The Heroic Surgeon(23)
Dante couldn’t believe he was really here and holding her again. It had taken all his courage, and all his weakness, to risk coming back.
He breathed her in, angled his mouth against hers. Then he sank. He felt life rush through him, passion cresting in dark, overwhelming waves, crashing inside him. Magic. And love. More. Adoration and beyond. His Gulnar…
“We have an hour!”
Her moan reverberated inside him, made no sense. He raised his head, gasped, “What?”
“Emilio gave us an hour.”
He did, huh? Well, well. “And do you want to devour me, like I want to devour you in that hour, Gulnar?”
Her eyes rivaled the sea in its most violent rages, slamming him with her answer. Then she said it.
“Yes.”
He hauled her back to him and she tore at his scarf, running grasping hands all over his head, his back, her kisses deluging him.
He snapped his head back again, cupped her face with both his hands, his thumbs smoothing her lips, catching her fervent kisses. He wanted to feel them all over him, cherishing and consuming. But he had to do something first. Something ugly, but the one thing that would make this possible. “Rules. Rules first, Gulnar. You may tell me to go to hell when you hear what I have to say…”
Her eyes stopped caressing him, her arms slipped off his body, then she stepped away, removing her face from his grasp and all warmth from his body.
It was spectacular, the way she turned off. Even more the way it hurt, the way he’d come to depend on her. Being deprived of her focus, even momentarily, almost wrecked him.
His jaw clenched, suppressing the pain as she moved away from him and shrugged. “I know what you’ll say. This is temporary. Anything else?”
She was OK with it, then? She really felt nothing beyond sex? It crippled him to know that, but it was for the best. Her best. It was what had made returning possible. He shouldn’t wish for more. Should pray there was no more.
“I’ve taken the helm at the Sredna camp operation. I’ll be here for two months. And I want to spend every possible free second soaking up your nearness, your eagerness—drowning in you, Gulnar.”
“Then we say goodbye.”
He nodded, the movement slow, hard. “It’s the only thing to do. I don’t do commitment, and you don’t either. Two months, then I’ll move on.”
She looked away, stared into space. “What if it burns out way before that?”
Dante’s lips twisted. He hadn’t thought of that, had he? He’d thought she’d barely be able to tear herself away at the end. Like he would. Was she telling him there was a strong possibility she’d be sick of him inside a week?
Something tore inside him. He gritted his teeth. Just another blow to endure, to survive. He’d take that week. “No strings, Gulnar. None. You have enough, just walk away. I won’t even ask what’s wrong, won’t try to persuade you to extend our time together.”
“This applies to you, too, of course.”
Would he ever have enough of her? With her taste and essence and love embedded in his cells and echoing in his mind, there was no way in hell or on earth he’d ever have enough of her. But he’d have no more than the two months. They would have to be enough. “We both have total freedom and there will be no recriminations whatsoever when either one wants to end the affair.”
He waited for her to say something, felt the slow constriction of his heart, the vice that would keep on tightening until it cut it in half.
Maybe he shouldn’t be doing this. What if he couldn’t walk away as he intended? He’d failed once already. He’d come back and was excusing it by telling himself he’d walk away again. What if kept doing that? Inventing wilder schemes every time to be with her? What if she pushed him away and he clung?
No, he wouldn’t. One reason would always remain that would hold him back, keep him away. This time for ever.
She remained silent, her eyes downcast, and suddenly a horrible suspicion hit him. What if she just wanted one more night—less, that “hour”—and that was all? “Stop me any time, OK? If the night we shared doesn’t mean the same to you as it does to me, if it wasn’t the best sex of your life, the most magnificent thing that has ever happened to you, if you don’t stay awake at night reliving…aching for every moment and touch and sensation of our love-making…” Her magnificent eyes widened. Because she was the one used to being forward? He went on, “If you don’t walk around daydreaming about me, if you’re not going crazy not having me, just tell me to go to hell. We’ll just work together, no harm done.”
It was only when tension almost had him knocking down the central tent pole that she let out a tremulous exhalation. “You feel all that and you’d just get it all under control and work with me as only a colleague, no problems?”
“There’d be problems. Big problems. But they’d be mine. You don’t have to worry about them. I promise I wouldn’t even look at you longer than necessary.”
Oh, the way she looked at him. What did it mean? Was she going to laugh in his face now? Was it possible…?
Her words braked his roiling thoughts. “Our night together was the best thing that ever happened to me, Dante—period. And the only real sex I’ve ever had. If you only knew how much I want you, you’d probably run.”
He laughed. His first laugh of unbridled joy. Ever. And he wanted to weep, too. He pulled her back into his arms, slowly, savoring the heart-aching feel of her filling them, life ebbing back into him with each inch of contact. “I’ll only run to you. Show me how you want me, give me all you got, amore mio.”
“The hour is ticking by.” A quivering smile lit her magnificent face, lit up his world as one hand dipped into his shirt, caressed his healed wound.
He captured it, buried his grateful lips in the soft, strong palm, then he nipped it. He caught her cry of pleasure in his mouth, poured all his longing into her eager lips. “Gulnar, I missed feeling you, tasting you—missed you. I can’t wait, amore. I just want to take you, hard and fast, just taking the painful edge away. Then we’ll have the rest of the hour, all the time we have together for slow and thorough and world-shattering. What do you say?”
An unrestrained giggle of pure delight burst from her lips as she tugged him back hard to her. “I say if you don’t live up to your promises right away, I may hurt you!”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“DOES this hurt?”
“Yes!”
Gulnar removed her hands, stood back.
She assessed her patient again. Thirty-three, under-weight, pale—but not exactly the paleness of anemia, at least not only of anemia, which most of the camp inmates suffered from anyway.
They’d been treating hundreds of cases with gastrointestinal complaints, which was also expected in their nutritional and hygienic state. Diarrhea, malnutrition, all sorts of dysentery. She shuddered again as she recalled the desperate time when a cholera epidemic had swept the camp during her time with Lorenzo and Sherazad. Even with the hundreds of ailments they treated per day, even a few dozen cases of typhoid, at least there was no true epidemic.
Most patients had been straightforward cases. This one wasn’t. From the moment he’d walked in, he’d been so inconsistent, so whiny, she had at first suspected he was a hypochondriac. He complained of too many unrelated symptoms, and when she’d examined him, he’d hurt everywhere.
Her mind raced, unwilling to dismiss him as a malingerer. Think!
She put her hands back on his concave abdomen and palpated gently. He moaned with each dip. But it was when she palpated his liver that his moans were louder. She ventured a deeper dip and he keened. She disregarded his squirming and dipped deeper and…Hmm. The liver consistency wasn’t as it should be. She could only feel it now she’d stopped being intimidated by his thrashing around.
OK, if she dismissed his accounts of hurting down to the last phalanx of his little finger, this looked like a lead. That and that yellowish tinge to his skin. She couldn’t be sure it wasn’t their horrible lighting giving him that cast, so she took off her glove and contrasted her hand to his color.
No. Yellowish. Definitely. All right. Now to look for other confirming signs. He was coughing, had a very low-grade fever and wasn’t eating because he always felt full. He said he passed strange “stuff” in his stools, had vomited it once, too. And he was itching madly. She’d thought he had an infestation at first, was starting to get sympathetically itchy, but now…
This could be something that would need Dante’s intervention.
And as usual, like it had been all through the past five weeks, whenever she thought of him, he was there. He was there all the time.
He’d stepped out of their shared examination tent to perform a quick procedure in the surgery tent, had only needed their anesthetist, Sam Hiller. He’d been gone thirty minutes. And now he was back, walking into the tent, snatching her heart with pride and joy. He was hers. For now.
He met her eyes, reconnecting with her, their escalating intimacy there for all to see in his. Her patient let out an exaggerated moan the moment he saw Dante.
“Any help?” Dante gave her a quizzical glance.