“I never laugh, and you all know it,” she quipped without glancing up from her work.
But as soon as she finished examining a patient in labor, she hurried downstairs, telling herself she was agreeing to do this out of simple curiosity. Was the guy really as gorgeous as she’d remembered?
Oh my, yes. He really was.
He was waiting behind a curtain, sitting up on a gurney, shirtless, with his legs dangling in snug jeans and cowboy boots. Danni decided his chest was even more amazing than she’d remembered—well-defined pectorals tapering down into hard ridges of the intercostals, small dark nipples, that perfect pattern of hair, and so tanned—or was that his natural skin color?
Danni grabbed up the chart and spoke to him without looking up from the pages. “Mr. Creed, I trust everything healed nicely.”
“You are Dr. Goodlove, aren’t you?” he answered.
She glanced up at him and only then did she realize that he was staring at her somewhat incredulously.
“The same woman who stitched me up?” he asked.
“Yes.” Danni frowned.
“You look so...so different.”
“Well—” she smiled “—you were drugged the first time we met.”
“No, really.” He tilted his head, studying her, like a painter assessing a model. “You look really... different.”
Danni felt a small surge of satisfaction. “Just a few pounds lighter.”
She took his arm and examined the nearly-healed burns, the well-mended suture line. As she traced her fingers over his firm, smooth skin she wondered why she was feeling so self-conscious. He was only a man. But when she glanced up into those blue eyes, which were peering at her intently, she knew why. He was not just any man, he was the first man, ever, to actually cause her breathing to become unsteady.
He leaned forward and glanced down at her hips, and Danni felt her cheeks grow warm. “If you say so,” he replied. “But there’s something else. Hey!” He pointed with his free hand. “It’s your hair, isn’t it? It was a lot longer before, and—” he squinted “—it was...different”
“Yeah.” Danni reached up and flipped one of the offending strands back. “It’s different, all right. The haircut-of-the-month featured in Beauty Doo.”
He laughed as she turned to unwrap the suture removal tray. “I take it you don’t like it,” he said.
Danni shrugged, slipped on her gloves. “Thank the Lord I don’t have to look at it.”
“Well, it’s kind of pretty.”
When she cast a disbelieving look over her shoulder, he protested, “Really.” Then he gave her a teasing, dimpled grin. “But personally, I like my women more...natural.”
Danni turned her blushing face back toward the tray and gathered up tweezers, suture-removal scissors, gauze. “Well, this is anything but natural. It takes a gallon of superglue and an Act of Congress to make it behave.”
“So—” he tried to lean around to see her face “—this is not the real you. That’s good. I liked the tourniquet better,” he added, which made Danni smirk, remembering what a mess her hair had been when they’d met in the E.R.
She turned to him and reached up to snip the first suture. “Nope. This is certainly not the real me.”
“That’s good,” he repeated—so quietly, so sincerely, that her hands stilled. Their eyes met.
They seemed suddenly to have run out of banter and fell into an awkward silence. Danni worked on his arm and, with a mixture of embarrassment, building excitement and hope, mulled over the fact that he actually remembered her makeshift ponytail holder.
His eyes traveled slowly from his biceps to her face while she worked. And just as she had on the night. when they’d met, Danni tried to keep her mind firmly on what she was doing. But, with his eyes only inches from hers, watching every move she made, it was an effort. And this time instead of smoke, he smelled like English Leather. Had he slapped on the aftershave because of her?
When she’d finished removing all twenty-four sutures, she probed the area gently with her fingers to test the integrity of her work. He didn’t even grimace.
“You’ve healed quite nicely,” she said.
“Are you married?” he asked.
Danni, caught off guard, even a little shocked by his directness, managed not to show her reaction. “You know,” she joked, “my mother warned me about firemen.” She looked at him with wide-eyed mock seriousness.
“Oh yeah?” he challenged.
“Yeah. Always rushing into hot spots.”
“Are you married?” he repeated. “Involved with someone? Yes or no?”
“N-n-no,” she stammered, trapped by those eyes.
“Then could I call you sometime?”
“Call me? Well...I don’t know....” Danni didn’t know why in the world she was hesitating. “You’d probably just end up having me paged. I’m...I’m an awfully busy woman.”
He hopped off the gurney. “Yeah, I guess you are,” he said as he tugged a navy blue fireman’s T-shirt over his head, then stretched it down over his massive chest. “Thanks for taking my stitches out.”
With a sense of dismay, Danni realized she’d succeeded in putting him off. She wanted to kick herself. “You’re welcome,” she said lamely to his back while he jammed the tail of the T-shirt into the waistband of his jeans.
“Have a good day, Doctor.” He turned to her and nodded. His mouth formed a tight line of disappointment as he picked up his ball cap.
“You, too.” Danni turned her burning face to his chart, and before she could think of some way to recover the situation, he pushed the curtain aside and left the cubicle.
She stared down at his intake info. Why the heck didn’t she give him her phone number like any normal woman would?
She noted his phone number, debating the ethics of copying it from the chart.
“Listen.”
Danni whirled around at the sound of his voice.
He had come back behind the curtain, so quietly she hadn’t heard him.
“You probably are really busy. Tell you what, let’s do it this way.” He held a business card out to her. “Why don’t you call me if you feel like getting together sometime?”
Danni looked down at the card. It had the city seal of Tulsa in one corner and in the center it read: Matthew Creed, Firefighter. The address, fax, and phone number of his station were in the other corners. Firemen carry business cards? “Oh. I—I couldn’t bother you at work,” she stammered.
“No, you couldn’t.” He flipped the card over. “That’s why I wrote this stuff on the back.” His home phone number was written in a neat, bold hand. Below that, of all things, he’d written an e-mail address. Firemen have e-mail?
He smiled when she looked up with a tiny, puzzled frown. “The e-mail’s for the truly shy.” His smile softened. “Is that the problem? Are you ‘truly shy’?”
“No!” Danni protested and took the card from him. Shy was definitely not a word she would use to describe herself, except that right now her cheeks were blazing and she couldn’t come up with a single word to say.
“Well, then, you’re not stuck-up, are you?” He grinned.
“No!” Danni protested again and found herself grinning back at him. This guy really was cute.
“Okay,