It wasn’t until the liquid started running down his chin that her face pinched on a surge of renewed worry. She adjusted his head and the bottle. “Easy. We don’t want you to choke. Not a good idea to cough now.”
“As if I even could. If any liquid goes down the wrong way, you’ll have to aspirate my trachea.”
“Dante, shut up and sip.”
He did. Surrendered to her ministrations, sipped and moaned his enjoyment at her stroking. He even thought he purred. It was amazing. There he was, in the after-math of a traumatic situation, feeling so good, so contented. It had to be shock.
And that Suakiri must really have magical powers. Life was seeping back into him with every sip. Must get the recipe. But he still wanted to sleep. Not the fading away of depletion, but the repose of recharging. He took the last gulp, hummed his satisfaction, adjusted his position and closed his eyes.
“Time to recheck you!” Gulnar substituted her lap for a folded towel below his head and undertook his reassessment with dogged determination.
“Gulnar, I’m fine. You’ve saved me. Again.”
“Let me be the judge of that!” She opened his shirt, slipped his arm out of one sleeve and recorded his pressure.
“One-ten over seventy, right?” Her astonished glance rested on him for half a second then she removed his pads. “I can tell. And I can tell you, whatever danger I was in, I’m past it. If you have other patients to see to, you can go now. I’ll just rest until you come back.”
“There are dozens of medical personnel on the scene now, more than enough to handle all the injured. And until it is your turn to ride in one of the ambulances going to and from Srajna General Hospital, you’re not sleeping, and that’s final.” He opened his mouth. Her hand below his chin closed it for him. “Can you sit up?”
He scowled at her and did, feeling the assortment of spears embedded in him shifting, introducing him to new levels of pain. “It’s a bunch of rubbish, you know, this myth about a trauma victim deteriorating if you let them sleep.”
“I know. I’m just being unscientifically paranoid. Humor me.”
He watched her eyes misting in the dimness as she rechecked both the entry and exit wounds, made sure that the blood level in the underwater-seal bottle was no longer rising now he was sitting up and in a position for better drainage. She seemed to be debating whether to leave them in or take them out. She shared her diagnosis with him, sought his. “I think there will be no more bleeding, that I can remove the chest tubes. What do you think?”
He looked down his chest, and only saw her splayed hand over his tensing muscles just below the wound. Images of catching that hand in his teeth and sucking each of her fingers completely into his mouth mushroomed. He winced, prayed that darkness was obscuring his blatant, idiotic reaction.
“What’s wrong? Oh, lie down again!”
He didn’t know whether to be thankful or exasperated that she had misinterpreted his state. “It’s nothing I can’t handle.” Which was an outright lie. Focus, Guerriero! “And I think your diagnosis is correct. This looks self-limiting. I think you can remove the upper chest tube. And I bet most of the bleeding wasn’t from the lung injury, but from a couple of torn intercostal and mammary arteries. Bet they went into spasm, made a healthy clot. As long as my pressure holds, I don’t think there’s any problem. But to be on the safe side and save you from introducing another chest tube if I start bleeding again, just fold the lower one in place and apply a bandage over it. If in a few hours there’s no more bleeding, you can remove it.”
Her nod accompanied a sigh of relief and a tremulous smile. She extracted the chest tube so gently he didn’t feel it being pulled from deep within his chest.
He drew a deeper breath, felt a rush of air and life and gratitude. He’d walked into the rebels’ stronghold yesterday, then into that municipal building today, with the willingness to end it all hovering at the periphery of his mind. But now he was fiercely glad that that woman hadn’t succeeded in killing him. Gulnar inhabited this world and he wasn’t in any hurry to leave it now.
Humor her? He’d do anything at all for her.
CHAPTER SIX
“WILL you do something for me?”
Gulnar met Dante’s eyes in the mirror, watched his left hand rubbing his three-day beard. He should look like hell. He did—yet was still heart-stopping.
His eyes flickered in uneasy entreaty, his voice dipped to danger level. “Please?”
Her bones increased their melting rate. Soon he’d have to scoop her off the floor.
Did he really think he needed to be uncomfortable asking her anything? Didn’t he know she needed no amount of persuasion, would have no hesitation to do anything for him, to let him have anything at all? Just as everyone else would be falling over themselves to give him the moon, and any other planet that he might fancy?
He should know. But he didn’t, even after being shown, in every way. It said a lot about him that he still didn’t accept everyone’s esteem and appreciation, didn’t acknowledge that he deserved them. He acted as if he’d done nothing at all. She’d never seen anyone more uncomfortable with attention and gratitude.
Ever since officials and reporters had milked the distraught survivors for every last bit of detail about the crisis, Dante had been fighting off both.
It hadn’t been easy, calming the over-zealous reports, with her in the middle translating both ways, trying her best to prevent the crisis from metamorphosing into a myth.
But there had been no stemming the tide of the excited masses that had swooped down on them, proclaiming him a national hero. He had been all but wrapped in cotton wool and swept to Srajna General Hospital, with every high official and security chief trailing ahead and behind their ambulance in a stately motorcade. They had even followed them through ER then every diagnostic suite as a dozen emergency doctors, radiologists and trauma surgeons had hovered over Dante, performing all kinds of unnecessary tests and taking every far-fetched precaution.
She had continued translating Dante’s insistence that she’d already done all that needed to be done, that all that remained was a simple chest X-ray to see if there wasn’t a residual clot around his lung, that all other costly tests were unnecessary. His insistence that as a trauma surgeon himself he should be allowed an opinion of his own condition had been overridden. Then his objections had grown stronger, and her translations more selective.
When all else had failed, he had demanded, loudly, to be left alone.
That needed no translation.
And that was when her role was considered over and she was herded out with the departing people. Frantic to be torn away from Dante’s side, she almost burst into tears of gratitude and relief when he clung to her. But to her distress he didn’t stop there. He forced her to translate to the crowd his indignation at their dismissal of her role in it all. “Just tell them what I’m saying,” he persisted. “Word for word, Gulnar. I’ll know if you’re watering it down.”
She needn’t have worried about his extravagant report, though. No one was inclined to believe that she was the real hero, the one who had snatched him from death’s jaws twice, and the reason all those who’d survived had. It was more palatable for them to believe a man of Dante’s stature and abilities to be the real and sole hero of the day.
Though she was happy to fade into the background, to get no recognition or gratitude, their prejudice still rankled. Chauvinist pigs!
But, to be fair, women thought the same. Even more. Chauvinist race, it seemed.
To further clarify her status in his eyes, he ordered a bed to be brought in for her in his room, made it clear she was the one to consult with about his condition, that she would be his companion until he was out of the hospital. Then he growled them all out of their room.
After freshening up all he could, he sat there in bed, envying her her no-holds-barred shower, huge and haggard and just too much for her battered senses. Then he asked her permission to sleep.
Torn between wanting to howl with laughter at his small-boy-asking-mama’s-consent act and her phobia of seeing his eyes closing, she forced herself under control. The man had to sleep some time. To save her sanity, she planned to stay awake beside him, counting his breaths. That sanity evaporated when he raised exhausted eyes to her and asked for a kiss goodnight.
It was as if a dam had burst. Tenderness swelled and crashed inside her. She wanted to throw herself at him, but couldn’t, dammit. He could barely breathe without moaning in agony, analgesics and all. But when she took his lips, he sank into instant slumber, his groan becoming one of contentment, reverberating on her lips, in her soul. She cast a look at her bed then curled herself in the few inches of space beside him.
She began her vigil, lost count of the times she counted his heartbeats, soothed his starts and sent up prayers of thankfulness for his survival, for his very existence, and a plea for his recovery.
It was so weird. She was beyond finished. Beyond devastated. The ghastly memory of taking another’s life, no matter how justified, and the nightmares of every complication he could suffer were tearing at her. Yet she wasn’t wishing all those horrors erased, like she did those before them. They had introduced her to him, and he was part of them and she would cling to their memory, scars and nightmares and all.