by Bianca D’Arc
“I’ll be careful,” he replied noncommittally as they resumed their positions. He had to get back on track and teach these newcomers the basic skills they might need to protect themselves. That was his mission here today. That had to be his goal.
He had to put aside his attraction to Sandra McCormick. She was too tempting and all too beautiful for his sanity. It wasn’t going to be easy to ignore that. Then again, as a retired Navy SEAL he wasn’t a man used to taking the easy path.
Partnering with Matt Sykes was even harder than Sandra had expected. Oh, he took every precaution not to hurt her as he demonstrated the martial arts moves he was trying to teach. That wasn’t the problem. She’d been thrown harder by Donna in practice. Matt guided her down to the mat light as a feather, controlling her descent in a careful and considerate way.
No, the problem was her reaction to him as a man. She’d been attracted to him from the start, but being near him—close to him this way—was kicking up the attraction another notch. His hands were big but gentle on her as he ran her through the combination move that ended with her flat on her back beneath him.
And that position brought on a whole other train of thought that was dangerous in the extreme. She wondered how it would feel if he crawled over her…naked. She could feel the heat of him through the worn fabric of their clothing. How much better would it feel skin on skin?
He was a large man. She’d known that theoretically. But having him toss her around as if she weighed no more than a feather brought home to her the real strength of him, the power behind his well-built frame. Even with a career-changing back injury, he moved with all the grace of a jungle cat. Matt was a man in his prime who was intensely attractive to just about anyone with two X chromosomes to rub together.
She fantasized about rubbing up against him, their naked flesh creating a friction that would probably burn her alive. Just the forbidden thought of it was heating her blood to an almost uncomfortable degree. She wanted him to climb over her and claim her. To stalk her like the male animal he was and put his mark on her. She wanted him. Like she wanted her next breath.
It was impossible, of course. He was the commander of this little operation and she was keeping some very dark secrets from him. Aside from that huge obstacle, she sincerely doubted a guy like Matt would even look twice at a lab geek like her. Sandra knew she cleaned up rather well, but she was by no means femme fatale material. Matt, no doubt, could have any woman he wanted. Why would he waste his time with a mousy scientist?
He wouldn’t. Which was just as well. She couldn’t afford to complicate her life even more by getting involved with anyone, much less the leader of the team that was working to fix some of the mistakes she’d made in the past.
Her thoughts flashed back to that night in the lab. The first night they’d tested the contagion and the first batch of zombies had risen. She’d run into the night, inadvertently letting the creatures out. That one foolish mistake would forever weigh on her conscience. Such a simple thing to have caused so much grief. All she had to do was bar the door and the creatures would probably have been contained.
But she hadn’t barred the door. She hadn’t even reported the incident. Once the day shift had discovered the lab empty, nobody had thought to ask if anyone had been tasked to watch the experiment overnight. Though they worked for the military, the science team hadn’t run a tight ship. Duty schedules varied widely depending on the needs of the experiment, and nobody ever quite knew where everyone on the team was supposed to be at any given time. They operated more or less on the honor system and a task-related basis. You worked until you finished your assigned task, no matter how long that took.
She’d managed to escape blame for letting the monsters out of the cage. She would never forgive herself for her cowardice that night. If anyone ever found out she’d been the one to let them out, it would bring all kinds of suspicion down on her. By hiding her involvement, she’d dug herself into a hole she would never be able to climb out of.
Add that to the fact that she’d naïvely helped Dr. Sellars with what seemed to be a few harmless equations, and it would be easy to suspect her of playing for the wrong team in this game. Which is why nobody could find out. Especially not Matt. He would lock her in the brig and throw away the key. If she was locked up, she wouldn’t have a chance to correct the wrong turns she’d made. She wanted, more than anything, to try to make things right.
Sandra had much to atone for, and ridding the world of the zombie contagion had to be her main focus for the rest of her life. However long that was. With Rodriguez after her and the possibility of her secrets being exposed at any moment, she had to concentrate on her goal and pray she had enough time to fix everything before her past caught up with her.
She managed to push lusty thoughts of stripping Matt naked and licking him all over to the back of her mind for the rest of the class. Barely. She grew concerned though, when he became less and less talkative. He seemed preoccupied, and she could think of no other reason than that his back was causing him pain. She’d gone into medicine initially because she’d had idealistic ideas about helping people. It was hard for her to watch anyone in pain—especially those who tried so valiantly to hide it.
She was relieved when the class ended with both groups joining for a final cool-down exercise period and some parting words of advice and encouragement from John. Matt had faded to the back of the room when the beginner and advanced groups reunited, but he was always on Sandra’s radar. She knew where he was without looking. She was becoming attuned to him, and she wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing.
Either way, she knew just where to find him when John ended the class. Wasting no time, she made a beeline for him. She saw him try to duck away, but she wasn’t going to let him suffer alone in silence. Not when she could help him.
“Commander, can I have a word with you?” she called out as he was about to leave. Caught, he turned back toward her. It would look odd if he ducked out now. Too many of the others had heard her request.
“Sure, doctor. Would you mind talking on the way to my office? I have an important call to make and need to get back there.” His words were polite, but she saw the slight wrinkles of pain edging his dark blue eyes.
She wouldn’t make this harder on him. “Perfect. My lab is on the way.”
She grabbed her jacket from the bench along the wall and headed for the door. Matt held it open for her to precede him. She had to squeeze between him and the door frame, invading his personal space and inhaling his masculine scent. Damn. The man was potent and dangerous to her sanity.
He fell into step beside her as they walked away from the gymnasium. She watched his gait carefully. Now that she knew what to look for, she realized he had a slight hitch in his step. She probably wouldn’t have noticed it before he’d told her about his back injury, but it was there.
“How’s your back?” She decided the direct approach would be best with a no-nonsense man like Matt.
“I’m all right, doctor.” His lips thinned and tightened. She took that as a sign he was lying—or at least minimizing the problem.
“It’s okay, Commander. I can help, if you’ll let me. You don’t have to suffer in silence, and I won’t report any minor treatment I may give you. I won’t get you in trouble with the personnel office if your injury is worse than you want them to believe.”
He stopped short on the path and turned to look at her. His expression was hard to read.
“You’d lie for me?”
He seemed to be testing her, and she didn’t like it. A shiver ran down her spine.
“I wouldn’t lie. But I also am under no obligation to report casual treatment of personnel not directly related to the contagion. If I gave any of the non-immune personnel an aspirin for a headache, I wouldn’t have to report it. Same goes here. If you need some therapeutic massage to ease the pain in your spine, I see no reason to have to report it. On the other hand, if I discover you’ve done
serious damage to yourself, I would strongly advise you to seek your orthopedist, which would put you back in proper military channels. No harm, no foul.”
He seemed to consider her words, his eyes narrowing and his expression unreadable.
“Neat and tidy.” He stared at her for a moment longer before beginning to walk again, this time at a slower pace. “All right. I’ll let you examine my back, but that’s all. It’s been worse than usual of late, and it would be reassuring to know what’s going on back there, but you were correct to assume I didn’t want to take the chance of being put out of commission because of my injury while all this is going on.” He sighed heavily. “If it put the mission in danger, I’d take myself out of the picture in a heartbeat, but I’m riding a desk now. I can’t see how a bad back would make a difference in how I perform my current assignment.”
“That’s reasonable,” she allowed. “And for what it’s worth, I agree. You’re needed here, Commander. You’re the glue that makes this whole weird team stick together and work. I can’t envision anyone else in charge of this mission.”
“Me neither.” He smiled for the first time, just a slight hint of a grin at one corner of his mouth as he slanted a look down at her. “So where do you want to do this?”
“My lab? I have diagnostic equipment there we could use if we need it, and nobody gets in without me letting them in. We’ll have privacy.”
Matt nodded. “Okay, but I’m on a schedule. About how long do you think it’ll take?”
“An examination shouldn’t take more than fifteen or twenty minutes. Treatment will depend on what I find.”
“Fair enough.”
He turned with her toward the walk that led directly to her lab rather than staying on the main path. Within minutes they entered her laboratory.
“There’s a cot in back here you can use.” She tossed her jacket on the lab bench and motioned for him to follow her toward the back room.
“I wondered why that was there when I inspected the place prior to your arrival.”
“Experiments can’t tell time. Sometimes an incubation phase will run into the night and someone has to be here to take the samples off the heat, or to add a reagent at a particular time, or whatever else needs to be done. If you miss that window of opportunity, days’ worth of work could be ruined. Better to catch forty winks in the lab with multiple timers to wake you than to chance getting snug in your bed somewhere else and sleeping through the critical moments.”
“Makes sense.” Matt looked around the small room at the back of the lab. There was an even smaller attached bathroom. The bedroom—if it could be called that—had just enough space for a twin-size bed and a small dresser complete with mirror.
“Take off your shirt.”
Matt jumped a little at the blunt request but quickly covered his surprise. He shouldn’t have taken such simple words as some kind of sexual invitation. She was a doctor. She needed to see his back in order to assess the damage. It was a logical request. Too bad his body had gone into overdrive at the mere idea of getting even partially naked in front of her.
Because thoughts of taking off his clothes inevitably led to thoughts of her doing the same. Man, he had it bad. He wanted to see her creamy skin and learn if that dusting of faint freckles on her cheeks could be found in other interesting places on her luscious body. He wanted to learn the color of her nipples, their shape and taste, and if she was as sensitive to his touch as he hoped. He wanted to feel her softness under his hands and against his body. He wanted to drive into her so that she would never forget the merging of their two bodies into one.
He wanted…the impossible.
“Don’t be shy, Commander. I’m a doctor.” She gave him a teasing smile as she turned away, and he realized he’d been standing there, mute, as she bustled around the room, bringing in basic supplies from just outside the door. “I’m going to get the ultrasound machine. Take off your shirt and lie face down on the bed. I’ll be back in a minute.”
Left alone, Matt shook his head at his unreasonable reaction. The forced intimacy of working together on the mats must have sent his libido into overdrive. She was the most attractive woman he’d ever met, but he really had to get himself under control.
So deciding, he shrugged out of his shirt and placed it neatly on the dresser next to…a bottle of lube?
Damn. There went his mind again, straight into the gutter. He’d better get face down on the bed before she saw the way his erection tented his pants.
He scrambled for the cot as she rolled a boxy piece of equipment into the small room. She squeezed between it and the bed as he watched.
“Scoot over a bit, if you can. I’ll have to sit on the side of the bed to make this work. There’s not enough room in here. Sorry.”
She sounded enticingly apologetic as he moved to the far edge of the bed. He felt the other side dip when she sat beside him, their hips connecting, sharing warmth on the small bed.
“How many surgeries did you have?” Her offhand question was the only warning he got before her fingers landed on his skin.
He had scars. He knew they were there. Enough doctors had looked at them over the years since his injury and subsequent treatment. But he’d never felt anything like this. Sandra’s touch sent fire through him. A cleansing, burning flame of desire that went straight to his cock.
“Matt?” Her soft voice called him back. “I can see at least three separate surgical scars here. It must’ve been bad. Did you have only the three surgeries, or more?”
“Just three,” he managed to choke out as her fingers traced lightly along the edges of scar tissue. He couldn’t feel everything because of the puckered, damaged flesh, but he certainly felt enough. He did his best not to squirm as she examined his scars.
“How did this happen?” She must have bent closer because he could feel her breath wafting across his skin as she spoke.
“I fell off a building and landed on my ass in the dirt.” He didn’t go into detail about which particular Middle Eastern hellhole that damned domed building had been in, and luckily she didn’t ask. Even after all this time, details about most of his prior missions were still top secret.
“Fractured vertebra or ruptured disk?”
“Both.” He grunted as she probed with her fingers in a sensitive place. “Lucky me.”
“Sorry.” She eased the pressure. “How many guys did it take to carry you out of there?”
“None. The situation was hot. I shuffled out on my own. To be honest, the adrenaline blocked the pain till we were back on the boat.”
“Ooh rah,” she said quietly, as if distracted by her examination. “Brace yourself. I’m going to squirt some gel on the small of your back for the ultrasound. It will probably feel chilly at first. Sorry.”
That was all the warning he got before a line of cold lube was laid down on his flesh. Now the bottle that had sent his mind into the gutter made sense. A moment later, the broad head of the ultrasound wand was pressed into his back, spreading the lube out and around the site of his old surgeries.
“I can’t see too much with this tool, but some of the soft tissue damage should be apparent. I’d need an MRI to know more.”
“It’s just a little residual pain. Nothing I haven’t felt before. I don’t think I need an MRI.” The last thing he wanted to do was get the attention of the docs who’d have to report changes in his condition.
“Let me be the judge of that, okay?” She continued to move the wand around on his back. He looked over his shoulder to see her watching the little screen on the machine next to his bed.
She hit a few of the buttons every few seconds and made some prints of certain areas. He couldn’t see much more than a black and gray blur on the screen, but she seemed to find it fascinating. After a few minutes she gave a satisfied sigh and shut down the machine. She took a moment to wipe the residual lube off his skin before sitting back.
He rolled carefully to his side to look up at her, propping his he
ad on one hand. “So what’s the verdict?”
“It doesn’t look too bad. I don’t see any evidence of further rupture in the same area. On a scale of one to ten, what level is the pain you’re experiencing?”
“Minimal. Maybe a two or three,” he answered at once. She didn’t look like she believed him. “Okay, maybe a little higher when I bend the wrong way.” She still didn’t seem satisfied with his answer, so he rolled and sat up in the bed, bringing himself awfully close to her.
Her eyes widened and zeroed in on his abdomen. She looked panicked, and he realized with a little thrill of masculine ego that she wasn’t as unaffected by him as he’d thought. He’d done his best to keep the washboard abs of his youth, and he swore the flush on her pretty cheeks was a sign she’d noticed. Damn.
How was he supposed to resist her if she wasn’t as immune to him as he’d believed? What if she welcomed his advances? What if she was as hungry for him as he was for her?
Damn it all to hell and back. He was about to find out.
Leaning in, he watched her reactions closely. Her breathing sped up, the blush on her cheeks increased, and she didn’t meet his eyes. She also didn’t move. As he invaded her personal space, she remained still as a statue…waiting.
“Look at me, doc,” he whispered, nudging her chin gently upward with one knuckle.
Her green eyes were mysterious as she raised her gaze to meet his.
“What do you want me to say?”
Confrontation. He hadn’t expected that. She took the bull by the horns and faced him head on. He liked her spirit.
“Just tell me the truth, Sandra. Are you feeling this, too?”
She seemed to consider her options. He could see the idea of flight flash through her mind only to be negated by something softer and more daring.
“I feel it,” she whispered.
He felt as if they were on a precipice. One false step and they’d both be lost. He wouldn’t let that happen. He wanted her to want the same things he did. He wanted her to be lost to the same madness he was feeling. He shouldn’t. He knew damn well he shouldn’t. But it was already too late. This train was racing down the track. Destination unknown.