by Julie Miller
Her footsteps and sobs faded as the whip hit his back, all nine of its claws ripping their way through his skin.
Chapter Six
“Maria? Maria!”
Bryce shivered at the fiery pain that burned through his feverish body. Maria was dead. Seventeen innocent civilians were dead because he hadn’t been quick enough to save them.
There were too many mines. Too many damn mines.
And the mortar fire.
The command to retreat.
Ordered to save his own hide and let them die.
“Sarge? You’ve got to pull through this. You’re a fighter. I need you on my team.”
Colonel Murphy’s voice. He’d always obeyed that voice. But he couldn’t do it. He didn’t have the strength in him anymore.
He was in the hospital. Lying on his stomach with his face looking through a hole to the green linoleum tile on the floor beneath him. He’d been lying here for weeks while the doctors battled infections and waited for enough skin to grow back so they could stitch him together.
“You did your best, Sarge. We’ll have another chance to get the bad guys. I promise.”
Bryce nodded, but he didn’t believe. Murphy was here. Powell and Trevor Blackhaw, too. Campbell. Brown. They’d all been in to see him.
He should rise to attention. Salute. But all he wanted to do was roll over and be done with the pain. He wanted to be done with giving a damn about things that could never be his.
He wanted to be done with living and losing.
“Bryce Martin.”
They were taking away his career—nerve damage, loss of flexibility—an honorable discharge and a couple of medals? They were taking away the last thing he cared about, denying him the one place where it didn’t matter where he’d come from or what he looked like.
“Keep fighting, Sarge.”
“I can’t.”
It hurt too much. Inside and out. The pain burned through him. Cut him to the heart as easily as the shrapnel cut through his skin.
“Bryce Martin.”
Something cool touched the back of his neck. Soft words he didn’t understand murmured a gentle rhythm against his ear, scattering his bleak thoughts.
“No, sir,” he answered with less strength. “Can’t fight…No reason to…”
“Do it for yourself,” the colonel ordered. “Do it for your men.”
“No.” It hurt too damn much.
“Shh.”
Sweet relief traveled across his shoulders and down his back, giving him the first real comfort he’d known in weeks. The fever in him cooled along with each gentle touch, each hushed word. The anger in him abated.
“Bryce Martin.”
Bryce awoke without opening his eyes, slowly sifting his way through hazy layers of consciousness.
He frowned into his pillow. Why would the colonel call him by his first and last name?
“Shh.” The cool balm settled at the back of his waist. “Rest easy. Shh.”
His breathing eased at the tender command. He never knew Colonel Murphy had such a soft, sexy voice.
Bryce’s eyes snapped open.
Murphy talked like a soldier. Nobody talked soft and sexy to Bryce Martin.
His muscles tensed with confusion as Bryce tried to sort through the images in his brain and place himself in his surroundings. Which were memories? What was feverish illusion? Where did the nightmares from his past end and his present reality begin?
A foggy mist of light and shadow told him nothing but that it was night. So he listened to the world around him—ocean waves splashing a rocky shore in the distance, a gentle trickle of water closer by. He sniffed the musty odor of damp ticking, and the more pungent smells of citrus and ointment.
Was he back in the hospital? Did that hushed, heavenly voice belong to a nurse?
“Are you awake, Bryce Martin?”
Trilled rs. Succinct articulation. The homey scents of yeast and spice.
An instant awareness cut through the shroud of fever, pain and confusion. Hell.
He wasn’t in any army hospital.
Colonel Murphy wasn’t whispering in his ear.
“Tasiya?” His voice was a ragged croak. He tried to get his arms underneath him, to push himself up. But his muscles were weak, wobbly.
And her hands were surprisingly strong against his shoulders. “Do not move. You should rest.”
But he’d been whipped. As if he wasn’t already hard enough to look at, she was sitting on the edge of his cot beside his prone body—in his cell—tending the wounds on his back. “You shouldn’t be here.”
She oughta leave. She oughta run as far away from him and his hell as her long legs would take her. He should make her leave. But her tender hands—the cloth and cool water and salve she used—felt so good against his skin.
“I am not leaving until I am finished. This is my fault.”
How could Marcus Smith being a son of a bitch possibly be her fault? Bryce turned his head on the mattress to glimpse her from the corner of his eye. “You’re not responsible. I had it comin’ to me sooner or later. I’ll be—”
“Do not tell me you have faced worse than this and survived.” She leaned forward so he could look straight up into those stern brown eyes. “You are facing this because of me. You are hurt now because of me.”
Such a sharp tongue. But he understood the difference between anger directed at him and a misguided woman being angry for him. Other people didn’t stand up and fight for Bryce—especially a slender slip of a woman. The men he’d fought with and worked with watched his back, but no one defended him. Most figured he didn’t need the help.
But Tasiya Belov was fired up—in her own reserved, ladylike way. If he had the strength, he’d smile and thank her for the uncustomary honor. But he needed to conserve whatever energy he had left. “Marcus Smith and his ego did this. Don’t feel guilty.”
“I did not know it would give him such pleasure to see you suffer.” Bryce followed her precise, efficient movements as she rinsed the cloth in a basin of water made pink with his blood. When she faced him again, some of the fight had gone out of her. Her eyes seemed darker, sadder, full of regret. “If you were not such a gentleman, you would not be so hurt.”
A gentleman? Was the translation between them that far off? “He used you to get to me. I shouldn’t have let him.”
Tasiya resumed her work without comment, folding the cloth and laying it over his tricep muscle. Some of the nerves there hadn’t functioned since he was a kid, so he felt no sting from the lemony soap she used. But he could feel the light, sure pressure of her fingers as she doctored the laceration there, handling him like a baby instead of a man twice her size.
A woman’s gentle touch was as foreign to him as the weakness that consumed his body. He’d lived a hard life, had never really done relationships. What he knew about women had to do with sex, generally the quick, no-strings-attached kind. He didn’t even have buddies who were women. A few co-workers, but that was all business. Jacob Powell’s fiancée had tried to talk to him a couple of times, and he appreciated the effort, but friendly banter was just awkward for him.
He knew his mama had loved him, but he’d been an unscarred, untested boy then. His grandma had loved him for the young man he’d become, but theirs had been a secluded life.
All this talking, all this tenderness from Tasiya was…perplexing. In the end, all Bryce could do was be who he was. “How long was I out?”
“You have not gone anywhere.”
“I meant, how long have I been unconscious?”
“Oh.” She pulled her hands away, clutching them together in a self-conscious gesture. Bryce wished he could withdraw the question. He should have just shut up instead of making her self-conscious about the language barriers between them.
But Tasiya was made of sterner stuff. “Mr. Smith’s men brought you here before dinner. You did not waken when I brought your food, so I…” She glanced over her shoulder at the steel bar
s that had separated them for so many nights. “I came in to help you. It is nearly three in the morning now.”
He tried to roll onto his side, to at least hide the worst of his injuries from her. “You need your sleep. I’ll be all right.”
But her firm hands guided him back down. She squeezed some ointment from a tube across the tips of her fingers and dabbed it over the cuts, stubbornly refusing to be shielded from his ugliness. “There is no doctor here, but I know something about taking care of wounds like this. My father was once…”
Bryce waited expectantly to learn more about her, but she didn’t complete the sentence. Reading the distant sorrow in her eyes, he didn’t want her to. He knew Tasiya Belov was no stranger to hardship. That wasn’t right. But Bryce didn’t know how to make things right for her, how to make whatever scared her go away. He couldn’t even get things right for himself.
“Tasiya?”
“I am almost finished.” She rose and carried the cloth and basin out into the passageway. She set the items on the floor, and for the first time he noticed she’d sneaked in to see him without her noisy cart.
Sneaking couldn’t be good for her safety.
“Finished with what?”
“Bathing you.”
She meant cleaning the cuts and welts, of course. Then Bryce realized that he smelled a heck of a lot better than he had yesterday. His face and hands had been washed and he…
He clenched and released his muscles, all the way from his nose to his toes. He ignored the stabs of pain and took note of the breezy sensations in between. Lordy. Now he was wide awake. His jeans were unzipped and hanging low on his hips, his briefs pulled down just short of indecent. The dainty, practical miss from Lukinburg had been quite thorough in her washing. His skin heated up, but not with the fever from his open wounds.
A new kind of feeling that had nothing to do with pain, and everything to do with the thought of Tasiya putting her capable hands on his buttocks and other interesting places that hadn’t been injured, charged his blood with a uniquely masculine burst of strength. Propping himself up on his elbows, Bryce managed to drop his legs over the side of the cot and push himself up to a sitting position.
The uneven floor swam before his eyes. “Whoa.”
“What are you doing?”
Bryce laid his forehead in his palms and tried to shake off the dizziness. Metal scraped against metal, and hurried footsteps brought her back to him. He swayed into her hands, but they latched onto his arms and steadied him until the light-headedness passed and he could open his eyes.
“I must have lost more blood than I thought.” Or he was still recovering from shock. He patted at her fingers and lifted his gaze to an eyeful of gently sloping breasts, rising and falling beneath her pale-blue sweater. She was long and lean and, oh, so feminine, making it damn near impossible for his pulse rate to regulate itself when she was this close. Wisely, he averted his eyes before giving in to the tempting urge to rest his head against her. “I’m okay.”
The cot shifted slightly as the mattress took her weight beside him. He angled himself away from her, but didn’t have the legs yet to put any more distance between her and his libido.
“I heard the men talking at dinner. Mr. Fowler said to give you a few days to heal before resuming interrogation. You must use that time to rest.”
They were finally cutting him a break? That probably meant Smith and his goons would be loaded for bear when they got the okay to torture him some more. In the meantime, they’d no doubt be practicing their skills on one of the other hostages.
Bryce should use the uninterrupted time to plot a way out of here—a way to get them all out of here—the bounty hunters, the soldiers. Maybe even Tasiya, assuming she wanted to go.
Right now, though, he could barely manage to pull up his pants. A pinch of pain beneath the elastic told him how far down his injuries went, but he didn’t plan on mooning the woman who’d been so foolishly kind to enter the cage with the monster and doctor him up.
Bryce flinched when Tasiya’s fingers brushed against the small of his back. But whether she attributed the corresponding flood of goose bumps to pain or understood that his body just wasn’t used to a woman’s familiar touch, it didn’t deter her from straightening the elastic and tugging up his jeans.
He drew the line, though, when she reached around to help him with his zipper. Bryce grasped her wrists and pushed them gently back into her own lap. Wounded or not, there was a thing or two about his male anatomy when he was around her she didn’t need to see. “I can get it.”
He tried not to be disappointed at how quickly she moved on to a new task—pouring him something that was too dark to be water out of her pitcher and unwrapping a crusty loaf of bread. “I saved you some food.” She tore the loaf in two and cradled one end in her lap while she dipped the other into the cup. “It’s cold now, but I made some broth to help you regain your strength.”
Propping the cup between her knees, Tasiya cradled the soaked bread over her palm to catch the drippings. When she carried it to his mouth, Bryce had to stop her. “I’ll get that, too.”
Letting Tasiya feed him was just too suggestive for his peace of mind right now. How incredible would it be if her tender attentions were motivated by attraction instead of a guilty conscience? Bryce had lived long enough to know not to ask for the impossible. But his weakened body seemed to have no problem interpreting the touches and the talking and the delicious smells of food and cook as a personal invitation to be aroused.
He sank his teeth into the first rich bite of nutty bread and beef au jus before he realized just how far she’d gone to help him. His chewing slowed as he stared at his naked wrists. He swallowed before trying to gauge the motivation in her expression. “You unchained me.”
“I put medicine on the welts around your wrists and ankles. You were already heavy enough to move. It was less awkward to bathe you once I removed them.” She was either exceedingly practical or too naive for her own good.
“You should have put ’em back on,” he suggested.
That tiny vertical line of confusion and doubt appeared between her brows. “You will not run away from me, will you?”
She must not know how badly he was hurtin’. He eyed the keys around her wrist. She’d been cautious enough to secure the manacles in the passageway outside his cell, but then she’d been trusting enough to lock herself inside with the keys to his freedom within arm’s reach.
“I wouldn’t get you into trouble that way.”
Yet.
But with that promise, she relaxed and smiled.
Bryce quickly stuffed another bite into his mouth, though the bread and broth had turned bitter. Maybe there was something he could do to earn her trust. He could take advantage of the pity she felt for him, the way it lowered her guard and made her believe he was some kind of victim or gentleman. Maybe he didn’t need Powell or Campbell to sweet-talk her.
And while she worked off whatever penance she felt she owed him, he could slowly gain her trust. She’d answer his questions out of guilt. And if pity could make her unlock his chains tonight, then a growing bond would make it a piece of cake to steal those keys without resorting to force.
Problem was, he didn’t want to leave her company, not just yet. And while he had no illusion of a happily-ever-after with any woman, he was human. He’d never known a woman’s gentleness before. He’d never known how much he craved it.
He risked a glance into her dark, mysterious eyes and allowed himself one moment to dream. Would her hair be as silky to the touch as it looked? As rich and heavy in his hands as it was a feast to his eyes? What would her lips taste like? They were pink and full, with enough attitude to make them interesting—like sweet, tart raspberries ripe for the plucking. What would she feel like in his arms? Strong? Delicate? Would she melt in a puddle of shy femininity? Or would she be as practical and efficient and sure of herself as the woman who’d stripped him down and washed him from head to toe?
Bryce snatched the bread and cup from her lap and turned away, damning the useless needs that heated his blood and made him hungry for more than a batch of fried chicken and mashed potatoes. This wasn’t a fairy tale, and he wasn’t gonna be anybody’s prince—not out of love or pity.
He just needed some time to heal. Then he needed to use her and not look back with longing or regret.
TASIYA WONDERED what dark thoughts had put such a scowl on Bryce Martin’s harsh face. She swore that his beautiful gray eyes had sparked with desire, that they’d shared an inexplicable warmth and closeness in the cool, dim air of his quiet cell. But maybe it was only an apology she had read there. She’d had so little experience with men who made her feel anything, it was hard to be sure.
Perhaps her presence here embarrassed him. The men she knew liked to be strong. And with the exception of her father, they seemed to possess a brutal urge to show off their power and lord it over others.
But Bryce Martin had needed her. At least, he’d needed a nursemaid to help him before he risked infection, perhaps even death, in this forgotten cage in the middle of the ocean. Since he’d taken the horrific beating to protect her, Tasiya felt honor-bound to repay the favor by bringing him food, clothing and medicine and tending to his needs.
She could have left an hour ago, been less thorough in her caregiving. But conscious or awake, Bryce Martin was a calming presence. Well, calming might not be the right word. She moved her gaze past the raw strips of skin that had been peeled from his broad back and studied the intriguing stretch and flex of his bottom each time he moved to find a relatively comfortable position or to finish the rest of his late-night snack.
Tasiya smiled to herself at her surprisingly naughty thoughts. She’d learned he was muscular all over—warm to the touch, too—even on parts of his body that she rarely got to see on a man.
If she looked past the surface of his skin, past his square, craggy face, he was really quite a fine specimen of a man. Tasiya’s smile quickly faded. She couldn’t ignore the old scars or the new ones he would bear from this ordeal. And she couldn’t ignore his face, because that would mean avoiding his eyes. There was such strength in his wintry irises. Such depth. Such beauty.