The Thunderbolt - Lori Wilde Page 0,19
hold the bow in place, but it slipped through her fingers and went skittering across the sidewalk.
“Oh, dear,” she murmured anxious to put a little distance between herself and Bennett. Anything to give her time to think. “My great-gramma gave me that bow.”
Forgetting about her precarious high heels, Lacy slipped her arm from Bennett’s grasp and charged after her errant hair ribbon.
The bow blew off the sidewalk and tumbled toward the wooden railing separating the path from the river embankment.
It hung for a moment on a tall clump of grass. Just as she got close enough to reach for it, the wind gusted again, and the bow took off, taunting her.
Lacy lurched over the soft ground, damp from recent rains, determined to retrieve her bow before the wind sailed it into the river below.
“Lacy,” Bennett called, “be careful.”
But his warning came too late. The heel of her right shoe sank to the hilt. She jerked her leg forward in an attempt to extract herself.
The other heel stuck, too.
She stood with her legs three feet apart, barely able to stand.
She tottered to the right. Lacy windmilled her arms, tried to correct, and overcompensated. Her balance swung to the left.
The next thing she knew, she was falling forward. Her left foot had pulled free of the infernal high heels, but her right foot, oh, her poor right foot, was still strapped into the shoe, which was twisted at a very odd and uncomfortable angle.
She lay face down in the dirt, her bottom sticking in the air, dress hiked around her waist, her racy stockings and black lace Victoria’s Secret panties clearly on display.
Ducky. Just ducky.
“Lacy,” Bennett exclaimed. Immediately, he was on his knees beside her, his hands going to her foot, undoing the buckle at her ankle.
“I got the bow.” She scrambled to pull her dress down and maneuver herself into a sitting position without putting any weight on her foot. She held up the wayward hair ribbon and tried her best to ignore the intense throbbing in her right ankle.
“I hope the bow was worth spraining your ankle over.” Gently, Bennett manipulated her foot.
“Ow!”
“I’m sorry.”
“How bad is it?” She struggled to peer over his arm, then gasped when she saw her ankle had already mushroomed to grapefruit size.
“Hard to tell. With luck, no worse than a second-degree sprain, but we need to get it iced and elevated, STAT”
“Oh, no,” she moaned. “I won’t be able to work.”
“Surely you’ve got sick time available.”
He didn’t understand. She didn’t care about missing work. What she cared about was missing him. He only had another week left in his rotation at Saint Madeleine’s. If she wasn’t able to go to work, she’d probably never see him again after tonight. Her bottom lip quivered at the very thought, and she feared she might burst into tears.
“It’s okay to cry,” Bennett said. “I know it hurts like the dickens. I sprained my knee skiing one Christmas.”
The ankle pain she could handle. It was the other pain, the one deep in her heart, that made her want to cry. She couldn’t let him slip through her fingers. If she had to, she would limp to work on crutches.
“Let’s get you home.” He slid one arm under her knees, the other around her back.
“Wait, my shoes.”
He scraped the mud off CeeCee’s high heels as best he could and handed them to Lacy. They were definitely worse for the wear. Then he bent, scooped her into his arms, and rose to his feet.
“Where to?” he asked.
“You can’t carry me the whole way!” Lacy protested.
“Nonsense. You don’t weigh much more than a hundred pounds.”
“A hundred and seven,” she corrected. “And my apartment in the River Run complex is three blocks away. Just leave me here and go back to the Recovery Room and get my friends.” She didn’t want him to go, but neither did she want to give him a herniated disk.
“Don’t be silly. I’m not about to leave you sitting out here alone in pain in the middle of the night.” His tone brooked no argument.
My hero, my Prince Charming, my thunderbolt!
He held her close to his chest and started walking.
Her legs dangled over his bulging forearms. By this point, her ankle was pulsing with pain at every beat of her heart.
What a ninny. She had to be the klutziest woman on the face of the earth, but the wondrous effects of being held so close to the man she dreamed of outweighed the downside of a sprained ankle.
“I