Jo Leigh - Release

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To Barbara Joel and Barbara Ankrum for being there just when I needed them.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

SETH TURNER REACHED FOR HIS blanket with a hand that wasn’t there. He’d been half-asleep, but now he was awake and filled with a red heat that burned behind his eyes, in his gut. Every day he had to relearn the raw truth: his left hand was gone, ripped apart by a bullet, tossed aside by the doctor upstairs. Without his consent.

He hated her for it. Hated her touching him even to give him an exam. Hated her voice when she tried to convince him she’d done the right thing—saved his life. Did it ever occur to her that he didn’t want this life?

He pulled the blanket up with his right hand and settled back on the pillow. It was a different kind of torture, knowing she was sleeping upstairs. That he would have to live here, with her, for months yet to come while he learned to use the prosthesis.

It had already been three months since she’d performed the surgery. It had taken this long for the wound to heal, for his skin to form a useless lump three inches up from what used to be his wrist. He’d been in bar fights, he’d been in wars, he’d even survived Delta Force training, but nothing had been harder.

He understood now why men, good men, turned to drugs and alcohol after they’d been mutilated. The pain was the least of it. The part he couldn’t stand, that made him want to die, was the loss of everything that was important about him. Which was the part Dr. Harper Douglas didn’t get.

To make things worse, to add the goddamned cherry on top, there were his dreams. They came every night now. At first he’d shaken them off, but there was no use pretending they were going to stop. He woke in the middle of the night sweating and hard, his erection throbbing as images of her, of goddamn Harper, made him ache until, with his one good hand, he took care of business. Even that didn’t end his torment. Once he’d come, thoughts of her haunted him long into the pale mornings. With luck he’d fall asleep again, but mostly his luck had run out. By the time she came downstairs he hated her again. He tried to be civil, but it didn’t come easy.

Harper, with her no-nonsense attitude and her sharp blue eyes, looked at him as if he were a piece of meat, a patient, not a man. Her in her white robe, tight at the waist and crossing at her breasts. She wore no bra when she came from her bedroom, and though her breasts weren’t large, they moved when she did, swaying just enough to sear a picture in his head.

His hand moved down to his erection, and he thought again that he should feel grateful that he’d lost his left hand. He wrote with his right, threw with his right, beat off with it. But his left, that was his rudder, his stabilizer. Without it, how would he use the sniper rifle? Reload? How could he defend himself, let alone kill a man? Shit, he couldn’t even tie his shoes.

He heated again as he remembered finding the slip-on loafers that had appeared by his bed. Harper had put his boots in a cupboard and replaced them with granddad shoes, something a crip like him could handle.

Shifting again in the hospital bed, he wished for the hundredth time that the bullet had hit him right between the eyes. Not that he’d want to abandon Nate and the others, but Jesus. What was he supposed to do now?

He hadn’t even realized that he’d only ever seen himself as a warrior. Not even that—as a weapon. He’d been good for exactly that and nothing else. And now he was broken, a piece of junk to be thrown in the scrap pile.

He closed his eyes and prayed for sleep. What he got instead was a wave of need and the cursed images of Harper torturing his soul.

THE WALLS OF THEhouse were mostly gone, but the bathroom was still private. Four walls, a ceiling and a door complete with lock. Harper stared at the sink, at the faucet that dripped brown rust instead of water, and all she could think was that she couldn’t treat the child with her hands so filthy. The chance of infection was too great. But the water…the water had stopped. The electricity was off. Everything in the tiny village in the north of Serbia was in shambles.

There was no hospital, no other doctors, and she only had the small bag, barely more than a first-aid kit. The child…he was four, maybe five. He spoke no English, and her Serbian was terrible, so she couldn’t ask him where his mother or father was. Maybe they were out there, with the others in the square. But no. She couldn’t think about that right now. She couldn’t save them, but the child, the boy…Perhaps…

She looked up from the useless sink to see her own image in the cracked mirror. What was she doing here? She could have taken that job at the USC medical center. She could have gone to Africa or Asia, worked with one of the relief agencies or the Red Cross. But she’d gone to the UN. She’d volunteered to go to Kosovo because the war was over, at least officially. She’d never bargained for this. She closed her eyes and breathed as deeply as she could, trying to think of anything but the carnage in the square. There had been so many.

She’d come with Jelka, who’d lived in this village her whole life. Anya, who’d been an excellent aide and a friend. Jelka had come when her mother hadn’t answered her phone. Neither had her aunt, her cousins. They’d driven into the square, and the bodies had been everywhere. Harper had known within minutes what had killed them. A nerve agent. Something bad, worse than anything she’d heard of in medical school or the special training she’d received from the peacekeeping force. The men, women and children had died horribly.

She looked at the boy. It didn’t matter that her hands were dirty. He was dead. Everything once alive in this town was dead. What she didn’t understand was why. No government would sanction this kind of genocide. No independent army she knew of had the technical capabilities. Who had murdered Jelka’s family? Who had brought this nightmare into the world?

Harper woke with a gasp, and for a moment she was back there, in her tiny apartment with its uncomfortable bed, cracked basin and inconsistent heat. But a few deep breaths and a sharp focus on the familiar comforter brought her home to her own bed in her little corner of East Los Angeles. The shaking would take a little longer.

The nightmares had started months ago and were as much a part of her life as being a doctor at the free clinic. She hated them, hated that she woke up sweating and trembling. There’d been a time, as hard as it was to believe, when she’d gotten sweaty from a hot man in her bed. Now the only man in her life was a wounded soldier living in her basement, cursing her with every other breath. That is, when he wasn’t trying to hide his hard-on for her.