“For the record, you could make a fortune in Hollywood as a stunt butt.”
“Oh, good.” Thomas was using sterilized tweezers to painstakingly pick the debris from Tasha’s wound. He was being careful to get it all, since his antibiotic options were limited to the topical ointment from the first-aid kit. Normally, with any kind of gunshot wound, an oral antibiotic prophylaxis was given as a matter of course. “We’re still talking about this.”
They’d moved into the kitchen, where the light was better.
He’d pulled one of the counter-height stools into the center of the little room, and with Tasha perched upon it, her arm was at a better height for his surgery, as it were.
With her robe off her left shoulder and upper arm, her still-damp hair swept to the side, her long, graceful neck was exposed. She’d pulled the right side of her robe over her breasts and was clasping it closed at her waist.
Thomas was bracing himself—and keeping her from moving—with a hand on her shoulder, and her skin was soft and cool beneath his fingers. She was an unbelievably beautiful, grown-up woman, and definitely not his sister, a fact he was fully aware of despite his focus on his work.
“It’s keeping me distracted while you... ooh!” She tried not to move, but she definitely winced as she sharply inhaled.
The bit of junk he was going after had gotten stuck, so he stopped digging and released her, to give her a break. “Sorry. We’re almost done. There’s a few more pieces of something—fabric from your jacket, I think. They’re big enough to... I really don’t want to leave that in there.”
She looked at him, over her shoulder. “Isn’t this where you’re supposed to give me a shot of whiskey and a stick to bite down on?”
Thomas couldn’t not smile at her even as he raised his eyebrows in a very clearSeriously?
She smiled happily back at him, and he was again struck by how vibrant and alive she was—and how very grateful he was that this hadn’t ended tragically. And how weird it still felt to be in this odd, alternative-feeling world in which he’d kissed her. A world in which it was very, very okay for him to kiss her. A world in which his automatic mental chants oflittle sisterwere quickly doused by reality.
“Or...”You could kiss me.She didn’t say the words, but he read them clearly in her eyes. “You could just let me continue to distract myself with our electrifying ass-chat.”
Thomas laughed as he returned his attention to her almost-clean wound, trying to find the best way to remove the debris without hurting her. “In that case, I will take your misguided stunt-butt comment as the compliment you intended it to be, and counter withThanks, but oh hell no.”
“A moment of silence for the world’s tragic loss. Although, wait, if you’re almost done with my arm,” she pointed out, “that means my knees are next. And that’s making me sweat because...” She pulled up her robe slightly to examine them and made a face. “I scrubbed them, I swear, but it doesn’t look like I did.”
“I’ll get them clean,” he reassured her.
“Yeah, no, I really just want you to look,” she said. “Give me a thumbs up or down. I can’t bandage my arm—” she tried to see it again by straining to look over her shoulder and once again failed “—well, if I were here alone, I’d muddle through, but it would be a challenge, and I wouldn’t be able to get it as clean as you can. But my knees...? That I can do. Melvin can attest to the high level of my personal nursing skills, if you need a reference.”
“It doesn’t make sense for you to—”
“Yes, it does.” She cut him off. “I’ll handle my knees while you tick off whatever’s left on yourGet Ready for the Lights to Go Outdoom-list.”
She was determined so Thomas surrendered. “Fair enough,” he said. “You ready for me to go again?”
She took in a deep breath and exhaled it hard on a rush of air, then nodded. Her shoulders started to go upward as she tensed, and he held onto her, shaking her just very slightly. “Try to stay loose,” he advised. “And tap your fingers on your leg so your focus isn’t on your arm.” That was a trick he’d learned from the nursing team in Landstuhl, to distract from the sharp pain of a needle stick. “Okay, here we go.”
“It’s so handy to have a hospital corpsman at hand,” Tasha said through clenched teeth as she tapped. “The perfect ass is just a very nice bonus.”
“And here I’d hoped we’d moved on with that discussion of your sweaty knees,” he said, leaning in and wishing the light was a few thousand watts brighter, or that he had an extra hand to hold up a flashlight. Please God, let him get it right away, and not have to hurt her again.
“Sweat-inducingscraped knees,” she said. “Very different.”
“Yes! Got the first one.”
“Go, team!” Tasha exhaled loudly as she relaxed her shoulders and circled her head to release the tension in her neck.
It would’ve been so easy to reach out and help her along with a little gentle massage. But as much as he wanted to, Thomas knew that finishing up and getting her bandaged while they still had electric light took priority, so he settled for another shoulder grip and light shake.
“You’re doing great. Ready to go again?” he asked.
“Last time?” she asked hopefully.
“Not quite.”
“Second to last?”
