Cole cursed, shaking his head in frustration. “What’s Peyton done this time?”
Amelia’s head whipped around to see the nurse anesthetist’s fist smash into a man’s face. She winced at the impact, at the way the man’s head snapped back. Peyton reared back to hit him again. Others joined the fight, some in an attempt to break up the argument, others to get in hits of their own.
Amelia sighed. Fights weren’t uncommon at port call. Actually, they were quite the norm. Several thousand soldiers barely out of their teens, some still in their teens, let loose with money in their pockets, too much pent-up testosterone and too much booze wasn’t a good thing under the best of circumstances.
But Peyton wasn’t a kid. He was a highly trained anesthetist and one of their own. Cole wouldn’t leave him. Neither could she without making sure he was okay and not in need of medical attention once the fight ended. Plus, several of the men involved in the fight were USS Benjamin Franklin crewmen.
Warning her to step back, Cole bustled his way toward where a cluster of men scuffled. Knowing she could hold her own in any fight, she followed him. By the time they reached the group, the fight had broken up. A corpsman’s face was bleeding from a cut on his cheek. Another’s nose bled profusely. Peyton rubbed his knuckles. A few others would sport bruises of various shapes and sizes come morning, but no one seemed to have suffered any critical injuries. Getting a couple of towels and ice from a bartender, Amelia went to the bleeding soldiers.
“Here.” She handed the towel to the one with the bleeding nose. “Pinch your nostrils tightly together.”
Using her fingers and nose, she demonstrated the proper technique. When he looked as if he might lose his balance, she shoved a bar stool toward him. “Sit down, pinch your nose like I showed you and don’t attempt to move until I tell you it’s okay.”
He did as ordered.
Cole was checking Peyton’s hand so Amelia turned to the soldier with the cut on his face. The slash wasn’t so deep or jagged that it required an emergency room visit, not really, but he would need a few stitches for the area to properly heal with minimal scarring.
Which meant she or Cole, probably both, would be heading back to the ship to attend to the injured crew’s needs.
So much for their night of sexual excess.
A bus carried the somber group back to the ship. Although Cole’s gaze met hers a time or two, they’d not talked more than to give a rundown of casualties.
On the bus, he sat with the soldier needing stitches and Amelia had ended up in a seat with Peyton, a plastic bag filled with melting ice plopped over his swollen hand.
“That’s going to smart in the morning. Why did you hit that man, anyway?”
Peyton shrugged, not saying more. He didn’t need to. The blonde she’d seen coming out of his room earlier now sat with the soldier whose nose had been broken by Peyton’s punch. She oohed and aahed over the soldier like a mother hen. Had they had a lovers’ spat and the woman had used Peyton? Or had Peyton taken advantage? Who knew?
“You should reset his nose without any painkillers.”
Amelia frowned at her friend. “You’re just saying that because he got the girl.”
“He can have the girl,” Peyton scoffed. “I got the only thing I
wanted from her this afternoon.”
Amelia winced at his crudeness. “Men are so gross.”
“Yeah? That wasn’t the impression I got when you were looking at my boy earlier.”
“Your boy?”
“You know who I’m talking about.”
“You really should be quiet before you end up in another brawl, Peyton,” she warned.
He laughed. “Talking about Cole get you hot and bothered?”
Half grinning, she narrowed her eyes. “Makes me fighting mad. Be quiet before it’s your nose having to be reset without painkillers.”
Amelia set the nasal bone back into place as best she could, and left the corpsman in a bay with the blonde watching over him.
A radiology technician had shot a few films of Peyton’s hand and he had a non-displaced fracture of his middle metacarpal. He wouldn’t need surgery, but he’d be sore for several days.
Cole was in bay two with the soldier with the cut face. He set up a suture tray.
“Here we are again,” she teased when she scrubbed her hands and took over the task for him. “I’ll finish setting this up. You scrub and get gloved.”