He cradled her as best he could, aware of every bare inch of skin he was touching, then slowly worked his way back the same way he’d come. It seemed to take forever, but at last he saw Tom’s face peering at them intently.
“You have that blanket?”
“Right here.”
Ricky reached for it, then wrapped it around Allie as best he could in the confined space, before shimmying the rest of the way out.
Allie blinked against the brilliant glare of sunlight and continued to cling to Ricky as if he were all that stood between her and an unfamiliar world.
And, of course, the neighborhood must seem strange—nothing like what it had been the last time she’d seen it before the storm. Ricky could only imagine how it must feel to emerge and find everything changed. He’d seen that same sense of shocked dismay on the faces of other victims of other tragedies as they realized the extent of the damage around them and the likelihood of casualties among their friends and family.
As for the way Allie was looking at him and holding on, it wasn’t the first time he’d seen that reaction, either. The bond between victim and rescuer could be intense, but in most instances it wasn’t long before familiar faces arrived and the bond was broken.
This time, though, only the elderly neighbor stepped forward to give Allie a fierce hug, even as the paramedics moved in to begin their work. Allie was on a stretcher and headed for an ambulance in no time, Jane right beside her, giving instructions. Ricky grinned at the bemused expressions of the paramedics at taking their orders from a pint-size senior citizen in a flowered housecoat and bright-pink sneakers.
“Wait,” Allie commanded as they were about to lift her into the ambulance. Her gaze searched the crowd.
Ricky felt a quick rush of heat at the precise moment when she spotted him. Her gaze locked on his.
“Thank you,” she mouthed, too far away for him to actually hear the words.
“You’re welcome,” he said, then deliberately turned away from the emotion shining in her eyes to move on to another complicated search taking place a few houses away.
“You going to see her again?” Tom asked as they began work on the recovery of a victim who had been less fortunate than Allie.
“I wasn’t down there making a date,” Ricky retorted.
“I was asking about your intentions.”
Those blue, blue eyes came back to haunt him. He wondered if he might not have to see her again before he could get them out of his head.
“I promised to take her dancing,” he admitted, earning a punch from Tom.
“Next time there’s a pretty woman involved, I get first dibs,” Tom said. “There’s nothing like a little gratitude to get a relationship off to the right start.”
“And what would you know about relationships, Mr. Love ’em and Leave ’em?”
“More than you,” Tom said. “I was married.”
“For about fifteen minutes.”
“Three years,” his friend corrected.
“And in that time you learned what?”
“That women get all crazy once you put a ring on their finger.”
Ricky chuckled. “Are you referring to the fact that Nikki thought you ought to stop dating other women after the wedding?”
“Very funny. You know it wasn’t that. I might have looked, but I never went near another woman during that whole three years. Nikki just got all weird about the job. She knew what I did for a living when we met, but for some reason after we got married she seemed to think I’d give it up and go to work for her father.” He shuddered. “Me, behind a desk. Can you imagine it?”
No more than he could imagine himself there, Ricky conceded. “Mama says Nikki still loves you.”
“Not enough to give up that crazy idea,” Tom said, a hint of something that might have been sorrow in his eyes. But it was gone in a flash, replaced by an irrepressible glint of laughter. “That divorce was the best thing that ever happened. Women figure if I got married once, I might risk it again. You’d be amazed what a woman will do when she’s optimistic about your potential. You should consider it.”
“What? Get married, just so I can divorce? Not me. If and when I ever take the plunge, it’s gonna have to be forever. Between Mama and the priest, my life wouldn’t be worth two cents if I even breathed the word divorce.”
“Which is why you never date a woman for more than two Saturday nights running,” Tom concluded. His expression turned thoughtful. “I wonder if Allie Matthews could make you change your mind.”
“Why would you even say something like that? I barely know the woman, and you didn’t exchange two words with her.”
“I got a good look at her, though,” Tom said. “A man doesn’t soon forget a woman who looks that incredible even after being buried under a collapsed building. Besides, if her neighbor is right about what an angel she is, she’s nothing at all like your usual dates. Did you ever consider that you make the choices you do precisely because you know they’re not keepers?”
Ricky scowled at the analysis of his love life. He had a hunch it was more accurate than he wanted to believe. “We’ve got more houses to check out,” he said, stalking away without answering Tom’s question. His friend’s hoot of knowing laughter followed him.
What if he did protect himself from winding up married by dating women he would never, ever spend the rest of his life with? What was wrong with that? It wasn’t as if he led any of them on. As Tom said, Ricky rarely went out with the same woman more than once or twice, and he always put his cards on the table, explaining that in his line of work he was on the go way too much to get seriously involved.
Maybe it was a pattern he’d developed to avoid commitment, but so what? It was his life. He liked living alone. He liked not being accountable to anyone. After spending his first eighteen years accountable to an overly protective mother, an iron-willed father and four sisters who thought his love life was their concern, he liked having his freedom. His nieces and nephews satisfied his desire for kids, at least for the moment. He got to play doting uncle, soccer coach and pal without any of the responsibility that went with being a dad.
There wasn’t a woman on earth who could make him want to change the life he had.
Satisfied that Tom was totally and absolutely wrong, he dismissed his taunt about Allie Matthews. He’d probably never even see her again, never make good on that promise to take her dancing. She wouldn’t even expect him to.
He was still telling himself that the next day, but he couldn’t seem to shake the image of Allie’s cerulean gaze as it had clung to his. If what he’d seen in her eyes had been expectations, he might have run the other way, but that hadn’t been it. There had been gratitude, but underlying that there had been a vague hint of loneliness.
He tried to imagine being rescued from the debris of his home, having only an elderly neighbor for support, rather than the huge, extended family he had. He couldn’t. He knew without a doubt that his hospital room would be crowded with people who cared whether he lived or died, people who would help him to rebuild his home and his life. Who would be there for Allie?
He spent an hour telling himself that surely a woman described as an angel would have dozens of friends who would be there for her, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that Allie might not.
“Damn,” he muttered, slamming his coffee cup into the sink and grabbing his car keys.
On the drive he told himself that if he got to the hospital and found that Allie had all the support she needed, he would just turn right around and leave. That would be that. End of story. End of being haunted by those big blue eyes.
Unfortunately, something in his gut told him he was about to go down for the count.
Chapter Three
Allie hated the hospital. The antiseptic smell alone was enough to carry her straight back to another time and place when her life had been forever changed. This time she was an adult and her injuries weren’t either life-threatening or permanent, but the doctors still had no
intention of releasing her until she could tell them she had both a place to go and someone to care for her.
Unfortunately, there was no one. She knew only a few of her neighbors, and their lives and homes were in as much a shambles as her own. Her parents had offered to fly down immediately and stay with her, but the expense of paying for hotel accommodations for all three of them struck Allie as foolish. In addition she knew that they would hover just as they had years ago. She didn’t need that. She needed to get back into a familiar routine as soon as she was physically able to. She had promised to let them know if she couldn’t come up with another solution. There had to be one. It just hadn’t occurred to her yet.
“What about that lovely young woman at the clinic?” Jane asked helpfully. She had been to visit the night before and was here again, taking a bus from her sister’s, where she had been staying since the storm.
“Gina has a brand-new baby and a two-bedroom apartment. I couldn’t possibly impose on her and her husband,” Allie said, though her boss had indeed come by and issued the invitation.
“I would insist that you come to Ruth’s with me, but she’s not in the best health herself and, to be perfectly honest, she’s a pain in the neck,” Jane said.
Allie bit back a laugh. Jane’s opinion of her sister was something she had heard with great regularity since she’d moved in next door to the elderly woman. They barely spoke, because Jane thought Ruth spent way too much time concentrating on her own problems and not nearly enough thinking of others.
“Old before her time,” Jane often declared. “She was a cranky old woman by the time she hit fifty. Dressed like one, too. I tried to talk her into a snazzy pair of red sneakers the other day. You would have thought I was trying to get her to wear a dress with a slit up to her you-know-what.”
Now she sighed. “The minute I get that insurance check, I’ll move to an apartment, so I won’t have to listen to her complaining all the livelong day.”
“She did open her home to you,” Allie reminded her. “She was right there as soon as she heard about what had happened.”
“Yes, she was,” Jane admitted. “Of course, she said it was her duty. She wouldn’t have come, I promise you, if she hadn’t worried what her pastor would think of her if she left her only sister on the street.”
Jane waved off the topic. “Enough of that. We need to decide what’s to be done about you. If I thought we could find an apartment in time, you could move in with me until you rebuild, but there’s no way I can get settled someplace that fast.”
“It’s very sweet of you to want to do that, but this isn’t your problem,” Allie told her. “I’ll figure something out.”
Jane looked as if she wanted to argue, but eventually she stood. “Okay, then,” she said with obvious reluctance, “but I’ll be back tomorrow. Same time. You have my sister’s phone number. If anything comes up and you need me, you call, you hear me? Any time, day or night.”
Her elderly neighbor bent down and brushed a kiss across Allie’s cheek. “I think of you as the granddaughter I never had, you know. I hope wherever we end up, we don’t lose touch.”
“Not a chance,” Allie promised, squeezing her hand.
She watched as Jane left, admiring her still-brisk step in her favorite pink shoes. She wore them today with an orange skirt and flowered shirt. A bright-orange baseball cap sat atop her white hair. It was an outfit that could stop traffic, which Jane counted on, since she hated wasting time on a corner waiting for a light to change. It was a habit that scared Allie to death.
All in all, her neighbor was a wonder, interested in everything and everyone. Allie saw her pause in the hallway and watched her face as she carried on an animated conversation with a nurse she’d befriended on her first visit. Jane had all of the doctors and nurses wrapped around her finger. Allie didn’t doubt that Jane was the reason they’d been taking such extraspecial care of her, bringing her treats from the cafeteria and lingering to chat to make up for the fact that she’d had so few visitors.
Once Jane was gone, Allie struggled to her feet, determined to take a walk around the room at least to begin to get her strength back. She closed the door on her way past so no one would witness her awkward, unsteady gait.
She was still limping around the confined space, filled with frustration, when the door cracked open and eyes the color of melted chocolate peered at her. When her visitor spotted her on her feet by the window, a grin spread across his face.
“You’re awake. They told me not to disturb you if you were sleeping.”
“Come in,” she said, glad to see her rescuer again so she could thank him properly for saving her life. “I just realized that I don’t even know your name.”
“Enrique Wilder,” he said. “Ricky will do.”
“Thank you, Enrique Wilder.”
He looked almost embarrassed by her thanks. “Just doing my job.”
“So you spend your life scrambling around like a cat saving people?”
“If I’m lucky,” he said.
She shuddered a little at the implications of that. “Well, I’m grateful.”
He moved carefully around the room, his gaze everywhere but on her. He seemed so uneasy, she couldn’t help wondering why he had come. He paused to gaze out the window, and after a moment she tapped him on the shoulder so he would face her.
“Why are you here?” she asked finally.
“To tell you the truth, I’m not entirely sure.”
“So this isn’t follow-up you do on everyone you’ve pulled from a collapsed structure?” she teased lightly.
He looked away. She could see his lips moving, but because of the angle of his head, she couldn’t read them. She touched his cheek, turning his head to face her.
“Oh, sorry,” he apologized. “I forgot. I just came to make sure you’re okay. No lasting damage?”
“None. You can check me off as one of your success stories.”
“When are they springing you?”
“Not fast enough to suit me,” she said.
“I thought the goal these days was to get people out as quickly as possible, too quickly sometimes.”
“That’s the general rule, yes, but these are unusual circumstances. It seems I don’t have a home to go to, and they don’t want me alone.”
“You don’t have a friend you could stay with?”
“None I feel I could impose on. I haven’t been in Miami very long. Most of my friends are neighbors.” She shrugged. They both knew the situation most of her neighbors were facing.
“Of course. How is Mrs. Baker, by the way?”
“Living with her sister and grumbling about it,” Allie said with a chuckle. “Jane is very independent. She thinks her sister is a stick-in-the-mud. A half hour ago, you could have heard all about it.”
His devastating smile tugged at his lips. “She was here?”
“Yesterday and today. She says it’s to check on me, but I think she’s just desperate to get away from her sister.”
“I know the feeling,” Ricky said.
“You have a sister?”
“Four of them.”
Fascinated by the idea of such a large family, Allie sat on the side of the bed and regarded him eagerly. “Tell me about them.”
He looked doubtful. “You can’t really want to hear about my sisters.”
“I do,” she assured him. “I was an only child. I’ve always been envious of big families. Tell me about your parents, too. Is your mother Cuban?”
“How did you guess?”
“Your coloring and your first name are Hispanic, but your last name is Wilder. Those looks had to come from somebody.”
He laughed. “Ah, deductive reasoning. Yes, my mother is Cuban. She met my father at school when she had just come to the United States. She swears she fell madly in love with him at first sight.”
“And your father, what does he say?”
“He says she didn’t look twice at him until they were twenty and
he’d used up all his savings sending her roses.”
Allie chuckled. “Maybe she just liked roses.”
“That was part of it, I’m sure, but Mama has always understood the nuances of courtship. She might have been madly in love, but she wanted my father to prove his love before she agreed to a marriage that would be forever.”
“And the roses proved that?”
“No, but the persistence did.”
“And she passed all of this wisdom on to her children, I suppose, assuring that all of you have nice, secure relationships.”
“Let’s just say that my sisters each made their prospective husbands jump through hoops before they said yes. On occasion I felt sorry for the poor men. They had no idea what they were getting into. Sometimes I tried to warn them when they showed up for the first date, but it was too late. My sisters are very beautiful, and the men were already half in love with them before they arrived at the house.”
“How about you? How have you made your mother’s wisdom work for you?” she asked, surprised by how much she wanted to know if Ricky Wilder was married or single and how very much she wanted it to be the latter.
“I haven’t. Haven’t met a woman yet I wanted to impress.”
“But I’m sure you’re swimming in eager admirers,” she said, teasing to hide her relief.
“What makes you think that?”
“Please,” she chided. “Look in the mirror.”
His grin spread. “Are you trying to say that you think I’m handsome, Allie Matthews?”
“Facts are facts,” she said, as if she were stating no more than that. She hardly wanted him to know that he was capable of making her blood sizzle with little more than a glance. “Back to your sisters. Tell me about them.”
He settled into the room’s one chair. “Let’s see, then. Maria is the oldest. She’s thirty-six and has four children—all boys, all holy terrors. Each of them is fascinated by bugs and snakes and chameleons. To her horror, they’re constantly bringing their finds home and letting them loose in the house. I told her it’s penance for all the rotten things she ever did to me as a kid.”
A Love Beyond Words Page 3
