Page 58 of Forever Fighting
Her lips form a flat line. “It’s going to hurt.”
I try not to smirk, but it happens anyway. “Kid, I’m a boxer and a chef. A little pain doesn’t scare me. Hell, I like it.”
She shakes her head and rolls her eyes. “Yes, you’re a tough guy, but I’m going to be poking around at your wound, and it will sting like a bastard. Plus, the Dermabond can burn when applied.”
“I’ll be fine, Nurse Albright. I promise.”
She huffs, so very annoyed with me as she opens a sterile drape and sets it down on the table. “You do know I’ve neverglued or sutured anyone, right? Typically, the interns or second-year residents do that.”
“How many have you seen?”
She throws me a look. “About a million.”
“See a million, do one.”
“You have a lot of faith in me. Sit back.”
“Why?”
Without answering me, she drops herself onto my lap, stealing the breath from my lungs as she settles back and inadvertently nudges my dick.
“Do this with all of your patients?” I tease, trying for a levity I don’t feel.
“Only the hot, married ones,” she quips.
“Funny.”
“It’s the best angle, and if you want me to do this so you have a functioning hand, let me work.”
She holds my hand over the basin and proceeds to squirt it with sterile saline from a syringe. And yes, that does burn. When she’s satisfied, she pulls my hand away from the basin and sets it on top of the sterile drape and starts to dab it with sterile gauze to dry it. She opens all of the supplies, dropping them from the packaging onto the drape before she puts sterile gloves on and gets down to business.
“Touch each of your fingertips to your thumb for me.”
I can’t help my smile. Luckily, she can’t see it because her back is to me and she’s hyper-focused. I do as she says and she continues her examination.
“Any numbness or tingling in your fingers or fingertips?”
“No.”
She pokes at me with the tip of the tweezers around my hand. “You feel that?”
“Yes.”
She sighs in relief. “If this were any deeper, you’d have beenin big trouble, and I wouldn’t be able to close it. Hold still. This will hurt despite what you think.”
She examines the wound using tweezers and cleans it with more antiseptic, and yeah, that doesn’t feel great either, but it’s nothing terrible. Still, she’s in my lap and I wrap my other hand around her waist, holding her to me. Then I drop my face into her neck, breathing in the scent of her.
I nearly kissed her on the boat. I was inches away. I wouldn’t have stopped.
She clears her throat and shifts ever so slightly on my thighs, and silence descends, thick and heavy and charged with electricity. The woman literally has a sharp implement in an open wound on my hand, but all I can think about is the feel of her. Her ass on my dick, her hair tickling my face, her soft skin against my cheek and lips.
Right now, she could stab me with those tweezers, and I wouldn’t notice.
“This…” She clears her throat again. “This will burn.”
I nod against her, my grip on her waist tightening as she opens the Dermabond and starts to glue up my hand. She gets to work, tweezing and pulling and gluing as more dense silence holds us hostage, only broken up by the sound of our breathing. But she feels me. I know she does. Her breathing has changed, and her body is still, almost afraid to move an inch.
“You’re, um, distracting me with your…”
