He had to wait until his heart unblocked his throat. “The wild card was you. I couldn’t have done anything at all without you. I would have been dead and I would have gotten everyone killed. You saved my life. You saved those people.”
She shook her head. “Oh, just take your dues. If you hadn’t risked your life in the first place, thrown yourself into death’s jaws, over and over, if you hadn’t decided to either save us or die with us, I would have sat there and died with the others when Molokai decided to off us all for best effect.”
“I’ll take my dues if you take yours.”
“Oh, all right. Let’s agree to split the credit—and the blame.”
So she was blaming herself for those who had died or been injured? For those they had killed?
A wave of tenderness swept him. His left arm was splinted to his side by her body. He tried to move his right one, to touch her, to soothe her, to feel that incredible, living mane for himself.
Wrong move. He doubted any move would be OK right now. His lung was scraping against his ribcage, muscles shredded, nerves exposed. “Tell me something,” he gasped, making the pain even worse. “I am going to live?”
There was no mistaking the green flare in her eyes. He didn’t need to see it to feel her concern, her anger at him for endangering himself, at the far worse fate he could have brought on himself. “You’d better!”
“I fail to see what I can…” He paused, waited out a spasm of searing pain. “Do about it if I don’t. If I’m not mistaken, the woman militant shot me in the back and—”
She cut through his feeble words, reassuring, furious. “And the bullet went clear through you! It didn’t hit the scapula, passed between your ribs, went through your right lung and out of your chest wall between the second and third ribs just beside the sternum. It hasn’t touched any major vessels or structures and your lung has already re-inflated. You did lose blood before I collected some through the chest tube, but at least no more is coming!”
So that was what was lodged between his ribs! A chest tube—to evacuate the blood that must have accumulated around his lung. From the second, higher chest tube he could now feel, he analyzed the foci of agony. He’d bet he had a pneumothorax, too, with air leaking from his punctured lung and becoming trapped in the pleural space. No doubt the pressure of the accumulating blood and air had caused his lung to collapse. But the reason a tension hemo-pneumothorax was often rapidly fatal went beyond the blood loss or the collapsed lung. The rising pressure inside the chest caused displacement of the mediastinal structures and pressed on the other lung and the heart, interfering with, then stopping their functions.
The only way to stop the deterioration was to relieve the building pressure, inserting one chest tube in the chest to drain off the blood, and another high enough to let the accumulating air escape. And that was what she’d done—hadn’t she? “Did you perform the tube thoracotomies?”
Her snort was indignant. “As if I’d let anyone else resuscitate you!”
This couldn’t be good, the way his heart was ricocheting inside his chest. It couldn’t be wise either, the way his deep-freeze was starting to thaw. The way he was starting to crave her caring. “And by the feel of it, you didn’t use local anesthesia before you shoved the tubes in my chest!”
Her touch melted, along with her luscious smile, down his cheek, stroked him down to his soul. “We were fresh out of lidocaine. But I wasn’t too concerned about the pain I would cause you. It was one more thing to stimulate you out of unconsciousness.”
“Cruel woman.” A couple of his fingers wrapped around a lock of hair, tugged. She came, willingly, gave him what would really revive him. Her taste, her breath. Her warmth and eagerness. She did all the work, moving her lips over his face, smoothing away the ordeal from his brow, taking the anger and horror and pain from his lips. He moaned it into her and she absorbed it all, imbued him with her vitality.
He felt his consciousness ebbing again. Felt like falling asleep. Hmm. What better thing than to fall asleep in her arms, with her lips on his face…?
Something wrenched him back, to suffer the pain and hear the weeping and scent the stench. Her loss. She was pulling away, leaving him alone and cold and bereft. His eyes snapped open to escape the nightmare, blurred over her image. Then his ears again rang with her frantic order. “Dante, stay with me!”
He winced, tried to pull her back, to dissolve in her warmth and nearness again. “Have mercy, Gulnar. I just want to sleep…”
She nudged him, gentle, then not-so-gentle, insistent, inescapable. “You’re not going to sleep. You’re going to sit up and drink. You’ve lost half of your blood between donation and injury. You’ll enter irreversible shock if you don’t replace the blood volume you’ve lost.”
“Hook me to a fluid bag, piccola. I’ll just take a little nap—”
“Don’t piccola me! No napping, and we don’t have fluid bags to spare. Every one must be kept for the unconscious injured.”
He closed his eyes, nestled back into her firm, warm bosom. “Consider me one of those…”
She pinched his arm, manually forced both lids open, peeling them off his unfocused eyes. “You’re not and you will not be again! You will drink and then I will take out the chest tubes, sew you up then take you for examination.”
“And then you’ll take me home?” Home. That was her place to him now. Where was that around here? Now, that was something to keep awake for, to be in it, with her—but he’d just rest for a while first…
No such luck. She nudged him again. “C’mon. Open those eyes. Up, up!”
The woman was pitiless. “Gulnar! I’ve been shot, for heaven’s sake!”
“So? Nothing was really damaged. I examined you thoroughly while I was trying to find out where all the blood covering your right side was coming from.”
It was only then that he noticed. His blood-soaked shirt was closed over two large pads, one on the entry wound in his back and one over the exit wound in his chest, with slits through it for the chest tubes. Immaculate as usual. She must have taken his shirt off, examined him, performed the tube thoracotomies and put the shirt back on to preserve body heat. With his blood loss and shock he was still a prime candidate for hypothermia even in this heat. She’d done everything to the letter of the most advanced life-support protocols.
And to think she’d done it all, so thorough and efficient, minutes after surviving such horrors! What she must have felt, dealing with it all while coming to terms with having to kill another human being to save him, then still having him shot and possibly dying on her hands…
He needed to purge all her terror and helplessness, her stress and rage. But how, when he was the focus of her dissatisfaction? “You’re angry with me, bella mia, aren’t you?”
“Wow. What insight! Angry is too mild a word, Dr. Dante!”
“Oh, no! You’ve already called me Dante. You can’t go back to calling me ‘Doctor’ now!”
“You don’t want to know what I want to call you right now!”
“You mean beside idiot, insane and stupid?”
“Oh, that was the censored version of what I think of you for exposing yourself to needless danger, for—for…” Her voice choked, her tears flowed again. “I kept screaming for you to get down, to just get the hell down! It was as if you wanted to get yourself killed!”
Which could be an interpretation not too far from the truth. “Says the woman who refused a sure chance of survival!”
She wiped an angry hand across her eyes, adding another shade of smudging to her face. “I accepted death. I didn’t invite it! Do you know just how lucky you’ve been?”
“Yeah. It’s so weird. I thought I’d used up nine lifetimes’ worth of luck in my life so far. Amazing to find out I still had some left over. I bet my luck has run dry now.”
“It will if you don’t shut up and drink!” She turned, grabbed a bottle up off the ground, put it to his lips.
He took an experimental sip. “Ugh. What’s that?”
“A local drink.”
“Tastes like the local refuse.”
“Drink!”
“Tyrant.” Her smile felt like a spotlight had been turned on, illuminating his heart. He gulped another mouthful. It tasted even worse. “Just thank God you don’t have to drink this swill…”
She stroked his cheek, her smile widening. “I did drink it. Two bottlefuls.”
“When you didn’t need to? When no one was threatening to keep you awake until you did? Brave woman!”
The look she gave him! His heart swelled with pride and pleasure that she appreciated his lame jokes. “It’s a potent folk remedy called Suakiri, made of an assortment of fermented seeds and molasses. High-calorie drink, packed with vitamins and minerals, all the things you need right now. The Azernians swear by it.”
He mumbled something under his breath.
“What?”
He sighed. “Don’t mind me. I’m just swearing at it.”
Her bone-melting smile blossomed into a giggle. She resumed stroking his cheek and watched him as he gulped the first few swallows. It felt as if he’d forgotten how to drink. He had no co-ordination. Whether due to her touch, or with depletion, he had no idea.