by Olivia Gates
She still couldn’t believe he’d seen through her disguise. No one had during the week she’d been in Zohayd. Her captors hadn’t, and she’d spent a whole day in their grasp. But he’d sensed her femininity in moments, with his senses almost blinded by the night’s dimness, the urgency and her disguise. He’d also had no tactile evidence, with the buffer of clothes—especially her jacket and the corset flattening her…assets.
Yet he’d known. And just as he’d felt her vibes, she’d been immersed in his. She’d felt every hot granite inch of his formidable body, smelled him over the overpowering stench of her prison, over the dispersion of the desert and the deluge of post-accident mayhem. She’d heard each inflection of his voice through the din of her inner cacophony and the madness of their escape and crash.
And instead of reacting to his maleness as she had to her captors’—with dread, revulsion, aggression and desperation—she was finding it bolstering, soothing and, if she could believe her body’s reactions in these insane circumstances, arousing.
She hadn’t found a male this arousing in…ever.
And to find this man so might mean it was she who’d hit her head. Or something. There must be something wrong, if all she wanted right now was to snuggle into him and hold on tight.
As if responding to her need, mirroring it, he leaned in, pressed his face lightly into her neck, breathed her in and groaned again with intense enjoyment. “Even with male cologne and all the traces of your ordeal, you smell heavenly. And you still haven’t told me your name, ya jameelati.”
She pulled back from his hypnosis, from the idiocy of her untimely weakness. She had to patch up this obdurate hulk. “And you still think if you ask me enough times I’ll give you a different answer.”
His eyes stilled on her. Then he nodded, as if coming to a decision. “So your name is T.J. What do the T and J stand for?”
She blinked. “You believe me?”
“Yes. My instincts about you have been right-on so far. They’re saying you’re telling the truth now. They even insist you probably haven’t developed the ability to lie.”
“You make me sound like an incontinent blabbermouth. I gave my kidnappers nothing.”
“Withholding the truth is not lying. It can span the spectrum of motives, from fear to nobility. Doing it under threat of harm or worse is courageous. But in almost all situations, telling an untruth is cowardly. And I had no doubt of your courage from the first moment. So, with that established…your name?”
T.J. drew in a shaky inhalation then blurted it out. “Talia Jasmine. Satisfied? Now where is that damned emergency kit?”
She heard his intake of breath, felt it sweeping inside her own chest like an internal caress. But it was the wonder that flared in those preternatural eyes that started her shivering again. With everything but cold.
Without a word, he reached overheard, opened a compartment and produced a huge emergency bag.
She pounced on it. Relief swamped her as she made a lightning-fast inventory of the contents. Everything she could possibly need.
She took out a saline bag, hooked it in an overhead protrusion, dragged his right arm over her lap and pushed the needle into his vein, then secured it with adhesive tape and turned the drip to maximum for quickest fluid replacement.
He tugged at her chin, pressed something to her lips. A bottle of water. She suddenly realized she was beyond parched. She downed the bottle in one go. He watched her as if he wanted to gulp her down himself, to decipher and assimilate her.
She licked her lips, cleared her throat. “Okay, I need you to expose the wound and hold this flashlight over it for me. Better do it in the back of this monster so you can lie down.”
He smiled in that seriousness-melting way of his. “I can give you two out of three of your demands. I can with pleasure take off my clothes. And I can shed light on the mess I made when all of my senses were so focused on you that I missed the pursuer who could have killed me with one haphazard shot. I shudder to think where that would have left you.”
“As if I’m in such a great situation now,” she mumbled under her breath as she snapped on gloves.
“We’re both in one piece, with me only slightly punctured, which in a hostage-extraction op is about the best possible situation. But I have to inform you I had to sacrifice the back end of the chopper to preserve the cockpit while crash-landing. I doubt there’s any space back there for even one of your species to stretch out.”
She looked up from preparing her surgical tray. “My species? Women you mean? Last I heard we were a gender.”
“Felines.” His smile widened as he reached for the swathe over his head to start the process of exposing himself…his wound for her. “I know of nothing else capable of exiting a six-foot-high window with as much economy of movement and grace.”
“They’re called gymnasts. I was one till I hit eighteen. Seems my abilities reactivated under duress.”
He finished unfurling the yards of material from his head in movements she could only describe as…erotic. This was a man used to barricading himself in mere cloth before plunging into the desert, pitting his wiles and will against its cruelty and capriciousness.
Suddenly all thoughts evaporated. The last coil fell off, and a mane of gleaming mahogany cascaded in layers of satin luxury to his shoulders.
She swallowed. “You should talk.”
“Oh?” One formidable wing of an eyebrow quirked as he shrugged off the outer layer of his night-colored desert raider/ninja/Black Ops hybrid outfit. He seemed to grow bigger in only a skintight, high-collared, long-sleeved top.
She gave him an encompassing gesture. “You should be on stage playing the Lion King yourself. With minimal or no makeup.”
And he gifted her with another of those amused rumbles that proved his great feline origins.
Then he tried to yank off his top and groaned, his face twisting in obvious pain. “Seems raising my left arm won’t be one of my favorite activities for a while.”
“Do you have a change of clothes on board?”
“Yes. And other supplies that I’ll access once we’re done with this.”
“Okay, then.” She swept scissors off the tray and proceeded to cut off his top.
He hissed as the coolness of the blade slid against his hot skin, groaned as she reached the parts that had stuck to his wound, then growled as her gloved hands glided over his flesh, separating the adhesions and palpating the edges of his wound.
There should only be pain. But to ears that were hyperaware of his merest inflection, the pleasure was unmistakable, too.
Tremors invaded her hands, traveling all the way from her core. And this from gloved and accidental contact while exploring his wound. What would touching him with no barriers do to her if she were exploring his power and beauty for pleasure instead?
Work, idiot. Stop fantasizing about this hunk of impossible virility and just patch him up. You’re probably in ten different types of shock and hallucinating most of this anyway. Moron.
Continuing her raucous inner abuse, she worked in silence.
Suddenly a realization dawned on her. All the time she’d been filling hypodermic needles with local anesthetic, analgesic/anti-inflammatory and broad-spectrum antibiotic, he’d been handing her vials, receiving filled syringes and placing them in the correct sequence on the tray like the best of her long-term assistants. He continued to help her with total efficiency and obvious knowledge of what went where and would be used when as she prepared forceps, scalpels, sutures, cautery, bandages, wipes and antiseptics.
He hadn’t been bragging when he’d said he’d take care of his wound. This was a man versed in more than hostage-retrieval ops. He was no stranger to field emergency procedures.
Just who and what was he?
She opened her mouth to ask and one of those fingers she’d bet could bend steel feathered down her cheek again. The gentleness of his touch almost pulverized her precarious control. Tears churned at the back o
f her eyes. She swallowed them along with any questions.
He asked them of her. “You weren’t exaggerating when you said you’d treated bullet wounds before. Just who are you, my heaven’s dew?”
Her hands stilled from checking her supplies before she started the procedure.
No one had ever realized the meaning of her name.
“Your parents are to be applauded for choosing such a name to befit your wonder and delicacy.”
She shot him an affronted look. “I’m not delicate!”
His smile filled with teasing indulgence. “Oh, but you are, incredibly so.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “How’s your jaw?”
Something hot and delighted rumbled deep in his chest, revved in her bones like a bass line made of urges instead of sound. “My jaw will always remember its meeting with your fist. But sheathe your claws. Delicacy doesn’t equate with fragility when describing you, but with refinement mixed with delectability wrapped around a core of resourcefulness. That’s what you are. An exterior of pure gold, a filling of sheer delight and a center of polished steel.”
Her lips twitched. “You sure you didn’t hit your head? Or are you always so ready and free with spontaneous poetry?”
“I’m the very opposite. Women call me a miser with words. I never say what I don’t mean. What I don’t feel. It’s no wonder I was chosen for law enforcement and not diplomacy.”
“So among the hordes of women who’ve stampeded through your life, I’m the only one who, in the aftermath of a rescue mission out of a Mission Impossible movie, has moved you so much you’ve found your inner poet.”
“You’ve summed it up perfectly.”
He suddenly turned around and lay back, placing his head and shoulders on her lap.
He grinned up at her as she froze, stared down at him. “This is the only place I’m lying down around here.”
She gulped, looked into his upside-down eyes and repressed the urge to smooth her hands over his face, to thread her fingers through that incredible mane fanned over her lap, and most insane of all, to bend down and kiss his forehead before she started poking him with needles and slicing him with scalpels.
Before she succumbed to any of those ridiculous urges, he transferred the tray she’d prepared to the floor, then turned to his side to present her with an optimum view of his injury.
She almost choked when he looked up from his sideways position and purred, “And that’s the best way to hand you instruments as you work.”
She gave a jerky nod and a throat-clearing cough, hoping to expel any mind-fogging stupidity.
Then proceeded to examine his wound.
Harres looked up at this enigma in a woman’s form whom he’d saved. And who was in turn saving him.
He held the flashlight at an optimal angle for her. And while she injected his side with local anesthetic, he examined her.
She was beyond beautiful. Unique. Magical. He hadn’t told her the half of it when she’d charged him with being poetic.
She finally made that throat-clearing noise he’d come to realize meant she was fighting for composure. And he bet it had nothing to do with the medical part of their situation.
“Okay. The bullet made a clear track through your muscles. It hit the tip of your scapula, grazing three ribs. No tendons or nerves are severed. There is muscle damage at the bullet’s entry point, then as it came out the front it tore a four-inch wound in your skin. But the bleeding is the worst of it, since a few arteries have recoiled out of reach. I’ll have to widen the wound and deepen it, to fish them out and cauterize them, and for future drainage. I’ll place deep sutures to repair the most traumatized tissues, but will leave the wound open to drain for later closure, once the swelling goes down, so no infection is trapped within.”
As she spoke, she continued to implement her plan with flawless execution. He continued to assist her.
Every minute brought more unprecedented sensations. It wasn’t just physical reactions to feeling her firm, warm thighs beneath his head, or breathing her hot, intoxicating scent with every breath. He’d never experienced this synergy, not even when working with his brothers or his men. He’d never let another person take charge of anything while he was around, let alone his own physical well-being. He’d never lusted after a woman anywhere near this intensely, let alone while simultaneously respecting the hell out of her capabilities, relying on her efficiency and wanting to pamper her with all he had and protect her with his life.
Was this real, or was everything being amplified by the circumstances combined with a dose of blood loss, survival elation and gratitude?
But when he added in his mounting physical response and mental appreciation, he was back to square one.
This was as real as anything got. And from the way she kept stroking him with her eyes after she finished each step and with her hands after each cut as if to apologize for the necessity of hurting him to heal him, from the way her hands and lips trembled at his merest indication of discomfort, he knew.
It was just as real for her.
It didn’t matter who they were, or how and when they’d met. What they’d done since, the seeming lifetime of life-changing events and feelings they’d experienced together, meant they could leap over most stages of development and acknowledgment of attraction.
She finished the procedure and he sat up, helped her wrap his torso in bandages. As she began to draw back, he couldn’t bear it. His right hand wove into her hair, kept her close, brought her closer. And she lurched away.
He stilled, his heart jolting with the same force.
After a long moment, he removed his hand, whispered, “Are you afraid of me?”
“No.” Relief deflated him at her vehement denial. Then she grinned sheepishly at him, boosting her beauty to dizzying heights. “Which might be the stupidest thing I’ve ever thought or felt, considering I’m in the middle of nowhere with a hulk of a man in a hostile land where I know no one. But there you go. I’m not afraid of you. Not for a second. I’m…the very opposite.”
Warmth flooded him at her admission. He’d been right. She felt the same way.
Another unknown urge took him over, the desire to tease her, even as he wanted to devour her. “Now that’s a little white lie. You were so afraid of me for at least a few seconds that you almost gave me a permanent disability.”
“That was before I saw your face, heard your voice. Before that, you were this…huge chunk of night that had come to claim me.”
“You were right about the coming to claim you part.” He reached out to her again, slid a hand around her waist, drew her to him. “So are you going to tell me where you learned to perform field surgery like that?”
“In medical school, where else?”
“You mean you are a doctor?”
“Last I heard that’s what came off said school’s production line.”
“So everything I thought you were was false, from your gender to your profession. Is there no end to your surprises?”
A grin trembled on her dimpled but now colorless lips. “Now why would there be?”
The urge to capture her lips, nibble color and warmth back into them surged inside him, almost brimmed over into action.
“No reason at all, ya shafeyati.”
“What does this mean?”
“My healer.”
“So how do you say ‘my rescuer’ in Arabic?”
“Monqethi.”
She repeated the word after him, that voice that even when she’d tried to deepen and roughen it had coursed through him like an intravenous aphrodisiac now becoming a vocal caress that soothed his insides, infused his every cell.
Then she heightened her exquisite torture. “And ‘my hero’?”
His vocal cords locked against the tide of temptation. He whispered, “Buttuli,” listened to her hypnotic melody begin to repeat it, before his control snapped.
He swooped down and took the rest of her tremulous homage inside him, a
long with that breath that had been tormenting him with its arousing fragrance. She gave him more, in one gasp after another, opened for him.
He wanted to drown in her, drown her in him, give her a glimpse of the need and ferocity she ignited in him. His lips claimed hers as if he’d brand her, his tongue thrusting deep, breaching her, draining her of moans and sweetness. She took it all, seeming unable to meet his passion yet overwhelming him with her surrender.
“Talia…nadda jannati…my heaven’s dew…”
“Not fair,” she moaned into his lips. “I don’t know your name…let alone what it means.”
He drew in her plump lower lip, suckled it until she cried out and took his tongue deeper.
“Harres…Harres Aal Shalaan.” He started to translate, had said only “Guardian—” when she gasped then pushed him away.
He stared down at her, all his being rioting, needing her back against him, her lips crushed beneath his, her heat enveloping his suddenly chilled body.
She gaped up at him.
Then she finally rasped, “You’re an Aal Shalaan?”
Harres nodded, already acutely sorry that he’d told her.
Now it would end, the spontaneity of the attraction that had exploded to life between them. Now that he’d told her who he was, nothing could ever be the same. There hadn’t been a woman of the thousands he’d met in his life, the hundreds who’d pursued him, no matter how attracted to him they were, who’d seen him as anything but an amalgam of status, power and money. He was never just a man to them. He’d cease to be just a man to her now.
He exhaled, his gaze leaving her kiss-swollen lips in regret as he waited for artificiality to settle into her guileless eyes, for calculation to take hold of her open-book reactions. He’d often chafed at the trappings of his status and position and wealth. He now positively cursed them.
Then she again did the last thing he could have expected.
Her gaping became a glare of such revulsion and hostility, he might as well have turned into a slimy creature before her eyes.
Then she spat, “You’re one of that pack of highborn, lowlife criminals?”
