As if responding to her need, mirroring it, he leaned in, pressed his face lightly into her neck, breathed her in and groaned again with intense enjoyment. “Even with male cologne and all the traces of your ordeal, you smell heavenly. And you still haven’t told me your name, ya jameelati.”

She pulled back from his hypnosis, from the idiocy of her untimely weakness. She had to patch up this obdurate hulk. “And you still think if you ask me enough times I’ll give you a different answer.”

His eyes stilled on her. Then he nodded, as if coming to a decision. “So your name is T.J. What do the T and J stand for?”

She blinked. “You believe me?”

“Yes. My instincts about you have been right-on so far. They’re saying you’re telling the truth now. They even insist you probably haven’t developed the ability to lie.”

“You make me sound like an incontinent blabbermouth. I gave my kidnappers nothing.”

“Withholding the truth is not lying. It can span the spectrum of motives, from fear to nobility. Doing it under threat of harm or worse is courageous. But in almost all situations, telling an untruth is cowardly. And I had no doubt of your courage from the first moment. So, with that established…your name?”

T.J. drew in a shaky inhalation then blurted it out. “Talia Jasmine. Satisfied? Now where is that damned emergency kit?”

She heard his intake of breath, felt it sweeping inside her own chest like an internal caress. But it was the wonder that flared in those preternatural eyes that started her shivering again. With everything but cold.

Without a word, he reached overheard, opened a compartment and produced a huge emergency bag.

She pounced on it. Relief swamped her as she made a lightning-fast inventory of the contents. Everything she could possibly need.

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She took out a saline bag, hooked it in an overhead protrusion, dragged his right arm over her lap and pushed the needle into his vein, then secured it with adhesive tape and turned the drip to maximum for quickest fluid replacement.

He tugged at her chin, pressed something to her lips. A bottle of water. She suddenly realized she was beyond parched. She downed the bottle in one go. He watched her as if he wanted to gulp her down himself, to decipher and assimilate her.

She licked her lips, cleared her throat. “Okay, I need you to expose the wound and hold this flashlight over it for me. Better do it in the back of this monster so you can lie down.”

He smiled in that seriousness-melting way of his. “I can give you two out of three of your demands. I can with pleasure take off my clothes. And I can shed light on the mess I made when all of my senses were so focused on you that I missed the pursuer who could have killed me with one haphazard shot. I shudder to think where that would have left you.”

“As if I’m in such a great situation now,” she mumbled under her breath as she snapped on gloves.

“We’re both in one piece, with me only slightly punctured, which in a hostage-extraction op is about the best possible situation. But I have to inform you I had to sacrifice the back end of the chopper to preserve the cockpit while crash-landing. I doubt there’s any space back there for even one of your species to stretch out.”

She looked up from preparing her surgical tray. “My species? Women you mean? Last I heard we were a gender.”

“Felines.” His smile widened as he reached for the swathe over his head to start the process of exposing himself…his wound for her. “I know of nothing else capable of exiting a six-foot-high window with as much economy of movement and grace.”

“They’re called gymnasts. I was one till I hit eighteen. Seems my abilities reactivated under duress.”

He finished unfurling the yards of material from his head in movements she could only describe as…erotic. This was a man used to barricading himself in mere cloth before plunging into the desert, pitting his wiles and will against its cruelty and capriciousness.

Suddenly all thoughts evaporated. The last coil fell off, and a mane of gleaming mahogany cascaded in layers of satin luxury to his shoulders.

She swallowed. “You should talk.”

“Oh?” One formidable wing of an eyebrow quirked as he shrugged off the outer layer of his night-colored desert raider/ninja/Black Ops hybrid outfit. He seemed to grow bigger in only a skintight, high-collared, long-sleeved top.

She gave him an encompassing gesture. “You should be on stage playing the Lion King yourself. With minimal or no makeup.”

And he gifted her with another of those amused rumbles that proved his great feline origins.

Then he tried to yank off his top and groaned, his face twisting in obvious pain. “Seems raising my left arm won’t be one of my favorite activities for a while.”

“Do you have a change of clothes on board?”

“Yes. And other supplies that I’ll access once we’re done with this.”

“Okay, then.” She swept scissors off the tray and proceeded to cut off his top.

He hissed as the coolness of the blade slid against his hot skin, groaned as she reached the parts that had stuck to his wound, then growled as her gloved hands glided over his flesh, separating the adhesions and palpating the edges of his wound.

There should only be pain. But to ears that were hyperaware of his merest inflection, the pleasure was unmistakable, too.

Tremors invaded her hands, traveling all the way from her core. And this from gloved and accidental contact while exploring his wound. What would touching him with no barriers do to her if she were exploring his power and beauty for pleasure instead?

Work, idiot. Stop fantasizing about this hunk of impossible virility and just patch him up. You’re probably in ten different types of shock and hallucinating most of this anyway. Moron.

Continuing her raucous inner abuse, she worked in silence.

Suddenly a realization dawned on her. All the time she’d been filling hypodermic needles with local anesthetic, analgesic/anti-inflammatory and broad-spectrum antibiotic, he’d been handing her vials, receiving filled syringes and placing them in the correct sequence on the tray like the best of her long-term assistants. He continued to help her with total efficiency and obvious knowledge of what went where and would be used when as she prepared forceps, scalpels, sutures, cautery, bandages, wipes and antiseptics.

He hadn’t been bragging when he’d said he’d take care of his wound. This was a man versed in more than hostage-retrieval ops. He was no stranger to field emergency procedures.




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