How easy it would be to trail her hand up his calf. The familiarity of other mornings spent in the same kitchen lured her. Her body hungered for him, like an addictive habit.
A very dangerous habit she needed to break.
Lori unrolled a patch of gauze, procrastinating until her breathing regulated again. Gray ripped pieces of tape with his teeth and passed them to her. Lori anchored the bandage, her damp hair fanning forward over his leg. His muscles flexed again.
He reached to tuck her hair behind her ear, slowly, deliberately. His eyes fell to her mouth and lingered, caressed, as powerfully as any kiss. Her breasts, aching and heavy with yearning, tightened beneath the gentle abrasion of her T-shirt.
She backed away. "How's that?"
Gray cleared his throat and swung his leg off the table. Standing, he said, "Couldn't have done it better myself."
He tugged his flight suit off the hanger and stepped into it, shrugging it over his shoulders. She watched him dress, caught in that time warp of familiarity. A quick whip of the zipper and the intimacy fell away.
She skirted past him. "Give me a second and I'll gather up my other clothes."
Gray snatched the pad from the table and tore off the top sheet. He passed it to her, fingers brushing, pausing, heating, before he sank back into a chair to pull on his flight boots.
Slumping against the door frame, Lori read the numbers jotted in Gray's nearly illegible scrawl. She flipped the paper over and found nothing else jotted. "What's this?"
"Phone number for the Medical University Hospital."
"Are you doing rounds there?" She'd forgotten flight surgeons wore their uniforms even when acting as a doctor. A startling thought stopped her short. She looked down at the phone number. Did he want her to contact him? "Am I, uh, supposed to call you for something?"
"Nope." He tucked his squadron scarf along the neck of his flight suit. "That's the direct number to the nurses' station on Magda's floor."
The blood drained right from Lori's head to her bare toes. A dull ache throbbed inside her as she thought of the scene on the flight line. "Magda?"
"I followed up with the medical corps on base who logged them in last night. Magda was transported to the Medical University. She has pneumonia. I thought you would want to know."
He'd checked on Magda. Warmth pooled low in Lori's stomach. He could be so sweet sometimes. Then his words filtered through and chilled her. "Pneumonia?"
Gray jerked the laces on his boot taut. "Yeah."
"Poor little thing." Lori crossed her feet at the ankles, as if that might somehow ease the urge to race to the hospital. Reason battled some odd instinct within her to bolt out the door, anyway. "At least she has her sponsor family with her. It wouldn't be fair for me to disrupt her bonding with them."
Yanking the laces on his other boot with a vicious tug, he grunted.
"Gray?"
He pulled the legs of his flight suit down over the boots. "Gray?" Lori shoved away from the door to stand beside him. "She does have her sponsor family with her, doesn't she?"
His elbows thunked on the table. "No."
"What do you mean, no?"
"According to the nurse, Magda's back in the system. The couple slated to take her had tried for years to have a kid of their own. And wouldn't you know, the rabbit died while we were in the air. So now they don't need Magda anymore."
"Oh, my—" Lori bit back the need to rage at people who weren't even present. She would have given her eyeteeth for one child, and this couple tossed away the double blessing of two. "How did you find all this out?"
"Side benefit of having privileges there, and my signature is on her chart."
Lori paced around the kitchen, unable to dodge images of Magda's crying face. "I need to check in with the office to step up the search for another family so she'll have somewhere to go when she's released. I can't afford any glitches in placing these children. Neither can Magda." A scary flutter started in Lori's stomach. This kid was wriggling a little too close. Keep perspective. Don't lose objectivity. Lori ignored the warning. "I've got to go up there and see her."
"Of course you do."
"What?"
He tipped his chair on two legs, defensiveness warring with the cocky tilt of his beard-stubbled chin. "I can be through at the base and back here in a couple of hours, long enough for you to wash your other clothes, grab a nap, dry your hair, whatever. I can get you into her room. You'll learn a lot more with me along."