breath, she straightened her shoulders, turned away from her exhausted, drained and sad looking image in the mirror and tried to stop thinking about how yummy the man looked.
He was still a soldier. She was a doctor. Two different worlds. Two different end games. Their two worlds couldn't mix in any positive way.
Pushing her feet forward, she grabbed the bag one of the local villagers had brought her, holding it against her chest as she walked into the recovery room.
For a long moment, she just stood there, her eyes moving over his muscles with relish and fascination. Once again, she was startled by how amazing he looked. The man was built!
“Are they gone?” he asked as he slowly woke up, his eyes looking up at her.
Even as she looked down at him, he went from sleeping to fully alert in a matter of seconds.
“Are you feeling okay?” she asked softly, not sure how long he’d been sleeping or if he was still in pain.
His eyes moved up and down her jeans-clad figure, a slight smile forming on those handsome lips. “I’d feel a whole lot better if you’d kiss me,” he told her.
All of Raven’s professional demeanor crashed with those words. Her mouth fell open and she looked at him as if he’d just told her he was going to bomb the clinic. “Excuse me?” she asked him, sure that she’d misunderstood him. Surely he hadn’t just said…
“I’m going to kiss you,” he told her and pushed himself up to a sitting position. “And eventually, we will make love together. I’ve been contemplating the eventuality all day.”
She shook her head and backed up. “No. That’s not possible.”
A dark eyebrow went up with that denial. “Not possible? How is it not possible?”
She stepped back, realized what she was doing and pulled herself up short, trying to appear strong even though her stomach was flipping about and her body was trembling with the idea. The very bad idea. “No. No kissing. No making love, especially not in the near future with that wound and no…nothing else.”
He laughed softly when she looked down at the bag in her hands. “I brought you clothes.”
He chuckled as he accepted the shirt and sweatpants. “Are you sure they’ll fit?” he asked, lifting the shirt up to look at it.
She stepped back slightly, trying desperately hard not to look at his bare chest. Or his shoulders. Could he please just put the stupid shirt on? “I asked around. Someone found a…large one.” Oh, please, please let that shirt fit, she thought silently.
He lifted the white tee-shirt up, holding it against himself and nodded. “It just might fit me,” he said, amazed. The older shirt definitely wasn’t his style, but he would wear it if it would make her feel more comfortable.
Raven sighed with relief when all that amazing, tanned skin was now hidden from her desperate eyes. Almost sinking to the floor with relief, she bit the inside of her cheek, not allowing herself to tell him to take it off again.
Dinner that night was a strained affair, her eyes kept moving over his tee-shirt covered shoulders and chest, remembering how amazing he’d looked without the material covering all of those muscles. She had barely finished her soup and toast tonight, too distracted by thoughts of that tee-shirt “disappearing” or
“accidentally” getting shredded in the dead of night. Where was a fireplace when one needed one?
Chiding herself for thinking such ridiculous thoughts, she left him to his sleep earlier than the previous night, too ashamed of the way her mind was trying to come up with ways to get rid of the shirt she’d worked so hard to obtain for him.
Chapter 4
“You’re too young to be a doctor,” he told her the following morning when she brought him coffee and some toast with what he suspected was peanut butter, but how she’d gotten peanut butter in this area of the world, he had no