by S A Gardner
His gaze stilled on me, their expression unfathomable.
Then he turned to Ed and Matt. “You got that?” Both men nodded. “Get on it, then. Assign six to setting up our living quarters, too. Engage full safety protocols.”
“One more thing.” I caught Damian before he turned away after the two men. “I want ten health posts interspersed throughout the camp. Each will serve five thousand refugees. One from your team will do in each, archiving cases, handling everything that doesn’t require our specialized medical attention, and referring those who do.”
That caused a freeze in his Affable Damian program. “I need my people free so I can round up a team whenever I have openings for reconnaissance. A post would tie them up, make their disappearance from it obvious and questionable.”
“Sorry if I’m limiting your team’s movements, De Luna. But everything takes second-row seat to helping the refugees.”
“Commendable of you to feel this way. As I predicted you would.” Seemed he knew me more than I knew myself. I’d thought I’d be able to use the aid mission as only a cover. “That’s why I said you should focus on your job, while we get on with ours.”
I shook my head. “To do my job, I need paramedics at those posts. It was you who limited my team in favor of yours. And I need each one of them by my side. Dispersing your people throughout the camp is the only way to set up a rapid and effective scanning operation. If refugees inundate the hospital it will be chaos. Your job can wait.”
“It’s my job then?”
Oops. Lapsus linguae.
Though it wasn’t a slip of the tongue. I never contested that it was, only that he’d tried to exclude me from it.
The gorgeous, gargantuan rat was still waiting for a verbal concession. Oh, fine.
“So it’s more your job, the covert stuff.”
“More by over ninety percent.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
His gaze eloquently said: Got you where I’m keeping you.
Not that I’d let him have the final say. “I’m not debating percentages here. If we get on with our retrieval mission, there’d be no turning back to the aid one.”
“That’s why the plan is for both missions to run simultaneously.”
“That was on paper. On the ground our best security and the most cooperation we’d get from either side here, is if we establish ourselves as a formidable medical aid effort. I don’t have enough people to do that on my own.”
“Aren’t you anxious to release Jake? Or is this your way of showing me you’ve got your personal feelings vanquished?”
His lie-detector eyes penetrated me, shrunk me. Why did he keep doing this to me? Wasn’t it enough he existed and made me forget everything, including Jake? Did he have to spell it out now, make me feel inhuman for not thinking of Jake first?
But I couldn’t think of Jake first. Even if I did. Even if logic argued that I wasn’t here in a bid for the refugees’ relief or freedom, but for Jake’s and the others’.
Logic had no chance. As emotionally imperative as it was for me to free Jake, I had to give precedence to the bigger picture. A few days could save so many lives, while they’d probably mean nothing to Jake. Not after eight years of captivity. Being a doctor and an aid worker himself, he’d probably understand.
I cleared jagged emotions from my throat. “Our lost people are eight. There are fifty thousand lost people here. And I have the unprecedented chance to do something for them.”
“Be realistic, St. James. Whatever you—we—do, it won’t be much, won’t leave a lasting effect.”
“You’re wrong, Damian.” Why did his name slip out when my emotions lay bare? “We may not lift their oppression or cure all their ills, but we’d give them our very best. Beyond all else, these people need the knowledge that they’re not forsaken. That is a lasting thing.”
A supernova flared in his eyes, burning away some barrier we’d had been between us since the day we’d met. It felt like a crossing over.
Into what?
Before I could make a guess, his eyes resumed their coolness. “Okay, St. James. You get a week as total boss. Let’s set this operation up, show them what we’re capable of. Any more orders?”
Nothing I could think of. Nothing non-X-rated at least.
Work. Get busy. God knew there was far more than enough to exhaust me out of these moronic emotions and gnawing lust.
I couldn’t wait to begin.
Twenty-Three
When would it end?
Where was anticipating being riddled by bullets, or blown to bits at any moment? Give me danger, give me terror, give me pain. Anything would be preferable to this torment.
I tried again to put an end to it, my eyes on the apathetic woman imploring. What I really needed to do was yell, “Lady, do something to shut your kid the hell up.”
No chance of that. You didn’t speak to your patients that way, even if you were teetering on the edge of berserkdom.
This was my eighteenth hour today of being exposed to bone-splintering screams. Two hundred and ninety kids so far, each one handing the flagellating baton to the next.
A shrieking kid below the age of five was a form of agony overlooked by all torture connoisseurs. You want to drive a tyrant to repent his atrocities before killing himself? Put him in a roomful of screeching kids.
Tiny three-year-old Mustafa here had an edge over the rest, the frequency of his shrillness enough to liquefy metal.
I’d exhausted all my cajoling powers. They’d only worked anyway with each kid, until I’d given them the first MMR shot. Then all gloves had come off. Giving them the rest of their vaccinations and tending their other conditions had turned into a struggle. Anyone standing outside this tent would think I was dissecting those kids alive.
I tried to approach Mustafa again and the little boy did the impossible. He raised the pitch of his scream another octave. I almost crumpled to the floor like a dog bombarded by a supersonic barrage.
As he broke out of his mother’s ineffective hold, I sagged to my chair, glared at the uncooperative woman, and swung my pulsating head around.
“Megumi, will you do the honors?”
Sedation was in order. I’d tried to avoid it, as the kid was already in bad shape and we didn’t have an unlimited supply of drugs. But I had no hope of convincing him the rest of the vaccinations, followed by a local anesthetic injection and scalpels to drain his abscess weren’t a torture-murder scheme.
Megumi, knowing there was no use sweet-talking the boy, pounced on him with a mask of nitrous oxide. The boy grew groggy after the first gigantic breath between screams.
We, too, pounced on him the moment he stopped thrashing. Ishmael injected the remaining vaccines while Lucia handed me instruments. I rushed to incise the abscess in his right hypothenar eminence, draining it and extracting the offending splinter embedded deep in his flesh.
Stuffing the abscess space with antiseptic-dipped gauze, I left it unstitched to drain, bandaged his hand, leaving his fingers free to move, injected him with broad-spectrum antibiotics. And felt like shit all through.
I should be used to kids being scared witless after being injected for the first time, no matter how light my touch was.
I was. At least, I handled it. This had just been too much.
I’d never faced that level of hysteria. They’d almost all exhibited the same inconsolable terror, with their custodians or parents useless in explaining the fear or in curbing it. I was at the point where screaming and drumming my heels myself sounded like a feasible outlet.
To add to my aggravation, at one point Damian had burst into our minor surgery compartment, rushing in from his head paramedic station at admittance. He’d taken in the scene, his simmering gaze skimming us as we restrained our shrieking patient.
Then, before he walked out again, he’d drawled, “Always knew you had a sadistic streak, St. James.”
The magnificent weasel hadn’t even tried to use his vaunted colloquial
Russian to soothe the kid, or prod his zombified mother into a more active role.
The crowning provocation had come when I’d moaned to Ishmael, “Is it me? Am I that scary?”
The jerk had actually had the nerve to give my question serious consideration. And come up with a “We-ell…” answer.
He’d gotten a spurt of saline in his wiseass mouth.
I sent the knocked-out Mustafa away with his sluggish mother, filed his vaccination card and his malnutritioned condition. The others disposed of used instruments and sterilized multi-use ones. Bless them, they moved soundlessly. Or maybe I was deaf by now.
Silence, after two days of cacophony, swooped down, an equally painful whooshing vacuum. But at least I could hear myself think. And now that I could, suspicions trickled in.
Kids in desperate situation were always unnaturally subdued. But those kids had seemed to have an ingrained reaction waiting to be triggered by any unknown grown-up. I could find one explanation. That the militants had been abusing them.
I needed no more reasons to abhor them, but this possibility almost made me go after them right now. Their representatives were out there, on their biweekly patrol.
They’d confiscated rations and fuel from the relief efforts, and were now dispensing them tat their discretion. With the mines back in place, there’d be no more operations. And with the meager land the refugees farmed, they were back to depending on the militants for everything, and they were giving them just enough to keep them barely alive. They’d only let us come when they’d realized their captives might start dying en masse, losing them their human shield.
“Are we done here?”
My eyes swung to Lucia. Swaying on her feet, eyes ringed and bloodshot. I’d driven her and the others beyond capacity. I’d push harder tomorrow.
Our worst projections had paled in comparison to the horrifying reality. We had to pack several days’ work into each one we could snatch here. It would be over all too soon.
It was over for tonight. None of us could be trusted to work one more minute.
“Yeah, we are.” I stood up and herded them outside. “Go get unconscious fast. Tomorrow we start surgeries, and we need twenty hours minimum to get through our day-one list.”
To their credit, and to my continuing amazement, their expressions betrayed only anticipation. Among exaggerated accusations and theatric moans of “Slavedriver” and “Sadist” and “Damian was so right.”
These were good people. The best.
As I walked out, I was alarmed to feel a drag to my feet, a droop to my lids. Being unable to defeat gravity was not a good sign. In four hours I had to be fully charged again…
Uh, make that four seconds. That was how long it took for the sight of Damian to have me all systems go. The ferocious hormonal rush took care of that.
He was stepping out of the nearest Health Post, his gaze instantaneously slamming into me across the distance.
I stopped, let him come to me. A woman had to get her distractions where she could. And watching Damian De Luna prowl toward me like the sleek human jaguar that he was was one of life’s gourmet moments.
Made me thankful to be alive, to fully appreciate what he was. An erotic thriller on legs.
And he didn’t seem aware of it. Or did he? Never being certain with him amplified his effect, if that was even possible. All in all, that guy was…excruciating.
He stopped a foot away, made every nerve buzz as if he’d plastered himself all over me, naked.
Then his bass whisper made it all worse. “Your interrogation tactics are appalling, St. James.”
There was that flare in his eyes. Humor too, whimsical and scalding, flitting on those masterpiece lips.
Uh—why was it again that I wasn’t devouring that tormenting smile off them right now?
The mission. Jake. Mel. And just about everything else.
Right. Keep it light.
I sighed to camouflage a ragged exhalation. “And ineffective, too. Not one kid broke down and spilled even their own name.”
And that applied to their parents, too. And everyone else. We needed in-depth info on our enemy, their movements, their numbers, their arsenal, their chain of command. All we’d gotten was a head-on collision with the personification of mute hopelessness.
Those people were even worse than the ones in Sudan. They’d given up on their people’s help, their enemies’ mercy and the world’s intervention. They were past grabbing at a rescuing hand…
Thoughts crashed in a pileup. Damian had reached a hand to my shoulder. Now that hand was gliding from its curve down to my waist. Languorously. Sensuously. Then he was steering me toward our surgical trailer.
Hey. Hey. What was going on here?
Had he decided to act on the not-so-dormant volcano between us?
Sure. My hormones would say that. They were accumulating in hope, after all.
He’d probably just had enough of my phasing out on him, was anxious to get on with our daily wrap-up.
At the end of every day we met to report on both teams’ progress. Patients screened and treated, lab work done and needed, sanitation measures installed, high-energy biscuits and dietary supplements distributed.
We’d lost a lot of our provisions, instruments and all the in-trailer sleeping arrangements with the four lost vehicles. Thank God we hadn’t lost our latrine and showers. And that Damian had turned out to be one hell of a logistician. I shouldn’t have even doubted he’d be the best.
Each night I told him what I needed the next day, and he somehow made the supplies we had left do, kept track of everything, dispensed the needed stuff at the right moment, made us feel everything was at our fingertips. He even sorted out our own stuff, not only GCA’s and PACT’s supplies. As organized as we were, I now had proof that my team would have been nowhere as efficient.
As if I needed more reasons to admire the living hell out of him. Every single thing that guy did exacerbated my already critical feelings for him.
I took a step ahead, severing the contact. If this was business, as it surely was, let’s keep it strictly so.
“I left today’s report back at the hospital,” I said.
Closing the gap I’d put between us, he bent and put his lips to my ear, literally. “We can do the report tomorrow. Now I just want some time together.”
Oh. Oh?
Real “time together” would be back in my tent…
Down, moron.
So he was offering…something. Uninfluenced by mind-altering drugs. Didn’t mean I had to grab at it, and at him. Even if I was dying to, I got to say when we had time together. When I thought the time was right. Which probably meant never.
And then, what if he didn’t mean any of the x-rated stuff that had streaked into my mind?
Choosing to believe he didn’t, I cocked my head at him. “Okay. You can have the time before I fall asleep on my feet. So—you get any luckier? You have hypnosis among your interrogation methods, after all.”
“While you have your cocktail of will-nullifying drugs.”
Oh. Were we bringing up the truth serum incident at last?
It didn’t seem he would. But he was alluding to that night. Lightness had seeped out of his face, something close to ferocity replacing it.
Before I could say anything else, Damian almost carried me off the ground as he steered me towards the nearest truck, then into it.
Then he was coming over me.
Or he would have if I hadn’t slid across the seat. The seat he was pursuing me across.
Okay. No doubt now. He wanted to be all over me.
That was it. To hell with the right time. To hell with anything and everything. Time was up. At too long last.
Watch out, De Luna. Coming right up, for real this time. Time together.
Twenty-Four
I swore I felt the hooks of restraint tearing from my flesh. Each recoiled with a deafening twang, flinging me into him.
The impact with his unyieldin
g ruggedness had me quaking, with the enormity of letting go. I moaned at the exquisite pain of relief, my knees trembling as they gathered his thighs between mine.
Something still stopped me from grinding my flowing core onto his hardness. Save this for last, savor everything else first.
I started with his mane, my stinging fingers tangling in its luxury. It was longer since that time in my apartment. Giving me something to hold on to, to tug on. I did, hard, dragged his face up to mine for a fierce nuzzle.
Answering my ferocity, he tugged on my braid, sending a million arrows of pleasure lodging in my core. His body vibrated beneath me, his groan echoing mine, darker than the wilderness night, eloquent with his own torment and enjoyment.
So good. So right. Indescribable. This seeking. This claim. This live, all-powerful thing we had between us.
But would anything be enough after six years? Or to do this vast hunger justice?
I doubted it. But it was a necessity to find out the right dose. Of license, of indulgence. To keep on experimenting until I did. Even if it took forever.
Fine by me.
I sank into him, lips and embrace, took his brunt. Everything about him, emanating from him, was mind altering in perfection, sanity destroying in intensity.
His aroused aroma mingled with the frosty mountain air that clung to his polished skin. The combo fogged my brain like the fumes of a hallucinogen. Mixed with that deluge of hunger I felt bunching his every steel muscle, it made me ache down to my pores. And then there was his taste. On every exposed inch as I tried to suck his very essence into me. On his tongue, as he devoured everything that I was.
Then suddenly, I was hauled off his lap and shoved away across the seat.
“They’re…gone,” he panted, staring across me into the night.
The words sank in through the molasses of confusion, the cacophony of disappointment. Then they finally hit bottom.
The patrol.
This had all been for their benefit. To—to what?
Whatever it had been, it had better have been for a critical cause. If he’d done this to me, made me demolish my protective barriers for anything less, he’d probably walk out of this truck castrated.