The Mile High Club

by Jasinda Wilder

  The four brothers were all around the same height and all had dark hair and the same attractive features and builds, but the differences between them beyond that were vast. Rob, the oldest, was a bear of a man, nearly forty by my estimation, burly and thick and slow-moving, beady eyes and a mat of black, close-cropped hair, heavily scarred across his face as if peppered by shrapnel. Jon was the next oldest, maybe thirty-six. He was as tall as the others, around six-three or so, but he was lanky and wiry and toned, hard arms and lean muscles, sharp features, busy hands, shaved head and a body writhing with tattoos. Shane was the third oldest, and Luke was the youngest. Of them all, Luke was the most classically attractive. He had movie star looks, perfect hair, a straight, proportionate nose, a strong chin, gleaming, almost iridescent green eyes, a body that looked actually carved out of stone, even more so that Shane's--Luke was wearing a leather biker's vest, open over a bare torso.

  We walked into the dark, smoky, cafe, an outdoor place that wasn't air conditioned, and his brothers all stood up. Shane may not have been the oldest, but for some reason, they all treated him as if he was the leader. They shook hands and thumped backs in the male we're-not-actually-hugging ritual. Shane put his hand on the small of my back, too low down to be merely a gesture of introduction, and introduced me as the newest member of the team.

  They all made eyes at me. Luke, the movie star, even went so far as to lower his sunglasses and stare at me over the top of them in a move straight of Top Gun. Shane quirked an eyebrow and narrowed his eyes, an overtly threatening look. Luke raised his hands in an I-surrender gesture and replaced his sunglasses.

  I was amused by all the male posturing, but kept my amusement to myself.

  "Took you long enough to get here," Rob grumbled, his voice gravelly and rumbling like an avalanche.

  Shane waved a hand in dismissal. "I had some business in London. I'm here now. So what's happening in Sudan?"

  "Fighting, what else?" Jon said, with a laconic shrug of his shoulders. "It's focused in Khartoum, mainly. That's where we'll be, I assume. It's where the fighting's the heaviest, and we're most needed."

  Rob glared at me over the top of his micro-cup of coffee, then at Shane. "So, Leona. You ever done work like this?" He waved vaguely eastward. "High pressure sort of stuff?"

  Shane answered for me. "She's spent nearly ten years as an ER nurse. She'll be fine."

  I rolled my eyes at Shane, irritated that he'd spoken for me. "I can speak for myself, you know. And yes, I have. I may not have been in combat, like you four, but I've know how to stay calm under pressure."

  "I hope so," Rob said. "Cause I sure as hell don't have to time to rescue no newbs when the shit starts flying."

  "She'll be fine," Shane said, his voice gruff and irritable.

  Despite his claim that I'd be fine, he looked worried, which wasn't helping my nerves. I'd been playing it cool for Shane's brothers, but now that I was actually sitting in a foreign country, surrounded by millions of people whose language I didn't speak, whose religion I didn't understand, whose culture was completely alien to me, I felt how fully out of my depth I was.

  Shane sensed my hidden fear and squeezed my hand underneath the table.

  Not for the first time, and what would certainly not be the last, I thought, what had I gotten myself into?

  We left for Khartoum the next day, so I would soon find out.

  *

  Khartoum, Sudan

  I did my best to block out the sounds of gunfire and screams to focus on the bleeding young man in front of me. He was jabbering in panicked Arab, his chest fluttering in hyperventilating gasps. I held a sopping bandage to a bleeding hole in his side, pressing as hard as I could while Shane knelt next to me, popping the cap off of a syringe of morphine. His rubber gloves were painted crimson, his clothes were spattered and crusted, his gray-green eyes laser-focused, grim and hard.

  He jabbed the syringe into the victim's leg, depressed the plunger and tossed the syringe to the side. Almost immediately, the young man's pained thrashing quieted, and Shane began packing the wound and taping gauze over it. Shane worked in an unhurried rhythm, each motion practiced and automatic.

  I was barely holding on to my sanity. Shane was the only familiar thing in my world, anymore. He was my rock, the tenuous thread to which I clung when all the world around me was madness and chaos and war.

  He hadn't spoken to me except to issue commands for nearly seventy-two hours, and we hadn't slept much in more than eighty. For every single one of those hours we'd been stuffing wounds with gauze, suturing, injecting morphine ampoules, holding men as they died.

  We finished patching the young man, left him where he lay for Shane's brothers to move to safety. Shane took my hand and pulled me on to the next victim, an older man with a long beard and three holes stitched down his stomach, seeping a copious amount of blood and other fluids. He stank horribly, and was screaming.

  Shane glanced at me, his eyes resigned. He shook his head imperceptibly, and I knew this victim wouldn't survive. Shane plugged him with a vial of morphine, and then another, and the man went quiet, his eyes flashing gratitude at Shane. I heard words I now recognized, "Allah...Insha'allah..." and then he was quiet.

  I'd seen men die before. I'd worked the ER for seven years, starting as a twenty-year-old med student frightened of her own shadow, fresh out of Buttfuck Nowhere in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and I worked at a huge hospital. I'd seen death. I'd attended patients as they gasped their last terrified death. Some of them had even been gunshot victims. But this...this was different. I'd seen this very man get shot right in front of my eyes. He'd been healthy and vigorous, kneeling in a doorway with an AK-47 blasting fire and noise, not ten feet from where we worked.

  Then, in a spray of blood and wet thumps, he was down. This all happened while we were working on the young boy.

  I choked, heaved a breath in, and collapsed in the dirt next to the dead old man. Nothing worked. Sounds dimmed around me, my muscles froze, and my brain turned to sludge. I couldn't move, couldn't breathe. I just wanted to lay my tired body down, close my eyes, and not see blood. I saw, heard, and felt nothing.

  Shane shook me. "You have to get up, sweetheart. You can't stop yet. We're not done." He tugged hard on my arm; something hot buzzed past my ear. "Move, Leo!"

  The urgency in his voice, the very fact that he was yelling got me moving. We wore all-black fatigues with giant red crosses on the backs, on the arms, on our chests, and on our backpacks, clearly marking us as medics. We were neutral, equal opportunity; we helped anyone who was hurt, regardless of political affiliation. They weren't supposed to aim at us, Shane had said, but that didn't stop strays from finding us.

  He dragged me into a run. Everything was a blur, sand, buildings, blue sky, blazing sun, Shane next to me, his hand vise-tight around my bicep, something crack-crack-cracking above us and behind us and all around us. Shane was imperturbable, silent, huge and strong, running beside me, keeping me going. My rock.

  Sound returned, emotion returned.

  We reached an intersection and Shane jerked me to the side and into an empty, bombed-out building, full of rubble and broken furniture. He pressed me into a shadowed corner and shielded me with his body. We both wore body armor, so he was even bigger than normal. He had a pistol strapped to each thigh and a black bandana marked with a red cross covering his hair. His eyes burned into me.

  "You're okay." His voice washed over me, a whispered counterpoint to the cacophony of gunfire and RPGs and screams outside. He was sweating, his chest heaving, and his hands were on my waist.

  "I'm okay," I agreed, gazing up at him.

  God, he was sexy. Shane was all warrior. I found myself turned on by his presence in front of me, his hard green-gray eyes lighting into me, his solid body a shield against the world, unafraid and unstoppable. I was turned on by the way he'd dragged me, shielded me, kept me going, calm all the while. There was also something running through me, a buzzing energy in my veins,
a kind of fire that I couldn't slow or cool or control, a fire deep in my veins and burning in my belly. Shane's eyes fixed on mine, glittering in the shadows, pushed the fire down between my thighs, setting them to trembling.

  It was absurd, but nothing sounded so good at the moment as to feel Shane's hands on me. This was the wrong place, the wrong time, but I couldn't force it away.

  "Is it bad that I'm horny right now?" I asked, watching him through lowered eyelashes.

  He smirked and pressed his hips to mine. "No. It's a normal reaction to adrenaline. I'm always horny after a battle."

  "The battle is still happening," I said.

  "True," Shane said, closing the distance between our lips. "But it's moving away."

  "Shouldn't we be out there?"

  He didn't answer my question, just pressed his lips to mine, a soft and moist heat passing between us, a slow passion rising from the tingling touch of our mouths. Noise and fear and exhaustion drifted away, replaced by Shane's body against mine and his lips against mine and his hands on me. I lost myself in the kiss, vaguely aware of the hammering of my heart and the thudding of shells outside, the complete impracticality and utter improbability of the moment threading its way through my brain.

  We broke apart, and his eyes were crazed with need, his fingers digging into my waist. I felt his heart hammering in his chest. I knew it was crazy, totally ridiculous, but I wanted to jump up and wrap my legs around his waist, rip our pants down and get him inside me.

  He saw it in my eyes, I saw it in his. We moved at the same time, caught up in the frenzy of adrenalinized ardor. His hands and mine moved in synch, unbuttoning the other's pants and shoving them down past our hips. I didn't get my pants all the way off, but managed remove a boot and free one leg.

  Shane lifted me up and I wrapped my legs around him. He drove himself into me in a quick, hard plunge. I buried my mouth into his neck, biting at his jugular to stifle my scream. His hands were under my ass, holding me up effortlessly, lifting me up and dropping me down onto his slick, hard shaft in a frantic rhythm: lift-plunge, lift-plunge, lift-plunge.

  I was there, right at the edge from the very first stroke of his cock inside me. The danger of the moment, the realization that anyone could walk in at any moment, and not just see us, but potentially harm us, even kill us...it made it that much hotter, that much more erotic simply from the forbidden insanity of the moment.

  Shane twisted in place and pressed my back against the wall, and now we were facing so he could watch the entrance with one eye. I shoved against the rough grit of the wall with my spine to drive my hips down on him, and he was rising up on his toes to ram into me, slamming with not-quite-painful force using the strength of his legs and core.

  Our lips met again, and now the explosions were taking place inside me as well as beyond the wall, thunderous detonations rocking my body, causing me to clamp around him, arms and legs locking on his body with crazed, impassioned strength as my climax hit me. I screamed into his mouth, and now he was beginning to come, slowing his strokes as he unloaded into me, grunting against my lips, the sweat from our foreheads mingling, our cries merging, our orgasms blending.

  I was draped over his shoulders, my face next to his, and out of the corner of my eye I saw a flash movement near the doorway, a glint of skin. I reached down without thinking and drew one of Shane's pistols, pointing it at the doorway. I wasn't sure what came over me, what caused me to do it, but there it was, a pistol in my hand, pointing at another human being. Shane tensed, drew one arm out from beneath my buttocks. I clenched my legs harder around him to support my weight on my own. He too then had a gun in his hand, and I couldn't see what we were really even aiming at except the doorway, but I kept it trained there until Shane lowered his and holstered it.

  He lifted me off him and set me down. We adjusted our clothing and I gave Shane his gun back, still unable to believe what we'd just done.

  "That was..." I started.

  "Crazy," Shane finished.

  "Yeah." I felt daring, and not a little juicy. "Crazy, but fun."

  Shane dug in his bag and brought out a wad of gauze. "Here," he handed it to me and turned his back. "Thought you might want to clean up a little."

  I took the gauze and cleaned up, grateful and touched by his thoughtfulness.

  Shane watched me as I cleaned up, a smirk on his face. "Have you ever shot a gun before?"

  I buttoned up and tucked in and adjusted. "Nope."

  "Would you have been able to pull the trigger?"

  I tossed the used gauze on a pile of rubble and stood up, facing him. I shrugged. "I don't know. Is there any way to know how you'd react until it happens?"

  Shane shook his head. "No, there's really not. I was just impressed that you drew." He ducked his head, seeming almost embarrassed. "It was my brothers, by the way. At the door. They saw us."

  I laughed, not exactly amused, nor surprised. "They're still out there, aren't they?"

  "Yep, probably."

  I raised my voice to carry out the door. "You might as well come in. We're done now." I glanced at Shane. "You weren't exactly subtle about the status of our relationship, by the way. With your brothers, I mean. You might as well have stuck a sign on my forehead that read 'mine'."

  Shane shrugged, not looking up as his three brothers trooped into the room. "I know my brothers. If I hadn't staked my claim on you, they'd've made a move. Then I'd have to kill them. Which would suck for business."

  Luke flopped down against the wall next to Shane. "You sound like Dad. It's always all about business."

  Shane didn't look up still, scraping in the dirt at his feet with his finger. "It was a joke, jackass."

  "So was mine, jackass."

  Rob squatted near the entrance, stripping off a pair of reddened rubber gloves. "Shut up, you two. You're both jackasses."

  Jon came in last and dropped a pack near the center of the room, flopped down and used the bag as a pillow. "I think we've hit the wall. We're long past the point where we're going to be effective. We need to rest."

  None of them had even looked at me, not even Shane. I realized this was their way of dealing with having walked in on us. Not wanting it to hang in the air between us for the rest of the time I spent with them, I decided to take the bull by the horns.

  "You're all jackasses. I'll say it, since all of you are being babies about it: yes, Shane and I were having sex. Right there where you're sitting, actually, Luke."

  Luke made a face and scooted over nearer his brother.

  Shane laughed silently, his shoulders shaking. "Way to be, Leo. I think you just scarred Luke forever."

  Luke squirmed, stood up and crossed to the other side of the room. "I didn't need to see that, didn't need to know that." He grinned at me, though.

  "None of my business," Rob said, still not looking at me. "You're both consenting adults. Shane can screw who he wants."

  "My only issue is the middle of a civil war might not be the best place for it," Jon said. "But then, it ain't me doing it. Sexual arousal is a natural reaction, though. The body needs a way to purge the hormones released during the stress and adrenaline of a battle."

  "That's what Shane told me," I said. "We were just testing his theory."

  The Sorrenson brothers were all suppressing chuckles, trying to maintain their composure by not looking at anyone or anything. For some reason, this irritated me. Something told me if I wanted the respect of these men, I'd have to earn it.

  "So, Shane," I said, as casually as I could, "are you feeling purged? Or should we ask your brothers to step out for a few minutes?"

  Shane choked on his laughter, glancing at me in surprise, then at his brothers, who were all red-faced and shaking.

  "I think I could go for another purging," Shane said.

  "I ain't moving," Jon said, not opening his eyes. "But feel free. I won't interrupt."

  Luke was the first to laugh openly, and soon all of them were laughing, even taciturn and practic
al Jon.

  "You're all right, Leo," Luke said. "I can see why Shane brought you. You did good today, too. Not bad for a newb."

  "Told you she'd be fine," Shane said, standing up. "I've gotta take a leak."

  Jon stood up. "I'll watch your six, then. Shouldn't go anywhere alone."

  The two men left and I was alone with Rob and Luke. Rob was a huge, silent presence in a far corner, digging at the dirt with the tip of a serrated combat knife. Luke just sat, looking at me, as if he couldn't figure me out.

  "What?" I asked.

  Luke shrugged. "You're not like the other women Shane's dated."

  "I wouldn't know." This was getting into tricky territory for me. I barely knew Shane, and it was moments like this that I felt it the most poignantly.

  "It's a compliment," Luke said. "Most of them are...uh, well, not like you."

  I laughed. "Very helpful."

  "You're smart, and capable," Rob said. "And you're not a skittish little bird."

  "Thanks, I think."

  "How'd you end up here?" Luke asked. "Shane doesn't bring people with him. He doesn't hire people. This is a family thing, and it's usually just us four."

  I shrugged. "It was kind of a last minute thing. I haven't known Shane very long."

  The brothers exchanged a look that I couldn't interpret. Something was telling me my presence was a serious conundrum they simply couldn't figure out.

  "Quit interrogating her," Shane growled as he came back in, Jon in tow. "I knew she'd be fine, and she was. That's it."

  Luke raised his hands in a gesture of capitulation. "Hey, I was just curious." He grinned at Shane, a greedy expression on his face. "You owe me five thousand dollars, you know."

  Shane's face went hard, his expression shuttered and angry. "Not now, Luke."

  "You lost the bet. I expect you to pay up as soon as we get back States-side."

  "I said not now, goddamn it."

  Something told me this had something to do with me. "Shane? What's he talking about?"

  Shane sighed and thumped his head back against the wall. "Thanks a bunch, jackass," he said to Luke. To me, he said, "Things are quiet outside. Let's go talk."