Dragon Fall
Page 12

“It is an ah that means I see no obvious injuries.”
Once again I looked over the doctor’s stooped shoulders, bracing myself for the sight of blood or at least a gaping wound that had been washed clean by the sea. There was neither. What there was made me blink in surprise. The man’s chest seemed to go on forever, with lovely swells of muscles at the pectorals, rippling down to a six-pack that would have done any Hollywood actor proud. “Wow,” I said, drinking in the magnificent sight. He had what I thought of as a reasonable amount of chest hair, not so much that he looked like a monkey, but he was no plucked goose, either. A line of hair disappeared into the waistband of his pants.
I had a sudden, almost overwhelming hope that the doctor would cut off those pants.
Inappropriate smutty thoughts aside, I looked back at the man’s face. There was something about those high cheekbones and black hair that rang a distant bell in my memory. Was he some sort of a celebrity that I’d seen pictures of? Mentally, I shook my head. The memory was on the edge of my consciousness, hovering tantalizingly just out of reach.
Dr. Ek hummed to himself when he pulled out a stethoscope and listened to a couple of different spots on the man’s chest, then with a grunt, rolled him onto his side and listened to his back before letting him return to his resting position. “No water in the lungs. That, my dear, means your man was most likely conscious when he went into the water. It is a good sign.”
“He’s not really my man,” I protested.
One fuzzy white eyebrow rose over the lens of his glasses. “You were certainly ogling him as if he was.”
My face heated with embarrassment. “Oh, uh… I was…” I cleared my throat. “I was just glad to see he wasn’t hurt.”
“Mmm-hmm.” He didn’t sound like he believed me, and I couldn’t blame him. Not with the blush that was burning up my cheeks at being caught all but drooling over an unconscious man. “We might as well take his trousers off, if you think you can control yourself.”
“Hey! I may have admired the way his chest has all those muscles and the cute little nipples and the six-pack, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to pounce on the man the second you get his pants—Sweet sizzling soupspoons!”
While I’d been speaking, the doctor got the belt unbuckled, the zipper lowered, and jerked the sides of the jeans down to the man’s knees. Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending on how you looked at it—the man’s underwear went with the pants.
“Well, there’s the myth about men and cold water blown all to hell and back again,” I said, staring at the man’s groin before I realized that the doctor was asking for my help. “Oh, sorry.”
Hurriedly I set down the basin and helped the doctor divest the man from his shoes, socks, and pants. The doctor, with a glance at me, tossed a towel over the man’s privates.
“I’m quite in control of my libido, I assure you,” I told him with much dignity.
“It’s no concern of mine what you do with your man,” he said, giving a little shrug before continuing his examination.
I tried to adopt a nonchalant “I don’t care if there’s a naked, seriously hot man in front of me” expression and held the basin in case he needed one of the tools.
He didn’t.
“I don’t see any marks on him,” the doctor said. “Nothing that would indicate he’d been tossed around by the tide, as you said he was.”
“I said I thought he’d been rolled ashore with the tide, but maybe he swam there and then collapsed. Do you think his brain’s okay?”
“I can’t tell without a scan, but I don’t see any signs that there is damage.” He straightened up and peeled off a pair of latex gloves. “Let’s see if we can bring him around with a little chemical aid.”
He snapped a small plastic vial under the man’s nose. The smell of ammonia made my nose wrinkle, but it took about ten seconds before the man suddenly coughed, blinked, and tried to shove the doctor’s hand away.
“Ah.” The doctor smiled at me. “That is a good ah. He awakens.”
“So I see.” I stepped to the side to look at the man. He was squinting up at us, one hand shielding his eyes against the bright examination light.
The doctor tipped it down so it wasn’t shining right in the guy’s face, and asked, “How do you feel?”
The man looked first at the doctor, then at me, his eyes narrowed in confusion and, I thought, suspicion. He said something that I didn’t understand.
“Um… did you catch that?” I asked the doctor.
“No. It sounds Russian, or like one of those languages.”
“Russkie?” I asked the man.
He started to shake his head, yelped, and put a hand to the back of it, wincing.
“That would be the goose egg you have back there,” the doctor said, pushing his hand aside to gently probe around the area. “It didn’t feel too worrisome to me, but evidently you’re feeling it now, eh? Your head hurts, yes?”
The man said something else, carefully holding on to his head as he swung his legs over the side of the table.
The towel slithered down off his lap, leaving him exposed. He looked down at himself in surprise, then up to me.
I kept my eyes firmly on his face as I knelt to pick up the towel, handing it back to him. And if you think that was easy, you’re dead wrong.
“You don’t speak Swedish?” I asked him as he tucked the towel around his hips.
He just looked at me.
“English?” I switched to that language. “I hope you’re not Russian, because I never did pick up any of that language.”
“I’m not Russian,” he said, his voice a husky baritone that seemed to brush over me like a wave of velvet. He had a slight, very slight accent that I couldn’t place but seemed vaguely Slavic. He frowned first at me, then at the doctor. “Who are you? Why have you beaten me on the head and captured me? If you intend to kill me, I must inform you that my brother, although not currently on speaking terms with me, will avenge my death.”
“Wow. Straight from who are you to avenging your death? That’s some pretty big leaps of logic right there.”
“You are conversing with him?” the doctor asked, evidently not understanding English.