Beyond the Breaking Point - Lori Sjoberg Page 0,26

considered, these look pretty good.” She set the used bandage aside and tore open an antiseptic wipe. His muscles flexed beneath her fingers as they moved with trained precision to clean and disinfect each of his wounds.

Thankfully, his pack had shielded him from the brunt of the buckshot. The wounds were nothing to sneeze at, but they could have been so much worse. If he’d been shot at closer range, or if the shotgun had been loaded with slugs instead of pellets, he wouldn’t be acting as if this were all just a giant inconvenience.

During her time at Landstuhl, she’d operated on soldiers suffering a wide range of traumatic injuries: limbs blown off by IEDs, bullet and shrapnel wounds, and traumatic brain injuries, to name a few. Thanks to improvements in medical care and technology, fewer of them died on the battlefield. She’d stopped the bleeding, stitched them back together, and used every trick in the book to make them whole again. But regardless of how well their bodies healed, it would take them much longer to recover from the invisible trauma that war inflicted on soldiers.

Hope imagined the same applied to Wade. She didn’t know the full extent of his injuries, but the scars on his face and back were bad enough. A shiver slid down her spine at the thought of the hours of torture he’d endured at the hands of Aranza and his henchmen. Not to mention, being forced to watch his partner’s torture and murder. That kind of trauma took its toll on a man. It certainly explained his desire for vengeance, though she wasn’t certain it would provide the closure he needed.

As expected, Wade made one of those low, rough sounds that she was beginning to grow accustomed to hearing but wasn’t quite sure what it meant. From what she gathered, it could mean anything from kiss my ass to if you were a guy, I’d punch you.

Finished with cleaning the wounds, she unscrewed the cap of the tube of antibiotic ointment. The area around each pellet wound was inflamed, which was typical at this stage of the healing process. In a few days, so long as infection didn’t set in, the redness would fade and the skin would start to scab over. “You’re lucky these didn’t go very deep. Another few millimeters, and they would have penetrated the muscles.”

Another grunt. “Yeah, that’s me, Mr. Lucky. When I get home, I’ll buy a lottery ticket.”

Though she didn’t want him to know it, she kind of liked his jaded sense of humor. As far as coping mechanisms went, it was one of the least harmful. But behind it was an abundance of bitterness, coupled with a burning impatience and an unyielding desire for justice. It would either help him achieve his goals or get them all killed. She hoped it wouldn’t be the latter.

Pushing the thought from her mind, she applied ointment to the wounds and slipped the tube back into her bag. Then she taped a large piece of gauze over the affected area and took a moment to inspect her handiwork. “There, all set. That wasn’t so bad, now was it?”

The look he slanted over his shoulder could have peeled paint off a wall. “Do I get a reward?”

“That depends on what you want. Fair warning, I’m fresh out of lollipops.”

He tugged his shirt back down and tucked it into his pants. When he turned to face her, there was something in his eyes that sent an unexpected burst of warmth right through her body. Her breath caught, and she barely resisted the instinctual urge to step back.

Or did she want to step forward? She honestly couldn’t say. It was as if her fight-or-flight responses were working on competing wavelengths. She wasn’t sure which one she wanted to prevail. Probably flight. It was the safe choice. Flight kept her from doing dumb things she’d live to regret later.

Trouble was, her feet weren’t in the mood to cooperate, and she cursed her traitorous body.

His head cocked slightly to the right. “You okay, Bones?”

Hope blinked a few times, and then her brain latched onto what he’d called her. “Bones?”

The corners of his mouth twitched. “Yeah, you know, like in Star Trek. You do that ‘I’m a doctor, not a fill-in-the-blank,’ thing that Dr. McCoy always did.”

The reference triggered a memory from what seemed like a lifetime ago, and she couldn’t help but smile. “That used to be one of the running jokes among the residents at