Low Pressure

“Heavy bastard. Solid. Left arm is covered in a tattoo. A snake with fangs dripping venom. You said the guy in the pickup had a heavily tattooed left arm that was propped in the open window. Putting one and one together…” He left her to do the math.

During the drive here, he had related to her the details of the attack. “Except I’m skipping the dirty parts.”

“Dirty parts?”

“Nasty things he said about you.”

Most alarming, he’d told her what his attacker had threatened to do. Now she said, “He wants to kill us.”

“That’s what the man said.”

“But why? Who could he be?”

“I’m thinking. I’m also still leaking.”

“Oh, sorry.” She motioned him over to the table, where she remained seated. “Turn around.”

He presented her with his back. The shorts were riding low on his hips, revealing an oozing red line like a wide smile across the small of his back.

“Dent, you should go to an emergency room.”

He peered over his shoulder, trying to assess the damage himself. “I doubt they’d believe I cut myself shaving.”

“You could claim it was an accident.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” she said throwing up her hands, her voice breaking with frustration.

He turned around to face her and tipped her chin up. “Hey, you reacted with nerves of steel, then drove like Mario Andretti. You’re not going to crack under pressure now, are you?”

She lifted her chin off the perch of his fingertips and, placing her hands on his hip bones, turned him around none too gently. She emptied the contents of the sack onto the table and uncapped an ominous-looking brown glass bottle. “I hope this antiseptic burns like hell.”

It must have because he hissed and cursed as she applied it. To distract him, she passed a cotton ball doused with the liquid up to him. “Dab that on your face and hand. How is it?”

He unwound the washcloth and took a look. “The cuts aren’t deep. Fingers will probably be stiff in the morning, but he could have cut them off.”

She shivered. “That’s the least of it. But why give you warning? In the time he took to issue those threats, he could have killed you.”

“Disappointed?”

“I’m serious,” she said, speaking up to him when he looked down at her from over his shoulder.

“Maybe he was afraid that somebody was watching from inside the restaurant. Or he’s more bluff than bite. Or he’s a psycho who’s lost his powers of reason. It’s anybody’s guess until we know who he is and why he has it in for us.” He checked her progress. “About finished?”

“It’s not bleeding as much.”

“Because you damn near cauterized it with that stuff.”

She unrolled a length of gauze and gently tapped it into place over the wound. “Turn,” she said. He made three revolutions while she wound the gauze around his middle, then placed vertical strips of adhesive tape at intervals to secure it.

“You’re getting hair caught in that tape.”

“I’m trying not to, but I can’t see what I’m doing if you don’t move your hands.” He did, and she pressed a final strip inches away from the silky stripe of hair that bisected his abdomen and disappeared into the waistband of his shorts. With affected detachment, she said briskly, “There. Done.”

But when she tipped her head back and looked into his face, the intensity with which he was looking down at her stopped her breath. In a voice that was low and husky and suggestive, he said, “As long as you’re in that neighborhood, anything else you want to do…”

Moving slowly, he reached out and traced the shape of her lower lip with the pad of his thumb, then brushed aside her hair and gently rubbed her earlobe between his fingers. Desire blossomed in her lower body and brought a whimper to her throat that she was powerless to contain.