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earth makes you think I married you for your legs?”
    “Listen, Hamilton. I have to take credit for my legs. God knows I wasn’t built like Mae West upstairs.”
    “What fun would it be being married to a life jacket?”
    “Lord, I’ve trained you well,” Sonia marveled.
    “ Very well. And in the meantime, I certainly hope you didn’t marry me for my nose.”
    She chuckled again. “I did.” She cocked her head, studying him. “But I guess you’ll still do. It’d be too darn much trouble breaking in someone new.”
    He heaved a weary sigh. “So you want to watch me tie you down and take a feather to your feet?”
    When the nurse walked in, Sonia was grateful. The banter had set at a distance the horrors of the night before, but other realities were intruding with frightening speed. Craig was in pain. Serious pain. His movements were achingly slow and his color increasingly ashen. He was giving an Oscar-winning performance, trying to hide the fact that he was hurting, and she loved him with a raving, consuming frustration inside her. Give in, Craig. Taking on five men. You damn fool. If something had really happened to you, do you think I would have wanted to go on living?
    “ Mister Hamilton, I really don’t believe this.” The RN’s name was Trether. A tiny white cap was perched meticulously on butter-yellow hair, and the nurse’s whites were spotless on a tall, spare figure. “You will be returned to your own bed the very instant I can get an aide in here,” she scolded firmly, setting a tray down next to Sonia’s bedside. “The doctor will be in your room to see you shortly, and in the meantime Mrs. Hamilton is going to have her shower and eat her breakfast.”
    Craig didn’t even turn around. “You feel up to a shower?” he asked quietly.
    “Lord, yes.” Sonia was already slipping out of bed. The floor felt cold beneath her bare feet, and so did the provocative draft that sneaked in through the back opening of the hospital gown. Just standing up caused her whole body to ache like the devil, but she knew there was nothing seriously wrong with her. Well, her shoulder was injured. But her concern was all for Craig. She bent over him. “Do what the nurse says,” Sonia whispered. “You’ll be fed gruel if you don’t.”
    And as she disappeared into the bathroom, Sonia crossed her fingers that he would have no reason not to lie down.
    It didn’t work. When Sonia was behind the closed bathroom door, Craig turned with aching slowness to the nurse. His voice was low, and lethally quiet. “You left my wife alone last night.”
    The accusation, so deadly flat, held more sentencing than a judgment in a court of law. Nurse Trether was taken aback. “Mrs. Hamilton had only to punch the button for any of the nurses to come in here if she’d needed the least thing.”
    “I told you under no circumstances to leave her alone.”
    The gently teasing, softly reassuring man who’d deliberately chased away Sonia’s memories was gone. Back was the commanding, determined man who’d risen from orphan to self-made engineer of a kind. A man who never backed down, not for a principle, never from a fight.
    The nurse sucked in her breath at his tight, cold stare. “Mr. Hamilton, I intend to call the doctor immediately. You were told unequivocally to stay in bed. You shouldn’t even have been able to make it up here.”
    “They x-rayed her shoulder last night.”
    “We told you. It’s dislocated. She’ll be uncomfortable for a while, but then she’ll be perfectly fine.” The nurse, about to say something else, rapidly changed her mind. In four long strides, she reached Craig before he fell.
    ***
    He woke up four hours later in the men’s ward, to find a familiar, wizened little man peering at him worriedly from the far corner of the hospital room.
    “Charlie,” Craig managed to croak.
    The man immediately surged forward. “About time you quit napping. Though I admit the plane trip in the middle of the