Internal Affairs. Jessica Andersen

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СКАЧАТЬ with looks and touches, with no question in either of their minds where and how the night would end. They hadn’t even made it all the way up the stairs before they’d collapsed, twined together, needing each other so much it had seemed like madness.

      Blushing, she stepped into her office, crossing quickly to the locked gun cabinet in the far corner, where she kept not only the small .22-caliber handgun she’d purchased just after al-Jihad’s reign of terror began, but also her medical supplies. The elegant cabinet was far more graceful—and much less expensive—than a safe. She dialed in the combination and popped the door, then stood and stared for a second at the large tackle box she’d outfitted as a field kit.

      She’d freshened her supplies regularly over the past year. With al-Jihad hitting targets in and around Bear Claw, she’d wanted to be prepared for emergencies. She’d never actually used the thing, though. Had hoped she’d never have to. She couldn’t handle the immediacy of living medicine, the emotions. Now, facing the prospect of working on a man she’d known intimately, a man she’d loved, she quailed. She’d never understood how her mother reveled in the godlike act of cutting into living flesh. Then again, she’d failed to understand a number of her mother’s choices over the years.

      You can do this, she told herself, squaring her shoulders and reaching for the medical kit. You have to do this. He’d trusted her enough to put his life and safety in her hands. She would reward that trust by patching him up. Then, once he’s awake, I’ll get some answers out of him, she thought as she returned to his side. Now that she had a plan of sorts, her emotions were starting to shift from dizzying relief at finding him incredibly, impossibly alive…to anger at the deception he’d perpetrated, and his presumption that she’d take him in and treat his wounds on the basis of a note that explained less than nothing.

      Leave it to slick, handsome, charming Romo Sampson to assume she’d take care of him after what he’d done to her.

      “Bastard,” she muttered under her breath, holding on to the anger because it steadied her hands as she cut away his jacket and black T-shirt, revealing the strong lines of his back, the angry bullet wound and the streaks of forming bruises.

      She removed the bulk of his clothing, save for his boxers, which were cheap chain-store wear, and nothing like what he would’ve worn before.

      Shoving that thought aside, she piled several blankets over him, then turned up the heat in the living room. She had to get him warm and find a way to get his fluid volume up. But at the same time, she knew she had to be smart, too; she needed to protect herself if things proved more complicated than her more optimistic hypothesis—that he’d been undercover, the blood spatter was from a clean kill of one of the terrorists, and he was in the clear, fully sanctioned for whatever he’d done.

      A quiver in her belly warned that the explanation, when she got it, probably wouldn’t be that neat. Romo had never been one to make things easy—either on her or on himself.

      His clothes were damp with sweat and blood, and streaked with dirt and other substances. His pockets were empty save for her spare key; a quick search revealed that he wasn’t carrying any wallet, ID, or weapon. She placed his clothes and boots in a paper bag and taped it shut, signing her name across the tape. Then she locked the bag in the gun cabinet. It wasn’t a perfect chain of evidence and probably wouldn’t be admissible in court, but it was the best she could do under the circumstances.

      It’s just in case, she told herself, and worked very hard not to think about what some of those cases might be.

      Returning to him, she found that his color was a little better, his flesh a little warmer beneath the blankets. It seemed very strange that her patient’s skin was flesh-toned and body temperature, but she shoved aside the oddity, locking it down along with her emotions and telling herself to woman up and do what needed doing.

      She set him up on a portable monitor that told her what she already knew: his blood pressure, pulse and respiration were all dangerously depressed. Knowing she needed to get his vitals headed on the upswing, she started him on a saline drip. If it came to it, she’d transfuse him with her own blood. She was a type O, a universal donor. But God help her, she hoped it didn’t come to that. She’d already given him everything she intended to of her inner self.

      Soon, though, his numbers started coming back up, and his skin and gums pinked, indicating that the shock was fading. Which left her with the bullet wound.

      She followed the bruise tracks with her fingers, probing as deeply as she dared. She found three spots where she was pretty sure she felt something. The bullet had fragmented. Damn it.

      Doing the best she could, she pulled on sterile gloves, cleaned and numbed the three spots, then chose one and used a scalpel to dissect away the skin and muscle. Without clamps or suction, blood welled immediately, obscuring her working field. She cursed and blotted it with a sterile pad, but gave that up almost immediately as pointless. Instead, she resigned herself to working blind, probing with the scalpel, then forceps.

      “Come on…come on…” She was breathing heavily, sweating more from nerves than exertion. Then she felt the forceps lock on to something hard and metallic. “Ah! Gotcha.”

      She dropped the bloodstained fragment in a specimen jar, used stitches to close the muscle and incision and then repeated the process twice more. By the time she was done, she’d nearly gotten used to the fact that when she cut into him, he bled. Yet although his vitals had stabilized where they needed to be, he hadn’t moved or made a sound. He just lay there, breathing. In and out. In and out.

      Forcing herself not to watch the rhythmical fall of his back, she returned to her work, stitching up the last of the three cuts before turning her attention to the recovered fragments. When she pieced the ragged bits of metal together in their specimen jar, it looked as though she’d gotten all of the projectile. The metal was deformed, making it impossible for her to be sure, but without an X-ray, there wasn’t much more she could do.

      She cleaned the entry wound as best she could, then closed it as well, leaving a spot at the bottom for drainage. Finally, she hit her patient with a whopping dose of a broad-spectrum antibiotic. That, plus crossing her fingers, was going to have to be enough. She debated over the painkiller choices she had on-hand, and went with the mildest. He’d be hurting when he awoke—she deliberately thought “when,” not “if,” as though positive thinking would be enough to pull him out of the deep unconsciousness that continued to hold on to him. But it was that very unconsciousness that meant she couldn’t give him one of the stronger painkillers, which had sedative effects.

      She needed him to wake up, needed to get a grip on whether the head injury that had blown his pupils to uneven sizes had caused serious damage. If it had, she’d be doing him a major injustice keeping him hidden. But it wasn’t as if she had a CAT scan or an MRI handy.

      Her training warred with her conscience. She knew she should take him to the ER, where he could be properly cared for. But at the same time, despite what had happened between them, she had to believe that Romo never would have perpetuated a fraud of any sort—never mind faking his own death—if it hadn’t been absolutely necessary.

      As a child, he’d lived through scandal and a trial when his businessman father had been framed for embezzlement by a coworker. Thanks to solid police work and an ambitious public defender on her way up the political ladder, Romo’s father had been acquitted, the other man jailed. Gratitude, and that early exposure to justice, had set Romo on his path to a career in law enforcement.

      Sara had heard the story for the first time at his funeral. She also hadn’t realized he’d come to Bear Claw via the Las Vegas PD. That it’d taken СКАЧАТЬ