Dark Romance Collection: A Sexy, Dark Bundle

by Huntington, Parker S.

  The sky was crystalline blue, heavy and thick, the only pure thing in a messy world. It connected all of us equally under its sapphire bowl.

  Its presence disconcerted me, and yet there was hope under it.

  * * *

  He was the last of the six army surgeons. Captain Caden St. John. Accepted a commission after finishing Officer Candidate School in November 2001. Desperate for general surgeons, the army had signed him to a three-year commission and a four-year service obligation. Field training at Walter Reed. He’d just started his second sixteen-month deployment. I was surprised he’d lasted this long. He was still a civilian as far as I was concerned.

  “Jenn.” I caught Lt. Jackson as she set up triage in one of the tents.

  “Yeah,” she grunted, moving the monitor on a crash cart.

  I helped her move the cart. “I’m looking for Dr. St. John?”

  “The hot one?”

  “By ‘hot’ you mean…?”

  “On fire. He just got out of the OR.”

  Strange. Casualties hadn’t come in yet. I knotted my brow and headed for the changing room.

  Metal sinks. Empty linen hampers. One man in scrubs stood with his back to me, peeling off bloody gloves.

  “Dr. St. John?”

  “Yeah?” He slipped off his cap, revealing a full head of dark hair.

  “I’m Dr. Frazier from psych.”

  He pulled off his scrubs and his undershirt in one movement, and I had to bite back a gasp. I’d seen some pretty ripped soldiers, but he’d caught me by surprise. His waistband hung on his hips below two divots in his lower back. Surgeons didn’t look like that.

  “Psychiatrists don’t fucking knock?”

  “Surgeons don’t close the fucking door?”

  He turned at the waist—just enough to take stock of me. His jaw was sketched with a light beard, his lips were a full, dusty pink, his eyebrows arched, and his eyes… his fucking eyes were the color of the bowl that connected all of us.

  Were my nipples hard?

  Maybe. He didn’t linger on them though. He took inventory slowly and deliberately, giving equal weight to my feet, my legs, my torso, before landing on my face.

  “You wanted something?” he asked, turning around again and undoing the tie at his waistband.

  “There’s an offensive coming,” I said.

  “No shit.” He dropped his pants.

  His ass was too perfect for human eyes. I looked away.

  “I need to do a benchmark intake on your mental state. It’s going to get hairy around here real soon.”

  Smiling, he turned around, giving me the full sight of an enormous cock. He balled his scrubs and tossed them in a hamper beside me. I kept my focus off his dick and on his eyes, but they were doorways to the sky and I was afraid of heights.

  “I’ll be fine,” he said, picking up his camo shirt by the neck. The name tape said JOHN without the ST., and his rank was on his collar.

  “Captain,” I replied, “I’ll see you at my desk in one hour, ready to answer questions.”

  He smiled like a fucking civilian. His dimples went black with his beard, and his eyes sparkled as if the sky could rain without clouds. “Of course.”

  I put my right toe behind my left heel, spun, and about-faced before he could see his effect on my body.

  * * *

  With a football tucked under his arm, Ronin ran like an All-American. I waited until he spiked it in the end zone before I stopped him.

  “How are the intakes?” he asked.

  “Almost done. Now it’s just hurry up and wait.” I scraped my foot on the sand. It sparkled.

  “Broken glass?” he asked.

  “Mortar fire melts sand into glass.” I pointed toward the border of the base. “They shoot them over the wire.”

  He tossed the ball to his teammates. “Fun times.”

  “No joke.” I nodded, and he took two steps back toward the game.

  “Wanna hang out before the shit hits the fan?” he asked.

  We both knew what he meant by “hang out,” and I couldn’t. No reason not to really, except… I couldn’t. Not with the sky watching.

  “I have nursing and support staff to interview,” I said. “Maybe next war.”

  * * *

  My desk was two sawhorses with a slab of plywood laid across. I had a small, barely private office separated from triage by white canvas walls.

  Ronin didn’t have a desk. He stood at mine and handed me a metal box. “You should hang on to this.”

  “What is it?” I opened the box to find vials of clear liquid.

  “Synthetic amphetamine.”

  “We have plenty of the generic.” I went over the contraindications. To be used after rest, no food required, eight-hour spread.

  Ronin shrugged. “Works faster and stays effective longer. One shot holds twenty-four hours.”

  I folded up the sheet and stuck it back in the box. “What are you doing here anyway?”

  “I can neither confirm nor deny I’m even in Fallujah.”

  “I won’t tell then.”

  He smiled and left to do whatever it was he did.

  Fifty-nine minutes after I left post-op, Caden poked his head around the canvas flap of my office. He was fully covered in camo, thank God, and he’d shaved.

  “Major,” he said with a smirk, as if he found my title arousing.

  “Greyson’s fine.” I indicated the chair in front of my makeshift desk.

  He sat in it, slipping off his cap, which told me volumes. A gentleman by training. Strict, traditional upbringing. His behavior in the post-op room had been deliberate and against character.

  “Thank you for the show in post-op,” I said.

  “It’s a changing room. You can’t be shocked I was changing.”

  “It takes more than a penis to shock me.” Even a magnificent one.

  “A quality I admire.”

  The parentheses around his smile were no less effective without the beard.

  “The schedule says you were doing a hernia operation.”

  “Real quick. I just needed two surgical nurses and a gasser.”

  “And the patient?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “You couldn’t put it off for a few days?”

  “Why?”

  Why? meant why not? Like asking a four-year-old why he’d had the extra lollipop. Why not watch an extra hour of TV? Why postpone joy?

  Mental note: He loves it. Expect him to engage in risk-taking behavior and attempt to function even if performance is suffering. Expect him to push his limits in the OR.

  “In an emergency,” I said, taking out the five-page mental evaluation questionnaire, “we may have to administer psychotropic medications before we can evaluate their safety for you. So, we do this assessment before we need to.”

  I pushed the questionnaire toward him. He put his elbows on my desk and flipped through it.

  “About the changing room,” I said.

  “You see something you like?” He snapped up a pen and ticked boxes.

  “Why did you feel the need to express your dominance over a woman you didn’t even know?”

  Head still facing the page, he looked me with only his eyes. “I was getting changed.”

  “Denial is a river in Egypt, Captain.”

  He went back to the questions, reading and answering quickly. “Caden’s fine.” He showed me the page. “What exactly do you mean here?” He tapped the pen on a question. “Forty-seven. Part B. Does jerking off count?”

  Why was my neck going prickly? I talked about deviant sex acts with attractive patients all the time. Many transferred sexual feelings onto me, and I was trained to deal with it. This guy had disarmed me completely.

  “Sexual activity is with a partner. Masturbation is covered in question forty-nine.”

  “Ah.” He put the paper down and, on question 47b, ticked the box for “infrequently.”

  One. He hadn’t fucked the entire camp, mal
e and/or female.

  Two. He’d made sure I saw which box he ticked.

  I watched him move over the last page, his answers marked with Xs that went from corner to corner without overshooting the boundaries. His hand was wide across the knuckles with long fingers and had a way of moving that was like a lucid, articulate speech pattern. Every stroke counted.

  What would those hands feel like on my body?

  Cool air came into contact with the sweat breaking out on my neck. I pretended to reread medication labeling while he finished, but I kept his hand in view over the edge of the page.

  He put down the pen and pushed the papers toward me.

  “Thank you, Caden.”

  “My pleasure.”

  I stood, then he stood. “I’ll let you know if I have any follow-up questions.”

  He transferred his cap from his right to his left and held out his right hand. “Nice to meet you.”

  That hand bridged more than a gap in rank. That. Beautiful. Hand.

  I took it, and we shook.

  He turned to leave but stopped at the flap just as I was sitting. “So you know, in the changing room? My ass was because I was annoyed that you came in. I showed you the rest because I want to fuck you.”

  My pussy clenched as if he’d kissed it. “That is highly inappropriate.”

  “I know.” He put on his cap and left.

  * * *

  No disciplinary actions. No insubordination. No complaints at all.

  Caden St. John had a year and a quarter left on his obligation. He didn’t owe the army time for his education. If he left at the end of his four years, he wouldn’t get a pension, but from his sweet reek of privilege, I got the feeling he wasn’t worried about that.

  I’d been active duty for almost thirteen years. The obligation I’d accrued for my medical training would be paid in two years. He’d be long gone by then. Not that it mattered.

  Not that it mattered at all.

  Seven and half months between the end of his obligations and mine.

  Why would I even do that math?

  From my trailer, I heard the transports rumbling. Boots stomped on the pavement. Rifles click-clacked, and men yelled orders.

  They were heading out.

  There was nothing I could do now. I’d prepared as much as I could. I tried to rest, lying on my back with my hands folded across my chest. In the space between sleep and wakefulness, when the dark part of my heart opened like a simply written birthday card, I wished I could go with them.

  Chapter Two

  DAY ONE

  04:06:00

  Meal scheduling was suspended. The chow hall had laid out some basics to keep everyone going. The usual laughter and conversation at the long tables had also been put on hold apparently. Anyone staying still long enough to eat was working or filling out requisition forms. I was sitting with the brass, huddled at a round table by the soda machine.

  The tension of anticipation was butter-thick.

  “One good thing about an offensive,” Colonel Brogue said, fisting a hot burrito, then chomping off the end like a jerky stick. “Enemy doesn’t have the time or people to hit us. This base normally gets a mortar a week. Now it’s crickets.”

  “Any idea how long it could go? I calculated shifts for the medical staff, but it breaks down after forty-eight hours,” I said.

  “Gonna need more than that.” He balled up the burrito wrapper and got rid of it with a cocksure toss that landed right in the pail. He must have been a complete stud when he first got his commission.

  “I can extend it. Rotate in more rest. Four days sound right?”

  We walked out of chow hall and into the buzzing night.

  “These people are fighting for their lives. Our guys are fighting for fuck-all for anyone can figure out.”

  I’d heard this in my sessions. Wounded soldiers wondered what they’d given their bodies for. They were snide or angry, but few broke down. Your mental state was the measure of your worth as a soldier. Anger was acceptable. Weakness was not. They were a hard lot to heal.

  The colonel stopped between the motor pool and the hospital. Interior lights enveloped a swarm of activity, bleeding together in the open space between.

  “You’re from California, right, Major Frazier?” he asked.

  “My father was in the 101st Airborne, so we moved a lot. He and mom retired to San Diego.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t know what’s on your minds out there. But if someone air-dropped onto Main Street and said they were running shit, I’m sure you wouldn’t take too kindly. You’d fight to the death.”

  “It’s like you know me.”

  He wagged his finger at me. “I know a soldier when I see one.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “So, when you make your rotations, keep that in mind.”

  “I will. Thank you.”

  * * *

  DAY ONE

  08:23:00

  The surgical rotations were set at six days. Without a full day’s rest, they’d start breaking down at four days, and the mistakes would start. After that, we’d need more doctors and nurses. We had enough PAs for an extra twelve hours. It wouldn’t be enough, because if tanks full of foreign soldiers rolled down Main Street, I’d fight to the death.

  There was a shout outside as a truck pulled up.

  I went out through the hospital. Boxes were being unloaded, and I was nearly knocked over by a grunt carrying a crate of meds.

  “Sorry,” he shouted over his shoulder.

  “No pro—”

  A weight hit my chest, pushing me back. I spun back to front and center.

  It was still night, but the bright light of day shone in Caden’s eyes. He pushed the crate against me. “Take it.”

  I held my arms out under the crate and accidentally touched his hands. He slid them out from under, giving me the full weight.

  “Give it to Yvonne,” he said. “She knows where it goes.”

  Without another word, he went back to the truck, scrubs skimming his body until he was naked in my mind.

  “Let’s go!” a sergeant shouted to someone I couldn’t see. It didn’t matter. Time to get moving.

  I found Yvonne and gave her the crate, then I went for another, taking whatever was handed to me.

  Twice more, the hauling pattern brought us together. Twice more, our hands brushed together under the box. After the second time, I returned to the loading dock to find the truck pulling away. Caden watched it go with his bare arms crossed in the cold air. On most men, that body language was closed. On him, the ropes of his forearms were nothing if not inviting.

  “Did they bring additional staff?” I asked.

  “Nope. They took two surgical nurses though.”

  “What? Who?”

  “Barn Door and Guitterez.” Totally normal to pepper nicknames with real names. “They have field experience.”

  “Shit.”

  He raised an eyebrow at me, tilting his body in my direction.

  I stepped back toward my office. “I have to watch the nurses too.”

  “That’s about to be the least of our problems. Rumor has it, at least.”

  “It’ll be fine.”

  “Sure.” Before I could get back to the tent, he called for me. “Major.”

  I turned on the ball of my foot. He was the only still point in the floodlight. “Yeah?”

  “I was being a dick. No excuses.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Under different circumstances though…” He didn’t finish.

  “If wishes were horses, Captain.”

  “The streets would be full of horseshit.”

  I laughed. He was pulled back into the hospital with a wave. I went to redo my rotation forecasting, imagining meeting him in a different situation, a different time, a different place.

  * * *

  DAY ONE

  09:12:00

  When the choppers arrived, there was a palpable sense of relief among
the staff. They had jobs and could finally do them. I didn’t have much for the first few hours. I fetched and ran. Filled in forms. Administered first aid when needed. Assisted as much as I could. I was an MD, but the best use of my skills was to let people who knew what they were doing get the job done.

  That was the report I wrote in my head.

  The reality of triage was more complex.

  “Major Frazier!” Corporal LeShawn called. He was kneeling by a screaming man bathed in black soot and blood, holding a red-soaked gauze over the soldier’s hip.

  I ran over because I was needed, but my chest hitched, and I had to hold back a cry of despair over his pain. It wasn’t the first time that day I’d had to enforce professional detachment—or the last. I navigated rows of bloody stretchers, narrowly missed a nurse heading in the opposite direction, and kneeled across from the corporal, trying to breathe around the stench of intestinal matter.

  “Pressure,” he said calmly.

  Surprised I could hear him through the screams, I replaced his hands on the bloody gauze while he put together a morphine drip. The wounded soldier was down to weeping.

  “You’re doing great,” I said, checking his blood-soaked name tape. “Hardy. You’re doing great. Breathe.”

  “They came out of nowhere. I didn’t see them.”

  “You did your best.”

  “They were everywhere.” He was hyperventilating from the memory.

  “Okay, breathe.” His hand grabbed for mine, and I took it. “You’re here now. LeShawn’s getting you something for the pain.”

  The drip was going.

  “My wife.” An injured man will often forget the strength he has in the limbs that still work, and Hardy had forgotten his hands could probably break mine. “We run marathons. If I can’t run… will I be able to run?”

  I didn’t know if he had anything worse than a paper cut or if he was too wounded to walk again.

  Outside, the slapping sound of choppers. More coming.