Doesn’t happen.
Jack spots me and vaults the wall Mal rebuilt with his bare hands a few weeks ago. He’s at my side before I’ve shut my car door. “What happened?”
I tell him.
He winces. “That place is as bad as any warzone I remember.”
I doubt that, but I get his point. A&E is a unique beast, no day ever the same. It’s why it called to me in nursing school, muscle memory from a place far worse. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”
My face, not A&E.
Jack’s unconvinced and uses his body to block me as we slip through the back door to the abandoned kitchen.
He finds first aid supplies and I let him clean up the gash on my hairline, encouraging the confidence he has that he can. It’s not misplaced. Like Mal, Jack’s SAS. Once upon a time he had the field medicine skills of a top-level paramedic and I don’t think he’s lost them.
“Who taped this?”
“Dr. Squeamish.”
Jack’s concentrating too hard to grin, but I catch the humour in his gaze as he peels the botch job from my temple and drops it onto the counter next to where I’m sitting. “Marc wasn’t in?”
“Not today. This wouldn’t have happened if he was.”
Truth. Marc handles rowdy elderly patients as well as he does brutal trauma cases. But this isn’t the first battle scar I’ve brought home from work and it won’t be the last.
Jack cleans the wound and my mind starts to wander as music drifts in from the bars. Shanty singing and the dancing beat of a drum Sol calls a crowdy-crawn.
“Lively tonight?”
Jack hums. “Aye. They had a good day on theSirona. Sold out in the harbour.”
“No market tomorrow then?”
“Sol said he might go back out if the wind shifts and he’s not too leathered.”
“Alone?”
The frown line Jack carries these days deepens a touch. “You think he shouldn’t?”
“I don’t know anything about fishing.”
Jack takes a breath to question what exactly Idoknow. And it’s been a long time coming for me to tell him a whole lot of nothing except that his brother fixed a year-long problem in less than a month.
“What—”
He’s cut off by a tornado.
Unruly hair.
Tanned limbs.
A glare just like the ones he’s sometimes capable of, but a hundred times worse.
Mal steps in front of Jack and wraps his hand around my jaw like he owns it. “Who did this to you?”
“No one.” I knock his wrist, not shocked it’s like hitting an iron bar. “It was an accident.”
“Where?”