his gaze rest on her again. "The worst was a fluke, not really a normal accident. I was spreading out leftover dynamite after a shoot so we could burn it off when a lunatic walked up, whipped out a pistol, and fired into the explosives."

"My God! What happened?"

"One hell of an explosion. Because I was kneeling, most of the blast went over me. Not entirely--there was enough force to throw me seventy or eighty feet. A couple of ribs were cracked, I lost some hearing in one ear, and my college ring was wrenched off. Not that I'm complaining. I got off lightly."

"What happened to the man who set off the explosion?"

"Dead. A frustrated implosion junkie." He pressed the icy glass against his forehead, remembering. It had been Phoenix in August, and hotter than the hinges of hell. "Apparently he wanted to kill someone from PDI because our security guards had prevented him from stealing any explosives from the site. He didn't mind blowing himself to smithereens in the process."

"And you tell me
I'm
trouble-prone! I just fall down elevator shafts and get bopped by ceilings. You've had someone actively try to blow you up."

"You've got a point."

Kate crossed her arms on the edge of the tub. "When you've come close to death like that, have you ever had your life pass in front of your eyes? Thought about unfinished business?"

"To be honest, no. The incident has always been over before I had time to think about such things. Did you have those kinds of thoughts today?"

"Yes." Her wine glass was empty, so she set it against the wall. "You must be ready to wash the day's sweat and dust off. Why not join me? This tub is big enough for two."

"Jesus, Kate! How much have you had to drink?"

"Only two glasses of wine. Not enough to get drunk." She took a deep breath. "Just enough to give me the nerve to...to proposition you."

Her words triggered a rush of heat that dizzied him. "Don't start something you won't want to finish."

"I don't intend to." Her eyes closed for an instant. "When I was lying under that slab, wondering if I was going to suffocate or get crushed by the loader, I realized that my biggest regret was being too afraid to...to be with you. I'm still scared, and Lord only knows if anything worthwhile can come of it--but I know now that this is one risk I'll have to take, or I'll never forgive myself."

"You're sure about this?"

"I'm sure."

He stripped off his T-shirt and tossed it to one side. "Then let us hope,
cara mia
, that there is enough water in that tub to wash away a dozen years worth of very heavy baggage."

Chapter 36

Despite the warmth of the water, Kate shivered as she watched Donovan peel off his T-shirt. Years of construction work had layered hard muscle on his chest and arms, as well as adding a scar or two.

She couldn't quite believe that after weeks of doggedly repressing her attraction, she'd finally had the courage--or craziness--to confront her fears head on.

He unsnapped the waistband of his jeans. Before undressing further, he bent over the tub to tenderly touch his lips to the abrasion on her cheek. "You look ready to jump out of your skin. It's not too late to change your mind. But it will be soon."

She slid her hand around his neck and turned her face, bringing their mouths together.
Patrick, Patrick
.
She'd have known his lips, his kiss, anywhere in the world. Warm, firm, familiar. They'd shared so many kisses once. Some of passion, others of affection, sometimes as a casual token that they were bonded.

This was a slow, gentle kiss of welcome and exploration. She could feel the desire in him. Her fear was replaced by tension of a different sort. "I won't change my mind. I promise," she whispered.

She made herself look at the thin, almost invisible scar that ran from his left shoulder down his upper arm to almost his elbow. The sight made her stomach knot. She traced the faint line with her fingertip. "What about you, Patrick? Are you sure you want to get so close to someone who stabbed you?"

He caught her hand and held it against his heart for a moment. "The only harm you ever did was what I drove you to, Kate."

He'd learned a thing or two about patience in the intervening years. Rather than following up the first kiss with another, he slid into the far end of the tub. The water level rose as his powerfully muscled legs bracketed hers. Both of them had to bend their knees to fit comfortably into the tub.

"I think this is a project worthy of some serious anticipation." He stroked the side of her hip with the arch of his foot. Sensuous. Sexy.

"This tub seems much smaller than it did with just one person in it." She laid her hand on his ankle, then slowly skimmed upward over his shin and calf.

"Togetherness is the whole point. Speaking of which, I haven't been celibate for the last ten years, but I had a blood test with a physical not long ago, and I don't have any horrible viruses."

"Same here. And the contraception part is okay, too." She blushed a little. A modern woman was never supposed to trust what a man might say when he was under the influence of raging hormones, but this was Patrick. Though he'd wounded her more deeply than anyone else in her life, at the same time she knew he could be trusted absolutely to protect her health. As he could trust her.

He captured the washcloth floating around the tub and did a little scrubbing. Thinking he might like the water jets, she restarted the whirlpool action.

He leaned back in the tub as the currents swirled around him. "That feels good. I should use the whirlpool at home more often. Usually I just shower." His hand drifted up her leg, sliding from outside to inside on the way to her knee. Lazily he caressed her inner thigh with his knuckles.

Sensation blazed through her. It took so little for him to kindle her. "Showers are good for washing hair. Baths are for serious recreation."

"I'm willing to recreate."

"It's odd that the first time we were together--and not even on a real date!--sex was so easy and natural. Now I'm tied in knots."