She moaned with relief, feeling rejuvenated with every encouraging sweep of tenderness that his thumb brushed over her cheek as she finished the rest of the glass’s contents. “Better now?”
The solicitude in his voice, in his eyes, thundered through her. She shuddered under the impact of her gratitude, her need to hide inside him, dissolve in his care. She tried to answer him, but this time it was emotion that clogged her throat. But she had to express her thankfulness.
His face was so close, clenched with concern, more magnificent in proximity, a study of perfection in slashes of strength and carvings of character. But haggardness had sunk redness into his eyes, iron into his jaw, and the unkemptness of a few days’ growth of rough silk over that jaw and above those lips caused her heart to twist. The need to absorb his discomforts and worries as he had hers mushroomed inside her.
She turned her face, buried her lips into his hewn cheek. The bristle of his beard, the texture of his skin, the taste and scent of him tingled on her flesh, soaked into her senses. A gust of freshness and virility coursed through her, filled her lungs. His breath, rushing out on a ragged exhalation.
She opened her lips for more just as he jerked around to face her. It brought his lips brushing hers. And she knew.
This was the one thing she’d needed. This intimacy. With him.
Something she’d always had before and had missed? Something she’d had before and had lost? Something she’d never had and had long craved?
It didn’t matter. She had it now.
She glided her lips against his, the flood of sensuality and sweetness of her flesh sweeping against his sizzling through her.
Then her lips were cold and bereft, the enclosure of muscle and maleness around her gone.
She slumped against what she now realized was a bed.
Where had he gone? Had it all been a hallucination? A side effect of emerging from a coma?
Her eyes teared up again with the loss. She turned her swimming head, searching for him, terrified she’d find only emptiness.
Far from emptiness, she registered her surroundings for the first time, the most luxurious and spacious hospital suite she’d ever seen. But if he wasn’t there…
Her darting gaze and hurtling thoughts came to an abrupt halt.
He was there. Standing where he’d been when she’d first opened her eyes. But his image was distorted this time, turning him from an angel into a wrathful, inapproachable god who glowered down at her with disapproval.
She blinked once, then again, her heart shedding its sluggish rhythm for frantic pounding.
It was no use. His face remained cast in coldness. Instead of the angel she’d thought would do anything to protect her, this was the face of a man who’d stand aside and brood down at her as she drowned.
She stared up at him, something that felt as familiar as a second skin settling about her. Despondence.
It had been an illusion. Whatever she’d thought she’d seen on his face, whatever she’d felt flooding her in waves, had been her disorientation inventing what she wanted to see, to feel.
“It’s clear you can move your head. Can you move everything else? Are you in any pain? Blink if it’s too uncomfortable to talk. Once for yes, twice for no.”
Tears surged into her eyes again. She blinked erratically. A low rumble unfurled from his depths. Must be frustration with her inability to follow such a simple direction.
But she couldn’t help it. She now recognized his questions for what they were. Those asked of anyone whose consciousness had been compromised, as she was now certain hers had been. Ascertaining level of awareness, then sensory and motor functions, then pain level and site. But there was no personal worry behind the questions anymore, just clinical detachment.
She could barely breathe with missing his tenderness and anxiety for her well-being. Even if she’d imagined them.
“Cybele! Keep your eyes open, stay with me.”
The urgency in his voice snapped through her, made her struggle to obey him. “I c-can’t…”
He seemed to grow bigger, his hewn face etched with fierceness, frustration rippling off him. Then he exhaled. “Then just answer my questions, and I’ll leave you to rest.”
“I f-feel numb but…” She concentrated, sent signals to her toes. They wiggled. That meant everything in between them and her brain was in working order. “Seems…motor functions are…intact. Pain-not certain. I feel sore…like I’ve been flattened under a-a brick wall. B-but i-it’s not pain indicating damage…”
Just as the last word was out, all aches seemed to seep from every inch of her body to coalesce in one area. Her left arm.
In seconds she shot beyond the threshold of containable pain into brain-shredding agony.
It spilled from her lips on a butchered keen. “M-my arm…”
She could swear he didn’t move. But she found him beside her again, as if by magic, and cool relief splashed over the hot skewers of pain, putting them out.
She whimpered, realized what he’d done. She had an intravenous line in her right arm. He’d injected a drug-a narcotic analgesic from the instantaneous action-into the saline, flicked the drip to maximum.
“Are you still in pain?” She shook her head. He exhaled heavily. “That’s good enough for now. I’ll come back later…” He started to move away. “No.” Her good hand shot out without conscious volition, fueled by the dread that he’d disappear and she’d never see him again. This felt instinctive, engrained, the desperation that she could lose him. Or was it the resignation that he was already lost to her?
Her hand tightened around his, as if stronger contact would let her read his mind, reanimate hers, remind her what he’d been to her.
He relinquished her gaze, his incandescent one sweeping downward to where her hand was gripping his. “Your reflexes, motor power and coordination seem to be back to normal. All very good signs you’re recovering better than my expectations.”
From the way he said that, she guessed his expectations had ranged from pessimistic to dismal. “That…should be…a relief.”
“Should be? You’re not glad you’re okay?”
“I am. I guess. Seems…I’m not…all there yet.” The one thing that made her feel anything definite was him. And he could have been a mile away with the distance he’d placed between them. “So…what happened…to me?”
The hand beneath hers lurched. “You don’t remember?”
“It’s all a…a blank.”
His own gaze went blank for an endless moment. Then it gradually focused on her face, until she felt it was penetrating her, like an X-ray that would let him scan her, decipher her condition.
“You’re probably suffering from post-traumatic amnesia. It’s common to forget the traumatic episode.”
Spoken like a doctor. Everything he’d said and done so far had pointed to him being one.
Was that all he was to her? Her doctor? Was that how he knew her? He’d been her doctor before the “traumatic episode” and she’d had a crush on him? Or had he just read the vital statistics on her admission papers? Had she formed dependence on and fascination for him when she’d been drifting in and out of consciousness as he’d managed her condition? Had she kissed a man who was here only in his professional capacity? A man who could be in a relationship, maybe married with children?
The pain of her suppositions grew unbearable. And she just had to know. “Wh-who are you?”
The hand beneath hers went still. All of him seemed to become rock, as if her question had a Medusa effect.
When he finally spoke, his voice had dipped an octave lower, a bass, slowed-down rasp, “You don’t know me?”
“Sh-should I?” She squeezed her eyes shut as soon as the words were out. She’d just kissed him. And she was telling him that she had no idea who he was. “I know I should…b-but I can’t r-remember.”