by Kym Dillon
Marnie had walked off a plane straight into an intense operation in which the patient had been lost. She had gone from there to the laboratory trailer, and then after a break of just a few hours, she found herself performing solo surgery on a man who should not exist. It was enough to make a grown woman weep, but as one of her instructors had told her, there was no crying in the operating theater. She pushed back the fear, she pushed back the worry and the wonder and the outright confusion, and instead she worked on doing what she had wanted to do her whole life. She was using her skills to save a life, and she battled for hours with death for this one man's life.
At some point, hours later, she realized that she no longer felt fear or pain. Instead, despite the weariness that had sunk into her bones earlier, she felt a calm settle over her. At the bottom of it was a bedrock of certainty that this was the work that she had been prepared to do her entire life. Before her stint in the hematology labs, before medical school, before high school, even, Marnie had been driven by the urge to save lives. This was the elemental heart of her profession.
Twice, she was certain that she had lost the man under her hands. Twice, she braced herself for the ice-cold realization that the patient that she had been working so diligently to save had become one more dead body on the slab. Twice, he shocked her. His pulse continued to thrum, his heart continued to beat, and she felt a surge of joy so fierce it almost made her shake.
Finally, Marnie closed the wounds as best she could, her hands barely trembling at all. She had done everything she was able to do. All else would be up to the man himself. For the first time, she could take a good look at his features, and she did so now with a nearly scientific curiosity.
The man was large and heavily muscled, easily topping six and a half feet. A white man was rare in this part of Tanzania. He was deeply tanned, though she thought that at least some of that may have been his natural coloration. His face was stern, but there was a sensuality to his lips that reminded her of the marble statues of the Italian Renaissance, where male beauty was never thought to be feminine, only beautiful.
I think this is the most exquisite man that I've ever seen in my life, she thought, and the thought nearly had her looking around in shock. It was the truth, but the thought had come through so clearly, so very powerfully that it had the force of a religious epiphany.
She didn't just think that this man was beautiful; she wanted him. It was as if he’d awakened something inside her for the first time in her life.
Almost hesitantly, Marnie reached up to touch a curl of hair falling over his brow. There was a scrape there, mostly healed, and she frowned at the dried blood around it.
There was a mystery here, one that her scientific mind picked at. The scrape looked old, at least a few days healed. However, the blood that had dried around it was fresh. The wound would have been cleaned not long after it occurred, or at least the blood would have been wiped away or smudged from perspiration. That hadn't happened. Judging just from the blood, the wound should still be fresh. Judging from the wound, the blood shouldn't be there at all.
Marnie shook her head, feeling as if she were moving through a mire of tar. She had been up too long, and now that the adrenaline had pulled back from her system, she was left shaky and trembling. She longed for a bed, a place where she could simply lie down and withdraw from the entire confusing world for a while, but she knew that she could not leave this man unattended, not for a few hours at least.
She settled in on the camp chair next to him, but it was barely fifteen minutes before she could feel herself start to squirm. Marnie had thought that being as tired as she was would mean that she could sleep anywhere, but apparently, that wasn't true. Despite herself, she started eying the table where she had been operating on the man in question. It was cleaned now, as best it could be, and there was plenty of space.
Besides, he's going to be out of it for most of the day. No reason not to stretch out for just a minute. No one's ever going to know...
Marnie never would have done this under other circumstances. She never would have infringed on a patient's space like that or curled up next to someone's unconscious body. However, right now, far from home, lost and exhausted beyond her capability to imagine it, she gave in. She put away thoughts of desire and need, blood and wounds, and tried to rest.
She meant to only shut her eyes for a moment, but then darkness took her with no mercy at all.
In the darkest part of the jungle, the tiger stalked with grim purpose. It was a hunter, one of the finest killing machines to be birthed out of the mountains of Asia. This was not its home. This was not its preferred prey. Still it stalked with a determination that had earned it fear throughout the world.
It could scent something delicious on the wind. There was something lush and perfect ahead. For a tiger, for any animal that lived by tooth and claw, scents like that meant killing, and the part of the tiger that relished the hunt and the kill woke up, ready to conquer, ready to slay.
The tiger had never been bested. It had never been beaten. If it had been, it would be dead. So, it had grown used to victory, strong and even cruel. There was no mercy in its world. It was kill or be killed, eat or be eaten. It was something the tiger had understood its entire life.
The smell was getting strong, far stronger. It sunk into the tiger's consciousness changing it in some elemental way. It was puzzling, but the tiger ignored it. The tiger was concentrated on the power of that smell, what it meant.
The tiger finally came to clearing where the prey awaited. By now, it was nearly mad with hunger and craving, but what lay beyond shocked the beast mind, pushed it back to that of the man who had lived so long with the beast.
It was not a red deer or a fat pig in the clearing
No, it was a delicate human female, her skin as pale as moonlight, her eyes holding the blue of a perfect summer sky, her hair as gold as the sun itself. The tiger realized that what he felt was not hunger, but something far more powerful and compelling. This was need and desire, and he would have her...
Or he would die.
4
"Well, hello, sunshine."
At first the words seemed to come through a dream. Marnie had heard those words before, of course, but for once, they were stated without a leer or without a kind of roughness that told her that she needed to be very careful and very wary about what was happening around her.
Instead there was a soft sensuality to those words that made her feel instantly safe. She started to burrow into the warmth that was settled next to her, and then she woke up.
With her awakening came the full realization of where she was and everything that had recently transpired. Yelping, Marnie rolled off the table she was sleeping on. She would have hit the floor with a thump if a strong arm hadn't shot out and wrapped around her waist. She was pulled back onto the table in a single jerk, just one more completely bizarre thing that had happened to her in the last twenty-four hours.
"Oh my god!" Marnie squeaked, looking up into a pair of bright green eyes.
Lying comatose on an operating table, the man she had treated last night was beautiful. Eyes open and his body animated with vital life, there was something terribly striking about him as well.
His body?
Memory flooded through her with force, and she struggled away from him to stand next to the table. For a moment, he simply stared at her in surprise. Then he let go. She had the fleeting feeling that if he had been unwilling to let her go, she never would have gotten away, but she ignored that thought for the moment.
"You shouldn't be up already," Marnie blurted out. "You're going to be recovering from your wounds for... for..."
She blinked because the sheet she had draped up to his shoulders last night was now pooling around his waist as he sat up. The wounds that had been so vivid last night were fading already, the centers still red but the edges pink with the advanced stages of healing tissue. Marnie couldn't help but notice how broad his chest was and how po
werful his arms and shoulders before she tugged her gaze away.
"What are you?" Marnie found herself whispering. "What can heal like that? That should be impossible..."
There was a flash of something through his eyes, something strange and so foreign that her mind shied away from the conclusion that it was trying to draw.
"I'm Jax Vander Broek," he said. "In regards to healing, I suppose that's just living right..."
He said the words lightly, but there was a kind of intensity to him that made a flame alight inside her. She knew that her face was heating up and turning red, and that was before he had slipped off the table to come towards her. He still wore a pair of grimy trousers stained with blood, and they drooped low over his hips, forcing her eyes to his trim waist for a moment.
He definitely was not moving like a man on death's door, and she backed away from him until she could feel her back hit one of their supply cabinets.
"I..."
"So, you were the one who patched me up last night," he murmured, and speculatively, Jax ran a tender finger over the curve of her cheek. There was something beautifully electric and warm about his touch, and she nearly tilted her face closer before she remembered herself.
"I... I don't know you," she managed to get out, and he gave her a smile that was white and sharp.
"You will. I'm not someone who hides my desire, little sunshine. You're beautiful, the most beautiful woman that I have ever seen... Tell me your name."
It came out more as an order than a request, and Marnie's mouth responded before her brain could intervene and tell her that perhaps a man this mysterious and dangerous should not know her name.
"I... I'm Marnie Arbinger, Dr. Arbinger," she said, belatedly trying to exercise some authority over the situation. "Please, I need you to sit down again, so I can examine you... I need to make sure that everything went well last night..."
She thought, somewhere in the back of her mind that was still able to think, that his eyes were the deepest green she had ever seen, an emerald shade that put the jungle around them to shame.
"I'm fine," he said dismissively. "My kind heals fast. What fails to kill us outright makes us stronger.
"No," Jax continued, "I am far more interested in what a beautiful woman like you is doing so far away from the civilized world. Tell me. Tell me everything about you, Dr. Marnie."
Again, it was a command rather than a request, and there was something inside Marnie that, despite her independence and capability, wanted to obey.
Instead of giving in, however, she seized every ounce of her authority, lifted her chin and gave him a stern look.
"I will not do anything of the sort," she said, and when he raised a dark eyebrow, she grabbed the first thing that came to hand. It turned out to be basin of water, and without thinking, she shoved it at him.
"Here, take a bath," she babbled. "You...It's going to be far better for you if you get clean. You'll... You'll heal better!"
For a moment, Jax looked profoundly stubborn, as if he had absolutely no interested in her words at all. Then, a small spark of humor crept in, and he grinned. There was something about that grin that felt like a hand passed slyly between her legs, but to Marnie's relief, he took the basin from her.
"All right," he said, as if he were doing her an enormous favor. "All right. Questions later."
Marnie figured that she must have made some sound of agreement. At the very least, he allowed her to escape the operating tent, and for the moment, that was all that she cared about.
Outside, dawn was just beginning to streak the camp with purple and blue. The air still held a little of the chill from the night before, but she could already feel the heat start to rise from the ground. The camp was slowly shaking itself to life, and to her relief, Marnie found the mess tent operational.
She was startled when some of the other people, medical professionals and labor alike, greeted her by name and with cheerful waves. The encampment was much like a small village. She figured that word must have gotten around about who she was. Marnie was a little surprised that no one asked her about the man she had treated last night. In fact, no one acted as if it was unnatural at all, and she wondered once again what she had gotten herself into.
Feeling in a mood for quiet, Marnie finished her food quickly and then took a muffin from the pile of stale pastries that were on offer. It would have been the smart thing to go hide out in her tent and try to get a few more hours of sleep, but right now she didn't think that she wanted to be enveloped in the stuffy nylon shell. Instead, she took a shower in the camp washing facilities, put on a fresh new set of clothes, and wandered the slowly awakening camp. She found herself back at the rock where she had spotted Jessica the night before.
She scrambled up on the rock, and for a few moments, she looked out over the grasslands, the jungle to her back, the sky opening up above her. She was overcome by a calm she had never felt before. She took several breaths, and wondered what in the world was going to become of her, before she realized she was not alone.
The man standing beside her was large enough that for a moment, she thought Jax had followed her out to the rock. After a few seconds, she realized it was the other man, the one who had come in with Jax, the one who had been arguing so bitterly with Jessica.
He was watching her with a slight smile on his face, and it struck her that though they only looked a little alike, mostly height and build, there was something else about this man that seemed to recall Jax. There was something dangerous about both of them. The man stood with his arms crossed over his bare chest, watching her as if he had every right in the world to do so.
"You were the one who tended to my companion last night," he rumbled, and she nodded.
"I did. He seems fine this morning. I can't explain it, and I certainly can't make heads or tails of it, but he looks as healthy as if he hadn't been slashed to ribbons last night."
The man grimaced, nodding.
"That must have been shocking for you," he said sympathetically. "It's... he’s fine though. It's natural for our kind."
"Our kind," she echoed. "What does that mean? What’s our kind? It's like you're telling me that neither of you are… human."
"My name is Marcus," he said instead of answering her question. "Mind if I come up there with you?"
For a moment, it occurred to her to refuse, but instead she shrugged and scooted over to make space.
He didn't bother with climbing up on the rock. Instead, with a single leap he claimed the place next to her, smiling a little at her flabbergasted face.
"It's all a lot to take in, isn't it? I think it happens to everyone who comes out this far, who has spent most of their lives in the United States or in Canada or Western Europe. Things are different here, that’s all. Bigger, more real, somehow."
Marnie could feel her temper cracking just a little.
"You know, I don't believe that."
"How do you mean?"
"It's not the part of the world. I'm from the Midwestern parts of the United States, the place that has the greatest temperature shifts all over the world. I see the same place go from subzero in the winter to sometimes over a hundred degrees in the summer. A friend of mine works in the park service in Montana, where there are plains and mountains as far as the eye can see..."
She met Marcus's eyes directly. He looked surprised, wary and a bit intrigued all at once.
"I don't think it's this place that is making things so strange for me. I think it’s you and Jax."
For a moment, Marcus froze, and then to her shock, he chuckled.
"You know, she told me that you were smart, but I guess she didn't tell me what kind of smart. You know more than books, don't you?"
"Who told you that?"
"Jessica," he said, and when he said her best friend's name, there was a kind of warmth and longing to it that made Marnie ache. Her best friend had found a man that spoke so lovingly of her... what in the world was wrong.
"Jessica
was pretty angry with you last night..."
Marcus flinched a little at that, and a darkness crept over his expression.
"It has been a difficult and trying time for both of us," he began diplomatically, but then they could both hear the grass swishing and determined, no, angry, steps heading for them.
"Jessica," cried Marnie, and for a moment, her mind was simply filled with happiness at seeing her friend. They still hadn’t been able to catch up after being apart for months while Jessica had started her work in Tanzania. It felt good to see her this morning, like a rare pleasure, something wonderful pulled from a world of great uncertainty.
Marnie slid down the rock to meet her friend, but in a moment, she could see that something was wrong.
Jessica was rumpled as if she had just climbed out of bed, her clothing askew and her short black hair out of place. There was something beyond furious in her eyes, and even though Marnie knew that this was her friend, a woman she had trusted for years and years, she shrank back a little.
Jessica threw her a look that was both maddened and scornful, and then she turned her eyes to Marcus.
"This is where you come after you crawl out of my bed?" she snarled. "You can’t wait to go sniffing around the new girl on the block?"
Marcus's face darkened, and he leaped down, landing lightly close by. There was something grim on his face as well, but Marnie read there the same sadness that she had seen on Jessica's face the night before. There was more than just a lover's quarrel here, and Marnie could feel something dark hanging over them both.
"You need to stay calm, Jessica," he said, his voice lowered. "There's nothing going on here. I just came out to think, and I found Marnie out here..."
Marnie could have told Marcus that that was the worst thing that someone could say to the strong-willed Jessica. Even under the best of times, she didn't like being told what she needed to do, and this moment was no exception.
"Why the hell would I be calm when the man who told me he loves me only hours ago is sniffing after my so-called best friend before I've even wake up? God, is this what you do when you are out on the range with Jax? Am I simply an ego stroke, you just come back here to pride yourself that you can?"
