“She has you,” he said. “And you’re the best.”
And I believed it because he believed it. I blinked back the tears, swallowed... and focused.
And slowly, agonizingly, the wreckage of Krista’s body began to make sense. I started to see places where, if I was careful and delicate enough, I could maybe begin to piece things back together. I took a deep breath... and began.
Corrigan stood right next to me, holding clamps and suctioning away blood when I asked him to. His hands were huge next to mine. Not clumsy, just big, and with so much strength: he was like a giant trying to pick up a Fabergé egg. And he couldn’t get out of the ER mindset of frantic patch-it-and-pray. That works when you’re trying to open airways and restart hearts, but it’s disastrous when you’re repairing delicate organs. “Slow,” I said gently. “Slow and easy.”
“But—” he nodded at the clock. We could only keep Krista on bypass for so long.
“You have to not let it faze you,” I told him. “Don’t take your time. But take as much time as it needs.”
He nodded and tried. I loved that he tried. I knew how hard it was, to be totally out of your comfort zone.
Twenty minutes in, I thought I smelled something, but pushed the thought away. A few minutes later, I heard Lina sniff. She looked up at me, worried.
“Okay,” I said carefully. “That’s smoke.” As soon as I acknowledged it, I felt my heart start to race.
“How are we doing?” asked Corrigan, his voice calm but strained.
“Halfway there.”
We kept working. After another five minutes, I started to notice my hands were sweating under my gloves. Corrigan’s forehead was glistening. The room was warming up.
The door suddenly crashed open and a cloud of smoke rolled in. A firefighter emerged from it. “Out!” he ordered, holding the door and pointing to the hallway.
I looked at the smoke and fought down the rising panic. The hospital is on fire. My safe little sanctuary was being destroyed. I shook my head. “We’re not leaving.”
He frowned at me, then stepped inside, letting the door swing shut. “Don’t argue with me, we got gas lines and oxygen cylinders and all sorts of shit on this floor. The whole place could go up.”
I kept working. “Your job is to save lives?” He nodded. “Well, so’s mine. And she’s going to die if I don’t keep going.”
The firefighter glared at me, then looked down at Krista’s face. He had gray eyes and thick, black hair and was quite good looking, if you liked the rough look.
“You go and do what you need to do,” I told him. “But I’m not leaving her.”
He looked at me, looked at Krista again...and then nodded and left. More smoke and scalding hot air rolled in before the door swung closed, gathering in clouds near the ceiling. I coughed. “I can manage on my own,” I told the others. “You should go.”
Lina shook her head, silent and stoic as always. Adele’s eyes were huge and scared, but she shook her head, too. I looked at Corrigan.
He frowned at me disbelievingly. Then he slowly shook his head. “You really don’t get it at all, do you, Beckett?” he asked. And those blue eyes fixed me with such a look of deep, aching love that my chest went tight.
I pressed on. The room was getting hotter, now. Adele stuffed some sheets under the bottom of the door, but the smoke got thicker and thicker: it was becoming difficult to breathe. Outside, we could hear heavy boots and the hiss of hoses, shouted orders and—wait, was that... was the fire close enough that I could hear its roar, or was it just my imagination?
If I’d been the person I was a week ago, there’s no way I could have kept working. But all that time in the ER had taught me to shut things out. I worked on, Corrigan dabbing away the sweat as it coursed down my forehead. And finally, just as the smoke became unbearable, I tied off my final suture and we were done. Now the moment of truth: would Krista’s heart beat on its own? “Internal paddles,” I said, my voice high and tight. Then, “Clear!”
Krista’s heart contracted as the current coursed through it. Relaxed... and then grudgingly began to beat on its own. “Attagirl,” I breathed, my eyes suddenly full of tears.
The firefighter burst through the door again. His face was grimy with soot and his uniform reeked of smoke. “Thought you’d want to know,” he said, “fire’s out.” He nodded at Krista. “You save her?”
I nodded weakly.
He held up his fist. I blinked at it for a moment, and then mimed fist-bumping him, stopping short so I stayed sterile. I’ve never done that before. It felt good.
I closed Krista up and Lina and Adele took her downstairs to the critical care beds. Apparently, the ER had escaped the fire: the mostly-empty parking garage beneath it had acted as a fire break and the flames had spread outward and upwards instead. The surgical floor had actually come off worst. I stared open-mouthed at the blackened walls right outside the OR. The surgeon’s lounge had been destroyed, the fancy coffee machine a melted wreck. “Looks like you’ll be joining the rest of us downstairs for a while,” said Corrigan.
I slumped against his shoulder. I was utterly exhausted, plus I was a little shell-shocked at seeing my burrow laid to waste. “We should go see if they need our help,” I mumbled.
But he shook his head, took me by the hand and marched off along the hallway, towing me behind him. “Bartell is down there organizing everyone. He’ll come get us if he needs us.”
I had to almost run to keep up. I’d never seen him like this before. He was a man on a mission. “But—”
“No buts.” He pulled me into one of the other operating theaters.
The air was fresher and cooler, here, because the door had stayed closed. With the lights off, the only light came from the moon, shining in through the window. He hauled me towards the center of the room and I looked around, confused. “What are we doing in—”
He spun me around and pushed me back until my ass hit the operating table, then put his hands on my shoulders to fix me in place. I opened my mouth to speak again—
“Beckett!” He used that voice.
I gulped. I could see the emotion in his eyes and it made my stomach flip-flop. God, his whole body had gone tense: his hands were like iron on my shoulders. I remembered how he’d tried to tell me something, just after the shooting. It seemed like a lifetime ago. He’d been desperate to get me alone ever since and now he had to tell me….
I shut the hell up and listened.
He rubbed his hand down his face, his stubble rasping. “When I met you, I thought, ‘she’s hiding. Hiding away up here.’” He laid one hand on my cheek and smoothed it back, knocking off my surgical cap and sliding his fingers into my hair. “‘I need to bring her out into the light.’” He shook his head. “I didn’t realize I was hiding, too. That’s what Africa and Libya and working in bad neighborhoods was all about. I was burying myself in it so I didn’t have to think or feel. You were the first person to make me want more again. You stopped me hiding.”
My mouth had gone dry and I was taking panicky little breaths. I nodded.
“The more I fell for you—and I have fallen for you—”
I bit my lip.
“—The more I thought about Chrissy and Rachel. Felt like I shouldn’t be with you.” He was struggling to get the words out, now. “Like I was being torn between you and them.”
Oh God, no….
His voice slowed right down. “I can’t be with you both,” he managed.
This is where he does it. This is where he tells me it’s over. I couldn’t look at him as he said it so I pushed him back, tried to wriggle out from between him and the table.
He frowned and pushed me back into place. “No! Listen!”
I listened, my face and eyes going hot.
“I let them go,” he said quietly.
I felt my eyes widen. I never meant to hurt him. Had I hurt him?
He understood and shook his head. “I let them go,” he said again. And he sounded.
.. peaceful. For the first time, the pain in his eyes was gone.
I drew in a little breath of hope. And then both his hands were buried in my hair and his lips came down on mine.
46
Amy
HIS LIPS PARTED MINE, his thumbs stroking across my cheekbones and tilting my head back to meet him. The kiss was slow and deliberate, loaded with meaning. With every tiny caress of his lips against mine, he let me know: I was his.
His tongue teased over my lips and then plunged deep to own me. I’d never known anyone to be so absolutely certain of anything, so completely sure that this was the future they wanted. Corrigan was stubborn as hell and this whole time, that had been holding us apart as he refused to let his family go. But now that he’d made up his mind, that same stubborn, unstoppable intent was all focused on me. And it was glorious. My heart lifted and I just melted inside, the hot emotion sluicing down and then rising up as pure joy.
A slow rhythm began that wound all the way down our tightly-pressed bodies, chests grinding and hips circling. I felt the swish of my hair falling free as he removed the clip. He buried both hands in it behind my head and then gently combed his fingers down its length. He kissed across my cheek and into my hair and finally just dug his nose between the soft strands and inhaled. “Amy,” he said with his next breath, my name a blast of heat against the top of my head. When he spoke again, his voice had an ache in it, a neat wound painfully tight. My name, said that way, in that accent, slid straight down my spine, a shining silver pebble that landed weighty and urgent in my groin. “God, Amy….”
I pressed in close to him, suddenly breathless, and explored his chest. I slid my palms over the hard curves of his pecs, feeling his heartbeat through the thin scrubs. His hands were moving, too, tracing down my back to cup and squeeze my ass. My heart was dancing: he’s here. It’s real. We’re together. And along with that light, heady excitement, there was another kind, dark and heated, vibrating down my body in dense waves, making me crush my thighs together and press myself even harder against him. The feel of him, the scent of him, had a physical effect on me: I could actually feel my eyes go big and start to dart around and hear my breath going trembly. That part of me I kept locked down deep, that I only let out when I was alone in bed, safely secret under the covers? Dominic Corrigan brought it bursting right up to the surface.
I was obsessed. I wanted to lose myself in this man, to throw myself right into the very center of some green, ancient land that smelled of wet rock and crisp air and disappear into him forever. My hands wouldn’t stop moving: I wanted to grab as much of him as possible, wanted to fill my senses with him. My fingers slid over his sides, thumbs riding the hard ridges of his abs—
That did it. That unleashed him. He gave a kind of growl, grabbed my waist and lifted me right off my feet. He molded me to him, those big hands tight on my ass, as his lips found mine in breathless, frantic hunger. I wrapped my legs around him, my breasts pillowing against his chest. He marched us across the room like that. Each step made me lift and bounce, stroking my clit against the hardness of his six-pack. One of my outstretched feet caught an equipment trolley and I felt it tip, then heard the crash as hardware scattered across the floor.
A second later, he reached the counter he’d been heading for and swept it clear so that he could perch me on the edge. Kidney bowls clattered to the floor but I didn’t care. With his hands freed, Corrigan rammed my scrub top up to my neck, flipped up the cups of my bra and began to roll and squeeze my breasts, his thumbs stroking over my nipples. My yell of shock and pleasure drowned out the metal ringing as the bowls rolled across the tiles.
“Christ, you’re beautiful,” he muttered. He barely broke the kiss to speak, as if he couldn’t bear to stop kissing me. He kept his lips so close, I could feel every hot breath and the bs and fs made little feather-light kisses that drove me absolutely crazy. He squeezed my breasts in a slow, insistent rhythm. “Right from the first time I saw you,” he told me, “I wanted to kiss you. Wanted to fuck you. And I won’t ever, ever stop.”
The words were pure molten silver, burning into my brain and making me groan and lock my ankles around his calves, pulling him harder against me. All the barriers between us were finally gone and I wanted him like I’ve never wanted anything or anyone, a soul-deep ache that I had to satisfy now. I grabbed the hem of his scrub top and pulled it up his chest and off. The few seconds where his arms were trapped and we couldn’t touch each other felt like an eternity. When he hurled it aside and grabbed me again, both of us sighed out loud in relief.
He devoured me with frantic, open-mouthed kisses that started on my hungry lips and worked down my neck and between my breasts. My hands went wild on his shoulders, his pecs and his back, delighting in the feel of him: solid, heavy muscle beneath smooth skin. He was panting, I was panting. The more I touched him, the more he touched me and the more out of control we both got.
He grabbed the hem of my scrub pants in one fist, bunching it up, and pulled. The pants dragged down around my hips, then whipped down around my ankles and off as I lifted my ass. It was only when I felt the cold counter under me that I realized my panties were gone, too.
He kissed down the length of me, from throat all the way to groin. As he crouched, I felt his hot breath in the soft hairs there, felt his rising excitement as quickening rushes of air against my damp folds.
And then he stopped. Just for a second. As he stood up, his whole body was rigid with tension, his breathing ragged. He was just barely holding himself back: I could see how much he wanted to grab me, fuck me. But first—
“Let me look at you,” he ordered in a throaty Irish growl. And he nudged my knees apart and moved between them, then stood there and just looked.
His gaze stroked all the way down my body, from the copper hair on my scalp all the way down to the soft copper hair between my thighs, each square millimeter of skin throbbing and aching in its wake. I’d never been looked at that way before, not with such utter devotion, such complete lust. He reached out with one hand and gently glided his palm over my breast, making me gasp. His touch was worshipful, as if he couldn’t believe he finally had me. “You’re the center of my fucking world, Beckett,” he growled. “All that exists.”
I tried to say that I felt the same, but I was choking up. I’d never thought anyone would feel that way about me. I grabbed his bicep and squeezed and nodded instead. He looked into my eyes and nodded back. He knew.
He slid a hand down between us, still slow and reverent. A thick finger parted my folds and pushed up inside me. He watched me, eyes hooded with lust, as he found my clit and brushed his thumb across it—
I groaned, mouth opening wide, and squeezed my thighs around his hand, twisting around his finger—
And that sent him over the edge. He couldn’t wait any longer. He scooped both hands under my ass and lifted me again, marching me over to the padded table in the center of the room and laying me down on it on my back. He hooked his muscled arms under my knees and with one tug pulled me towards him, so that my groin was right at the edge. Oh God, he’s going to—Right here, on the table—
He shoved down his scrub pants and boxer shorts. His cock sprang out, straining and ready, and he rolled on a condom. He stepped between my dangling legs and I gasped as the head brushed my wet folds….
And then he was in me. Fast at first, rushing into me, and I sucked in my breath and arched my back at the wonderful, silken friction of him. Then he slowed, but kept going, grabbing my hips and pinning me in place as he sank deeper and deeper, my eyes widening and my back arching as he filled me completely.
He leaned down and we kissed, open-mouthed and panting. His hands sought out mine and he pressed them down to the table above my head, his sculpted forearms like tree trunks. He knitted his fingers with mine, possessive but gentle. And then he began to move.
I groaned at how good it was, at the glorious hot stretch as he filled me, at the needful ache as he left me again. The moonli
ght coming through the window lit up his body, each hard slab of muscle edged in silver. He loomed over me: that broad chest and powerful back, narrowing down to that tight, powerful core and the hard ass that let him lunge into me again and again—
I caught my breath and bit my lip as the pleasure started to build, a swirling, violet hurricane that wound tighter and tighter, faster and faster. My fingers squeezed his in time with his thrusts, my hips beginning to rock and twist around him. He growled at how that felt and picked up the pace, moving mercilessly faster and faster, pounding at me until I had to squeeze my eyes tight shut, everything gone except the pleasure, coiled so tight and so hot inside me that I thought I’d explode. I began to cry out with each thrust, high little cries that didn’t sound like me. I was panting and gasping, my hair sticking to my damp forehead. My legs scissored around him, heels climbing his back. God, I was out of control! And it felt great.
“Jesus, woman,” he muttered. The more turned on he was, the stronger the Irish got in his voice and right now it was stronger than I’d ever heard it. “You’re incredible. You drive me fucking mad.”
Me? I did that to him? I was close, now, the climax thundering towards me.
I sensed him leaning down, felt the heat of his breath on my lips and then he was kissing me, hard, staccato little kisses on my panting lips that drove me absolutely crazy. Then his head moved lower and—Oh Jesus! He started doing the same thing to my nipples, catching each one with a quick little swipe of his tongue as his cock hammered into me faster and faster. His words came out as hot little rushes of air against the shining, sensitive flesh. “Beckett,” he rasped, “I’m keeping you forever.”
That did it. I cried out, my back arched and my head pressed into the softness of the padded table. My thighs crushed tight around his waist, but even that friction couldn’t stop him: he kept slamming into me, each hard thrust lifting the pleasure higher. I squeezed his fingers so hard it must have hurt and came with a long, keening scream that they must have heard down in the Emergency Room. I spasmed and shuddered around him and then felt the heat of his own release. At last, I slumped back against the table, panting.
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