Recon Marines III: The Marine's Doctor (40 page)

“
It might be better to
wait a few hours and see if the stitches hold. If he lives that
long.”

Emma couldn’t protest the dour
prediction. And Vin’s experience with such life threatening injures
probably outnumbered hers. He’d certainly acted in a calmer manner.
“Thank you for helping me.”

He carried the pail of bloody water to
the sink, dumping it with care so as not to splash any on the
floor. His reply seemed as measure. “I only did what anyone would
do.”

She snorted and bent to gather up the
discarded shirts that had served as bandages. “Not many can work in
this,” she gestured toward Russ’ legs, “carnage. Not without
passing out or losing their meal.”

Vin rinsed the pail and returned it to
its place beneath the sink. “I’ve seen worse.” He looked for
something to dry his hands on and then settled for wiping them down
the sides of his coarse, gray shirt. He’d shed his jacket at some
point and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt.

Emma had noticed his strong hands
while he stitched but now the tightening and gliding of sinews and
muscles in his forearms distracted her. Without his jacket, his
lean physique drew her attention. He looked too thin as if recently
ill. Or perhaps he’d served in a combat unit and still recovered
from a wound. Though he didn’t move like a man suffering the
lingering effects of an injury as he walked back to Russ’
side.

Emma joined him, refocusing on Russ.
“I don’t know what to tell Jenny?” She pulled the scarf restraining
her hair off and rubbed her temples.

“
Jenny?” Vin asked but he
stared at her hair.

Wondering how wild her curly mane
looked after hours in the kitchen and with the stress sweat
dampening the roots, Emma resisted reaching up to touch it. Instead
she checked Russ’ weak pulse again. “Russ’ wife. How can I face her
if he doesn’t make it?”

“
Did you injure
him?”

“
What? Of course
not!”

“
And you’ve done
everything you could here. Tell Jenny that.”

Emma’s outrage drained, leaving behind
exhaustion and worry. “That’s small comfort to Jenny.”

Vin studied her hair for a moment
longer and then switched his gaze to Russ. His expression went hard
and distant. “They were married, had time to love and be together.
What more can a man want?”

The man really knew how to hit nerves
with the wrong thing to say. “They could want years and years
together rather than months. Russ could want to live to see his
child born. Jenny could want her husband at her side to help her
raise their child.”

Vin stepped away from her and scooped
up his jacket from one of the beds. He walked to the door and
stopped with his hand on the knob and his back to her. “Some people
never get a single day of warmth and love. Some people get only
hours or days. Russ and Jenny have been blessed with more time than
many others.”

He opened the door to the dark and the
quiet murmur of voices. Every citizen of Hovel Port seemed to wait
outside her door. The people parted in front of Vin, whatever they
saw in his expression opening the path.

Jenny escaped Vannie’s grasp and raced
in through the open door. She flicked one desperate glance at Emma
and then hurried to Russ’ side. She keened as she reached a
hesitant hand toward Russ’ face.

“
Sorry, Emma, she got away
from me.” Vannie entered and closed the door behind him.

“
I was about to come out
for her.” Emma gathered the used needles and the extra thread up
with trembling fingers. She longed to climb the narrow stairs to
her living quarters or fall into one of the beds along the wall but
a long night of watching over her patient awaited her.

“
What can I tell the
town?” Vannie whispered as he followed her over to the
sink.

Emma looked over her shoulder. Poor
Jenny leaned as close to her husband’s head as her belly would
allow. Only two months until the due date for the couple’s first
child. Jenny mumbled words into Russ’ ear, stroking his hair and
bathing his face with her tears.

Emma turned on the water to wash her
hands and hide her words before answering. “Tell them he lives for
now. Blood loss could take him by morning or infection in the next
few days.”

“
What of that stranger?
Did he help you?”

Emma paused, recalling Vin’s last
callus words, but also his fingers covered in Russ’ blood as he
worked across from her. “Vin did as much for Russ as I did. Russ
would have bled to death before I finished if Vin hadn’t been here
to assist.”

“
He’s a doctor,
too?”

Emma shook her head and found a bottle
of antiseptic to drop the stitching needles into. “He leaned his
skills on the battlefield.”

“
Well, we owe him, but I
don’t like it. No reason for a soldier to come here.” Vannie and
Moe worried about Emma’s secret more than she did.

“
Everyone has a past.
Perhaps he’d seen enough of death and wanted to retire from
war.”

“
You always think the best
of people, Emma.” Vannie gave her a weak smile, tinged with worry.
“That’s why we love you, lass, but I’ll be sending Vin on his way.
He’s too young to be retired from the military.”

After Vannie left, Emma trudged
through the cleaning of the surgery. Then she pulled a chair near
the operating table for Jenny to rest.

She checked the bandages on Russ’
legs. No blood leaked through but was it because the stitches held
tight or because so little remained in his body? Images of tanned,
clever hands flashed before her as she tucked the blankets around
Russ’ legs.

Had Vannie allowed Vin to spend the
night within the walls? Usually Vannie or Moe would send strangers
on their way before the daylight faded and the gates closed but
dark had already fallen when Vin left the surgery. And the rains
had arrived sometime in the last hour. Surely Vannie wouldn’t force
Vin out into the wilderness in the wet. And dangerous wildlife
roamed the forest.

Emma settled on one of the beds,
sitting up so she wouldn’t fall into a deep sleep. She watched
Jenny and Russ but her thoughts turned again and again to Vin.
Where did a man learn to act with such calm competence in a crisis?
What experiences created his cool indifference? Why had he come to
Hovel Port? Though none of it mattered. She’d likely never see him
again.

Chapter Two

Vin watched the settlement stir into
wakefulness. Not even the top of the line viewing equipment could
see much through the driving rain. He’d been on planet for the last
cyclical rain though under the cover of his ship.

Only a few people dared the wooden
walkways connecting the buildings. They huddled inside long coats
and beneath hoods of water resistant canvas. Vin stayed dry under a
waterproof tarp, high in a thick-limbed tree growing part way up
one of the steep slopes surrounding Hovel Port.

His perch provide a good scouting
position and kept him above the reach of the larger predators
roaming the forest below him. He’d mounted an electrified snake
ring beneath this nest to keep out the half dozen viper species
he’d encountered. The camouflaged tarp over his head hid him from
the winged predators he’d fought off his first day of observing the
settlement.

Today the gates of the village stayed
closed in the rain but the walls wouldn’t keep him out if he wanted
in. Did he?”

Vin didn’t like thinking about the
injured man and his pregnant wife. Seeing Jenny’s protruding
stomach the previous night had caused a pinch in Vin’s chest as if
he’d been shot with a stun laser. For a moment he couldn’t find his
breath. He fought back the pain of remembrance and sought the
numbness of mission focus. He’d found his bait but would she draw
his prey?

Emma wasn’t at all what he’d expected
when he started his search for her. He should have checked deeper
into her background. She was young to be educated as a doctor. Last
night gave away her inexperience with wounds. Perhaps she’d only
used her skills in the world of the pampered citizenship where
she’d lived most of her life. Her compassion surprised him,
especially considering her parentage, as did her modest living
arrangements. He wouldn’t have thought a woman used to the luxuries
her father’s evil had bought would hide in a place like Hovel
Port.

Emma Jones didn’t resemble her father
in any physical way. Her dark eyes contrasted with the golden curls
that fought against restraints. The mass of hair looked too heavy
for her petite form and delicate bones. How did her thin neck hold
her head up with all that hair weighing on it? He hadn’t cared for
his body’s shocking reaction when she freed the curls and ran her
small hands through it. But those hands had darted with precision
and strength as she stitched her friend’s torn flesh.

If he’d dreamed of those gifted hands
moving on his body last night, he rationalize it down to long
months of loneliness. But Recon Marines knew about being alone. His
solitude sat comfortably with him in the tree. Even during the last
months of travel among societies and large crowds of citizens, he’d
been alone, more alone than ever in his life.

Since his earliest memories, his
brothers had been beside him, fighting and dying. Only after the
disaster on Crevan Four had he learned the true meaning of being
alone. Recon Marines never looked beyond the current mission until
Crevan Four where his brothers-in-arms had found a way to have a
future. The others made plans for a life, a family and finding a
way to live as real people. But not him. He had his mission, his
revenge. When he finished with this last bastard…. He didn’t know
what he would do. He had no hopes, no dreams and no desire to start
a life somewhere.

The worst of the rain had passed and
it would end abruptly an hour before sunset. The thirsty ground
would soak it up and the towering mountains north of Hovel Port
would fill the fill the streams the miners worked in. The men would
pan and sift, hoping the rains carried bits of silver ore from the
massive operation upstream. Vin didn’t understand how Hadrason’s
Mining empire continued to operate when the owner languished in
prison. The world of business was as foreign to a Recon Marine as
breathing water.

Vin put his long viewers away and
settled back into the hammock he slept in. He’d rise early and
enter the town as soon as the miners departed for their work. The
stream they worked lay half a mile from the gates, and they started
their shift with the sunrise and ended it ten hours later. They
eked out a living here on the edge of civilization and far from
Galactic Law.

Why did Emma decide to hide here? Was
it only to his inexperienced eyes that she didn’t blend in? The
thought returned him to his contemplation of her person. He could
lift her petite form with one arm. He shifted in his swinging bed,
calling on years of discipline to put Emma Jones from his mind and
seek sleep. Any good soldier could sleep and wake on demand even if
he couldn’t control the dreams and nightmares waiting for him
there.

* * * *

Emma rubbed her aching back. She
resisted groaning as her muscles protested her movement but she
didn’t want to wake Jenny. Her friend dozed on the bed only a few
feet from where Russ lingered in the mercy of deep unconsciousness.
He’d held on through a day and another night but had still to wake
or stir. Infection had replaced blood loss as the main threat to
him though she worried he’d fallen into a coma.

She hobbled to the refrigerator
holding her limited medicines. Russ had already received the entire
supply of her best antibiotics so the next dose would be a second
tier of effectiveness. If Russ woke, he would suffer severe pain
and what she had wouldn’t last him three days at best. She’d used
most of it up on a woman who had burned her hand in an accident
seven days ago. She’d lost track of how long ago the last shipment
of supplies had reached Hovel Port. She leaned her head on the
door, staring at the contents as if her wishes might answer her
needs.

A rush of cool, damp air feathered
across her back. Cold and wind always lingered the first two days
after the rain. She turned, expecting the door had blown
open.

Vin pushed it closed behind him. He
carried a small package under one arm. He nodded at her and walked
to Russ’ side.

Today Vin wore similar clothing as
before, gray pants and a light blue shirt beneath his brown jacket.
In the muted light created by the lone lamp over the sink, his eyes
looked lighter than ever. He touched Russ’ cheek with the back of
his hand. His gaze lifted toward Jenny and lingered there for a
moment.

Emma thought he flinched before
looking away but her exhaustion might be playing with
her.

When Vin looked her way, his
expression was his usual. “I think he’s starting a
fever.”

Emma joined him at the bedside,
keeping her voice as quiet as his. “Not unusual for a severe
injury.” But she feared the same. She touched Vin’s hand where it
rested on the table side. “Thank you again for your
help.”

He stared at her hand resting on his
for a moment and then removed his. He unwrapped the shiny material
covering the package in his other hand. He pulled out a small
bottle and held it toward her. “Give him this to fight the
infection. Your medicinal supplies are pathetically
inadequate.”