He glanced suspiciously at Marcus, then nodded.
“Okay. Well…” She drew a breath that sounded a bit like Darth Vader due to her mask. “You were dying, Jean-Luc. Three days ago, you slipped into unconsciousness—”
“Wait. Three days?” Last thing he remembered clearly was begging Claire to not let him die like the old man two beds down had. That had been three days ago? A chill scraped down his spine. All those hours were nothing but a black hole to him.
Claire nodded. “You were in a coma, unresponsive to stimuli. After I found Marcus, he gave me permission to give you Akeso.”
He stared at her, then squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his fingers to his temple as his headache got worse. “You…gave me a drug that’s never been tested on humans?”
“It’s been tested on human cells,” Claire protested.
“But not on humans.”
“No. You’re the first.”
“Don’t be pissed at her,” Marcus cut in. “I made the decision.”
He knew he should probably be angry, but he wasn’t. At all. He’d been so close to death he could all but smell the fires of hell, but Claire’s research, her life’s work, had brought him back. She had saved him. He wanted to jump up and hug her. More than that, he wanted to kiss her until they were both gasping and breathless. The good kind of breathless that made your fingertips tingle and promised twisted bed sheets later.
He. Wasn’t. Dying.
A rusty laugh rolled out of him as an overwhelming sense of relief made him giddy. He had the best fucking friends a guy could ask for. The best. He didn’t deserve them, but he would. He’d make sure they never regretted saving his sorry ass.
Claire was smiling. He couldn’t see her mouth under her mask, but her eyes crinkled and he could hear it in her voice. “Would you like some water?”
“Oh, I’d kiss you for some water. Mais, I’d kiss you just for the pleasure of kissing you.” He jerked his thumb toward Marcus. “I’d kiss him for some water.”
She laughed softly. “Nobody has to kiss anyone.”
“That’s a shame. Kissing is one of life’s greatest pleasures.”
Marcus snorted. “Oh, yeah, he’s back to his old self.”
Chapter Fifteen
The headache didn’t fade for several hours, but after some water and a sick man’s meal of bread and broth, he was already feeling well enough that lying in bed with nothing to do was starting to make him twitch. Marcus and Claire had been forced to leave—apparently they could only spend so much time in the hot zone before they had to decontaminate—and he was left to twiddle his thumbs while Claire ran tests on his blood.
He sat up and watched the medical staff tend to the sick. So many had died while he’d been unconscious, but the staff was still outnumbered. They needed help, and while he didn’t have much in the way of medical training, he did have two hands.
One emaciated patient two beds down reached weakly for a water bottle beside his bed and knocked it over. Remembering how dry his own mouth had been, Jean-Luc jumped up and grabbed the bottle before the entire thing spilled out onto the floor. The man looked at him with pleading, bloodshot eyes.
“I gotchu, mon ami,” he whispered and slid a hand under the man’s head to help him sit up. He lifted the bottle and poured a little into the man’s mouth. It made the man cough and turn his head away in rejection. Water flowed down his chin and chest.
Dieu, Jean-Luc knew exactly how that felt. Drowning in your own body. It was hell and he felt more than a little guilty that he was healing while everyone else in here was dying.
What had he done to deserve salvation?
Didn’t seem fair.
“Rest, mon ami. I’ll come back in a bit.” He settled the man back into bed and set the water bottle aside, then moved on to the next patient to see if there was anything he could do to help.
By the time Claire came back, he was making his second round of the hospital. She gasped when she saw him wiping blood away from a child’s mouth. “Jean-Luc! Stop! You’re going to reinfect yourself!”
He gently laid the listless child back in her bed and stood. His temper was hot under his skin, had been simmering since he got out of bed, and ignited at her words. “You have your miracle drug. Just dose me again. Or better yet—” He pointed at the girl. “Dose her.”
“I can’t,” Claire said. “She’s too young to consent and her parents are too uneducated to understand what they’d be consenting to. It’s unethical. And, as far as a second dose, I have no way of knowing what it would do to you.”
“You didn’t know what it’d do the first time, either.”
“You’re right. I didn’t. But it worked and I’m not willing to risk you again.”
He stared down at the girl and something snapped painfully in the vicinity of his heart. “Well, then, get me a fucking space suit! She needs help.”
“No. You should be resting.” Claire stood her ground, didn’t give an inch.
Not that he’d expected her to. He’d fallen half in love with her that day in Martinique when she’d given him a skeptical up-down in the hotel lobby and told him in no uncertain terms, “I don’t think so.” That woman wasn’t the kind who shrank back at a bit of spicy Cajun temper. Maybe that was why he’d felt comfortable unloading on her. Because he was a jumble of messy emotions and survivor’s guilt and she could take any of the shit he dished out.
He threw the blood-soaked rag in a bucket already overflowing with them. “I’m not lying around when I feel fine. These people need help. I can’t do anything but give them water and wipe away blood, but it’s better than doing no-fucking-thing.”
Behind her mask, her eyes softened. She stepped forward and clasped his good hand between both of hers. “But you are doing something. You are walking proof Akeso works. Just by living, you’re guaranteeing the funding I need to finish Akeso and get it out into the hands of people who need it.”
His anger fizzled out, leaving in its wake a bone-deep sadness. “It won’t help them now.”
“No.” She looked at the semi-conscious little girl and he heard the raw emotion in her voice when she added, “It won’t help these people. There’s nothing we can do for them at this point. They’ll either beat it, or they won’t.” She met his gaze again. “But next time there’s an outbreak, we’ll be ready. Because of you. So you need to be careful. You can’t risk reinfection. Your body didn’t fight off the virus naturally, and we don’t know if you have antibodies like the other survivors.”
His heart did a little loop-de-loop. “Survivors?”
“We have two. With Ebiere, the girl we found at the village, it makes three total.”
“Three out of…” He trailed off as he stared at all the empty beds around them. “How many died?”
“More than three,” Claire said, heartache raw in her voice. “The virus still has close to a one hundred percent fatality rate. They’re calling it Delta Hemorrhagic Fever.” She was still holding his hand and gave it a little squeeze. “C’mon, we’re moving you into the warm zone with the other survivors until we can do more blood tests.”
He winced. “You’re going to poke me again?” It was a silly thing to be worried about after everything, but needles freaked him out. It was why he’d never gotten a tattoo.
“Probably a few times.” If he wasn’t mistaken, there was a smile in her voice.
“You don’t have to take so much joy in it,” he muttered and followed her toward the exit.
Stepping through into the warm zone was a bit surreal. When they’d carried him in here days earlier, he’d absolutely expected to be carried back out in a body bag.
“Okay,” Claire said and turned to him. “I need you to strip.”
He arched a brow at her. “I’m all for some kink, cher, but this is probably not the best place to—”
She pointed at the yellow-clad nurse who carried a sprayer and his smirk faded.
“I’m not gonna like this, f’true?”
…
Nope, he hadn’t liked it. He cursed a blue streak in every language he knew while two male nurses covered the wound on his arm then scrubbed him from head to toe. There were some things a man was just supposed to do on his own and scrubbing his junk clean was one of them.
Okay, he was overreacting. They hadn’t actually sexually assaulted him, but they’d come too damn close for his liking, thank you very much.
When they finally released him from bath time hell in a pair of blue scrubs, he found Claire waiting for him on the other side. She only wore regular protective gear—gloves and a surgical mask, currently hanging loose around her neck.
For the first time since their meeting in Martinique, he saw her face unshielded and stopped short in awe. Of course he’d remembered she was beautiful, but his memory hadn’t done her justice. She had naturally gorgeous skin, and wore no makeup to hide the faint dusting of freckles across her slightly upturned nose. He hadn’t forgotten her sensual month, or the way her upper lip was fuller than the bottom—he had dreamed about that mouth more times than he was comfortable admitting. But, still, his memory hadn’t captured the je ne sais quoi that made her so unbelievably stunning in person.
He wanted to kiss her. Hell, he’d be happy just to touch her.
He took a step forward, but she held up a hand in a halt gesture and his heart sank. She must have noticed his disappointment, because she gave a soft smile, then pulled on her mask. “We have to make sure you didn’t reinfect yourself first. The chances are low. You have enough Akeso still in your system that it should wipe out any reintroduced virus, but we still need to take precautions for the next day or so.”
“Sure.” He forced a grin. “Yeah, of course. I want you to stay safe.” Which was true. He wanted her safety more than he wanted anything else in his life. But the need to hold her, just grab her and pull her into his arms had been so…real. It actually hurt that he wasn’t able to.
Claire led him into another tent that was a smaller version of the hospital with fewer beds. She motioned to one. “Here, sit down. I want to look at your arm.”
He winced when she pulled off the bandage. The gash looked red and wicked to him, but she made a pleased sound.
“I think we knocked the infection out. Let me get a suture kit and I’ll stitch it up.”
She left, came back a few minutes later with a metal cart, rolling it over beside him. As she prepped a syringe of local anesthetic, he scowled. “More needles.”
“Suck it up, buttercup. This is your life now.” Even as she stabbed him with the needle, she softened her words with a reassuring smile. He couldn’t see it behind her surgical mask, but it crinkled her eyes. “If it bothers you so much, don’t watch.”
As his arm went numb, he watched her thread the needle and broke out into a cold sweat. Yeah, not watching was a good plan.
He was such a coullion. His weapon of choice was a knife. He’d dispatched many bad guys with a blade over the years, but come at him with a tiny needle and he turned into a big baby.
Instead of watching Claire close the wound, he took the time to study the rest of the room. He found himself holding his breath, scanning the few faces of the survivors. He didn’t recognize any of them. Why did that put a knot in his stomach?
Claire finished the final stitch and touched the back of his hand. “She’s not here.”
Machie.
He swallowed hard. “When did she die?”
“About a day before you woke up.”
He swore softly. “I gave her false hope.”
“Jean-Luc…” She trailed off like she couldn’t think of what to say. In silence, she placed a fresh bandage over his neatly stitched wound, then tried again. “No, you didn’t give her false hope. You gave her hope, period. You gave her New Orleans, and dreaming about the city was a way to escape the inescapable for her. That carried her through her last days. It helped.”
Maybe it had, but he wasn’t totally convinced. He remembered the way Machie’s dark eyes had lit up when he spoke of his hometown. Was it better to dream of a place you’d never see, or to never know of its existence at all? The question brought his headache thundering back and he squeezed his eyes shut.
“She was such a smart girl. Had a light inside her.” He opened his eyes again and met Claire’s gaze. “You have the same light, cher. Don’t you ever let anyone put it out. Including me.”
“You would never hurt me.”
She said it with such certainty, he winced.
She didn’t know him. Not really. She didn’t know about all the women he’d taken to bed, sometimes more than one at a time. Some had been married, which had meant little to him as long as it didn’t end with him getting his ass handed to him by an angry husband. He’d spent his entire adult life leaving a trail of broken hearts and marriages wherever he went, and she thought he wouldn’t hurt her? Hah. He was poison and she should stay far, far away from him.
But when he opened his mouth to tell her so, he couldn’t find the words. He was too ashamed of himself. For the first time in his life, he was ashamed of how he’d lived it.
Rather than say what was on his mind, he settled back on the bed and faked a yawn. “I’m feeling a bit rundown.” A lie. In fact, he felt better than he had in a long while, and the flash of concern across Claire’s features only twisted the knife in his heart. Here he was lying to her, causing her to worry, just because he couldn’t face his own fucked up self.
She deserved better.
Chapter Sixteen
How did you kidnap a doctor from a hot zone without risking infection yourself?
Mercedes had been working on the problem for days, ever since she and Seb tracked Dr. Oliver to the field hospital and set up camp on the opposite side of the river. She’d considered prying Claire out of her tent in the middle of the night, but the woman hardly slept, and when she did, it never seemed to be in her own quarters.
Through her binoculars, she watched the woman come out of the largest of the tents—the main hospital, she guessed—and walk over to join Marcus Deangelo where he stood in front of one of the smaller tents—likely the mess hall judging by all the traffic going in and out.
Beside her, Sebastian tensed and raised his rifle. “He’s right fucking there. Let me take the shot, Merce. Let me finish the job and we can run away. Disappear and start again.”
Mercedes placed a gentle hand on the barrel of the rifle and pushed it toward the ground. Rain pattered against the leaves around them, reminding her strangely of children, of tiny bare feet running. It also made her think of Seb as a father. He’d be great at it. A natural. She, on the other hand… Well, that wasn’t the kind of life she’d ever lead, as much as Seb wanted it to be.
“You know there’s no disappearing from Defion,” she said. “Especially if I bail before my job’s complete.”
“Your brother did it.”
Her spine snapped straight at the mention of her brother and she couldn’t help the coolness that seeped into her voice. But, dammit, Seb knew the topic of her brother was off-limits. “He never escaped, and you know it.”
With a sigh, Seb lowered the weapon and shook his head. “Okay, sorry. That was out of line, but you gotta listen to me, Mercy. What are your options here? You won’t get Dr. Oliver out of there without a fight, and you can’t go in without risking infection. I won’t let you go in.”
She arched a brow at him. “You won’t let me?”
“No, I won’t. I will knock you out and carry you away from here before I’ll let you go in that fucking hospital.”
She should be offended, but she couldn’t bring herself to be when his words made her melt into a gooey puddle. But she couldn’t let him see that. She mustered up as much derision as she was able. “Caveman.”
“If being a caveman means I don’t see you die of some horrible virus, then yeah, I’m a caveman.”
Ugh. For such a stone-cold killer, Seb could be an amazingly sweet man. She kin
d of wanted to kiss him, so instead she lifted her binoculars to watch Dr. Oliver and Marcus Deangelo have an apparently intense conversation. Marcus stared out across the river, and for a moment, she feared he’d spotted them. This was it. Game over.
Marcus turned away and followed the doctor inside the mess tent.
Seb sat back against a tree and dragged his rifle bag over. Probably to clean the weapon again. He did that when he was bored and itching for action. One night, months ago, when they’d met for a drunken night of sex in Barcelona after each completing successful jobs, he’d told her he’d loved his SABR 308 more than anything else in the world…until he met her.
“Too bad we don’t have a disposable army we could send in to flush them out,” Seb muttered as he started breaking down the weapon.
She turned to him. “What?”
“You know, grunts. The guys generals send out onto the frontlines because there are always more to take their place. Don’t suppose Harrison would lend us a few of his less desirable men?”
“No.” But a new idea started to form. “You’re right. We need to flush them out.”
“Fucking great idea,” Seb said, sarcasm heavy in his tone. “And how are we gonna do that?”
After days of camping in the rain without a fire to warm them, he was getting cranky, and she couldn’t blame him. She didn’t like this any more than he did. She was ready to end it, too. All of it—maybe including her career with Defion. Seb’s constant refrain of running away and starting fresh sounded more and more appealing each passing day.
“Remember the militants we passed on the way in?” she asked.
He paused halfway through unzipping his cleaning kit. “The ones we avoided because they looked like trouble?”
“Yeah.” She gazed back out over the river and lifted her binocs again. Dr. Oliver and Marcus hadn’t re-emerged from the tent. All was quiet. “Maybe we should go have a chat with them. Bet they’d love to know where this hospital is.”
Seb stared at her for a solid five seconds. Then closed his mouth, zipped up his cleaning kit, and snapped his rifle back together. He stood. “You’re a crazy woman, Mercedes, but I love it. Let’s go stir us up some grunts.”
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