by Michael Todd
Once they were in the elevator and alone, he looked at Jessica, who stared at him with an odd expression.
“Is this…one of those places?” she asked and tilted her head as she scrunched her face into an expression that might have suggested distaste along with real curiosity.
“One of what places?” he asked and kept his face as deadpan as possible.
“Well, one of those no-tell motels.” She looked around once more and held tightly onto Savage’s burlap bag that they had filled with all the medical materials she needed to treat him.
“Well, you would know, right?” He couldn’t resist a grin—he had waited for the perfect opportunity to bring the topic up. “You were the one who had been in that motel before we stayed there. Your phone connected automatically to the wi-fi, remember.”
“Come on. You won’t make me tell that story, will you?” she demanded as the elevator dinged. The doors opened and they stepped onto the fifth floor of the building and proceeded through the carpeted hallways toward their room.
“I don’t want to pry into your life, Dr. Coleman.” He walked slowly and accepted help from her, his hand on her shoulder so he could lean a little when he needed to. “You work hard at a job you love—I assume, anyway—but everyone needs relaxation. I’ve done the same myself over the years, and while it would be hypocritical of me to judge you for it, you can’t expect me not to tease, right?”
Jessica chuckled. “Remember the fact that I’m the one who’ll clean you up and ensure that you don’t die of sepsis before morning. So be respectful—at least until I’m finished.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Jeremiah chuckled and pressed the keycard to the lock on the door. It clicked open immediately. For a motel, this place was surprisingly high-tech—which was why Anja had been able to make reservations for them, he supposed.
“Back to your original question, though,” he said as he pushed the door wide and turned the light on. “I think this is one of those no-tell motels. I don’t know…call it a hunch.”
It was a good hunch. As they stepped into the room and the lights came on, his first clue was that most of the lights were shaded in red. They illuminated the room with romantic lighting that he knew would definitely not be the best thing for Jessica to work with while she treated him. Most of the room contained a plethora of heart shapes fashioned into the furniture, including a chair. The bed itself wasn’t shaped like a heart, though, thank goodness. The problem, of course, was the fact that there was only one.
“Trust your instincts, Savage,” Jessica said with a chuckle. “Do you think Anja’s trying to tell us something? She’s not the best at making personal suggestions, so do you think that she’s perhaps sent us a message?”
“What kind of message?” He cleared his throat and avoided her gaze as he walked to the chair, sank onto it, and sighed gently.
She opened her mouth to respond but seemed to have trouble articulating the words. Thankfully, the red lighting in the room was enough to hide the blush that touched her cheeks. “Nothing. Never mind. Let’s get that shirt off you.”
“I wonder how many times that particular line has been used in this room,” he commented as she moved to the bed, dropped the bag onto the silky red satin sheets, and pulled the zipper open. Jeremiah did as he was told, lifted his shirt clear of his torso, and after a moment’s thought, tossed it aside. If the truth be told, he would probably have to burn the damn thing anyway. He wouldn’t worry too much about keeping the room clean, all things considered.
Jessica turned one of the bedside lamps on—thankfully, it wasn’t shaded in red—and pointed it directly at the canvas of bruises, blood, and scar tissue that comprised his chest. Some looked more recent than others, which made her wonder how many times he’d been in similar situations before. She checked the bandages to make that they were all still in place and none had soaked through before she moved to the minibar. Predictably, it contained only tiny little bottles. They were whiskey, though, and branded too, which told her that they would have a better experience than they’d had with the tiny bottles of vodka at the previous motel.
It was, for some vague reason, a little reassuring that they were in an establishment that at least held to a higher standard than the one they’d vacated earlier that day.
She didn’t bother to pour the amber liquid into the glasses that the room provided. Instead, she simply handed Savage one of the bottles.
“I thought we picked something up from the pharmacy to clean the wounds.” He looked the whiskey with a somewhat bewildered expression.
“We did.” She chuckled and took a moment to crack another bottle open and raise it to him in a toast. “Cheers.”
Jeremiah nodded. He acknowledged that they both needed to have calmer nerves for what lay ahead, so he readily followed her example. They clinked their bottles together and downed them quickly. The comfortable burn slid down his throat, but Jessica looked like she needed a moment as she exhaled a rough breath. She seemed flushed and her cheeks a little heated.
“Are you ready?” he asked and tilted his head at her he leaned back in his seat.
“As ready as I’ll ever be.” She nodded firmly and focused her attention on unpacking the materials from the bag. A pair of gloves emerged first, which she pulled on with the practiced efficiency that he recalled in himself when he was in the middle of a firefight. This was her job. Well, not technically, but something like it. She shifted closer, and Jeremiah helped by dragging his seat closer to the bed. He simply waited while she made a closer examination of his wounds while she removed his bandages.
“You’ll probably want to take a shower after this,” Jessica said with a nervous chuckle as she dabbed a soft cloth with antiseptic liquid. She turned back to him and realized that her hands were shaking. And, for some totally ridiculous reason, she couldn’t stop them. She dragged in a deep breath, looked down at them, and pressed them together. The trembling stopped, but she knew that it would simply start again when she pulled them apart.
She closed her eyes and tried to focus on something more appealing than the harrowing experience she had recently endured. When he moved, she opened her eyes and his hands wrapped around hers to squeeze them gently. She wasn’t sure if the unexpected tenderness came from the blood loss—which wasn’t helped by the alcohol, of course. Whatever had caused it, though, her hands no longer shook, and her mind had lost focus on the memory of the gunfire from which her ears were still ringing. Something entirely different had crept in to replace these things.
And it wasn’t the time for that, as tempting as it might be. She doubted that it would ever be. Her mind simply wandered, and now that she no longer thought about what might have happened in the other hotel and how close she came to losing her life there, she needed to stop thinking about what might happen in this one.
Down girl, she told herself firmly and met his gaze with a smile.
“Are you good, Doc?” he asked and quirked an eyebrow at her.
She nodded. “Thanks, I am. Let’s get this over with.”
Jessica refocused and tried to ignore the calming warmth that radiated from his bare chest as she removed the last bandage from his upper arm. It was the deepest of his handful of wounds, and the man’s knife had bit deeper than she was comfortable with. She didn’t like how calm her patient was through this, either, or the way he toyed casually with the empty bottle in his fingers.
“How many times have you been through something like this?” she asked. Conversation might help her to keep her mind off the fact that his wound had opened again—not to mention the other things that still lingered behind the practical demands. “I can tell from the rest of your chest that this isn’t the first time you’ve dealt with wounds of this nature, but how many times have you been treated out of hospital like this?”
Savage tilted his head from side to side as he considered his answer to the question. “This is not the first time, definitely. A couple of times, I’ve found myself i
n a situation where first aid was needed without access to a hospital. Black ops fireteams don’t usually run with a medic on hand. Most of the guys know first aid, though, but not much else. You can tell from the weird shape of the stitching.” He pointed out a couple of scars, one on his chest and one on his right arm. The former was round, with only a couple of stitches, while the latter looked long and jagged.
“That’s a bullet wound. It was a through and through, so there’s another matching scar on the back.” He indicated the round one. “It wasn’t really life-threatening, but we were stuck in a forest and needed to keep it from getting septic. This was shrapnel from an exploding car bomb. That was more life-threatening. My boys did a good job, but it looked as ugly as hell all the way through.”
“What about this one?” Jessica asked and gestured to a two-inch scar over his stomach. Without thought, she let her fingers glide lightly over the unsurprisingly firm muscles there. The stitches were off balance and all four of them improperly placed.
“That one I did myself.” He grinned sheepishly. “I managed to be gut-stabbed by a drunk guy in a bar on my first leave back in the US. We got into an argument about…uh, something, after my fifth round of tequila. Although I was all tough, military man and all and didn’t back down, I didn’t see the knife until it was already in me. Still, I beat the living shit out of the guy anyway.”
“If you were in the States, how come you didn’t go to a hospital?” she asked.
“Well, I was drunk, and therefore not in any condition to make the best decisions of my life. Besides, when you show up in a hospital with a stab wound, the doctors will ask questions, they’ll involve the police, and that felt like a chickenshit thing to do. Even if the guy pulled a knife on me in an honest bar brawl, I still didn’t want to get him in trouble.”
“Or get yourself in trouble, considering that you had beaten a man unconscious,” Jessica retorted as she cleaned the fresh and old blood from around the new wound.
“Again, drunk, not making the smartest decisions—fuck!” he snapped when she got a little too enthusiastic with her efforts.
“Pipe down, you big baby.” She smiled to soften the admonishment. The wound was now clean enough and the blood flow had stopped, so she drew a small contraption from inside the bag. It looked like a stapler, but it was plastic and disposable.
“This will probably hurt,” she said softly, focused her attention on the wound, and held it closed with one hand as the other pressed the surgical stapler to the injury. She hadn’t expected to find one in a family-owned pharmacy but had pounced on it the moment she’d seen it. The store apparently supplied smaller clinics with certain lines of medical equipment—a second income-stream which had been a real bonus for what she had to accomplish.
Jeremiah made surprisingly little noise as she applied ten staples to the wound that traced over his bicep. It seemed that he didn’t really mind the pain she had warned him to expect. He grunted a couple of times, but other than that, remained perfectly and utterly still as she sealed the wound.
“You weren’t kidding about that being painful,” he said finally once she was finished. “I assume you want to use that thing on this graze on my shoulder too. If you do, I think I’ll need more alcohol in my system.”
“Actually, you don’t.” Jessica squinted and shifted closer to inspect the wound on his shoulder. “Alcohol—it’s numbing effects aside—acts as a blood thinner that will keep you bleeding.”
“Right.” He sighed morosely and raised his arm a little so she could wind the bandage off his shoulder. “I think I wouldn’t mind risking it unless you have something in the way of painkillers that might help me sleep another way.”
“As a matter of fact, I did find something for the pain and to help you sleep.” She dabbed a new piece of cloth into the antiseptic agent and attended to his wound with quick, deft strokes. “This one isn’t half as deep as the other one, though. It’s shallow and more of a graze. You don’t need any stitches here.”
“Many thanks to the big, bearded dude in the sky for that.” He definitely looked relieved as she reapplied the bandage to his shoulder.
“Keep it clean and you should be fine.”
“Excellent.” He paused, his expression hesitant, before he said, “I don’t suppose you could help me wrap my ribs a little? I think I might have bruised a couple.”
“You think?” She flashed him a wry smile. “I hid under the bed and I could hear your moans when that man judo-flipped you. I didn’t need a class in med school to tell me that had to hurt. So, I brought something else.” She retrieved a roll of tape from the bag. “Anesthetic tape to bind your chest. It’ll help to hold your ribs in place and let them heal and provide some tingly numbness at the same time. I read up on it when…someone I knew had a broken rib and wouldn’t stop complaining about it. Come on, get up and put your hands up. I need to wind it around you.”
Jeremiah did as he was told as she moved in closer—close enough, now, that she could feel his warm skin under her fingers. There were dozens of scars around the tattoos, she realized as he stood taller than her by about a foot. But they didn’t detract from what she saw. He looked more like a canvas. All the bruising and the wounds, new and old, were merely experiences. They might be horrifying and painful, but they were living memories of what he’d gone through.
She stopped when she realized that she had completed the binding on his injured ribs. Her hands seemed to work automatically to sever the tape and toss the roll aside, but she couldn’t pull away from his presence. Something about him drew her in, the compulsion strong and tempting. She ran her fingers over the tiny scar on his stomach, the one with the drunken stitching that he’d told her about. His reaction as he sucked a breath in told her that he was ticklish. She tried to pull her hand away, but his hand wound around hers to hold her fingers in place.
It was…something. In all honesty, she wasn’t sure what it was, but to say that the shared touch didn’t have its own unique brand of electricity would have been a lie. Her instincts nudged her irresistibly to lean closer.
“That someone you knew,” he said, his voice almost a whisper. “Is he your boyfriend?”
“Ex, actually,” Jessica murmured, almost entranced by the man in front of her. It was difficult to tear her eyes away and his body seemed to be drawn in by the pull of her gaze. “He was a nice enough guy, but he had a bit of temper. Not against me, but against men he thought were hitting on me. It reached the point where I couldn’t have any male friends without him getting all worked up. He punched a friend when I hugged him, and the friend punched back, hence the whole research on that…tape…”
Her voice trailed off. His right hand remained on hers and dragged it up to pin it against his chest. He held her gaze as his left hand moved down over her hair, brushed it gently to the side, and tucked a few errant strands behind her ear. The touch sent tingles down her spine. Those immediately turned to shivers that compelled her to seek the sensation again. Her fingers splayed over his bare chest and felt the soft thud of his heartbeat. A reciprocal hammering resonated in her chest and increased its pace in anticipation when he removed her glasses gently and pressed his mouth against hers. His lips tasted fresh and warm at the same time. She leaned into the kiss and breathed in the magic of it.
Suddenly, he pulled away and dragged that delicious taste and feeling with him. He took a step back and set her glasses on the bedside table with a slow, careful movement.
“Look, this might be all a little new to you.” Despite the disappointment, he sounded the perfect kind of breathless. “It’s a common feeling to experience right after being in the middle of a gunfight, which makes it more—”
“Shut up.” She placed a finger on his lips. He was hot and she wanted him, but damn, he had to lose the habit of talking at the wrong time. “Just shut up.”
She threaded her fingers through his hair and yanked him down to her again. He was willing, at least, and leaned into her kiss. She
felt hungry—almost literally enough to bite at him—but she would have to settle for a taste. With a soft moan against his lips, she took the initiative and pressed her body into his as she walked him back a couple of steps. He sat in the chair he’d used while she’d treated him, but she didn’t want to think about that.
Although she did have to keep it in mind. He was battered and bruised, and she couldn’t be too rough.
Her dress glided smoothly up her thighs as she hiked it up so she could straddle his hips. The motion eased him gently back into his seat as she pressed herself into him. They met in a delicious contrast of his hardness and the softness of her body so delicately accentuated by the thin dress that she wore.
She sighed softly, breathed him in, and ran her fingers through the thick, short curls of his hair. They seemed to trace their own path down to the firm, warm arch of his neck, over the muscular shoulders, his chest, and finally, his arms. In that moment, she needed to touch and feel and wanted the same in response. His calloused fingers tugged her dress higher and she shivered with a delighted moan as his hands caressed her bare skin.
“Fuck,” he hissed against her lips.
“You know…” She straightened and look down at him as a smile played over her full lips. “That’s exactly what I had in mind.” Calm and deliberate, she accentuated her words by moving her hands to the belt that held his pants in place.
Chapter Thirty
The first thing Jessica heard was the sound of the shower running. It wasn’t an unpleasant sound, more like white noise on a television.
The bed was more comfortable than she would have thought, which further reinforced the idea that this place was somewhat higher-end than she would normally have been able to afford. Apparently, their benevolent overlords had a healthy budget that they didn’t mind Anja splurging with when necessary. They needed a place to lie low, all things considered, and the hacker had selected a romantic motel near the outskirts of the city for them to do so. It wasn’t like the police would look in a love nest for people involved in a shootout in another hotel.