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Resisting Her Commander Hero
Lucy Ryder
Frankie doesn’t need a hero…But can she fight her attraction to Nate?Paramedic Frankie Bryce is finally over her crush on her late brother’s best friend, ex-Navy SEAL Nate Oliver—but then he returns to their hometown, acting as if she’s still the wild-child teenager he has to protect because he promised her brother he would! Frankie’s all woman now, and she definitely doesn’t need rescuing! The trouble is, this super-sexy hero is impossible to ignore…
Frankie doesn’t need a hero...
But can she fight her attraction to Nate?
Paramedic Frankie Bryce is finally over her crush on her late brother’s best friend, former navy SEAL Nate Oliver—but he returns to their hometown acting as if she’s still the wild child teenager he has to protect (he promised her brother he would!). Frankie’s all woman now, and definitely doesn’t need rescuing! Trouble is, this super-sexy hero is impossible to ignore...
With two beautiful daughters, LUCY RYDER has had to curb her adventurous spirit and settle down. But because she’s easily bored by routine she’s turned to writing as a creative outlet, and to romances because—‘What else is there other than chocolate?’ Characterised by friends and family as a romantic cynic, Lucy can’t write serious stuff to save her life. She loves creating characters who are funny, romantic and just a little cynical.
Also By Lucy Ryder (#uf6319a1d-8589-5d68-8c26-65007de51836)
Resisting Her Rebel HeroTamed by Her Army Doc’s TouchFalling at the Surgeon’s FeetCaught in a Storm of Passion
Rebels of Port St John’s miniseries
Rebel Doc on Her DoorstepResisting Her Commander Hero
Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Resisting Her Commander Hero
Lucy Ryder
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ISBN: 978-1-474-07494-0
RESISTING HER COMMANDER HERO
© 2018 Bev Riley
Published in Great Britain 2018
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
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www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
As always, to my family.
Especially my daughters Kate and Ash.
You are, and always will be, everything to me.
Contents
Cover (#u7d063582-76a1-5e3a-9725-e101be98478e)
Back Cover Text (#u7c543507-8abc-59fa-9805-45e70488cc5c)
About the Author (#u9f98fca2-89f0-5329-b3d0-ff05e0279dcf)
Booklist (#u6beadd76-9404-58fa-9182-b3a3962874ca)
Title Page (#u5ddcd6d7-4735-5452-849c-9237e8831e95)
Copyright (#ub5431c6a-add4-5f78-8982-9ac6c583fa23)
Dedication (#u1f0827f3-5b80-553e-ac39-a8598626d0a4)
CHAPTER ONE (#u092a0330-05cd-5184-b196-62037e663670)
CHAPTER TWO (#u39f7c719-dcff-5366-bbd8-891a999f8400)
CHAPTER THREE (#u15aa548b-f852-5c6e-824e-18820a282f76)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#uf6319a1d-8589-5d68-8c26-65007de51836)
“LOWER THE BASKET!” yelled paramedic Francis Abigail Bryce into her headset over the whop-whop-whop of the helicopter hovering a hundred feet overhead. Wind and rain lashed at the ledge on which she was crouched, shielding the fallen climber.
If she slipped it was a long way down and probably wouldn’t end well. It wasn’t exactly how she’d envisioned spending her Friday evening but when word had come through from the rangers’ station earlier that a climber had fallen, Frankie had been dispatched to the scene.
Further up the coast from the large seaside town of Port St. John’s on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state, heavy rains had caused a huge landslide and rescue teams were busy digging out survivors. With the storm wreaking havoc on the Juan de Fuca Strait, rescue personnel were stretched to the limit.
Frankie had returned with a few of the injured and then been the lucky candidate in the wrong place at the wrong darn time. Now, instead of providing emergency medical care at the site of the slide, she was clinging to a slick ledge only a few feet wide and a couple hundred feet from certain death because a group had thought it smart to go climbing in torrential rain.
She looked down into the guy’s youthful face and shook her head. Probably a student on spring break, she thought. EMTs were always busy this time of the year, rescuing kids from their own ambitions.
“Hang in there, handsome,” she yelled, aware that in the fifteen minutes she’d been there, he’d been slipping in and out of consciousness. She suspected a ruptured spleen and she’d already wrapped his leg in an inflatable compression cast.
Concerned about what was taking so long, Frankie looked up as a deep voice in her ear warned, “Heads up,” and the next instant a large figure dropped onto the ledge. Dressed in a red and black jumpsuit and wearing a half-face helmet with comms mouthpiece, he looked like a huge bug from an alien world.
Frankie didn’t need to see his eyes to know who it was. The hard, masculine jaw and the unsmiling line of his sensual mouth would have been a dead giveaway even if the hair on the back of her neck hadn’t stood up like a freaked-out cat.
Nathan Oliver. The man who’d been back for months without at least letting her know he was home.
What the hell was he doing here? Wasn’t he some super-secret commander of the Maritime Security Response Team or something? Unless her patient was a terrorist, or a foreign national in the country illegally—which Frankie doubted—she was pretty sure a member of the nation’s deployable operations group stationed at Port St. John’s wouldn’t normally be part of search and rescue.
Then again, maybe the landslide and current conditions in the strait had put all coasties on call, including the MSRT. And, yeah, wasn’t it just peachy that he had to be the one dropping from the sky?
Unhooking his line from the chopper, he gave a couple of hand signals to the pilot above before his safety line disappeared into the lashing rain.
With her heart in her throat, Frankie ruthlessly squelched the urge to reach out and grab him before rotor wash blew him off the ledge. Or maybe before she gave him a little shove over the edge herself.
Okay, fine, so maybe she was tempted for about a nanosecond, but even though Nathan Oliver was the last person she wanted to see, she didn’t want him to die either.
They’d meant too much to each other—once.
Besides, balanced on the rocky ledge and sure-footed and powerful as a mountain lion, Nate was more than capable of rescuing them both. He’d been a Navy SEAL before transferring to the Pacific North West unit of the US Coast Guard as Lieutenant Commander of the MSRT. Granted, the present conditions probably weren’t the worst he’d experienced, but even he couldn’t walk up sheer cliffs in this weather.
He dropped to his haunches beside her and she felt the sweep of his penetrating gaze. The resultant shiver, she told herself, was from being soaked through and freezing. It couldn’t be that he still affected her.
That ship had sailed a lifetime ago and Frankie didn’t make a habit of repeating her mistakes. Especially the very public ones that had devastated not only her pride but also her heart.
She saw his mouth form words that looked like, “You okay?”
But instead of replying, she yelled, “Where’s the basket? He’s going into shock.”
He pointed skyward and she looked up to see the rescue litter swinging wildly in the gusting wind as it descended toward them. Nate barked out an order to the chopper and the pilot edged closer to the cliff face. But instead of controlling the swing, it caused the litter to spin.
He rose to his feet in one smooth move and stretched out a long arm to snag it. Almost in slow motion, Frankie watched as it abruptly shifted in the wind. She opened her mouth to yell a warning as the medevac litter flew through the air toward him.
He saw it coming too late to get out the way and it clipped him on the side of his helmet, sending him staggering backward toward the edge.
Time slowed and stretched, narrowing into an endless tunnel of pure horror as Nate fought to regain his balance. Then his foot slipped and in that split second before he went over, his gaze caught and held hers.
In that timeless instant, all the wild conflicting emotions she’d managed to suppress for twelve long years exploded through her, blinding her to everything but him.
Everything but the need to keep him from disappearing from her life forever. And before she realized she was moving, Frankie rose and leapt for him in one desperate move.
She reacted. As she always did.
Fear gave her strength and speed and before she could even process her actions, her icy fingers closed around his harness. Her momentum sent her thudding into him and Frankie wrapped her legs around him like a vice as they shot off the ledge.
Through the frantic yelling in the comms, she heard him curse as his arms enveloped her like banded steel. Her line went slack and for one awful moment she thought they were headed for the bottom of the gorge. She sucked in a breath, tightened her grip and pressed her face into Nate’s throat, thinking stupidly that maybe it wasn’t such a bad way to go.
Wrapped around his big tough body and with his uniquely potent masculine scent filling her lungs, Frankie could think of a dozen worse places to be.
It was the closest she’d been to him in twelve years. The closest she’d been since the night of her eighteenth birthday, the night he’d completely humiliated her in front of half the town.
He’d been around forever and as well as she’d thought she’d known him, she couldn’t have known how much he’d changed or that he’d lost friends on his last mission. He’d looked the same—although bigger, harder and fitter—and acted the same as the boy she’d known her whole life. And if she’d noticed the closed-off expression in his eyes, the tight line of his mouth and jaw that night, she’d put it down to typical male arrogance and the fact that he was a member of the nation’s elite fighting force, mixing with a bunch of wild immature teenagers all because she’d begged him to come to her party.
She should have known better than to try to measure up to all the women in his life. To him she’d always just been his best friend’s kid sister; wild, reckless—always wanting to tag along.
Besides, she’d never measured up, to him or to her brother Jack. At least not in her parents’ eyes. Jack had been their golden child and Nate, popular, sporty and incredibly smart, was like their second son. They’d excelled at everything and it had been daunting, living in their shadow.
The birthday incident had been humiliating and she’d said things that filled her with guilt and shame whenever she thought about them. She’d lost him that day...and then seven years later she’d lost Jack in a mortar attack.
Her champions. Her own personal superheroes.
Frankie’s heart squeezed. And now she and Nate were heading for the bottom of the gorge and she’d never get the chance to prove that she’d—
The safety line abruptly snapped taut, halting their graceful pendulum arc into empty space; halting the wild, regretful thoughts flashing through Frankie’s mind. The next instant they were headed straight for the unforgiving rocky surface of the cliff face.
She tensed, because this was going to hurt.
Nate tried to turn, probably to take the brunt of the impact, but Frankie was attached to the safety line and the collision was hard enough to force the air from her lungs...and Nate’s big warm muscular body between her thighs.
Stars exploded behind her eyes. Whether they were from the jolt to her skull or his hard, tough body, Frankie wasn’t sure. But it was enough to rattle loose her good sense and cause some seriously inappropriate thoughts to flash through her mind, sending heat exploding through her body.
Nate Oliver was still the hottest man she’d ever known. The kind of hot that made women think inappropriate thoughts even while dangling hundreds of feet in the air by a slender nylon rope, and one wrong move away from falling to their deaths.
“Don’t look down,” he ordered. “And for God’s sake don’t let go. Not yet.”
Of course Frankie didn’t listen. Craning her neck, she looked down and then promptly wished she hadn’t when a distressed squeak escaped without permission. All she could see beneath her was a dark cold emptiness. Vertigo abruptly clamped queasy fingers around her throat and her belly churned.
“Dammit, Frankie,” Nate growled in her ear. “I said don’t look down.”
She wanted to tell him that he wasn’t the boss of her but her breath was lodged in her throat and she could only gasp.
Oh, God. How mortifying. Inside, Fearless Frankie—Port St. John’s former wild child—was freaking out.
“I’m going to let you go,” Nate said calmly, and it took a couple of beats for his words to register.
When they did, she snapped, “No!” and tightened her grip on him. No way was he letting go.
