Forged

by Jacquelyn Frank

  “Don’t … move,” she said, fumbling for her phone. “I’ll call for help.”

  “No!” He reached out to grab her by her front, her thick coat suddenly feeling like nothing in the grip of his fist as he jerked her forward. She felt like something fragile all of a sudden, like he could snap her in two at his whim. “You see what I am. I canna control it. The pain … They would see what I am.” He looked up then, searching the dark predawn skies. She and her mother always spoke in the freakishly early hours before dawn, and they always called each other through a cup of tea and coffee, respectively, touching base and bookending their days to the sound of each other’s voice. “I need shelter. Please. I canna be caught out in the daylight.”

  Katrina sat there on her knees, the wet snow melted by her body warmth seeping into her jeans, frozen with fear and indecision. In the end it was the bright red of another gush of blood that galvanized her.

  “This is crazy, this is crazy,” she said under her breath in a fast, heated whisper. “Okay,” she said so he could hear her. “I’ll bring you inside. But … that doesn’t mean I won’t call for someone. If you try to hurt me … my dog will attack you.”

  “Oh,” he said, his chiseled lips turning into a wry smile, “the dog that was just merrily licking my face?”

  Crap. Damn it, Karma, she thought with heat.

  “W-well … I-I’ll scream or call for help.”

  “Thanks for the warning. Once we’re inside I’ll snap your neck to shut you up.” She gasped as he gave her another wry smile. “Doona tell the villain what you’re planning tae do when you doona know what he’s capable of. I willna hurt you. I need your help. And fast. I’m getting weaker by the second and you willna be able tae move me if I become dead weight. You’re far too small.”

  He mentioned her smallness almost as if it were a terrible failing on her part and that got her back up. People had treated her like this tiny little missish thing all of her life and frankly it just served to piss her off. She was small, no doubt about that, but she could pack a punch if necessary. And after his warning about keeping her plans secret, she bit her lip to keep herself from saying as much.

  Instead she reached out to help him up. It was clearly all he could do to gain his feet, and she realized just how critically wounded he was. But she couldn’t see the damage just yet with all that blood obscuring her ability to determine the worst of it. Despite his concerns over her diminutive shortcomings, he leaned heavily into her all the same, making the disparateness of their heights seem suddenly more obvious. As they trudged up the sloping drive she began to fear her ability to get him to safety. Her muscles began to burn under the strain of climbing with his significant weight against her just as the house came into view through the thickness of the pines.

  “How much …”

  Farther, he wanted to know. The blood coming from him was soaking the left side of her clothing and she knew why he couldn’t speak. He was using all of his focus to stay on his feet.

  “It’s here. Right here. Not much farther. You can do it,” she encouraged him. It seemed to give him strength and he lifted his weight further onto his own feet and propelled them forward quickly. At the walk of the house, however, he stumbled and went down, staining her stone walkway with his blood. “Come on,” she said, fearing he couldn’t go farther and, like he had said, she wouldn’t be strong enough to get him into the house. She glanced up at the sky, the dawn doing nothing to lighten it because of the bitter cloud cover heavy with snow. Worse still, the wind was picking up, promising a blustering and brutal blizzard.

  But the weather was a ways off and it was the least of her worries. Except, a storm could cut her off from any help, and she would be helpless to him …

  But right then it was he who was helpless to her, and that galvanized her into action.

  “Up!” she commanded, yanking at the arm he’d lain across her shoulders. “Get up. Only a little farther. The dawn is coming,” she warned him, not knowing why that should trouble him so much. Maybe it was the coming storm that worried him. Rightly so. Washington was known for some mighty mean snowstorms. Especially at this altitude.

  She pulled him up and he got his feet under himself in what she suspected was his final act of strength. They stumbled to the door and she hastily juggled him and the doorknob, his weight on her making her fumble at it. Finally it gave way and they staggered into the house.

  “Somewhere dark. No light. Protected.” His words jolted out of him on groans of obvious pain. Far be it from her to argue.

  “I know the feeling,” she muttered.

  She went for the nearest bedroom, which turned out to be the master suite. All the other rooms were on the second floor and she knew navigating stairs was out of the question for them both. Even without his weight, the burning muscles of her legs couldn’t possibly have gotten her up them.

  “That’s it,” she said with a grunt, “I’m getting my fat ass in gear and getting on the treadmill. In the spring it’ll be better … A few treks up and down the mountain, right?”

  After much grunting and bumping into walls, they made it into her bedroom and fell into the bed together, his weight flattening her until she could barely breathe. She shoved at him, but he was barely conscious and she realized that the weird stone thing was once again shifting in and out of being on his body … if that were even possible. Hell, it had to be possible. She was watching it with her own eyes. Feeling it against her own skin. Before he turned to stone completely and she found herself trapped under a ten-ton statue, she strained to push him off her with what remained of her strength. But as much as she shoved at him, she knew it was his help alone that allowed him roll to off her.

  She wriggled out from under him and gained her feet by the bed, panting hard for breath. Damn it, she thought inanely as she saw him lying big and bleeding in her bed, she really loved that quilt set and she was never going to be able to get that blood out.

  Thinking he was unconscious, she reached out and poked a finger against the stone-looking skin on his arm. She couldn’t believe it, but it really was stone! A rough stone like that of an unpolished statue. How in the hell was that possible? It couldn’t be … but it was. She was feeling it right under her fingertips.

  “No outside light. Please,” he said, startling her. Begging her. “The daylight will make it impossible for you to help me, and I will die. I promise you, I will die.”

  She nodded hastily, reaching out to give him an awkward pat of reassurance on the large, curving muscle of his shoulder. “Don’t worry. I’ve already closed the storm shutters.” And started a fire in the fireplace that warmed both the master bedroom and the living room with shared sides, its warm light dancing over them both. That and the bedside light was enough.

  He exhaled then, a long shuddering breath of his final strength bleeding out of him, and suddenly she remembered what all of that blood meant and forgot about her damaged clothes and quilts. She ran for her bathroom, yanking out the supplies she had squirreled away in dribs and drabs over the years just in case … well, just in case. And now, it was in case. She found a basin and loaded it up with gauze, iodine, and 2-0 vicryl sutures. She belatedly washed her hands and snapped on a pair of purple nitrile gloves, even though she was already drenched in his blood. She would work better with clean hands and the traction of the gloves.

  She hastened to the bed, moving up to him and hitting both of the bedside lights. She turned him and realized there was no more stone skin on him. He was entirely a flesh-and-blood man. For some reason that comforted her a little. But the idea that that could change at any moment sat heavy on her thoughts. Suddenly she felt the burning presence of her phone in her back pocket. She should call for help, never mind his protestations. He was out like a light and there was nothing he could do about it, he was just that weak. But he had surprised her thus far with his ability to power through his weakness, and even if she called for help, it could take anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour b
efore anyone would make it up the mountain to her. This was what she had feared, and the only thing she had feared, about living alone so remotely. She had imagined things like this, evil men stumbling upon her house and she alone and helpless.

  But nothing about him made her sense that he was evil, per se. After all, he had pointed out to her what he could do to her … inferring the opposite, that he wouldn’t do anything to hurt her.

  In the end she decided to leave the phone silent in her pocket, even as she berated herself for probably being stupid and very likely to regret it. But the healer in her jumped to the forefront, and she grabbed gauze and began to wipe at the source of his blood. She gasped when she finally cleared the field and could see the extent of the damage. A cut deep into his side, as if someone had swung a sword into him, trying to cleave him in half, and down his side and leg he was violently burned, third degree in most places.

  Again, she felt the burn of her phone in her pocket.

  “Doona,” he rasped, as if he could read her mind.

  “I won’t,” she soothed him. “But you are terribly injured. You need a hospital.”

  His mouth turned grim and his eyes fluttered open. For the first time the golden topaz of his eyes jumped out at her. They were beautiful, she thought with no little awe, as was the rest of him. He had the darkest, deepest black hair she’d ever seen. Not blue-black … not dark brown … but purest black. It had the lightest curl to it as it fell in waves to just above his collar. He had an aquiline nose and deeply sculpted cheeks, the cheekbones wide. His mouth was full, like for a woman, only unmistakably male. She imagined a mouth that large had a smile just as wide. A killer smile, she was sure. He was not pretty or boyish by any stretch of the imagination, but was still strongly handsome.

  But there was no time to further enjoy the view. She had to clear her field once again and she grabbed her suture kit. As deep as the wound was, she worried about the contamination of the leaf litter and whatever had caused the injury in the first place. She first used saline to wash it clean until she was satisfied there was no debris in the wound, and then she squeezed the bottle of iodine over him and prayed for the best.

  “This is going to hurt. I don’t have anything to numb the area.” The area? Hell, she was practically going to have to do surgery to put him back together.

  “Do it,” he rasped. And then, fortunately for him, he passed out completely. She felt it ripple throughout his body, almost like the deflation of sudden death. She worriedly checked his breathing and found it, shallow and weak as it was. She turned her attention to his wound, threaded her needle, and went to work.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Kat had finished her ministrations a while ago, but then she’d had to shower the blood from her own body and change her clothes. Once she had done that she went about the process of cleaning up the rest of her patient. The wound was clean and neatly sown where it could be sown, but his jeans had been burned onto his body and removing them was no easy trick.

  She had a pair of surgical scissors, heavy gauge and meant for cutting through some pretty tough stuff. She’d already cut his jeans down the left side and away from his wound, so now she worked them under his jeans on the right and slowly cut the thick, resistant denim away. It was no easy trick and her hands were burning with an ache by the time she cut through the ankle hem. She didn’t know if it was because the material was particularly tough or if it was her adrenaline crashing and her hands were shaking like crazy from it, but she had to stop a couple of times for fear she might accidentally cut him. The last thing he needed was to lose more blood. As it was, he was very pale and drawn around the lips, his skin having a grayish sort of pallor to it, but this time it was not from stone. It was what anyone might look like after leaving so much blood on the ground. He hadn’t woken up since the last time, and although that was sparing him a great deal of pain at the moment, that also made him dead weight.

  She grabbed his jeans by the ankle and, digging her feet into the wood floors and putting her weight into it, she dragged the cut denim from under his body.

  And now she had a naked god in her bed. She hadn’t really paid any mind to him while he’d been in dire need, but now she drank him all in, head to toe, and tried to come to grips with the idea that anything human could be built so big and so beautifully.

  Wait a minute. How do you know there’s anything human about him? she wondered. But looking at him now, after having her hands on him and her fingers within his tattered flesh, she wondered if what she had seen before had been merely a trick of the predawn light. But no, she gave her head a shake. Sight was one thing, but this had been touch as well and she had felt the roughness of stone. She had felt the weight of it against her body. Logic screamed at her that it couldn’t possibly be true, that she hadn’t seen and felt what she knew she had seen and felt.

  Impossible. The whole situation was impossible. She took out her phone and for the hundredth time she debated calling her mother.

  She shoved the phone back in her pocket at that thought and gingerly picked out the remnants of his jeans from the burn wounds, debriding his flesh meticulously until it was bleeding freshly and clean of all debris and dead flesh.

  After cleaning up the bloody mess she’d made, making certain every inch of him was cleaned and tended to, she marched to the kitchen and made herself a cup of hot, liquid java nirvana. She normally didn’t drink coffee at this hour, but she figured she would need it if she was going to tend to her patient for the next few hours.

  She’d fantasized about mainlining it, hooking up an IV to get it straight into her bloodstream like any good junkie would desire, but alas, via stomach was the only delivery method to be had, her medical expertise notwithstanding.

  Speaking of medical expertise, it was nice to know she still had it. It had been five years since her tenure as a physician’s assistant in one of Manhattan’s busiest ERs. Like any skill, it was easy to lose one’s knack for it. And while she couldn’t say she was up on the latest methods of doing things, she was content to know that she knew enough to get by.

  She pushed away any other ruminations about her skills and where she had last practiced them, ghosts too easily stirred up whispering mockingly in the back of her brain.

  “Five years. You’re a whole new you now,” she said softly to herself, soothing herself with the mantra. Sometimes it worked. This was one of those times, but probably only because she had much bigger fish to fry.

  And no sooner had she thought that thought than the naked behemoth himself came stumbling down the hallway, lurching from side to side like a drunkard, the light of a fever burning in his eyes.

  “Is it night?” he croaked. When she didn’t answer fast enough he reached for her and slammed her up against the wall with a bone-jarring thud. After working in a city ER for years she had seen this a hundred times, a patient waking up disoriented and aggressive. Just the same, there were no orderlies or security guards there to bring him down. It was just her. Little ol’ her. “Answer!”

  “No! It’s daylight and you need to be back in bed before you rip those stitches!” Everything about him screamed of a superhuman man. His temperament was still up in the air, but everything about him reeked of dangerous power.

  Not to mention nudity. A state he didn’t seem to notice at all. And being a former trauma nurse, she shouldn’t be noticing, either, but it was kind of the elephant in the room. Elephant meant in more ways than one. There was nothing at all small about the man. His wife, if he had one, had to be an equally big girl. Kat couldn’t begin to imagine being on the other end of someone so big in so many ways. It was one time where she was happy to admit she was way too small to even consider tackling that particular mountain.

  She turned her voice soft and coaxing. “Come,” she said gently, her hand running soothingly down one of the forearms trapping her against the wall. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”

  He scoffed. “There’s very li’le that can hurt me.”
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br />   But she could tell he was struggling to remain upright, his brawny body shaking in fine tremors at first then expanding into harder ones. “Please come lay down in bed for me and rest. It’s not like you can go anywhere with a storm closing in.”

  He growled and gave her a shake. “Offer me bed one more time, wench, and I’ll be taking you with me.” He leaned in close, his nose touching her temple as he snuffled against her rather like her bear of a dog might do. “You smell very tempting, but as li’le as you are I wouldna risk it if I were you. I’ll no’ be an easy lover.” His voice dropped an octave. “I like to grab at my lass, dragging her tight again’ me, and devouring her smells and tastes before I even think about fucking her to within an inch of her life … but maybe, even as small as you are, you’re wanting to be devoured like that?”

  Oh yes, please! part of her cried suddenly. Wait. No! her saner thoughts prevailed. She shook off the momentary melting craving his sensual threats caused, the bold words having jump-started her brain into illicit musings. There will be none of that, she told herself sternly.

  Right before he ran a hand up her ribs and completely embraced her breast with palm and fingers.

  She yelped, grabbed his hand, and smacked it away.

  He growled impatiently. “First you offer me bed, then you push me away. Quit your teasing, woman.”

  “I am not teasing! I only meant—” She huffed out a breath, realizing she was trembling just as powerfully as he was, and she told herself it was from fear and not because he’d just weakened every bone in her primitive body.

  “There will be n-no wenching tonight,” she stammered as firmly as she could, pushing at the massive wall of man with an ineffectual palm against his chest. There was some sort of raised burn on his chest, something long healed but purposeful in shape … as though he’d been branded. Two snakes, wrapped around a dagger in an infinite figure eight, each snake seemingly devouring the tail of the snake before it in what seemed to be a never-ending cycle. The heavily defined and branded pectoral muscle jumped, ostensibly at her touch. Like a kid seeing something fascinating and new, she wanted to repeat her action just so she could see the reaction once more. Truth be told, there was a wave of virility pounding off him, catching her in the surf of it, dragging her around like a helpless child at the beach. But there was nothing at all childlike about the heat his words sent snaking through her.