Her Sexy Beast

by Karin Shah

  She opened her mouth to tell him she was fine, but he suddenly lifted her bodily, his fingernails biting into her shoulders as he moved her out of the way, eliciting a startled squeak. Her exclamation nearly masked a horrible wet thud.

  She spun to find the source and realized why he’d relocated her as her back found the support of the risers.

  Something blunt and vaguely rectangular protruded from Roan’s lower abdomen.

  He’d taken a knife meant for her.

  A scream tore from her vocal cords. Terror glazed her vision. Her body had blocked his view. If it hadn’t, or he hadn’t stopped to move her, he wouldn’t have been injured.

  His attacker seemed as stunned at the success of his thrust as she was. The corners of his mouth pulled back and down. His face ashen, he raised his hands palms out and shook his head as if to deny the dire result of his actions.

  The gray-haired older townie who seemed to be the leader, swore. “Shit! Scott, what did you do?” He swept the other townies with his gaze and circled his thick forearm in the air. “Let’s get out of here!”

  The youth who’d stabbed Roan shuffled in place for a heartbeat and took to his heels. His movement jarred the other townies into dashing back to their vehicles, piling inside and into the cargo beds. The wail of the engines revving back to life and squeal of the tires peeling onto the road, burrowed under her skin.

  The crisp morning air seemed to drop thirty degrees.

  Slim, Sue, and the others darted toward Sofia and Roan, but Sofia grabbed Roan around his lean hips. “Someone call an ambulance!” she ordered and strained to keep him from toppling as his knees buckled and he sagged to the ground.

  “No!” Lu hurtled toward them. “No one call! He’s not documented!”

  His weight was too much and Sofia was forced to relinquish him to gravity, slowing his descent so that he wouldn’t injure himself further.

  She glared up at the redhead, who’d reached them by now, her hands braced on her knees as she panted over the knot of people surrounding the wounded man. “That doesn’t matter if he dies!”

  “Just let me see.”

  Sofia hesitated for a moment, but her hysterical brain brought Tia’s words flooding back. “Former combat medic.” She scooted back to allow the other woman in.

  “Okay. Lay him down.” Hands reached out and aided Sofia in stretching Roan’s huge body out on the hard-packed dirt and gravel. He groaned a little at the movement. Sofia shook her head. How the hell was he still conscious?

  Lu knelt, her bird-like, tattoo-latticed hands skated from the obscene entry-point of the knife to his wrist. Sue shoved a phone with a timer open where Lu could see it.

  Sofia’s raging heartbeat slowed a hair. The flame swallower might be a sarcastic mischief-maker, but her steady hands and even breathing shrieked calm competence.

  Lu finished taking his pulse and said something that sounded like a number, but Sofia’s ears were filled with the rushing of her blood and she might as well have been underwater.

  The number meant something to Sue though. The big woman nodded. “Shit, he’s tough.”

  Lu returned her attention to the knife. “He’s lucky.”

  Sofia almost sputtered. “Lucky?”

  Lu turned her pointed chin in Sofia’s direction, but didn’t take her eyes away from Roan’s lower abdomen. “Roan’s so large, even a knife this size might not have hit his femoral artery or the lower intestines. “I’m going to need to get him some place cleaner to see more.”

  Lu glanced directly at Sofia. “If I get a better look and I think I’m wrong or his pulse gets weaker, I’ll call for an ambulance, documents be damned.”

  Roan grunted in protest. “No hospital.”

  The fact that he could speak reassured Sofia further. She patted his calf. The pads of her fingers longed to linger on his skin, probe the texture of those bronze-painted scales that fooled her eye so completely, but she ignored the impulse. “We’ll see.”

  He grumbled but didn’t answer. Slim approached. He’d found a backboard and he laid it beside Roan’s body. It was too short. His legs would dangle off the edge, but it was better than nothing.

  Roan started to slide onto the board, but Lu slapped his shoulder. “Keep still. We’ll handle this.”

  Sofia almost laughed. She cleared her throat instead, and stood, paddling the air on each side of her hips with her hands to get the crowd to retreat.

  Sue, Slim, and Lu made short work of sliding him onto the pallet, but the three weren’t enough to lift him. Several of the roustabouts joined the effort and less than two minutes later, after a hasty debate, they maneuvered him next to one of the large picnic tables.

  Sue turned to a gawking bystander. “Don’t just stand there! There’s unopened plastic table cloths in the bunkhouse storage cupboard.”

  The gawker took to his heels in the direction of the bunkhouse trailer.

  “And bring my yoga mat and a clean sheet,” she called after him. “And speed it up, he’s getting heavy.”

  “And someone get my kit from my airstream!” Lu yelled.

  Roan closed his eyes for a minute, his face tight with pain. Sofia’s throat ached. She squeezed her hands together to stop herself from touching him.

  As soon as the runners returned with the requested items, Sue set them to work spreading the mat on the table, while the contortionist ripped open the tablecloth pack. “Be careful not to touch it any more than you can help.”

  The incongruously pink tablecloth was spread over the mat on the table and the group hastily deposited Roan onto the surface.

  Sue groaned and rubbed her left shoulder. “You better survive, Roan. I’m going to need a personal masseur after toting your heavy ass.”

  A ripple of tentative chuckles leavened the tense atmosphere of the group, but it had the ring of released nerves about it. In fact, Sofia could swear she smelled the odor of fear, pain, and anger in the air.

  If she could relax enough she would laugh at the fancy. Even if she suddenly possessed some extra-keen sense of smell, how would she know what emotions might smell like?

  The clean sheet was draped over Roan and Lu flipped it back, cutting his T-shirt, shorts, and boxer briefs away with surgical scissors and covering him back up, leaving only his hip and his groin just past the knife exposed, barely maintaining his modesty.

  There was a snapping sound as Lu and the former nurse pulled on blue nitrile gloves. Sue quickly set out the necessary items from one of the carnival’s first aid kits and Lu’s things.

  People wandered closer to see what was happening.

  Lu lanced a glare at the crowd, taking in Sofia as well. “Sue and I can take care of this. The rest of you looky-loos get back to your business.”

  Sofia bit back the argument balanced on her tongue. As much as every particle of her being told her to stay, Lu didn’t need distractions. “You heard her!” she said, and forced herself to walk away.

  Chapter 11

  Roan stared up at the glassy gray sky. Was it going to rain? No. He stopped himself from shaking his head. Everything, even Lu and Sue, seemed to have an ashy overlay. He buried his fists in the flimsy plastic tablecloth beside his hips, pulling it away from the PVC mat underneath.

  The slanting morning sun grew, eclipsing everything behind it, becoming the dazzling white light of a dentist’s office, but he wasn’t at the dentist.

  He was on a table inside what looked like an operating room or a lab. People in surgical masks leaned over him. He tried to identify their faces, but all he could see in the plastic face shields they wore was the reflection of a naked teenaged boy, his chest, wrists, hips, and ankles in thick restraints.

  Every breath filled his nostrils with the stink of a bitter chemical.

  Nauseating pain su
rged in his abdomen. He fought the creeping darkness. Was he dying? His gaze landed on the defibrillator next to the table. Maybe this time they would fail to bring him back.

  A stiff breeze returned him to reality. He wasn’t in an operating room. He was still at the campgrounds. He’d been stabbed.

  He wanted to reach down and touch the site of the pain. Indeed some part of him whispered that he should rip out the intrusion, that it was stopping him from healing, but the rational part of his brain knew the blade stemmed the bleeding, keeping him from possibly bleeding out.

  A greater surge of pain sucked a groan past his bared teeth. A bloom of sweat coated his cheeks and forehead.

  Sue bore down hard near the location of the wound. His arm lurched up to toss her away, but Lu grabbed it. As strong as she was, she didn’t have the weight to restrain him, but she shouted, “Stop it! Sue has to apply pressure to the artery so I can make sure the knife didn’t hit it.”

  Her words cut through the haze in his mind, and he reached down to the side, digging his nails into the sun-bleached wood under the mat instead.

  “Good.” Lu wrapped one gloved hand around the notched, black hilt of the knife. Her other hand was filled with gauze pads. “Now, let’s see how much of a lucky son-of-a-bitch you are.”

  Before she’d even finished speaking she began extricating the knife a millimeter at a time. It seemed to take years. He wanted to scream, but couldn’t muster the strength.

  She scrutinized the wound, then blew out a deep breath. “Damn, it pays to be enormous. Looks like you’re clear. He missed the artery, nerve sheath too.” She cleared her throat. “Not to mention other areas you might want in the future.”

  With that, she finished the removal, and Sue moved to apply direct pressure to the wound.

  “We’ll get you some antibiotics and pain meds as soon as possible.” The pair swiftly bandaged his wound and someone handed him a can of soda.

  Lu leaned over him. Her face gleamed with perspiration. “If you think you won’t throw up, we can move you to your trailer.” She gestured to Slim, who’d returned with the backboard.

  He took stock of his health. Actually, the gray pall over everything had retreated. The pain in his groin now felt no worse than a recently pulled muscle. “Um, I can walk.”

  Lu stared up into the sky as if she could find strength in the clouds. “Men! I just took a knife out of you. You could have died. Still could. We’re carrying you.”

  He allowed himself to be transferred onto the stretcher and soon he was in his large bed. Lu disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a tumbler of sports drink. “Keep drinking. And don’t move! You shouldn’t be alone, so I’m going to use your computer for a while. Call me if your pain increases or you start to feel sick or feverish.”

  “Um.”

  She’d started to go through the doorway, but at his utterance she pivoted, crossing her arms. “Yes?”

  “Um, to be honest, I don’t feel that bad.”

  “You were stabbed. Shock has probably set in. Believe me, you’re going to feel it.”

  “No,” Roan said, reaching for the sheet and throwing it back. “Really.” He put his hand on the neatly bandaged wound and started peeling back the tape.

  “What are you doing!” Lu almost dove onto the bed, but he’d already pulled the bandage away from the wound.

  They both stared at what he’d revealed.

  There, where his scales were paler in color and tapered into ordinary skin near his genitals, though he hadn’t exposed that area; there, where a gash should have bled, was a clean crimson scar.

  Lu sank onto the mattress. She seemed to fumble with speech, her mouth opening and closing without issuing a sound for several seconds. “How? How is this possible?”

  Roan tugged the sheet back over his lap. “You know how.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You do. It’s exactly what That5W1tch2U posted on the message board. Magic.”

  “No one is going to believe this! Hell, I’m seeing it and I don’t believe it!”

  “It doesn’t matter if someone would believe it, Lu. No one can know.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Sofia halted her pacing in the short floor space of her RV between the banquette and the couch and looked at her phone for maybe the hundredth time. 3:00.

  It had now been several hours since Roan had been transported to his trailer. Had he had enough time to rest? Should she check on him?

  Rationally, he needed time to recover, but the instinctual irrational side of her ate at her logic, insisting she go to see him and now.

  The feeling had only grown stronger since then. Unable to fight the impulse any longer, she chuffed in disgust at her own weakness, then stood and strode out of her home on wheels and toward Roan’s trailer.

  Her fist hovered over the aluminum door. He’d been seriously wounded. Her visit was premature and probably unwanted.

  She went so far as to pivot away, but the strange voice she’d been struggling with whispered, check on him. Her knuckles rapped against the cool metal almost of their own volition.

  Lu opened the door. She looked surprisingly collected for someone who’d dug a knife out of a friend that morning and was probably sweating about complications.

  Even as Sofia formed the words to ask about Roan’s status, Lu answered. “He’s sleeping. He has a fever. He needs to rest. Come back tomorrow.”

  The door closed in her face, leaving Sofia staring at the flat, scarred surface which had once been white and was tinted closer to cream from wear and aging.

  She shut her mouth with an audible snap and descended the aluminum steps. Okay, then.

  That odd, urgent need hadn’t subsided. In fact it prodded her sharply, Go back. Don’t let the female put you off.

  The female? Since when did she think of people like that?

  She flung off the weird notion and the urge to return, heading toward a group enjoying a coffee break under the shelter of an awning. “Sofia!” The wolfwoman noticed her first. The three bruised and battered roustabouts whose late-night visit to town had begun the whole incident, budged to the front.

  At least they were mobile. It seemed she was going to have to set rules about town visits at some point. That was going to go over well.

  Several more exclamations followed and a bunch of the cast dropped whatever they were doing, glomming onto her like iron fillings to a magnet, all asking about Roan.

  Considering the wide berth most of the group cut Roan on a normal day, Sofia would have been warmed by their concern except, bored from their unusually sedentary life the last couple weeks, gossip had become even more a part of their entertainment than usual.

  “Roan is stable. We all have jobs to do, so let’s get to work.”

  Sofia sent the injured roustabouts to their bunks to recuperate and headed toward the tent to check the progress of the acts.

  Once inside, she blinked to adjust to the sudden shadow. The space was lit only by a work light.

  Center stage, a roustabout turned stagehand had lowered the lighting rig and was fiddling with a klieg. The contortionist was stretching not far away while she chattered to the lanky, dark-skinned worker. He labored shirtless and Sofia could swear she could smell the pheromones between the two in the air. She buried a snicker in her hand. Stress was making her loopy.

  She started to lift a folding chair from the rack. Ow. A shaft of pain strafed her shoulders and arms. She released her hold on the chair and circled her shoulders, trying to estimate the extent of the damage. Her arms hurt the most, but her whole body ached. She must have pulled almost everything during the melee that morning. Adrenaline and worry had stopped her from noticing. Shit.

  She straightened and the dim confines of the entrance danced around her. Whoa.
Come to think of it, her head wasn’t feeling good either. Had she hit it during the fight? She didn’t think so.

  The townie had grabbed her by the roots of her hair. Her scalp should be tender, but oddly it really wasn’t. Her knees should be bruised, but they didn’t hurt that much either. Weird.

  Still, the general ache in her muscles and the banging in her head was suddenly too much, and she probably wasn’t the only one feeling like crap.

  “Sheila!” She raised her voice so the contortionist could hear her. “Tell everybody I said to take the rest of the day off.”

  There must have been people backstage because a muffled cheer reached her ears. She started to shake her head and grabbed her temples as the pain increased. “But nobody is to go into Romansburg. If you need supplies, go to the next town over. And there’s a curfew tonight.”

  A few people groaned. Sofia started toward the tent flaps. “If you got a problem with that, talk to Jared, Dino, and JD,” she said, naming the three men who’d run into trouble in town.

  Chapter 12

  Sofia gasped and curled around the large hand molding her breast. The sweet fiction of the rough palm on her nipple brought a name to her lips. “Roan!”

  She looked into his bright eyes and leaned forward to find his lips with hers, her hands searching for his skin.

  Before she could meet his mouth, a chime impinged on her mind. Roan disappeared. The efficient confines of her bedroom seemed to form around her.

  Damnit. A dream.

  Sofia hit her phone alarm and groaned, stuffing her hands in her hair, further rumpling the already tangled strands.

  She’d had the worst night’s sleep.

  After tossing and turning, she’d gotten up and popped a Tylenol. The medicine had allowed her to drop off, but her dreams had been a mix of, well, X-rated and action movie.