Death is Forever

didn’t have any words to tell him how much that meant to her. She was still discovering it herself. But she was certain about one thing.
    She couldn’t have left Cole Blackburn to die while she ran away unhurt.
    She knelt once more and went back to cleaning the wound. Hot tears gathered at the back of her eyes when his breath hissed out and he began cursing in a low voice.
    “I’m sorry,” she whispered, hating the knowledge that she was hurting him. As gently as possible she blotted the wound, trying to see how deep it was and if any cloth from his slacks was imbedded in his flesh. “Can you turn more to the left?”
    Cole’s leg bent. He braced his foot against the wash basin and wondered if Erin had the slightest idea what it was doing to him to feel her hair slide against his uninjured thigh, to feel her hands on his bare leg as she steadied herself, to feel her breath against his naked, sensitive skin. At least her unintentional seduction was taking his mind off the bruised, burning pain radiating from the shallow wound. He’d been lucky as hell to get away with such a minor injury and he knew it.
    “How’s that?” he asked, shifting until light fell directly on his inner thigh.
    “Good.”
    She put her hand on Cole’s thigh to hold him in place. With an effort she forced herself to concentrate on his wound as though she was looking through a camera lens. She bent closer, peering at the scarlet furrow. No matter how she turned, a shadow still fell across the wound, concealing its depth.
    Caged between his legs, she shifted awkwardly, almost leaning against his torso in order to see from a different angle. The motion sent first her shoulder and then her hair sliding across his groin.
    A shaft of desire went through Cole, tensing his whole body.
    “Does that hurt?” she asked anxiously.
    “Not…quite.”
    His voice was thick and his eyes were focused on her hair, not on her hands. He wondered if silk or satin or fire came in that particular color. Her hair felt like all three when it slid down over his skin, the strands cool and silky, yet somehow warm at the same time.
    “Lift a bit higher if you can,” she said, pressing gently with both hands against his thigh. “That’s good.” She looked at the wound and let out a long sigh of relief. “You’re right. It isn’t serious. It must hurt, though.”
    Cole didn’t bother to deny it. “Have any bandages in that kit?”
    “In your size? I doubt it,” she said dryly, starting to get to her feet.
    “Stay put, honey,” he said, holding her gently in place against his body. “I can reach it.”
    When he leaned forward, he all but surrounded Erin. She felt the supple power of his leg beneath her hands, felt the soft abrasion of his body hair against her wrists, and sensed the living, quintessentially masculine heat brushing against her arm. Sensations shivered from her breastbone to her knees, shortening her breath. Carefully she drew in air, telling herself that she must be mistaken. She couldn’t have felt what she thought she’d felt.
    Cole couldn’t be aroused.
    A tube of antibiotic ointment appeared at Erin’s eye level. She took it, carefully blotted the wound again, and began smoothing ointment over raw flesh. Cole hissed a string of words in a foreign language. She didn’t ask for a translation.
    With each light brush of Erin’s fingers against his body, Cole’s pulse leaped. The burning of the wound didn’t compare to the way she set fire to his blood. Because there was nothing he could do about either fire, he kept cursing in the kind of Portuguese used in the diamond fields of Brazil, blasphemies that could etch steel.
    As he cursed, he told himself it was a simple case of the oldest aphrodisiac of all—adrenaline. He’d felt it before, the aftermath of ambush, the vivid, almost overwhelming rush when he knew that he’d survived, and then the sexual hunger that was his body’s way of celebrating being alive. If Erin had been any other woman he would have pulled her onto his lap, burying himself in her until he came with a violence that equaled his arousal.
    But Erin wasn’t any other woman. She’d been raped and brutalized to the point that she might never invite a man into the hot, sleek depths of her body.
    Grimly Cole tried not to think about the delicate hands that felt so tantalizing on his skin. Like Erin’s breath, warm and sweet. Like the scent of her. Like her breasts brushing against his leg when she