Her words braked his roiling thoughts. “Our night together was the best thing that ever happened to me, Dante—period. And the only real sex I’ve ever had. If you only knew how much I want you, you’d probably run.”
He laughed. His first laugh of unbridled joy. Ever. And he wanted to weep, too. He pulled her back into his arms, slowly, savoring the heart-aching feel of her filling them, life ebbing back into him with each inch of contact. “I’ll only run to you. Show me how you want me, give me all you got, amore mio.”
“The hour is ticking by.” A quivering smile lit her magnificent face, lit up his world as one hand dipped into his shirt, caressed his healed wound.
He captured it, buried his grateful lips in the soft, strong palm, then he nipped it. He caught her cry of pleasure in his mouth, poured all his longing into her eager lips. “Gulnar, I missed feeling you, tasting you—missed you. I can’t wait, amore. I just want to take you, hard and fast, just taking the painful edge away. Then we’ll have the rest of the hour, all the time we have together for slow and thorough and world-shattering. What do you say?”
An unrestrained giggle of pure delight burst from her lips as she tugged him back hard to her. “I say if you don’t live up to your promises right away, I may hurt you!”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“DOES this hurt?”
“Yes!”
Gulnar removed her hands, stood back.
She assessed her patient again. Thirty-three, under-weight, pale—but not exactly the paleness of anemia, at least not only of anemia, which most of the camp inmates suffered from anyway.
They’d been treating hundreds of cases with gastrointestinal complaints, which was also expected in their nutritional and hygienic state. Diarrhea, malnutrition, all sorts of dysentery. She shuddered again as she recalled the desperate time when a cholera epidemic had swept the camp during her time with Lorenzo and Sherazad. Even with the hundreds of ailments they treated per day, even a few dozen cases of typhoid, at least there was no true epidemic.
Most patients had been straightforward cases. This one wasn’t. From the moment he’d walked in, he’d been so inconsistent, so whiny, she had at first suspected he was a hypochondriac. He complained of too many unrelated symptoms, and when she’d examined him, he’d hurt everywhere.
Her mind raced, unwilling to dismiss him as a malingerer. Think!
She put her hands back on his concave abdomen and palpated gently. He moaned with each dip. But it was when she palpated his liver that his moans were louder. She ventured a deeper dip and he keened. She disregarded his squirming and dipped deeper and…Hmm. The liver consistency wasn’t as it should be. She could only feel it now she’d stopped being intimidated by his thrashing around.
OK, if she dismissed his accounts of hurting down to the last phalanx of his little finger, this looked like a lead. That and that yellowish tinge to his skin. She couldn’t be sure it wasn’t their horrible lighting giving him that cast, so she took off her glove and contrasted her hand to his color.
No. Yellowish. Definitely. All right. Now to look for other confirming signs. He was coughing, had a very low-grade fever and wasn’t eating because he always felt full. He said he passed strange “stuff” in his stools, had vomited it once, too. And he was itching madly. She’d thought he had an infestation at first, was starting to get sympathetically itchy, but now…
This could be something that would need Dante’s intervention.
And as usual, like it had been all through the past five weeks, whenever she thought of him, he was there. He was there all the time.
He’d stepped out of their shared examination tent to perform a quick procedure in the surgery tent, had only needed their anesthetist, Sam Hiller. He’d been gone thirty minutes. And now he was back, walking into the tent, snatching her heart with pride and joy. He was hers. For now.
He met her eyes, reconnecting with her, their escalating intimacy there for all to see in his. Her patient let out an exaggerated moan the moment he saw Dante.
“Any help?” Dante gave her a quizzical glance.
“Please!”
He snapped on fresh gloves and only then noticed that she had one of hers off. “Tell me you haven’t touched him without a glove! If you have, disinfect your hands right now. Don’t bring them anywhere near your face until you do! Hell, disinfect your face.”
“Hey take it easy—”
“Do it, Gulnar! The guy has jaundice and, until we know how he got it, I have to assume he’s infectious!”
My. Just one look and he reached the diagnosis she’d agonized over!
“I didn’t touch him, darling. I was just contrasting the colors of our skin to decide if he does have jaundice.”
&
nbsp; “Well, he does. And humor me, OK?” He looked over his shoulder to the other exam station. “Who’s behind that curtain?”
“It’s Helena.” She was their only Badovnan nurse.