Lethal Treatment

by S A Gardner

  He’d stood there, letting me have his hands, turn them over, examine them line by line, phalanx by phalanx. Perfect hands, sensitive and haughty and singular, genius and dexterity and precision made flesh and bone.

  Another thing I remembered with absolute recall was what he’d said as those hands had ended my scrutiny, taken both of mine. And how he’d sounded. Part aroused, part frustrated, two parts elated.

  You’d better reach the age of consent quickly, Calista St. James.

  But eighteen had come, nineteen after it, and I’d continued our relationship platonically. Just about. I’d loved him, wanted him, with all the idiosyncrasies of a cocky, irrepressible, and narcissistic teenager. But I’d known my flaws, my emotional immaturity, been too eager and too driven to utilize my energies in other stuff. Sex would have taken my edge, a man my focus.

  I’d turned to him for all-the-way intimacy and solace only after Clara. And it had been good. Not as can’t-wait-to-devour-him-can’t-get-enough as with Damian. Not as I recall. Jake’s attraction had been overwhelmingly intellectual, with healthy sexual overtones.

  Then I’d been kicked out of med school and joined GCA. I’d known there had been no way to continue a relationship with us so immersed in different pursuits, so divided by distance and purpose.

  So he’d just left everything behind, a booming practice and professional stardom and followed me to GCA.

  He’d proposed the day he had.

  I’d almost said yes, so overwhelmed, so guilty that he’d thrown away his rocketing career to be with me. So stunned that he had, that he’d felt that much for me.

  But it hadn’t been a reason to accept.

  It had almost been a reason to refuse.

  So I’d run to a middle ground, asked for a continuation of our status quo, for more time. A long engagement.

  He’d said he’d been mine since I’d taken his hands in mine. He’d give me all the time I needed.

  There hadn’t been any. He’d disappeared a couple of weeks later, on his first assignment without me.

  I’d touched his hands and sent him to hell.

  Damian had said I’d done almost the same thing to him.

  So hard to believe. A more unlikely femme fatale never lived…

  “Warm, stable. She’s going to be fine.”

  Jake’s assessment dragged my focus back to our patient after I placed my last suture. We checked her vital signs one last time, wrote up her post-op care, then Lucia and Ayesha took her to IC, and Jake and I headed to the soiled compartment.

  While we stripped off our scrubs, his gaze had something un-definable as he looked down at me. “Did you ever imagine we’d finally work together this way?”

  I huffed a distressed laugh. “Until recently I believed I could only work with you in some afterlife OR.”

  “I, on the other hand, had highly detailed scenarios that we would, and just how we would.”

  “Telepathy to foretelling? Did you see I’d head a mission complete with a surgical trailer, and you’d descend from your mountain prison to join me—and to steal my thunder, too?”

  His eyes mocked me back. “I admit I got a few details wrong. Yours. The two dozen extra pounds, the drastically cut and dye-tired hair, the ‘character’ lines.”

  I giggled. “How chauvinistic and superficial of you.”

  “Well, I have changed beyond recognition. I was trying to be fair to you in expecting that you have, too. Very unfair of you not to have changed, Cali.”

  Everything slammed into me. His bared desire, my answering urge to give him something, anything, my rising confusion and turmoil.

  Keep it light.

  “Aren’t you too young for your eyesight to be going?” I walked out of the soiled room, escaping the crowding emotions, his overwhelming presence, passed the others as they cleaned up and prepared for another surgery on my way out of the trailer. “Or is it your memory?”

  He jumped out first, a graceful move that spoke of his superb fitness, handed me down. Ever the gallant gentleman.

  “My memory is an audio-video precision facility,” he said softly. That heat creeping up my neck and face had better not be blushing. “On the outside, you only changed for the best. But I don’t believe this is what you meant when you intimated that you changed. So tell me about the inner changes. What happened to bring them about?”

  “Besides having my sister and later my fiancé dying on me through acts of criminal omission or commission, you mean?”

  He just raised one eyebrow, expectant. I sighed. “If you need more reasons, how about my father finally going out there and eliminating dozens of rapists and serial killers who’d weaseled out of convictions on technicalities? That when he was caught, he didn’t even get the same leniency they’d given his ‘victims’? That he has a life in prison to look forward to? That he’s almost always in solitary confinement and before I came here I hadn’t heard his voice for months? Oh, and that my mother went away years ago? That I don’t expect to see her or hear from her again? So, enough for you?”

  He seemed to be studying and archiving my every nuance before he exhaled. “It is, for you.”

  I chewed on this. My losses and trials couldn’t be called trivial. But compared to what he’d gone through, was still going through, anything would be. Yet, I believe he didn’t make that comparison, didn’t belittle them in the least.

  “How’s your father faring in his captivity?” His voice was low, solemn. “I should imagine a vigilante would not be popular in prison.”

  It moved me that he’d relinquished his curiosity about me to inquire about Dad, focusing on my needs, leaving his behind.

  I cleared my throat from the congealing emotions. “You’d imagine wrong. He says it’s the criminals who’re incarcerated with him, not the other way around. He’s become the kingpin of an octopoid vigilante operation set up from the inside, with his toll on crime in the last five years a thousand times that of his twenty years as a cop.”

  Something leapt into Jake’s eyes—raw, fierce. Surprise? Admiration? Relief? For Dad? Or—something else?

  “I always liked your father,” he said, his aura once more placid, unreadable.

  And Dad had liked him. Which still had me scratching my head. Such opposites in temperament should have had a hard time tolerating each other. Especially when they had the same female in their emotional focus. But there’d been no friction of any sort between them, both evidently happy I’d had another male of the other’s caliber to worship me.

  Then I’d lost them both.

  Jake’s sigh brought me out of my bitter musings. “Now I know exactly why.”

  While I knew exactly nothing.

  I wanted him to elaborate on that hundred-implication statement. I couldn’t. His keepers were coming for him.

  And just like that, this fraught with emotion and developments day was over.

  With just a “See you tomorrow” and a last glance that penetrated me to my marrow, he turned and made his way through the militants, heading them back to their vehicles.

  Damian, who seemed to have been with the militants the whole time, walked up to me, his stormy expression almost a relief to witness after Jake’s tranquility. Not so welcome was the way my senses rioted at his approach.

  Towering over me with body, anger and angst, he watched the vehicles receding in the verdant horizon.

  Then he grated, “So, St. James, have you defied me?”

  Defied him?

  Holy mother of ego inflammation. And St. James, huh? We were firmly back to hostile territory.

  Feeling suddenly heartsick, I shoved past him. “Get over yourself, De Luna.”

  He caught my arm, aborted my movement to get away. “You never got it, did you? It’s never been about me. It’s always been about you. And about you making me your accomplice.”

  Thirty-Six

  “What the hell are you talking about? What accomplice…?”

  I stopped. Why the hell was I asking
? This had to be another blame blitz of some sort. Thanks, but I didn’t think so. And he wasn’t distracting me.

  “Don’t bother answering that. I have better questions. Like what’s this about not telling Jake anything? And what were you doing with the militants all day?”

  “I couldn’t refuse to resolve their logistical problems.” He huffed a short, furious chuckle. “I’ve made sure they have an impregnable chain of supply in place. Until I decimate them, they’ll be the best run terrorist outfit in the region.”

  “And my first and main question?”

  For answer, I got his hand clamping my arm and a ragged, “We need to talk.”

  Talk? After he’d ended our transfiguring night with that confession of hatred?

  I itched to knee him again.

  Too bad I needed to hear what he had to say.

  Oh, what the hell. Let’s get all dirty laundry lined once and for all.

  I knocked his hand off, led the way back to my tent. “Make it fast. I still have the rest of that packed schedule you so kindly reminded me of in the morning.”

  The moment he entered behind me, I whirled around, rammed his chest with both hands. I meant to hurt.

  I must have. Not that he showed it. Nor the slightest surprise. He’d known this was coming, even when I hadn’t. He’d been ready for it. No. Eager. His expression flooded with a give-me-all-you-got sensuality. Glad to oblige.

  I rammed him again, needing to make contact, impact. Needing him to fight back, physically. He parried this time, one smooth knee bend dipping him to the side, letting one of my palms thrust air, the other glancing off his arm, expending my unspent momentum in a barely checked stumble.

  Time for finesse. To make him an offer he couldn’t refuse. We both really wanted…needed this.

  I grappled with him, as if I was going for ōuchi gari, my favorite nage-waza judo throw, a major inner reap sweeping one of his legs from the inside, clipping his foot, while a diagonal lunge took him down. He countered by widening his stance, pitching his upper body weight at me. Just what I was after, for the real throw I had in mind, one of the ma sutemi waza, the rear sacrifice, techniques.

  I threw myself backward, clinging to him, bringing my leg up, my foot lodging in his midriff, the force of my fall, my leverage and his own pitched weight completing the tomoe nage, the circle throw. He flew over me in a somersault, ended on his back. For about half a second.

  It always amazed me when he did one of those arms-and leverage-free elastic rebounds to his feet. Okay, so I could do it. He’d taught me, relentlessly. Then I’d perfected it. But I didn’t tip the scales at two-hundred-plus pounds or have a six-foot-five frame.

  He came after me in an osoto guruma, a major outer wheel designed to sweep both legs from beneath me by hitting the backs of my thighs, and slamming me on my back. I used his momentum first, did a yoko otoshi, a side sacrifice throw, my legs splitting open sideways, one intercepting his legs, tripping him, my dragging weight bringing his mass in a cartwheel flip over to my side. I loved judo. Maximum efficiency with minimum effort. Weight and size and strength mattered nothing here.

  He rebounded again, his eyes blazing stimulation and lust.

  This was what our rigorous training sessions had been like. Mind-emptying, senses-expanding, sharp, taxing, crucial. Thorough demand and satisfaction. Nothing better. Couldn’t wait for the next attack. Especially since I was winning. And he wasn’t letting me win. He never had. Never would.

  I threw him again, twice, once with a hip technique, then with another side sacrifice one.

  He rose from the last throw, exhilaration setting his unique face on passionate fire. “Who’s been honing her skills behind my back?”

  His teasing kicked in my loins as he swung me up in a carrying-me-over-the-threshold hold. Showing me he could end it by simply picking me up?

  Nah. Damian wasn’t into posturing. He knew if this were a real fight, he’d have a smashed face by now. He was indulging in this steam-venting exercise we’d wordlessly agreed on. This was the prelude to a throw. He’d just picked one that would give us maximum pleasure first.

  Next moment he completed the ura nage, the rear throw, hurling himself down in a sacrifice throw, flipping me over his shoulder and in a backward cartwheel.

  I landed on my back. Ouch. So I hadn’t thrown him on the mattress when I could have either. We ended up head to head. Then he tucked and flipped, arcing backward and landed on top of me. His mass impacted me, crushing, assuaging—indispensable.

  Then the real fight began. I took his tongue, fed him mine, ground my flesh into his. The time we’d been apart, all that we did when we weren’t seeking, mingling, fell away, just impurities in between pure living. This. Here. Now. In each other. Essential—on every profound and basic level…

  What about Jake?

  Oh, God, Jake. He stirred me, on so many levels, too, just poles apart in texture, whispering to different needs, satisfying my idiosyncratic mind…

  But so did Damian, dammit.

  Never thought I’d be in this position.

  So damn flattering and oppressive and confusing.

  My body wasn’t confused. It sure knew its own mind, chose Damian, wept for him.

  But Jake had had the disadvantage of being dead to me for eight years. Maybe given half the chance Damian…

  “Damian.” An outburst of pleasure punched out of me. He’d somehow already stripped us both down to the waist, was reacquainting with my still-sore yet open-to-anything breasts. Then he came up, caught every decibel and gasp in his marauding mouth, ravenous, dominant, supplicant.

  Boy, could he kiss.

  It didn’t help that his hands and teeth invented new erogenous zones wherever they landed. Mine had wised up after last night’s lessons, too. His growls told me every time I made inventions of my own.

  His erection ground at my molten sex through our clothes, the potency that had thrust me into shrieking ecstasy only hours before. My body flared up in a conflagration, keening for an encore.

  Mindless now, I writhed to contain him, thrust back, imprisoning his hips in greedy legs, no more moral dilemma.

  I needed him to rip inside me and make me come all over him…now.

  He said exactly what I was thinking, needing what I needed. “Calista—I want to love every inch of you—I will—but now I need to just ram inside you, bathe in your pleasure, feel you convulsing around me. Querida…”

  I jerked. Hell—the way he said those things. And querida? That alone had me almost climaxing.

  But it also made me remember. What he’d said, this morning and minutes ago. How all this had started.

  My body screamed at me. Remember later. Let him take you into oblivion now.

  And have him tell me afterward how much he hated me? Again?

  God, I was tempted.

  But I couldn’t. Guess I didn’t have it in me to take my pleasure, and deal with the fallout later.

  Last night, giving in to the long-craved explosion of our simmering status quo had been unstoppable. Now there was Jake, and Damian had told me what he really felt about me. He’d also been right when he’d said this was all wrong. When the head on his shoulders had done the talking.

  Gasping, already cramping with deprivation, I shoved at him. He slid off me, didn’t press his point.

  We lay side-by-side, breathing hard, cooling fast. Thank God for zero temperatures. Who needed a cold shower? In minutes we’d be talking hypothermia though.

  I scrambled to pull my clothes back on. He did, too, far slower, unabated hunger coming off him in waves. I turned my eyes away, sat back on my heels redoing the braid he’d also managed to undo.

  Suddenly he rasped, “I lied to you, Calista.”

  My gaze dragged back to him. His pupils flared and contracted, imbuing his eyes with the illusion of burning coals.

  “I said I hate you more than I hate myself. That’s a lie. I tried to hate you. It didn’t work.”

  Then wh
at did he feel? Did I want to know? Didn’t I have enough on my hands dealing with how I felt?

  “I loved Melissa. She was fun and strong and passionate—and she loved me.”

  Uh, was there a point to this cut-and-paste leap in logic?

  “I thought what I felt for her was the most I could feel. Then you walked into Sir Ashton’s office.”

  Suddenly, it felt like a rock was expanding inside my chest, the very materialization of foreboding. Begging me to say anything, to stop him.

  I couldn’t utter a word.

  And there was no stopping him.

  “You sat there spitting fire at me all through the interview, and at its end, you left me bloodied and bruised, and sure of one thing. There was more I could feel. Way more. And it was you who yanked it out of me.”

  That had been exactly what I’d thought before I’d met him, about my feeling capacity. But he’d felt that way, too, all the way back then? And had hidden it that totally? For that long?

  “You asked why I had Mel on my team. She never was, though she always wanted to be. Then you happened—and I took her on my team. My response to her waned every time I was exposed to you, and I felt so guilty, I let her have her wish. I thought I might be cured if I had her with me all the time. I wasn’t.”

  So that was why he hated himself. And me.

  “But that wasn’t why I hated myself, and would have given anything to hate you.”

  I should give up trying to deduce emotional stuff, certainly where Damian was involved. It seemed beyond me to even hit the board.

  He kneeled before me, made sure I got first-row seat to his revisited agony. “Want to know the real reason?”

  Before I could gurgle no, that I wanted to maintain the mercy of ignorance, he imposed the knowledge on me.

  “That night in Sudan, she’d done her part, and I’d sent her to safety. Then you hit me, ran off to get yourself killed, and I could think of nothing but you in danger. I ordered them back, led the haphazard counteroffensive, knowing I was probably leading us all to death. I brought her, and the others back, to die— instead of you.”