by Olivia Gates
He turned away, his fists pressing his head, pushing back the crushing pressure of lust as he half fell down in the only chair in his tiny room.
He’d almost climaxed just looking and craving. He shouldn’t have left himself to starve till now, he should have taken sustenance where it had been offered, where it was still offered.
But nothing would have been sustenance, not after Savannah. Savannah who was here again, the never-ending feast he’d deprived himself of. And he still would. Nothing had changed or, if it had, had only changed for the worse.
Just tell her she can stay. She’ll leave soon enough on her own.
He rubbed his face, pressed eyes that felt swollen, inflamed, like the rest of him. Then he rose to stand over her as she leaned back on the bed. She looked as if he’d ravaged her for real, ready for more, for anything…
Dios. This was going to be impossible.
Get it over with, then get out.
“Welcome to Colombia and the MSU mission, Savannah.” He swallowed the rasp blocking his breathing. “I hope you’ve made the right decision coming here. MSU reconnaissance tomorrow at ten a.m. sharp. You can stay here till then.”
Savannah watched him turn away, her eyes clinging to his every move as he left the room. The door clicked behind him and the smooth sound ricocheted along her nerves with the force of a close-range bullet. She jerked, sagged back, hurting, her thighs pressing together, desperate to silence the cries and stop the melting.
She’d sat there talking to him, feeling her mind splitting in two. One mind that had her saying all the sane, right things while the other had urged her to writhe against him until she’d made him drag her to the floor, mount her, feed her hunger, release all of his inside her…
She’d been deluding herself, thinking she could be near him and not lose her mind again.
So much for keeping on the right track!
“This is all out of order!”
“It’s GAO’s schematics that are out of order.” Javier’s answer came from a foot above and behind her, lazy, deep, maddening—in every way. “This is the new and best functional layout for the MSU.”
Savannah looked around once more. Nothing was where it belonged. Nothing looked as it should. All those days spent poring over obsolete schematics! All that detailed knowledge she couldn’t impress him with! He’d changed the whole place out of recognition.
Frustration burst out of her. “Just when did you do that? When did you have all the changes manufactured and installed? And why didn’t you update GAO’s database on the specifications of the MSU, or at least notify them of what you were doing? Do you know how much time I spent learning every in and out of the place? A place that no longer—that never existed?”
He unfolded one of the stations and sat down, his eyebrows rising at each notch up in her tone, at each sentence that merged into the last, until they disappeared into the lush hair that gleamed navy blue under the MSU’s overhead fluorescent lights.
Incredulous, was he? And was that amusement, too? Was it? Ooh…
Four storming footsteps took her to him, a bend at the waist pushed her face into his. Her fists balled on her hips, daring him to twitch those lips once. “Are you enjoying this? Are you? Is that a smile? Huh, is it?”
Her intimidation worked like a charm all right. He burst out laughing.
She’d never seen him laugh. Not once. She’d seen him smile, smolder, frown. She’d heard him drawl, whisper, roar in ecstasy, but never, ever laugh.
Could there be anything more beautiful? Could she last much longer before she just grabbed and devoured him?
She threw her hands in the air. “Yeah, laugh, why don’t you? You’re not the one who’s expected to co-direct this mission while asking everyone you’re supposed to direct what and where everything is! You’re not the director who needs directions!”
Another boom of laughter greeted her laments, had her sagging against the stainless-steel lining of the MSU’s interior. Inciting his laughter was powerful. It could be addictive. She wanted more of it.
She went after more. “And what are all those unlabeled cabinets and multitude of identical panels? What does your MSU really stand for? Maze of Similar Unknowns? Mislaid, Slapdash and Unorganized?” She paused for inspiration and a critical, teasing look up and down his awesome, shaking body. “Male: Species Uncertain?”
That brought on a fit of spluttering and choking.
She stood watching him wiping tears and coughing at the mock-severe face she pulled. Oh, what was the use? She’d do it sooner or later anyway. And sooner looked good.
“Right, well, there’s one way to shut you up, or save you from laughing yourself to death. Come here.”
Her hands bunched on his shoulders, tugged slowly at his shirt collar. She felt his surprise. Satisfaction leapt through her as she savored every expression that fast-forwarded across his face. Then she sealed his half-open lips, taking her gasped name and his scalding breath into her.
Javier. From the first moment. Everything about him, everything with him had been beyond reason, way out of bounds of right and wrong. He’d warranted one-off rules. Still did. And it had been so long without this, without him. No reason was good enough for that kind of deprivation. Had he suffered, too?
Tell me…
Her tongue glided along his lower lip, her teeth and lips following, biting, suckling, anxious for his taste and heat, for his surrender, his dominance.
Tell me!
His body told her first, with a relentless thrust against the thigh that pressed between his. His hand spoke in spasms of passion in her hair, dragging her down, closer. His legs continued the confession, rough, urgent, spreading hers, his other hand beneath her buttocks bringing her where contact was a necessity. Then his lips started telling her the rest…
“Ahem!”
The mockery hit Javier first. Then the realization. Of what he was doing, what he’d let himself in for.
Savannah hadn’t heard, it seemed, was still offering her mouth and her body to him, ready for anything he had in mind. He still had his mouth open on hers, his body still surging, unmindful of the intruders. Push her away.
He did, watched shock and disappointment clouding her stormy-skies eyes and almost pulled her back. The others would leave, eventually.
He’d gone mad. Again.
He swept them both up to their feet, kept his body in front of hers, blocking the avid glances of his colleagues and giving her time to come down and pull herself together.
“You’re late!”
His bark sent his crew members’ eyebrows shooting up. What were they so surprised about? It was almost eleven a.m. They were late, and it was because they were that this had happened. If they’d been on time, he wouldn’t have been alone with Savannah, wouldn’t have ended up almost taking her in the first five minutes of this damned mission.
At least they’d made it here when they had. Ten more minutes and they would have walked in on a far more X-rated scene.
Would he have gone all the way? Here? Would he really have been unable to stop? Yes, you would have. Yes, really, his body moaned.
“Cool it, Jav!” That was Alonso Carreira, his mission anesthetist, and regrettably his best friend, the one who’d announced their presence. The double entendre only spiked Javier’s heat even more. “No need to knock us out. One almost out-of-it crew member is enough for one day. That’s why we were late.”
“It’s my fault really.” Caridad Dominguez, one of his two surgical nurses, spoke up, her tranquil voice more subdued than normal, her brown eyes lifeless. “I felt a bit faint and everyone insisted I rest before I got on my feet again.”
“Gave us quite a scare until she was, too.” Alonso winked at him. “Who would have handled sandwiches if we had to go without Cari?”
Caridad’s pensive eyes fixed on Alonso for a few seconds. It almost had Javier smacking the smaller man’s thick head. The woman loved him! It was a mystery why, when the insensitive
wretch kept teasing and tormenting her, oblivious to what he was doing to her.
“Let’s take a look at you, Caridad.” Javier opened one of the unlabeled cabinets that had confounded Savannah, brushing against her as she headed towards Caridad. His still throbbing body jerked. Down, amigo.
Caridad shook her head, looking even worse. “I’m fine, Dr. Sandoval, really.”
Savannah shook her head. “Not with that gray tinge to your complexion, you’re not!” She steered her to the emergency stretcher, the one thing that wasn’t folded inside the unit at the moment. “C’mon, hop up.”
“You’re the American doctor Javier told us about, Dr.—Dr….”
Miguel de Oliveira, their trauma surgeon, groped for Savannah’s name until Elvira, their obstetric surgeon and his wife, came to his rescue. “Dr. Savannah Richardson! It’s great to have another woman surgeon along. Another woman, period. We’re grossly outnumbered on this mission!”
“How can fourteen men outnumber three women?” Luis Marques, their pediatric surgeon, looked at Javier, inviting his corroboration of his question.
Javier gave it to him. “They can’t.”
“The boss has spoken.” That was their oldest crew member, their driver, guide and security chief, the intimidating Esteban.
Alonso grinned at Elvira. “And now you’ve become four, you’ve outnumbered us. So, Javier, you were welcoming Dr. Richardson, showing her some homegrown Colombian hospitality, huh?”
Javier glared at Alonso and considered wiping the mischief off his narrow, tanned face.
It was Savannah who answered. “Uh, we were more like catching up. We go way back—sort of.”
Sort of, indeed! How cool and practiced. But why should that burn him? He’d known that already.
She turned to him, avoiding his eyes, taking the sphygmomanometer and thermometer from him. Then she returned to Caridad. “Cari—can I call you Cari? Though Caridad is a beautiful name. What does it mean? I get the impression all Spanish names have a meaning.”
Caridad blinked at Savannah’s rapid words. “Charity.”
“Lovely! Just like you.”
A tremulous smile broke over Caridad’s face, answering Savannah’s enthusiasm. “Gracias! And your name?”
Savannah finished recording Caridad’s BP, and put the thermometer in her mouth as she took her pulse. “Some kind of tropical grassland. I’ll never understand what my parents were thinking when they called me that. With my complexion and coloring, I’m more of a tundra!”
It was a testament to everyone’s good English that they all understood the joke and laughed in appreciation, each joining in with a comment or an anecdote. Then introductions went round and the scene that had greeted the crew’s entrance was dismissed.
Javier watched Savannah chatting, fitting in. Sparkling. Over-sparkling. Shaken. So—she wasn’t cool at all.
That’s better. Something loosened inside him.
In minutes he’d sent everyone off with final directions before departure, and was turning to join Savannah and Elvira who’d been continuing Caridad’s check-up. Everything tensed inside him again when Savannah met him halfway, then twisted when she put her hand on his arm.
“I don’t get it. She has all the signs of heat exhaustion, bordering on heatstroke.” Her open face was serious, engrossed, her whisper audible to him alone. “But Bogotá’s climate is so mild, it can’t be more than 75 out there.”
“Maybe it’s just fever.”
She shook her head. “I really don’t think so. The others said she vomited and collapsed then looked confused and disoriented. She still is, I think. Her blood pressure is low, her temperature is 106 and her mouth is bone dry. I’ve put her on hyperthermia and rehydration treatment—cooling packs, saline fluid replacement. And Elvira has undressed her and turned up the MSU’s air-conditioning.” She gave a shudder. “As you must have noticed.”
Javier looked back to the prostrate Caridad, realization dawning on him. “Maldita sea! Caridad’s father had a stroke recently. He works in a glass factory. I remember her saying she and her older brothers would take turns filling in for him so he doesn’t lose his job. She must have finished her shift at the furnace then, no doubt, took her siblings to school, carrying the two youngest and towing the rest.”
Savannah’s eyes became aquamarine with sympathy as they swung back towards Caridad. “Big family?”
“Even bigger than mine.”
“She has more than seven brothers and sisters?”
That still overwhelmed her, didn’t it? And how could it ever cease to? It must be outrageous, even criminal in Savannah’s eyes that people should have so many kids, especially under the conditions in this country. Even without those, the idea of so many siblings must be weird, even repulsive to an only child like her.
Just another thing stressing how alien to him she was and would always be.
He nodded. “Eleven. And about a dozen nephews and nieces.”
“All in the same house?”
“Around and about.”
She didn’t voice her evident horror but only exhaled. “Do you think it’s wise to go on the road with her in this condition?”
“No real reason to hurry. Tell you what—we’ll give her time for your comprehensive cooling-rehydrating measures to revive her. If her BP isn’t up to 110 over 80 and her temperature isn’t back to the baseline by the time I’ve finished giving you a crash course on the MSU’s new layout, I’m taking her home. She may well stay behind. They surely need her at home as much as anyone we’ll serve on the road.”
He steered Savannah to the vestibule of the MSU. “C’mon, let’s start at the very beginning.”
“A very good place to start? I hope you won’t set your lecture to music!”
He laughed. This was getting weird. She’d never made him laugh before. There’d been no humor, no light moments between them. Even her answering grin was new, nothing like the steamy, knowing smile that had warped his reason and made him mistrust his senses…
He shook his head. “Setting it all to music might make everything stick in your mind, replace all that data I’ve made redundant.”
“Hmm. A tutorial music CD of the MSU’s specs. That would be some teaching tool. I can see it now. Anatomy: The Sung Seventeenth Edition. Putting the Beat Into Diabetes Control! Rapping Your Way To Your MBA!”
He laughed again. It was getting even weirder here.
“Will you perform my CD? Can you sing?”
He shrugged. “Haven’t you heard? All Latin-American men can sing. Can you?” Just what personal insights had they ever exchanged?
She gave a self-conscious giggle. “Not if I want intact glass around, and not for lack of trying—on my father’s part. I think both my voice and piano teachers quit the job in desperation after me.”
Poking fun at herself was another thing he hadn’t known she could do.
Shift this back to the professional. After their out-of-control scene back there, he needed to keep away from personal territory. They were outside again now, so he could recap everything from the exterior in. He started immediately. “The differences between GAO’s schematics and this MSU stems from it being a much more compressible model to allow us to go on some of the very narrow and rough roads up hills and through jungle areas on our way to our target towns and villages. Tell Elvira to hand you our itinerary later.
“The MSU measures thirty-five feet by nine feet when closed, and eighty by twenty-seven feet when expanded. It also expands vertically, to a final height of ten feet.” He pointed to the ingenious mechanisms where the trailer expanded. “I’ll teach you how to operate the expansion controls once we’re back inside.”
Savannah whistled. “And here I was worrying about how small it looked, when it will be one and a half times as big as the McCauley mobile units I’ve studied, and those are the biggest available mobile units. Did you have everything specially made from scratch?”
“The trailer was made to my specs
, yes. The towed generator unit, too. Usually mobile medical units have one separate trailer for surgery, X-Ray, lab, IC and so on. Incorporating everything in one unit is more effective and far less costly, but the costs still shot off the charts anyway—which was why I was forced to accept funding without checking its origins.” Bile rose inside him. She’d been right about him not forgetting in a hurry. But there was nothing to do about it now. Or ever.
He handed her into the entryway at the left side of the trailer. “We have a stretcher lift here for emergencies. Those panels you ridiculed so much are patient stations when expanded, accommodating up to fifteen patients. Here’s the medical gas system and these are the communications system, fiber-optic and copper network for telemedicine functionality, and the nurse call system. That’s the nurses’ station, with systems monitoring, double-locking narcotics cabinet, medication refrigerator, master alarms, and a radio-CD player for preoperative and recovery.”
“Javier…”
He steered her onwards. “That’s the infrared scrub area, and I can see you were thrown by having its position reversed with the soiled and clean utility rooms. These are really something. The soiled room has ultrasonic cleaner, nitrogen blow-gun, instrument sink, pass-through for biohazard storage and pick-up—”
“Javier!”
“What?”
“Richardson Health Group has a busy public service schedule and I did know that GAO was one of our beneficiary organizations. But I had no idea this gave them any kind of say over GAO’s operations, that their donations came with strings.”
“And now you know, so let’s get past this.”
“We’ll get past this only if you tell me you believe I had no part in it. I need to know we can work together without anything hanging over us.”
His laugh wasn’t born of humor this time. “Are you for real, Savannah? You think that will hang over us? Let me tell you what will—that panting little scene we started our working relationship with. And if I were one to hold grudges, your daddy pulling my project’s strings would be nothing compared to the way you laughed in my face when I proposed to you!”
