“Can I get another blanket?” he snapped.
Mike and Josie shared a look.
“What?”
“It’s true what they say,” Mike said. “Doctors make the worst patients. Now can you stop whining for a minute so I can take a look at your leg?”
Josie spread another blanket over him from the knees up, her slender fingers tucking gently on either side of his waist. Her curvy body leaned over him as she worked, and he caught a whiff of the light, sweet lotion she wore.
He turned away from her, repelled yet pleased that she took the time to touch him so tenderly.
“So, how’s my leg? And why is my hand splinted and packed?”
His mind was still moving like river mud from the painkiller he assumed he had been given, and he was having trouble thinking clearly. He recalled his hand being chaffed by the shark’s rough skin, but that wouldn’t warrant a splint.
Josie cleared her throat. “Your leg is fine. Eight two-inch puncture wounds, which I sutured, and multiple lacerations. You shouldn’t have any problems with those healing. Stay off the leg for several days, and you know the drill for sutures. We’ll take them out in about a week.”
Houston tilted his head to look at hen Josie’s words sounded reassuring, exactly what he had been hoping to hear, yet she didn’t sound right. She sounded nervous. Unnatural.
Something was wrong, and he wanted to know what it was. “Is that it?”
“Oh, and I found you a souvenir.” Reaching back onto the counter she held up a shark tooth. “From your leg.”
He fought the urge to shudder. As if he wanted to remember that mouth coming at him, those teeth sunk into his flesh.
“What exactly did you give me, by the way? I don’t remember anything at all. I’m really sensitive to painkillers.”
For some inexplicable reason, she blushed. “Diamorphine.”
A horrible suspicion overcame him, one that would explain Josie’s obvious discomfort. “Did I, ah...say anything unusual while I was out?”
The blush deepened.
Oh, God. He had. He tried to get his brain to cooperate and reveal his words to him, but it refused. There was nothing but a big blank.
“I don’t think so,” she said, her eyes not meeting his.
That was not reassuring. Though he couldn’t imagine what he would have said, unless he’d come on to her or something, given what he had been dreaming about. Maybe he had actually asked her to suck his...hell.
But he didn’t have time for regrets, distracted by Mike’s examination of his hand. He didn’t like the look on Mike’s face.
“What’s wrong with my hand? I thought I just scraped it.”
Mike didn’t say anything as he rebound the splint he had undone. Then he looked up and met his eye.
Houston’s stomach hit the floor. “Mike? What the hell’s going on here?”
“You’ve severed your FPL and median nerve. We need to get you into the OR.”
Once when he was a kid, Houston’s dad had shoved him out of the way, and he had fallen on the edge of the coffee table, forcing all the air out of his lungs and leaving him stunned and disoriented.
This felt like that.
He heard Mike’s words. He knew what they meant.
He just couldn’t believe it.
“Are you sure?” He propped himself up on his elbow, and focused on his hand.