“A bullet?” T.J felt both eyes almost pop out with shock. “You’re hit?”

The man nodded. “So will you take pity on an injured man and bestow your name on me? Make it your real one this time. And let me see how you look without that rug on your face.”

“Oh, shut up. Are you really injured or are you playing me?”

The man suddenly sat up from his seemingly indolent pose, tugged T.J.’s right hand. T.J. ended up pressed against him, chest to chest, face in his neck, arm around his massive torso. The sensation of touching a live wire came first. Then that of sickening viscosity scorched everything away.

Before T.J. could jerk back in alarm, the man meshed his right hand in T.J.’s hair, pulling gently until their gazes once again melded. “See? I’m bleeding. For you. I might die. Can you be so cruel as to let me die without knowing who you are?”

T.J. wrenched away from him, one hand drenched in the thick heat and slickness of his blood. “Oh, just shut up.”

Those lethal lips twitched. “I will if you start talking.”

“You don’t need me to talk, you need me to take care of this wound.”

“I’ll take care of it. You talk.”

“Don’t be stupid. Your intercostal arteries might be severed, and those bleed like gushing faucets. You might think you’re stable, but there’s no telling how bad your injury is, what kind of blood loss you’ve suffered. Your blood pressure could plunge without warning. And if it does, there’s no bringing it back up!”

“Spoken like an expert. Been shot before?”

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“I’ve treated people who were. People who weren’t too stupid to jump at my offer to help them.”

“Is that any way to talk to the man who took a bullet for you? And will you peel that thing off your face, already?”

“I can’t believe this! You might slip into shock at any moment and you’re still trying to prove this lame theory of yours?”

He just smiled, imperturbable, immovable.

“Okay,” T.J. gritted. “I’ll talk. After I take care of you.”

“I’ll let you take care of me. After you talk.”

“Come on. Where is this chopper’s emergency kit?”

“I’ll tell you after you tell me what I want to hear.”

“Not the truth, huh? ’Cause I already told you that.”

The man backed away when T.J. lunged at him, hands reaching out to expose his wound. “Uh-uh-uh. No touching until you admit you’re a woman. I only let women touch me.”

T.J. glared into eyes that had a dozen devils dancing in them. “You’re really out of touch with the reality—the gravity—of your situation, aren’t you? But what do you care if I admit it or not? You know it, after all. And then, I’m not going to merely touch you, I’m going to bathe in your blood.”

The appreciation in the man’s eyes expanded, enveloped T.J. whole. “I knew you were a bloodthirsty wench when you almost sliced me in half with the power of your glare alone. Then you tried to powder my teeth and transform me from a baritone to an alto.”

T.J. felt a smile advancing, dispelling the frown that by now felt etched on, and had to admit…

That man was lethal. In every sense of the word.

But though he was teasing, his irreversible deterioration might actually come to pass. There was no telling how serious his injury was without a thorough exam. “And to think you seemed intelligent. Guess appearances can be deceiving.”

The man’s lips twisted. “You can talk.”

“Oh, but I thought my appearance didn’t deceive you for a moment, that my ‘femininity’ kicked you like a mule.”

The man sighed, nodding in mock helplessness. “Aih. But if I do succumb, remember, it’s your doing, in every way.”

“Give me a break.” T.J. exhaled forcibly then scratched at the beard.

Then she snatched it away.

She yelped as a blowtorch seemed to blast her nerve endings, forcing her to leave the beard dangling over her lips. She rubbed at the burning sensation, gave her tormentor a baleful glance. “Happy now, you pigheaded, mulish ox?”

“A one-man farm, eh? No one has ever flattered me as you do.” She glared at him as he oh-so-carefully removed the rest of the beard, making the adhesive separate from her skin with a kneading sensation instead of a stinging one.

Then he pulled back, massaged her jaw and cheeks in an insistent to and fro, soothing her skin with the backs of those long, roughened, steel-hard fingers. She moaned as a far more devastating brand of fire swept her flesh from every point of contact.

He groaned himself. “Ya Ullah, ma ajmalek. How absolutely beautiful you are. I thought I’d seen all kinds of beauty, but I’ve never laid eyes on anything like you. It’s like you’re made of light and gold and energy and gemstones.”

Heat rose through her at his every word. When she’d first seen him, she’d been freezing with dread and the desert’s chill. But when she’d turned to him in that filthy bathroom, his very presence had sent animation surging into her every cell. The crash had drained her, but the heat of his solicitude, his awareness and appreciation, the stoking of his challenge, had been melting away the ice that seemed to have become a constituent of her bones.

She still couldn’t believe he’d seen through her disguise. No one had during the week she’d been in Zohayd. Her captors hadn’t, and she’d spent a whole day in their grasp. But he’d sensed her femininity in moments, with his senses almost blinded by the night’s dimness, the urgency and her disguise. He’d also had no tactile evidence, with the buffer of clothes—especially her jacket and the corset flattening her…assets.

Yet he’d known. And just as he’d felt her vibes, she’d been immersed in his. She’d felt every hot granite inch of his formidable body, smelled him over the overpowering stench of her prison, over the dispersion of the desert and the deluge of post-accident mayhem. She’d heard each inflection of his voice through the din of her inner cacophony and the madness of their escape and crash.

And instead of reacting to his maleness as she had to her captors’—with dread, revulsion, aggression and desperation—she was finding it bolstering, soothing and, if she could believe her body’s reactions in these insane circumstances, arousing.

She hadn’t found a male this arousing in…ever.

And to find this man so might mean it was she who’d hit her head. Or something. There must be something wrong, if all she wanted right now was to snuggle into him and hold on tight.




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