But nothing about him made her sense that he was evil, per se. After all, he had pointed out to her what he could do to her … inferring the opposite, that he wouldn’t do anything to hurt her.

In the end she decided to leave the phone silent in her pocket, even as she berated herself for probably being stupid and very likely to regret it. But the healer in her jumped to the forefront, and she grabbed gauze and began to wipe at the source of his blood. She gasped when she finally cleared the field and could see the extent of the damage. A cut deep into his side, as if someone had swung a sword into him, trying to cleave him in half, and down his side and leg he was violently burned, third degree in most places.

Again, she felt the burn of her phone in her pocket.

“Doona,” he rasped, as if he could read her mind.

“I won’t,” she soothed him. “But you are terribly injured. You need a hospital.”

His mouth turned grim and his eyes fluttered open. For the first time the golden topaz of his eyes jumped out at her. They were beautiful, she thought with no little awe, as was the rest of him. He had the darkest, deepest black hair she’d ever seen. Not blue-black … not dark brown … but purest black. It had the lightest curl to it as it fell in waves to just above his collar. He had an aquiline nose and deeply sculpted cheeks, the cheekbones wide. His mouth was full, like for a woman, only unmistakably male. She imagined a mouth that large had a smile just as wide. A killer smile, she was sure. He was not pretty or boyish by any stretch of the imagination, but was still strongly handsome.

But there was no time to further enjoy the view. She had to clear her field once again and she grabbed her suture kit. As deep as the wound was, she worried about the contamination of the leaf litter and whatever had caused the injury in the first place. She first used saline to wash it clean until she was satisfied there was no debris in the wound, and then she squeezed the bottle of iodine over him and prayed for the best.

“This is going to hurt. I don’t have anything to numb the area.” The area? Hell, she was practically going to have to do surgery to put him back together.

“Do it,” he rasped. And then, fortunately for him, he passed out completely. She felt it ripple throughout his body, almost like the deflation of sudden death. She worriedly checked his breathing and found it, shallow and weak as it was. She turned her attention to his wound, threaded her needle, and went to work.

CHAPTER FOUR

Kat had finished her ministrations a while ago, but then she’d had to shower the blood from her own body and change her clothes. Once she had done that she went about the process of cleaning up the rest of her patient. The wound was clean and neatly sown where it could be sown, but his jeans had been burned onto his body and removing them was no easy trick.

She had a pair of surgical scissors, heavy gauge and meant for cutting through some pretty tough stuff. She’d already cut his jeans down the left side and away from his wound, so now she worked them under his jeans on the right and slowly cut the thick, resistant denim away. It was no easy trick and her hands were burning with an ache by the time she cut through the ankle hem. She didn’t know if it was because the material was particularly tough or if it was her adrenaline crashing and her hands were shaking like crazy from it, but she had to stop a couple of times for fear she might accidentally cut him. The last thing he needed was to lose more blood. As it was, he was very pale and drawn around the lips, his skin having a grayish sort of pallor to it, but this time it was not from stone. It was what anyone might look like after leaving so much blood on the ground. He hadn’t woken up since the last time, and although that was sparing him a great deal of pain at the moment, that also made him dead weight.

She grabbed his jeans by the ankle and, digging her feet into the wood floors and putting her weight into it, she dragged the cut denim from under his body.

And now she had a naked god in her bed. She hadn’t really paid any mind to him while he’d been in dire need, but now she drank him all in, head to toe, and tried to come to grips with the idea that anything human could be built so big and so beautifully.

Wait a minute. How do you know there’s anything human about him? she wondered. But looking at him now, after having her hands on him and her fingers within his tattered flesh, she wondered if what she had seen before had been merely a trick of the predawn light. But no, she gave her head a shake. Sight was one thing, but this had been touch as well and she had felt the roughness of stone. She had felt the weight of it against her body. Logic screamed at her that it couldn’t possibly be true, that she hadn’t seen and felt what she knew she had seen and felt.

Impossible. The whole situation was impossible. She took out her phone and for the hundredth time she debated calling her mother.

She shoved the phone back in her pocket at that thought and gingerly picked out the remnants of his jeans from the burn wounds, debriding his flesh meticulously until it was bleeding freshly and clean of all debris and dead flesh.

After cleaning up the bloody mess she’d made, making certain every inch of him was cleaned and tended to, she marched to the kitchen and made herself a cup of hot, liquid java nirvana. She normally didn’t drink coffee at this hour, but she figured she would need it if she was going to tend to her patient for the next few hours.

She’d fantasized about mainlining it, hooking up an IV to get it straight into her bloodstream like any good junkie would desire, but alas, via stomach was the only delivery method to be had, her medical expertise notwithstanding.

Speaking of medical expertise, it was nice to know she still had it. It had been five years since her tenure as a physician’s assistant in one of Manhattan’s busiest ERs. Like any skill, it was easy to lose one’s knack for it. And while she couldn’t say she was up on the latest methods of doing things, she was content to know that she knew enough to get by.

She pushed away any other ruminations about her skills and where she had last practiced them, ghosts too easily stirred up whispering mockingly in the back of her brain.

“Five years. You’re a whole new you now,” she said softly to herself, soothing herself with the mantra. Sometimes it worked. This was one of those times, but probably only because she had much bigger fish to fry.

And no sooner had she thought that thought than the naked behemoth himself came stumbling down the hallway, lurching from side to side like a drunkard, the light of a fever burning in his eyes.