He shook his head. "No way. They've gotten worse excuses from me." He slipped a hand onto her belly and began to stroke her skin. "I wouldn't miss it, Willow. But if you won't come to Utah with me, that means I'll have to spend the preseason in Vermont with you. And I will, even if they threaten to kick me off the team."
She picked her head up in alarm. "What?"
"Shh," he said, fingertips on her belly. "Don't panic. I'm just asking you to think about coming out west. We'd have to spiff up my condo a little bit. It's got that bachelor look. The bookshelf is a board across a couple of milk crates."
Willow lay still for a moment. "That's big, Dane. But are you sure you're ready to go there? I worry that you never got to ask yourself which girl you'd like to wake up with every morning. I don't want you to think you didn't have a choice."
"Listen," he smiled. "There's only one way to win a downhill race. Right out of the gate, you choose your line. Then you accelerate to eighty or ninety miles an hour, and you don't second-guess yourself. No regrets. I know more about commitment than you think."
He paused to kiss her again and was rewarded with two warm hands gently stroking his chest. "Now, why would I ever want some other girl? Some stranger with an app on her phone to tally up my endorsement deals? You and I have been to the wars together, and now we finally have a chance to be happy." He brushed his lips across hers. "You and Coach are the only two people who know me at all. And I don't find Coach very attractive."
He could see her smiling even in the dim light. "You have thought about this."
"Every day I think about this." Carefully, Dane rolled on top of her, setting his knee gently onto the sheet. "You've taken good care of me. I would like to return the favor," he said. He took a deep breath. "I love you, sweet thing. Say you'll move in with me."
Underneath him, she gave a shaky sigh. "Okay, Dane. I want us to have a real chance."
Dane moved his hips, fitting his erection between her legs. "How shall we celebrate?" he whispered. He kissed her deeply, unable to resist an experimental grind of his hips. His knee seemed to tolerate the position.
"Did Folger inspire you?" Willow breathed.
"He only read my mind. I think about this every day, too."
"Mmm," she said, stroking his ass. "You feel amazing. Just be careful up there."
"I'd risk reinjury," he nipped her neck, "to do it like a boss."
She laughed until he kissed her again. And then there was no more talking-only kisses and sighs. As she wrapped her arms around his back, he hoped she'd never let go again.
The End
Also by Sarina Bowen
Next up in the Gravity series is Callie's story:
Falling from the Sky (Gravity #2)
followed by
Shooting for the Stars (Gravity #3)
Also by Sarina Bowen: The Ivy Years
The Year We Fell Down
The Year We Hid Away
Blonde Date
The Understatement of the Year
The Shameless Hour
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Falling From the Sky
She's the woman he doesn't remember. He's the man she can't forget.
Bad boy Hank "Hazardous" Lazarus used to have everything: a gorgeous girlfriend, a career as a freestyle snowboarder and a spot on the US Olympic team. Nine months ago, after a bad crash in the half pipe, he woke up in the hospital, unable to move his legs. Now he's landed there again, but gravity is not the culprit. His family is pressuring him to try a groundbreaking treatment, but Hank self-medicates with a bottle of tequila instead.
Doctor Callie Anders has the courage to restart a patient's heart with a thousand volts of electricity, yet she's afraid to risk her own. So she doesn't confess to her newest patient they they met just before the accident, an encounter that he doesn't remember. Even as their friendship develops, she won't admit that she regrets turning down his dinner invitation, or that her heart stutters every time those inked shoulders roll through the door of the therapy department.
With winter coming again, Hank needs a hand out from under the avalanche of his disappointments. If only Callie were brave enough to take the job.
[Turn the page for an excerpt.]
Excerpt
Falling From the Sky, Chapter One
Standing on the snowy hillside under the December sun, Callie Anders found herself pulsing along with an unfamiliar bass line. The heavy groove scraping through the oversize speakers was the sound of bands she didn't recognize, played in clubs she'd never visited.
And it wasn't just the music. Nothing about the slopeside party resembled her ordinary life. The vibe felt more like an after-hours club than a sporting event. Beers in hand, spectators watched as a final competitor tipped his snowboard over the edge of the super pipe to drop into its steep curve. Gravity did its thing for the athlete, ramping up his speed as the board dropped into the valley of the pipe and then up the opposite side. At the top again, the guy snapped his hips upward, grabbed the board with one hand, and then whipped his body around in the air, reversing course to land neatly on the snow again. And then he was off, hurtling down the pipe with only seconds to prepare for his next trick.
Callie had seen snowboarding on TV, but in person it was even more impressive. After the kid launched his second trick-some kind of dizzying spin, she lost count of his rotations-he seemed to meld his board onto the surface, his shoulders relaxing into a carefree stance as he dropped downhill again. As he sped by, Callie even saw his lips moving, forming the lyrics of the song thumping overhead.
After two more whirling tricks, he finished to a cheer from the crowd. The wool-clad heads in the crowd swiveled toward the giant screen, waiting for his scores.
"Not bad for a bunch of knuckle draggers," her friend Dane muttered beside her.
"I love it," Callie heard herself say. She was glad that Dane and Willow had towed her along to the snowboarding competition. "It's … half athleticism, half circus performance."
In response, Dane only snorted. And that made her best friend Willow grin. "He can't help it, Callie. A skier can't say anything nice about snowboarding. It's not in his DNA."
Dane gave Callie a wink. "In two months you'll see what a real mountain event looks like."
"I can't wait," she agreed. So far, she had only seen Dane race on television. But she'd already bought her plane ticket to Europe for the Olympics, where Dane would be contending for as many as four medals.
As if on cue, the music changed to the telltale trumpets of the Olympic anthem. Callie's eyes drifted to the big screen at the top of the pipe, which announced in giant type that the elite exhibition would happen next. After the last trumpet tone, the music devolved again into a heavy beat, and Callie saw the crowd begin to move with the music. As the knit hats and down jackets around her began to bob, it was as if Callie had been transported to a sunny, snowy land of hipsters. One that she wished she'd visited long ago.
Actually, she wished a lot of things.
When you spend nine years of your life becoming a doctor, there's a lot that you miss. For most of that time, the sacrifice hadn't really bothered her. But the past several months had been hard, and Callie had been spectacularly lonely.
It was almost exactly a year ago that she'd caught Nathan, her doctor boyfriend, cheating on her in an exam room with a leggy young nursing student. Callie had thrown the bastard out, of course. Yet twelve months later, Nathan and the nurse were still going strong, and she was still alone.
To make matters worse, Willow and Dane left Vermont for Utah in the spring, leaving Callie doubly bereft.
This weekend would make for a happy exception. Her friends were in town to take care of some business. And they'd brought Callie's new favorite person-their three-month-old daughter. Baby Finley was riding out the snowboarding event asleep inside Dane's ski jacket. If Callie put a hand on Dane's shoulder and raised herself up on tiptoe, she could just glimpse the baby's satin eyelids.
Callie hadn't seen her friends for ten weeks-not since she'd flown out to Salt Lake City after the baby was born in September. In the meantime, Willow and Dane had been busy settling into their new house, caring for the baby and surviving a whirlwind of preparations for the Olympic Games. In two months she'd see them again overseas. Callie and Willow would hole up in the hotel together, caring for Finley and cheering on Dane during the games.
It was all very exciting, but Callie still felt hollow inside. As she stood there beside her happy friends, she found herself fighting off unfamiliar feelings of envy. Willow had taken what seemed like an outrageous risk on a man with a difficult past. And now Willow was one third of what Sports Illustrated had recently described as "the cutest family in winter sports."