Up Close and Dangerous by Linda Howard Page B

purr; he sounded like a tiger getting a massage.
    It took her a second, but then she realized his cold toes were tucked against her breasts—her bare breasts. There was no help for it because his feet were big, probably size elevens or even larger, and she couldn’t make her torso any longer, so, logically, his toes were going to be on her breasts. She swatted his leg. “Behave,” she said sharply, “or I’ll let you get frostbite.”
    “You aren’t wearing a bra,” he said, instead of responding to what she’d said—or maybe that was his response, as if the fact that she wasn’t wearing a bra was excuse enough for the fact that he was wiggling his toes, just a little.
    “It got wet when I was dragging you out of the plane, through the snow, so I took it off.” She kept her tone severe.
    He got the inference that she was braless only because of what she had done to rescue him, and he winced a little. “Okay, okay. But, damn, bare tits. You can’t blame me.”
    “Want to bet?” It occurred to her that the icy, unfriendly Captain Justice wouldn’t normally be talking this way to her, that he almost certainly had a concussion and was woozy and in pain. She couldn’t see him being roguish and plainspoken, but from the moment he’d regained consciousness his language had been as informal as if he were talking to another man. It said something, she thought, that a concussion had improved his personality. “And I don’t like the word ‘tits.’”
    “Boobs, then. Is that better?”
    “What’s wrong with ‘breasts’?”
    “Not a damn thing, as far as I can tell.” His toes wiggled again.
    She swatted his leg again. “Be still, or you can get your own feet warm.”
    “I don’t have any boobs to tuck them against, and even if I did I wouldn’t be able to get my feet up to my chest. I’m not into yoga.”
    He was definitely feeling better, and was more awake; he was speaking in sentences instead of one- or two-word answers. Chocolate had to be a miracle drug.
    “Well, tell you what: get some breast implants, take up yoga, and you’ll be set for life.” Judging that he’d had enough fun, she removed his feet from under her shirts, tugged his clean pair of socks on him, and tucked the layers of clothing around him again. “Fun’s over. Is your forehead frozen yet?”
    “Feels like it.”
    “Let me finish reading the instructions, and we’ll get this over with.” She picked up the booklet again. “By the way, since we don’t have any water to flush out the wound, I’m going to use mouthwash. It might sting.”
    “Great.” A world of irony was in the single word.
    Bailey hid a smile as she read. “Okay…yada yada…I got that part.
‘Grasp the needle with pliers so the point curves upward.’
” She looked at the curved suture needle, then the rest of the contents from the first-aid kit. No pliers were included. “That’s great,” she said sarcastically. “I need pliers. Normally I have a pair in my makeup bag, but, gee, it never occurred to me I’d need them on vacation.”
    “There’s a small toolbox in the plane.”
    “Where?”
    “Secured in the baggage compartment.”
    “I didn’t see it when I was getting the bags out,” she said, but got to her feet to recheck. “How big is it?”
    “About half the size of a briefcase. It’s just a few basic tools: hammer, pliers, a couple of wrenches, and screwdrivers.”
    Feeling as if she’d been in and out of the wreckage so often she was wearing a groove in the earth, Bailey maneuvered her way back into the plane, clambered into the passenger seat, and looked over the back into the baggage compartment. The floor of the plane was buckled from the impact so everything back there had been tossed around, but the cargo net had been in place to keep anything from flying out the way her tote bag had. Just as she opened her mouth to tell him nothing was there, he said, “It should be in brackets against the back wall, just inside the