Pushing into the examination room, he—
Oh . . . dear God.
Oh . . . Lord above.
The patient on the table was lying still as water and . . . she was probably the most beautiful anything he’d ever seen: Hair was jet-black and braided into a thick rope that hung free next to her head. Skin was a golden brown, as if she were of Italian descent and had recently been in the sun. Eyes . . . her eyes were like diamonds, both colorless and brilliant, with nothing but a dark rim around the iris.
“Manny?”
Jane’s voice was right behind him, but he felt as if she were miles away. In fact, the whole world was somewhere else, nothing existing except for the stare of his patient as she looked up at him from out of her immobilized head.
It finally happened, he thought as he burrowed under his shirt and took hold of his heavy cross. All his life he’d wondered why he’d never fallen in love, and now he knew: He’d been waiting for this moment, this woman, this time.
The female is mine, he thought.
And even though that made no sense at all, the conviction was so strong, he couldn’t question it.
“Are you the healer?” she said in a low voice that stopped his heart. “Are you . . . here for me?”
Her words were heavily accented, gorgeously so, and also a little surprised.
“Yeah. I am.” He wrenched off his suit’s coat and threw it into a corner, not giving a shit where the thing landed. “I’m here for you.”
As he approached, her stunning icy eyes slicked with tears. “My legs . . . they feel as though they are moving, but I suspect they do not.”
“Do they hurt?”
“Yes.”
Phantom pain. Not a surprise.
Manny stopped by her side and glanced at her body, which was covered with a sheet. She was tall. Had to be at least six feet. And she was built with sleek power.
This was a soldier, he thought, measuring the strength in her bare upper arms. This was a fighter.
And, God, the loss of mobility in someone like her took his breath away. Even if you were a couch potato, life in a wheelchair was a bitch and a half, but to somebody like this, it would be a death sentence.
Manny reached out and gathered her hand into his own—and the instant he made contact, his whole body went wakey-wakey on him, as if she were the socket to his inner plug.
“I’m going to take care of you,” he said as he looked her right in the eye. “I want you to trust me.”
She swallowed hard as one crystal tear slipped out to trail down her temple. On instinct, he reached forward and caught it on his fingertip—
The growl that percolated up from the doorway was the countdown to an ass-kicking if he’d ever heard it. Except as he glanced over at Goatee, he felt like snarling right back at the son of a bitch. Which, yet again, made no sense.
Still holding his patient’s hand, he barked at Jane, “Get that miserable bastard out of my operating room. And I want to see the goddamn scans and X-rays. Now.”
He was going to save this woman even if it killed him.
And as Goatee’s eyes flashed with pure hatred, Manny thought, Well, shit, it might just come down to that. . . .
SIX
Qhuinn was out alone in Caldwell.
For the first time in his frickin’ life.
Which, when he thought about it, was nearly a statistical impossibility. He’d spent so many nights fighting and drinking and having sex in and around the clubs downtown that surely one or two had to have been solo flights. But nope. As he walked into the Iron Mask, he was without his two wingmen for the very first time.