Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Houston heard the voices murmuring on the other side of the curtain. His leg ached like hell and his hand felt numb. He shook his head to clear it.
He glanced around. He was in the ER. That made sense. He’d gone a round with a shark and had lost. The bump, the bite, then paddling himself to shore. He remembered all that.
It was what came afterwards that was foggy. He had been flat on his back staring up at Josie, her perky green eyes trained on his leg.
Then nothing.
They must have given him a painkiller.
Which normally had the effect of a semi-truck barreling into him at ninety miles per hour. He was extremely sensitive to drugs. He couldn’t even take over-the-counter decongestants without passing out.
Mike Williams strolled into his cubicle. “Hey, there, Hayes. Heard you had a wipeout and I had to come and see for myself.”
He forced himself to smile. “It’s not a wipeout when a shark drops in on your wave.”
Mike chuckled and flipped the blanket off of his leg. Josie peered over him with Mike. Houston was suddenly aware that he was wearing nothing more than a hospital gown, which had ridden up to nearly his waist. If they twitched that blanket around any more he was going to be flashing them.
He had enough problems right now. He didn’t need to add an inappropriate hard-on to the list. He’d been dreaming of Josie when he was dozing in and out of consciousness. Dreaming that she was in his bed, doing those delicious things to his cock with her tongue.
Houston didn’t like the fact that Josie could arouse him without even trying, even while he was drugged up and unconscious.
Nor did he like being flat on his back. How in the hell did patients stand this? He felt like he was laid out on a slab in the morgue.
“Quit gawking at me and help me get this bed up.” He rolled over, careful to tuck the blanket first to prevent skin exposure, and searched for the button to raise the bed.
Only to find to his astonishment that his right hand was wrapped in a splint. It had also been packed in ice, which had now fallen into his lap from his movement. “Damn! Get this ice off of me.”
He had meant Mike. Not Josie. But she moved first, before he could even think, and suddenly her hands were on his waist, retrieving the ice pack.
Actually, they were lower than his waist. In his lap.
With nothing but a paper thin hospital gown between her fingers and his skin, and he was tenting the fabric with a partial boner.
If this wasn’t humiliating he didn’t know what was.
Yet Josie looked cool and efficient, the picture of the unperturbed doctor.
He should feel grateful, but instead found himself irritated that she was undisturbed by his near nakedness.
Just the night before he had been tasting between her thighs, and now she was giving him a blank clinical stare.
“Can I get another blanket?” he snapped.
Mike and Josie shared a look.
“What?”
“It’s true what they say,” Mike said. “Doctors make the worst patients. Now can you stop whining for a minute so I can take a look at your leg?”
Josie spread another blanket over him from the knees up, her slender fingers tucking gently on either side of his waist. Her curvy body leaned over him as she worked, and he caught a whiff of the light, sweet lotion she wore.
He turned away from her, repelled yet pleased that she took the time to touch him so tenderly.
“So, how’s my leg? And why is my hand splinted and packed?”
His mind was still moving like river mud from the painkiller he assumed he had been given, and he was having trouble thinking clearly. He recalled his hand being chaffed by the shark’s rough skin, but that wouldn’t warrant a splint.
Josie cleared her throat. “Your leg is fine. Eight two-inch puncture wounds, which I sutured, and multiple lacerations. You shouldn’t have any problems with those healing. Stay off the leg for several days, and you know the drill for sutures. We’ll take them out in about a week.”
Houston tilted his head to look at hen Josie’s words sounded reassuring, exactly what he had been hoping to hear, yet she didn’t sound right. She sounded nervous. Unnatural.
Something was wrong, and he wanted to know what it was. “Is that it?”
“Oh, and I found you a souvenir.” Reaching back onto the counter she held up a shark tooth. “From your leg.”
He fought the urge to shudder. As if he wanted to remember that mouth coming at him, those teeth sunk into his flesh.
“What exactly did you give me, by the way? I don’t remember anything at all. I’m really sensitive to painkillers.”
For some inexplicable reason, she blushed. “Diamorphine.”
A horrible suspicion overcame him, one that would explain Josie’s obvious discomfort. “Did I, ah...say anything unusual while I was out?”
The blush deepened.
Oh, God. He had. He tried to get his brain to cooperate and reveal his words to him, but it refused. There was nothing but a big blank.
“I don’t think so,” she said, her eyes not meeting his.
That was not reassuring. Though he couldn’t imagine what he would have said, unless he’d come on to her or something, given what he had been dreaming about. Maybe he had actually asked her to suck his...hell.
But he didn’t have time for regrets, distracted by Mike’s examination of his hand. He didn’t like the look on Mike’s face.
“What’s wrong with my hand? I thought I just scraped it.”
Mike didn’t say anything as he rebound the splint he had undone. Then he looked up and met his eye.
Houston’s stomach hit the floor. “Mike? What the hell’s going on here?”
“You’ve severed your FPL and median nerve. We need to get you into the OR.”
Once when he was a kid, Houston’s dad had shoved him out of the way, and he had fallen on the edge of the coffee table, forcing all the air out of his lungs and leaving him stunned and disoriented.
This felt like that.
He heard Mike’s words. He knew what they meant.
He just couldn’t believe it.
“Are you sure?” He propped himself up on his elbow, and focused on his hand.
Impatiently, he attempted to wiggle and bend each finger. Neither his index finger nor his thumb moved.
“Oh, my God.” Houston started to claw at the binding with his left hand, as if seeing the damage for himself would somehow alter the reality.
The reality that was sitting down hard on him.
He couldn’t move his fingers.
If he couldn’t move his fingers, how in the hell could he operate?
Mike’s hand landed on his chest. “Take it easy, come on. We’ll get you prepped and into OR and we’ll patch you right up.”
Houston stopped pulling at the adhesive on the splint and understood for the first time why patients sometimes looked at him with complete loathing. Mike’s reasonable, calm voice made him want to ram a fist down the guy’s throat. Take it easy?
How exactly was he supposed to take it easy when his life was ruined?
Then he met Josie’s eye, and what he saw there was far, far worse. Swimming in her green eyes was compassion and something that he had only seen once before in his life—pity. Then it had been the neighbors feeling sorry for his mother when they heard her husband swearing at her, humiliating her.
At the time he hadn’t thought he could feel any worse.
He had been wrong.
His elbow gave out, and he sank back onto the bed, stunned. This was worse. For a man who demanded life obey his commands, this was the worst of all.
Then he prayed that Josie would leave the room, because her pity left him as paralyzed as his injured thumb.