Shiver

it’s all because of you. ”
    “Sam.” He was following her into the hall when the edge of his crutch caught on the threshold, where tile met thick beige carpet. “Look out!”
    Sam turned in time to see him stagger. Just as quick as that he lost his balance and started to fall. Instinctively she surged toward him, tried to grab him, to steady him, only to have him crash into her and send her reeling into the wall.
    God, the guy was big.
    “Umph.” The sound was forced out of her as he smacked into her. With the wall hard against her back, she felt like a bug being squashed.
    “Ow! Damn it!” The exclamation came from him as, in trying to regain his footing, he apparently accidentally put weight on his injured leg. He pitched sideways. The crutches went tumbling. Clutching at her shoulders, he tried to save himself. Locking her arms around his waist, Sam did her best to hold him up, but he was too heavy, and was off-balance to boot. There was nothing she could do. They performed a kind of staggering dance that ended badly: together they tumbled to the floor. Sam landed flat on her back, with him partly beside and partly on top of her. For a stunned moment she lay unmoving, fighting to catch her breath, as a stream of muttered curses passed over her head. His fall had loosened his robe so that what was pinning her to the floor was a lot of near naked man. He was heavy as a sack of cement, and she pushed at him in a vain attempt to shift his weight. With his robe askew, her hands encountered smooth, damp skin over sinewy muscles; she was pushing just above his hipbones, on the sides of his taut waist, without making any appreciable difference at all to their respective positions. She could feel the expansion and contraction of his rib cage as he breathed. Unwillingly inhaling the scent of soap and man, she felt the prickly warmth of hair-roughened bare skin brushing her cheek, along with the solid length of his uninjured leg lying against hers. A lightning sideways glance told her that it was his chest that her cheek was touching. Tan like the rest of him, his chest was wide and muscular, with a wedge of blackhair in the center. The unmistakably masculine look and feel of it—of him—bothered her in a way she refused to even try to define. Jerking her face clear of skin-to-skin contact, she shifted as best she could, managing to scoot upward an inch or so, winding up at approximate eye level with his square chin and his grimacing mouth. One of his hard-muscled arms rested beneath her head. The other curved across her shoulders. His injured leg lay across her thighs. His entire body was tense, with pain, she thought. Uncomfortable with the closeness of the contact, she would have shot to her feet if it had been at all possible, but it wasn’t. There was no way she was getting up until he moved. Shifting her gaze higher with some reluctance, she met his eyes. They were a little glazed, unfocused even. She wasn’t even sure that he knew whom he was looking at.
    Which suited her fine.
    “Are you okay?” she asked, although from his expression it wasn’t hard to guess that the answer was no. The fall had undoubtedly jarred the wound. She only hoped that it hadn’t done more than that, like make it start bleeding again or something. Luckily the carpet was thick plush, and his leg had landed on her rather than anything less yielding.
    “I’ll live.” His voice was tight, but at least he was answering.
    She took a steadying breath. If having him wrapped around her like this was making her feel ill at ease, she sure wasn’t going to let him know it. “See why you should have stayed in the wheelchair?”
    “Staying in a wheelchair doesn’t work for me.” She could feel the tension slowly easing out of his muscles. Out of the cornerof her eye she watched him carefully flexing his hand, and remembered that his leg was just the worst of his injuries, and not the extent of them by a long shot.
    “Why not?”
    “I need to get back up to speed. ASAP.”
    “That’s really not going to happen if you keep falling all over the place.”
    “The end of one of my crutches got caught on the carpet. Pure accident.”
    “You’re trying to do too much too soon.” Good God, she sounded like she could have been scolding Tyler, if he were doing something of which she disapproved. The smallest upward quirk of Marco’s lips told her that he recognized the tone, too.
    “I’m a little older than four, you