CHAPTER 13 #2
She was at the clinic. The boarders were settled, the night meds dispensed, the treatment logs updated in her handwriting that nobody else could read.
She grabbed her kit from the locked cabinet.
Forceps, gauze, antiseptic, the portable light she kept charged for after-hours.
And was in the truck before the pager stopped vibrating.
The ridge road was empty. She drove it at thirty-five, both hands on the wheel, the headlights cutting white paths through the dark that collapsed and reopened with each curve.
The Victorian’s porch light was on. Weak yellow.
The carriage house beyond it showed a single window lit from within, the glass fogged with condensation or steam.
Marcus met her at the door. He had gloves on. Latex, the kind from the clinic supply, stretched tight over his big hands. His sleeves were rolled. No blood on them that she could see.
“Left shoulder,” he said. “Wood fragment. I couldn’t reach it.”
She stepped past him. The carriage house clinic smelled of blood, antiseptic and a mustiness that settled into old wood left too long with moisture.
Single lamp above the treatment cot. Forty watts, maybe less.
Yellow light throwing hard shadows across the concrete floor and the metal side table where wet bandages lay in a crumpled pile near the edge.
Luca was on the cot. Shirt off. Sitting upright with his weight on his right hand and his left arm resting across his thigh.
The entry wound was below his collarbone, four inches off center, a dark hole about the diameter of a quarter with edges that had already begun to close.
Blood seeped from it in a slow, persistent leak that ran down his chest and pooled in the hollow above his hip bone.
Not arterial. Not emergency-volume. Just enough to keep the tissue wet and the wound from sealing completely.
June had stitched him before. She had not, until tonight, had reason to notice the rest of him while she did it, and she noticed now, in the one unguarded second before training took the noticing away from her and made it someone else’s job.
June set her kit on the side table. Opened it. Pulled gloves from the box inside and worked them onto her hands without looking at Luca’s face.
“How long ago?” she asked.
“Twenty minutes,” Luca said. His voice was warm. Direct. The same register he used for everything. “Maybe thirty. I walked from the turnoff.”
“Did you lose consciousness?”
“No.”
“Is the numbness spreading? Fingers, arm, chest.”
He flexed his left hand. Opened it. Closed it. “No numbness. Pain is localized. Radiating, but contained.”
She nodded once. The gloves settled against her skin.
She reached for the portable light, plugged it into the wall outlet beside the cot, and aimed the beam at the wound.
The light was whiter than the overhead. It caught the edges of the hole and showed what Marcus had missed: a dark line running diagonally through the tissue, about an inch deep, where something had broken off and stayed behind.
“Splinter,” she said. Not to Luca. To the room. “About three centimeters. Following the grain.”
Marcus stood at the foot of the cot. His weight was on both feet. His face showed nothing. “I tried forceps. Couldn’t get purchase without better light.”
“Hold the lamp,” June said.
He took the light. Held it steady on the wound.
June selected forceps from her kit, curved, fine-tipped, the kind used for sutures or foreign bodies.
She bent over Luca’s shoulder, close enough to feel the temperature difference between his skin and the room and made herself think about the wound and nothing else.
The blood smell was stronger close up. Metallic.
Warm. She worked the forceps into the wound along the track the splinter had left, feeling for resistance with the tips, and found it eight millimeters in.
The fragment came out on the third try. Wood.
Oak grain, from the look of it. About three centimeters long, tapered at one end where it had broken from the main stake.
Dark with blood along its length, the grain swollen from moisture, the broken edge rough and splintered.
She held it up in the portable light. Turned it once.
Set it on the metal tray beside the wet bandages without comment.
The bleeding had slowed to almost nothing.
That pulled her attention. She’d been deep in the work.
Forceps, track, retrieval, the mechanical sequence of removing something that didn’t belong.
And had forgotten, as medical personnel sometimes forgot when the problem was interesting, that the body on her table was not human.
The wound edges were closing. Not dramatically.
Nothing like the movies. Just a slow, visible contraction of tissue that human wounds didn’t do in forty minutes, or four hours, or sometimes four days.
The hole was smaller than it had been when she’d aimed the light.
The seep had reduced to a thin film that glistened under the lamp and did not run.
She stripped her gloves. Dropped them in the biohazard bin Marcus kept by the door. Her hands were steady. They always were. She’d been doing this long enough that steady was the default and anything else required explanation.
“Can you feel your fingers?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Good.” She reached for an alcohol pad from her kit. Wiped the forceps. Set them back in their slot. “You need to eat something.”
The word caught. Half a second. She meant blood.
She didn’t have a clinical term for it that fit the carriage house, the metal tray, the splinter lying in its own stain.
Blood was the word. It sat between them on the treatment cot while she wiped down the tray edge and avoided looking at Luca’s face.
“I’ll manage,” he said.
She didn’t push it. Started cleaning up.
Gauze into the bin. Antiseptic bottle recapped.
The portable light went back into her kit.
Her hands moved through the sequence they’d moved through a thousand times after a thousand procedures, and the habit carried her through the moment where the word had caught and left a silence in its wake.
She didn’t look at him while she worked.
She didn’t need to. She could feel the particular quality of a man watching her hands with an attention that had stopped being about the wound several minutes ago.
Then she stopped.
Her wrist was there. She had a wrist. The wound was closing but slower than it should be, and she had read enough.
Not in medical journals, in books Sebastian kept on shelves nobody was supposed to touch.
To know what helped. Not dramatically. Not like something out of a story.
Just a practical exchange between two people in a room where one of them was bleeding and the other wasn’t.
She laid her right wrist across the table between them.
Palm up. The veins showed blue under the skin.
She didn’t frame it. Didn’t perform it. Didn’t say anything about what it meant or didn’t mean or might mean under different circumstances.
She just placed her wrist on the metal and kept her eyes on the tray where the splinter lay in its own drying stain.
Luca looked at her. Long enough that she felt it without turning her head.
Then he looked at the wound. Then back at her wrist. His hand came across the table.
His fingers were cool. Dry. They closed around her forearm below the wrist, not hard, the grip of someone who had done this before and knew exactly how much pressure was required and how much was excess.
He bent his head. His mouth found the inside of her wrist.
The first touch was almost careful. Cool lips against warm skin. Then his teeth pierced her, and June’s breath caught hard enough to hurt.
She had expected pain. There was some: a sharp, clean sting followed by the deep pull of his mouth. But she hadn’t expected the heat that came with it. It traveled up her arm and spread across her chest, tightening her nipples beneath her shirt before sinking lower.
Straight between her legs.
Her fingers curled against the metal table.
Luca stopped drinking.
He didn’t release her. His hand remained closed around her forearm, his mouth resting over her pulse. She could feel the control in him. The absolute stillness of a man who had recognized a boundary and refused to cross it without permission.
“June.”
Her name vibrated against her skin.
“I’m fine.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
He lifted his head. Her blood stained his lower lip, shockingly red against his pale skin. His eyes had gone nearly black.
The sight sent another hot contraction through her pussy.
His gaze dropped to her mouth, then lower, to the movement of her breasts beneath her shirt, to how her thighs had pressed together. When he looked at her face again, none of what he wanted was hidden.
The clinic door closed with a quiet click.
Marcus.
Leaving.
June should have been embarrassed that he understood what was happening before she did. She should have pulled her wrist free, packed her instruments, and left Luca to finish healing without her.
Instead, she stepped between his knees.
“Ask me plainly,” she said.
His thumb moved over the inside of her forearm, smearing a thin line of blood across her skin. “Do you want me to stop?”
“No.”
The answer changed him.
His free hand caught the back of her neck, and his mouth crashed into hers.
She tasted her own blood on his tongue:copper, salt and something darker that belonged entirely to him.
His kiss had none of the patience of the first one.
None of the restraint he had shown on the porch.
He kissed her hungrily, his fingers tightening against her nape as she shoved closer and opened for him.