With his free hand he pressed down on the towel over his wounded thigh, then ground his teeth together. “Get those and come back.”
She hesitated. Stared at him. And had the strangest sense she’d met him before. Somewhere. Or maybe not him. But definitely someone like him.
Crazy. He was a stranger. Someone who had obviously gotten in over his head tonight. He could be a criminal. A mercenary. A madman. But even as the thoughts flickered through her mind, she dismissed them. Right now, he was nothing more than a man who needed her help.
Heart pounding, Casey turned and left the room, and when she came back with her sewing kit, she saw he wasn’t holding it together nearly as well now. His breathing was labored. Sweat dripped down his forehead. His skin was pale, his eyes clouded. She suspected he was fighting with everything he had left in him to keep from passing out.
Her hands shook as she dug through the kit and found a needle, then stilled as another thought struck. “It’s cotton. The thread is cotton. That’s not good, right? I mean, hospitals use something sterile. I need—”
“Cotton’s fine,” he rasped. “It’ll be absorbed into my skin within hours.”
She wanted to ask how that was possible, but he lifted those cloudy onyx eyes to hers before she could, and she got that fuzzy-headed feeling again, like someone else was controlling her from the outside in.
“I may pass out. I’ll try to stay awake, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to…take it. After you stitch up the wound, bring the lavender towels.” He squeezed his eyes shut tight. Blew out a breath. “Bring the towels, wring them out and lay them over my wounds.”
“But how will that—?”
“The lavender has healing properties. Trust me. On three. Alright, meli?”
His eyes locked on hers. And something passed between them in that moment. A connection she couldn’t explain. A familiarity that touched her somewhere deep inside. As her heart raced, all Casey could do was nod.
He nodded back, then lifted his hand from his injured leg and dropped back on her mattress with a groan.
Casey’s stomach flipped around like a fish out of water as she went to work. After cleaning the needle, she tried not to think of what she was doing or the way blood ran down her hands as she worked. She made methodical stitches and remembered her home-ec teacher’s words from high school: Small, even stitches, Casey. Don’t rush.
Oh, Lord, if Mrs. Stevens could see her now.
She tried to stay focused, to keep her hands from shaking. At some point she realized the man in her bed had stopped groaning and that his muscles had gone lax. She looked up only to discover he’d passed out sometime after she’d started, though she didn’t know when. Fear that she’d killed him nearly paralyzed her. She reached up quickly with her bloodied fingers, felt his pulse. Weak but consistent. She breathed out one sigh of relief, then forced herself to refocus and kept stitching. Only when she had the wound completely closed and she was snipping the end of the thread did she notice the blood flow had slowed considerably.
At least that’s one good thing.
She’d used all the towels she’d brought to mop up blood as she worked, and there were other cuts on his arms and torso that needed tending. One quick glance down and she realized her T-shirt was ruined, soaked clear through in places from his blood. Seeing no reason to salvage it, she lifted the cotton over her head and bunched it up against a nasty-looking wound beneath his ribs. He moaned, tried to move slightly, and that’s when the breath Casey hadn’t realized she’d been holding came out of her on a rush.
He definitely wasn’t dead. He was sleeping.
Probably better. She didn’t know how he could have endured that pain without anesthetics. She’d have been dead already.
She was hesitant to stitch up any other wounds, even though she thought they might need it. He’d only been concerned with the one, and he was a man who’d obviously been through his fair share of fights before. She noticed then, as she looked across his bare chest and toned abdomen, the myriad of scars that crossed his skin.
And the strange tattoos on his forearms that ran down to his fingers. Ones she was almost sure she’d seen before.
Who was this guy? And what had really happened to him tonight?
“Meli,” he said in a rasp, turning his head toward her.
She used the ruined shirt in her hand to wipe the blood from his face as gently as she could as she bent over him. And out of nowhere, a wave of tenderness she couldn’t contain whipped through her as she looked down at this big, strong, hulking male who was so completely vulnerable to her right now.
The emotion was completely out of place. She didn’t know him. Didn’t have any tie to him. And yet, she couldn’t have turned away from him if she’d tried.