There was no one back there. No trucks, no cars—and certainly no sign of the small blue Honda hybrid that Tedric was believed to be driving—although no one had been absolutely sure about the make or model of his vehicle.
Rio gazed across that empty expanse of a potholed tarmac and gravel parking lot, landing on...
A battered dumpster.
Dave sighed. “Welp,” he said. “According to GPS we’ve found Jeff’s phone. Rock, paper, scissors for the dumpster dive?”
“Fuck,” Rio said. “Me.”
“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 clear Seriously?
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 of little sister were 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 with Thanks, 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 your Get Ready for the Lights to Go Out doom-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-inducing scraped 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?”
“I can’t promise, but I hope so.”
“I love that you don’t lie to me,” she said, tapping on her leg again. “All right, I’m ready.”
Thomas braced himself and leaned in. “On three, two, one.”
“Ooh! Ouch ouch ouch!”
“Shit,” he said. Talk about sweaty knees—he now had sweaty everything. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. Keep going. It was a life-altering experience for me—the Pre-Shower Ass-ening,” she informed him. Apparently, she still wasn’t done with her... what had she called it? Ass-chat.
“The Pre-Shower...? I’m sorry, no.” She’d given it a name, which meant it would forever live in infamy—and be endlessly discussed—like the night of the massively bleeding head wound or Pink Settee-Palooza. Although that last one—the day that the pink settee had been delivered by the furniture store—was Uncle Navy’s creation, so maybe her propensity to name events was genetic.
Tash, meanwhile, was blithely ignoring him. “Pre for you, post-shower for me,” she explained through her clenched teeth, as if that was his issue. “And I mean, yes, I know you told me that you kissed me intentionally, and I love that you said that, I do. But part of me was still going, But did he really, or is he just taking responsibility? Because you are very intensely into taking full responsibility for anything that goes wrong.”