Wilde Love (Forever Wilde 6)

I left it to Doc to confirm the status of the dead while I did a sweep of the clearing to make sure there weren’t any more enemies hiding in the undergrowth. The minute I tried to take a step, however, I fell down onto one knee and keeled over into the mud with a splat.

The familiar smell of cordite, body odor, and blood hit me as I sucked in a painful breath. The hot, humid press of the jungle air suffocated me. This was the Vietnam I’d known for the three tours I’d already done here. But this time there was something else. A strange kind of panic to get Doc Wilde to safety at any cost.

He was by my side in an instant. “You were hit,” he said, his face pale with shock as he reached for my tattered pant leg. I batted his hand away.

“We need to move,” I told him, my voice more a wheeze than a command. “Someone will come looking for those VC soldiers.”

Doc’s hands hovered over my calf, his fingers slick with blood. He stared at them, looking suddenly lost, as though without the focused action of having to treat someone, he didn’t know what to do with himself.

He sunk back in the mud, his blood-soaked hands trembling. “Oh god,” he whispered, his eyes taking in the bodies littering the clearing. “It’s all my fault. They’re all dead because of me. Oh god. Oh god.”

“No,” I growled. “They’re dead because of fucking Charlie.”

He shook his head. “I should have been watching your back. I could have shot him while you shot the one with the machete. If I hadn’t been so worried about the men in the clearing—”

I grabbed the front of his shirt, forcing him to look at me. “Did you slit the corporal’s throat?”

“Of course not, but if I’d just—”

“Did you toss a grenade at a group of American soldiers in the first place?”

“Major,” he whispered, eyes filling. “I was so stupid. Maybe we could have saved them if I’d only had your back.”

My heart was breaking for him. When you made a mistake as a chef, it might result in an inconvenient case of the runs for a customer. When you made a mistake as a soldier in Vietnam, it might result in the deaths of several people. But I knew in this case we’d hardly stood a chance at saving those men. They’d been FUBAR the moment they’d run into the enemy.

“It’s not your fault, Liam. Got it?”

My use of his name seemed to startle him enough that it snapped him out of his downward spiral. He blinked several times before eventually nodding. I dropped his shirt.

“We need to get out of here,” I said, struggling to get my shit together. My brain scrambled to come up with a plan, but everything I thought of carried more risks than I was comfortable with.

“I need to treat you first,” he said, reaching for my leg.

I started to protest, pulling out of reach, but then his hand landed on my knee, his grip firm as he said, “Please.”

I looked at him. Dirt was smudged along his cheek and chin. Blood was smeared all over Doc’s uniform and lingered in the crevices of his knuckles and nails. It took all my sense of self-preservation not to stare at him, or worse, crawl over the top of his body and protect him with my own.

He needed this, I realized. He was a medic. It was his job to heal. He felt like he’d failed Moline and the men in this clearing and he needed a reminder that yes, there was death in this jungle, but there could also be healing and hope. I could give that to him.

“Get it over with,” I growled. In order for him to examine my calf, I had to lie on my injured hip with cause me to wince.

Doc’s eyes snapped up. “Do you need morphine?”

“No. Hell no. Just bandage it up so we can move.” I needed my wits if I was going to get him home.

As he worked to bandage the bullet wound to my leg, I finally called in a sitrep. The dispatcher informed me that they’d already tried to send another medevac chopper to the site but it had come under heavy fire. After ours and the second one had both experienced an air assault, they’d decided it would be better to wait until daylight to try again.

Basically, our instruction was to find a place to hunker down and stay alive until morning since we didn’t have any critical wounds needing immediate treatment.

“What do they call a bullet wound to the leg if not critical?” Doc hissed after I put the radio back in my vest.

“The bullet’s not in my leg anymore, and it didn’t hit anything important,” I said. “This is nothing. It’s like a scratch compared to most dustoff missions. Gather the corporal’s pack.” I nodded toward the nearest rucksack belonging to the last soldier we’d examined. “It probably has food and supplies we can use.”