Release. Jo Leigh

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      She used her hands to feel his stump. The blood flow was good, the scar was healing beautifully. But there was no callous from his prosthetic, which meant he wasn’t wearing it enough. “Yeah, stocking the exam rooms, cleaning up, filing. That kind of thing.”

      He didn’t say anything, but the vein in his jaw spoke volumes.

      “It’s not glamorous, but it’ll be good for you. You’ll get better at using the hand. It won’t replace physical therapy, but it’ll accelerate your progress.”

      “So I can do what?”

      “I don’t know. Get a life maybe?”

      He snorted, which was something she’d grown disturbingly used to. She held his arm to the side so she could examine a bruise that was starting to yellow. “Is this still bothering you?”

      “Yeah, a little.”

      “I’ll call Noah.”

      “For that?”

      “Making sure the prosthetic fits perfectly is his job. You won’t wear it if it’s uncomfortable.”

      “It’s always uncomfortable.”

      “You’ll get used to it if you wear it enough. It’s not easy, but you’ve faced harder things, I’m sure. Don’t you want to be able to pick things up? To hold a cup of coffee? Your dick?”

      The look he gave her was priceless. She’d only said it to shock him. For a grown man, a man who’d been to war, he sure shocked easily. She probably shouldn’t take so much pleasure in making him blush. But he looked good that way, and…oh, God, she needed to get out more. “Let me see you put it on,” she said, dropping his arm and replacing it with her coffee, which she picked up easily with her left hand, just to be obnoxious.

      He noticed, but he didn’t say anything. He just went about putting on the sock, which he did with his right hand and his teeth, then he got the prosthetic out of the top drawer of the small dresser in the corner of the room.

      She wondered if it was uncomfortable for him to sleep here every night. It wasn’t so much a cozy basement as a trauma room, complete with portable X-ray, surgical tools, every kind of medicine she could think might be needed and a handy defibrillator. She’d tried to plan for every kind of emergency—and good thing she had or Seth could have died from that gunshot wound.

      When Nate had proposed the idea of setting her up like this, she’d been shocked, knowing it would be outrageously expensive. But he’d come up with the money and she’d stocked the basement to the gills. She hadn’t had to use it until three months ago. Now it had become Seth’s home. She’d offered him the spare bedroom, but he’d turned her down. All he did upstairs was shower and make himself ham-and-cheese sandwiches. She’d never met a more stubborn man. She just wished he’d use that trait to get acclimated to his new life.

      He grunted as he struggled with the hand. It wasn’t a difficult task, but it was terribly awkward. His left shoulder kept moving, an unconscious response he wouldn’t lose for a long time, if ever. There were a million and one things the nondominant hand is used for, and the brain didn’t take to this kind of change easily. Finally he was set up, and while the manufacturers tried damn hard to make the fake hands look real, they didn’t. They were substitutes, ungainly ones, but in time Seth would find his way.

      He looked at her with a surprising lack of satisfaction. “Okay, it’s on.”

      “Open and close,” she said, leaning against the long cabinet.

      He went through his paces inelegantly, which was to be expected.

      “How many hours did you wear it yesterday?”

      Seth shrugged. “About five.”

      “I want you to wear it for a minimum of eight. Which works out well, since that’s the minimum you’ll be at work.”

      “I’m not going to be an aide, Harper, so forget it.”

      “No? What, are you planning to sell your body to earn your keep?”

      “If I’m that much of a bother, I’ll leave.”

      “And go where?”

      “I can hook up with Nate.”

      “No, you can’t. You’ll just be in his way. He doesn’t have time to babysit you.”

      He flushed again, this time with pure anger, but she didn’t care. The man needed a reality check. He had to get on with it, just as they all had to get on with it, whether he liked it or not.

      “Fine. When do we leave?”

      She checked her watch. “Be ready in forty minutes. I’m making breakfast. If you come up in ten, there’ll be food for you.”

      “I’m not hungry.”

      “Tough. You’re going to need your strength. Deal with it.”

      As she headed for the stairs, she heard him curse her under his breath. She didn’t say anything, though. Maybe she was a cold bitch. Hard times called for hard measures.

      2

      THE FREE CLINIC WAS in a run-down part of Boyle Heights, a sad suburb of Los Angeles where the median income was right at the poverty level, and the people who showed up on the doorstep were a damn sad bunch. They were mostly meth addicts, but there were still the unwanted pregnancies, the search for birth control pills, the folks with the flu and the cough and the red itch “down there.” No one came to the clinic if they had somewhere else, anyone else.

      All Seth could think about when he walked in the doors was that he’d seen it before. Maybe not this color and maybe there were different posters on the walls, but the poor people all over the world always ended up in rooms like these. With overworked doctors and nurses with sore feet.

      If he had to get a job in the outside world, then he supposed this was the safest place to do it. What were the odds that someone here would recognize him? He looked nothing like the man they’d flashed on television or the Wanted picture in the post office. His hair was the longest it had ever been, and the posters didn’t mention the missing hand, but that wasn’t even it. Since Kosovo, he’d changed. He had lines in his face, around his eyes. He looked tired all the time, and his skin was sallow and pasty. He felt like an old man despite his daily workout.

      Now that he was dressed in hospital scrubs, with an old Dodgers baseball cap on his head, no one would pick him out as a soldier or a traitor. He looked at himself in the clinic’s bathroom mirror and pulled his cap down a little farther.

      He finally understood what Kate had meant when she’d said she’d been invisible as the room-service lackey at the downtown L.A. hotel.

      She’d been a forensic accountant for the UN in Kosovo and she’d been the one who’d gotten the Delta Force team involved. She and Nate had been an item, and when Kate had discovered that something fishy was going on, she’d talked it over with him. She hadn’t known it at the time, but she’d found the first proof that a faction of the CIA, calling themselves СКАЧАТЬ