Forged in Ash (A Red-Hot SEALs Novel)

by Trish McCallan

  “Yes, it is. It doesn’t happen that fast. It takes weeks…even months,” she whispered.

  Rawls shrugged and squatted beside Cosky’s leg with a roll of gauze. He passed the roll through the space between Cosky’s knee and the pavement as he wrapped the joint. “We’ll know more after the X-rays. The blisters could be screwing with our perception.”

  Cosky didn’t look convinced.

  “I can give you some Demerol.”

  “Don’t bother.” Cosky’s eyebrows pinched together and he shifted his gaze to Kait’s gauze-wrapped hands. “It’s numb…” he said slowly. “Like cotton wool.”

  He was repeating what she’d said about her hands. She shook her head, too exhausted to try to figure out what that meant.

  “The ambulance is here.” Mac’s voice joined them. “What happened to her?”

  The sound of tires on pavement filled Kait’s ears, and the ground seemed to roll beneath her.

  “We’ll fill you in later,” Zane said.

  “Fine.” Mac didn’t sound like he cared. He stepped closer to Zane and dropped his voice. “Across the parking lot. The dark-blue hatchback. Do you see him?”

  Zane shifted. “Yeah. So?”

  Mac dropped his voice even more. “I recognize the motherfucker. He was on my ass for a while. But just when I thought I had a tail, he pulled a Casper. What about you, have you seen him around?”

  His voice had dropped again. Or maybe it wasn’t his voice. Maybe the buzzing in her ears was just drowning him out.

  So tired she couldn’t keep her eyes open a second longer, Kait let herself fall back to the pavement. She’d rest for a moment.

  “Kait!” Cosky’s roar echoed down a tunnel, from an immense distance.

  She tried to answer him, but exhaustion rolled over her like a tsunami, dragging her down into a sea of nothingness.

  * * *

  Chapter Ten

  * * *

  COSKY GLARED AT the privacy curtain, wincing as the high-pitched whine on the other side of the cloth rose higher and higher, adding fuel to his growing frustration. His neighbor barely stopped talking long enough to draw breath, before she was off again.

  Swearing, Cosky shoved the ice packs off his knee and swung his legs to the side of the ER bed. Kait was somewhere in this damn place, unconscious, possibly fighting for her life. He glanced around the room for something to serve as a crutch. An EKG machine on a rolling cart fit the bill. He was just about to swing out of bed and make a hop for it, when his curtain separated and Rawls pushed his way through.

  “Hold your horses, what do you think you’re doing?” Rawls snapped, launching forward and shoving Cosky back against the pillows. While Cosky struggled to sit up again, Rawls swung Cosky’s left leg onto the bed. He took much more care with the right leg and went to work covering the bandaged knee with the discarded ice pack.

  “I was going to check on Kait,” Cosky snarled back, giving the curtain separating him from his irritating ER neighbor a fuming glance.

  “She’s fine,” Rawls said, frowning down at Cosky’s knee. He adjusted one of the ice packs and stepped back.

  “So she’s awake?” Cosky asked, his muscles loosening. She’d been out like a light since she’d fallen back to the pavement, not even waking up during their trip to the ER in the ambulance.

  “No, but the docs say she’s just sleeping.”

  Rawls stepped back from the bed, but he looked tense, and he was balanced lightly on his feet, like he was ready to leap on Cosky and pin him to the bed if need be.

  The asshole.

  “Sleeping?” Cosky’s voice gained volume and velocity. “That wasn’t sleep, damn it.”

  He swung his legs to the side of the bed again. Ice packs went flying. “I want to see her.”

  Rawls shook his head in disgust and threw up his hands. “Fine. We sure as hell wouldn’t want you to exhibit any common sense and stay off the leg until we know how extensive the damage is.”

  “Are you gonna help me, or stand there like an ass?” Cosky asked, the impatience and worry thickening inside him until his lungs felt compressed beneath the pressure.

  Damn it, he shouldn’t have pushed her. She’d tried to pull away, tried to stop, and he hadn’t let her. He’d forced her to channel that damn energy, as she called it, much longer than she should have, much longer than was apparently safe.

  “You’ve got five minutes,” Rawls said, stepping up to the bed and presenting his shoulder. “I’m not shitting you, Cos. Five minutes, so you can see for yourself that she’s fine. Then back to bed. Got it?”

  Cosky slid to the side of the bed, grabbed Rawls’s shoulder, and pulled himself up, using his left leg to stabilize himself. He slung his arm over his corpsman’s shoulders. With his lungs in a straightjacket, he slowly hopped alongside Rawls out into the emergency room and down the length of curtained cubicles. They stopped in front of the last curtain and slowly swung around. As they pushed their way through the cloth, Cosky could suddenly smell her. Oranges or lemons. The sweet scent lingered beneath the sharper smells of disinfectant and blood. Something inside him eased, and his lungs started working again, drawing that sweet, clean scent in with deep, desperate gulps.

  Her curtained-off area looked identical to his except the bed seemed bigger, maybe because she looked so small and fragile within it. His chest tightened at how innocent she looked lying there like that, her face softened in sleep. Her braid glowed like molten honey against the hospital white of the pillow. It snaked out from behind her head and down the length of her body, in a gilded rope of gold.

  Cosky hopped closer and reached for the chair beside her bed, dragging it over to him. She didn’t stir at the dull scrape of metal against linoleum. Letting go of Rawls’s shoulder, he collapsed onto the cushion and used his good leg to drag himself, chair and all, next to the bed.

  “You call this sleep?” he asked in a tight voice, watching her lie there as still as death, her dusky eyelashes dark shadows against her pink cheeks.

  “Yeah, I do. So do the doctors.” Stepping up to the bed, Rawls scanned her face himself. Then, as though he couldn’t help himself, he pressed his fingers to the side of her neck. “Heart rate is normal. So is BP. She’s breathing fine. Pupils are reactive, and she’s responsive to stimuli.” He shook his head, dropped his hand, and took a step back, his face puzzled. “Granted, it’s unusual, but she appears to be in a deep sleep. They’re going to admit her to transitory care and wait for her to wake up.”

  Unusual?

  Yeah, well that pretty much described every single event of today.

  Unable to help himself, Cosky took hold of her bandaged left hand. It just lay there in his palm. Lifeless. There was no heat. No rampaging lust. Just guilt.

  And respect—she put her life on the line to heal him. Hell—considering what an ass he’d been less than an hour before, that kind of generosity was unusual to say the least. And look what her good Samaritan act had netted her?

  A night in the ER.

  Because of him.

  As if he needed another example of why he had to steer clear of female entanglements.

  “So you’ve seen her,” Rawls said as he hauled Cosky to his feet. “Now it’s back to bed. That leg should be elevated.”

  Cosky allowed Rawls to guide him from Kait’s bedside and back to his little section of the emergency room. But her pink, still face haunted him every step of the way. And he couldn’t help obsessing about this strange deep sleep of hers. What if she didn’t wake up in a couple of hours? What if she didn’t wake up at all?

  “You’re borrowing trouble.” Rawls sent him a sympathetic look as Cosky levered himself up and dragged his legs onto the bed. “Look at what she did. Is it any wonder she’s exhausted? She expended a tremendous amount of energy. Maybe this deep sleep is simply part of the process, like refilling the well.” Turning toward the chair beside Cosky’s bed, he settled into it and glanced at Cosky’s bandaged leg again. “Any feeling yet?�
��

  Cosky simply shook his head.

  Rawls frowned. “What did the doc say?”

  Cosky thumped his head against the thin pillow behind him and scowled. “Nothing. He hasn’t been in yet. They have a call into X-ray. The nurse said the doc may be in before X-ray shows up.”

  When Rawls’s cell phone rang, Cosky breathed a sigh of relief; it was annoying as hell being out of the loop. Zane and Mac had headed out to comb the streets for her, while Rawls had accompanied him and Kait in the ambulance.

  “Any luck?” Cosky asked as soon as Rawls lowered his phone.

  “No. Mac called in”—Rawls glanced at the curtain and lowered his voice—“some of the guys. They’ll keep at it through the night.”

  A few minutes later someone from radiology showed up with a wheelchair to take him down for X-rays. Lying there, with the icy metal of the table biting into his spine and the back of his skull, Cosky waited for the technician to ask about the bubbled and blistered skin of his knee, but she ignored the injury. No doubt a couple of third-degree burns and a shattered knee were small potatoes compared to the more traumatic injuries that wheeled in and out of her X-ray room.

  The X-rays only took a few minutes and then he was helped back into the wheelchair. As they wheeled him away, he absently checked out his exposed knee.

  At first he thought he was focusing on the wrong leg.

  He blinked and looked again.

  What the hell?

  He jolted forward so hard he almost fell out of the wheelchair—would have if he hadn’t grabbed hold of the armrests.

  “Easy there,” the tech said. A hand came down on his shoulder, easing him back against the backrest.

  Cosky muttered something incomprehensible and just sat there in frozen disbelief.

  After a moment of staring, he closed his eyes, counted to ten, and opened them again. The view hadn’t changed.

  The blisters were gone, so was the swelling. Healthy pink skin greeted his incredulous gaze. He leaned forward, staring in astonishment. The knee itself looked better than it had since before that flameout in Seattle. Christ, the bruising was all but gone. Even the surgical scars were thinner, lighter, and less visible.

  No wonder the technician had exhibited such unconcern—the injury looked months old.

  Suddenly it occurred to him that he felt amazingly good considering he’d hit the pavement at full speed. He’d landed on his shoulders, which had been aching like hell…at first. Not so much now. He rotated his arm. In fact, not at all now. And then there were his elbows and the back of his arms, which had received an extreme exfoliation. They’d been burning like a son of a bitch.

  He extended his arm and twisted it to get a look at the skinned elbow, which had plenty of dried blood, but no scabs. He probed his right elbow with his left fingers. Smooth skin glided beneath his fingertips.

  The burning sting from his collision with the pavement was gone too. Shaking his head, he pushed up the sleeve of his hospital scrubs and checked out his shoulder. More dried blood and smooth skin.

  Un-fucking-believable.

  Still unable to trust the evidence of his own eyes, he settled back and waited.

  Rawls scanned his face as the tech rolled him toward his hospital bed, and sat up with a frown. “What’s wrong?”

  Cosky jerked his chin toward his exposed right knee and waited. He didn’t have to wait long. Rawls glanced at it, did a double take, and shot out of his chair so fast it toppled over.

  Yeah, apparently he wasn’t hallucinating. Rawls saw the rejuvenation too.

  “What? How?” Rawls stumbled closer. He went down on his haunches in front of Cosky’s wheelchair and skimmed the faintly red skin with his fingertips. “Sweet Jesus.”

  “Is there a problem?” the technician asked, confusion on her face. She glanced between Rawls and Cosky.

  “Not now.” Rawls rose slowly to his feet.

  Cosky wasn’t quite as sure. The joint looked good. The kneecap had shifted back into place. The blisters and burns were gone. In fact, all the injuries he’d sustained earlier in the day had vanished. But there was still the matter of the earlier injury. Had Kait’s healing had any effect on the fracture to the tibial plateau?

  “When will I get the results of the X-ray?” Cosky asked.

  “Dr. Phillips has a call in to your orthopedic surgeon,” the tech said. “I’m sure he’ll be in as soon as he’s had a chance to view the films and consult with your attending physician.”

  When the tech set the brake on the wheelchair and moved in to help Cosky over to the bed, he waved her away.

  Rawls waited until the woman had pushed her way through the curtain, before squatting in front of Cosky again. This time he did a thorough probe of the joint, from left to right and top to bottom. Once finished he just squatted there, staring, disbelief still shining in his eyes.

  “Well?” Cosky prodded.

  “Maybe the patella didn’t shift after all. The leg was pretty swollen; maybe it just appeared that way.”

  Right.

  “Like it appeared to be blistered?” Cosky asked dryly as he lifted and bent his arm, offering Rawls a look at his elbow. “And like my arms and my shoulder appeared to be skinned and leaking?”

  Rawls’s forehead wrinkled. Walking around the wheelchair, he grabbed the handles and pushed Cosky toward the curtain. Cosky didn’t bother to ask where they were going. He could guess.

  Kait was still sleeping when they entered her room, but she’d rolled onto her right side and tucked her hands beneath her cheek. The knot in Cosky’s chest loosened. It loosened even more as her eyelashes quivered, and her lips twitched. Her sleep looked much more natural now. Normal.

  She stretched—a long, lazy arch of muscles and bones beneath the covers. Her breasts lifted, and the sheet slipped down to her waist. Suddenly Cosky was left staring at the round, ripe curves that were all but falling out of her loose hospital gown.

  A flash of heat rolled through him.

  Only this fire had nothing to do with healing.

  Tension flooded his groin. His cock swelled.

  And then he realized Rawls had noticed those tender, exposed curves too. This time the tension that flooded his blood and knotted his muscles had nothing to do with lust and everything to do with rage. When Rawls leaned forward, his hand reaching for Kait’s chest, Cosky shot out of the wheelchair, his hands cocked, every muscle in his body rigid and begging for action. The only thing that stopped his fist from breaking every bone in his buddy’s face was the sheet Rawls dragged back up to Kait’s collarbone.

  Son of a bitch.

  Still reeling from the adrenaline rush, Cosky collapsed back into the wheelchair. Only then did he realize he’d shot up on both legs, and his right leg hadn’t crumbled beneath him. Not only had it taken his weight, it had done so without pain.

  He was still processing that when Rawls captured one of Kait’s hands. She frowned and muttered grumpily. With a soft ssshhhhh, Rawls waited for her to settle again, before unwrapping the gauze. Once the bandage lay in a creamy puddle on the thin blanket, he simply stood there. Frozen.

  Finally, with a befuddled shake of his head, he stepped to the side.

  Cosky leaned forward as Rawls moved out of the way, and Kait’s hand came into view. Her perfect, slender hand, with its perfect, pink skin.

  Not a blister or burn in sight.

  “Fuck.” Mac snapped his cell closed and scowled through the windshield at the steady stream of traffic, while he tried to get his heart rate and respiration back under control.

  He wanted to chalk his tension up to frustration and rage, but he’d never lied to himself, and he wasn’t going to start now. Nor did frustration and rage explain the missile that had sprouted in his pants the second Amy Chastain’s voice had marched down the line. What the fuck was it about the damn woman that pushed his buttons like this?

  Damned if he could figure it out.

  Trying to focus on something beyond his redh
eaded albatross, he turned his attention back where it belonged—on their tail.

  How many weeks had it been since he’d noticed that cocksucker and his navy-blue hatchback, only to shrug the bastard off? Six weeks? Two months?

  “Goddamn fucking—” He set his mouth and sucked back the rest of his rage.

  Throwing a tantrum accomplished nothing. Next time he’d trust his fucking instincts and act on them regardless of how paranoid they seemed. If he’d grabbed the asshole back then, they’d have a six-week head start.

  They might actually have a clue to pursue by now.

  Zane pulled into the stream of traffic, before glancing across the van at him. “Amy didn’t know?”

  “Amy,” Mac said through his teeth, ignoring the way his dick twitched at her name, “isn’t aware of any DOJ-ordered surveillance on us.”

  Zane stopped at a red light. “You’re sure she’d know?”

  “She says she’d have heard.” Mac glared out the window as he concentrated on dragging in deep, calming breaths.

  If there was no surveillance on them, then the guy in the parking lot was either a coincidence, or a nonagency tail.

  He caught Zane’s lingering glance in the rearview mirror. “Anyone back there?”

  “No blue hatchback,” Zane said after a long pause.

  “But?” Mac prompted, hearing the qualifier in his LC’s voice. Twisting in his bucket seat, he studied the traffic behind them.

  “There’s a silver Accord eight cars behind us. I’ve seen a silver Accord off and on, never close enough to get a look at the driver, or plate. No distinguishing marks on the vehicle.” His eyes were grim as he touched Mac’s gaze. “It could be nothing. Lots of Accords on the road, and silver’s a common color.”

  Which would make it a perfect surveillance vehicle.

  “See what happens if you go evasive,” Mac said.

  Two turns later the Accord turned left and sped out of sight. Which could mean the car belonged to someone who lived and worked in Coronado—or, it could mean the driver of the car had realized he’d been made and broken the tail.