The UnTied Kingdom (26 page)

‘What about him?’ asked Harker, who was beginning to sound sleepy. How that was possible when she was digging around in an open wound on his chest, she had no idea. She supposed it was part of being a manly man. Shrapnel wounds? Splash of gin and a kip, that’ll cure it.

Gritting her teeth, she went after a particularly deep shard of plastic, intriguingly wedged in sideways. That seemed to wake him up.

‘If I’m digging bits of circuitry out of you, the least you can do is stay awake,’ she said.

‘Not an issue,’ Harker said.

‘You were dozing off there!’

‘I tend to do that during history lessons.’ He took a deep breath, which did interesting things to the movement of muscles in his chest. ‘What was that about Archduke whatsis being assassinated?’

‘Franz Ferdinand. It sparked off the First World War. The biggest war the world had ever seen. The War To End All Wars.’

‘No, that was in 1939, after Hitler–’

‘That was the Second World War.’

‘Then clearly yours wasn’t the War To End All Wars,’ Harker mocked.

‘No. That’s what they call “irony”,’ Eve said. ‘Do you still have that here?’

‘I’m familiar with the concept.’

‘Well, at least you’ve got that to be proud of. Are you familiar with the concept of the British Empire?’ Eve asked.

Harker laughed.

‘Don’t do that, I almost got my tweezers stuck in you,’ she scolded.

‘Then don’t make jokes.’

‘The British Empire is not a joke. The British Empire, my granny told me, used to cover a third of the world. When she was a little girl, geography lessons consisted of colouring in the bits belonging to us with a pink crayon, and she’d use up a whole crayon and need another one before she was done.’

Harker frowned. Then he flinched, as Eve went after a piece of plastic that had splintered.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘but how did you get this empire?’

Eve opened her mouth, then shut it again, and used the excuse of digging out the splinter of plastic to think about it. Well, how had such a small, damp island managed to conquer a third of the world?

‘I think,’ she said eventually, carefully grasping the shard, ‘it had a lot to do with not believing we couldn’t.’

Harker seemed to think about that. ‘I’m sorry, you’ve lost me.’

‘It’s like bumblebees,’ Eve said, and he gave her a look that questioned his own sanity in allowing someone as bonkers as her to perform minor surgery on him. ‘No, I mean – a bumblebee is the least aerodynamic thing there is. Look at it, all round and fluffy, it shouldn’t be able to fly. But it can, because no one’s ever told it it can’t.’

Harker was still staring at her. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’m in severe pain and dosed up on spirits. What’s your excuse?’

‘I’m insane,’ Eve said, and yanked out the plastic splinter triumphantly.

Chapter Nineteen

The flicker of the oil lamps clued Eve in to the fact that she’d been kneeling on the edge of the bed pulling bits of keyboard out of Harker’s chest for several hours. That and the blurring of her vision.

Harker lay back against the pillow, his skin gleaming with sweat, his mouth tight. Eve, who’d spent the last few hours arguing and contradicting him, was secretly filled with admiration that he’d withstood it all with very little reaction.

Well, he’d complained. He’d actually complained a lot. But it occurred to Eve that this was really because he liked to annoy her. He wasn’t whining in pain.

‘Okay,’ she said eventually, dropping the last piece of plastic into the glass. ‘Only one left now, and it’s the big one.’

‘You had to leave that ’til last?’ Harker murmured. His eyes were closed, and over the last half-hour or so his responses had become decidedly less animated.

‘Hey, you want me to do this my way, or not at all? It’s the bullet – damn good job it hit your shoulder, huh?’

‘Oh yeah,’ Harker said. ‘I’m really grateful it hit me.’

‘I mean,’ she tapped his other shoulder admonishingly, ‘you should be grateful it didn’t hit six inches to the left.’

‘No, that was reserved for the shattered keyboard.’ He yawned and shifted, wincing as the movement stretched the muscle in his shoulder. ‘I’m sorry, you know.’

‘What, for keeping me up half the night doctoring you? You’re the one who’ll be sorry come morning,’ Eve said lightly.

‘No. For messing up the keyboard. You said it was important.’

His words were starting to slur now. Eve couldn’t blame him, she was exhausted and she wasn’t the one with bits of metal stuck in her.

‘It’s okay,’ she said, leaning close and peering into the bullet wound. ‘I might still be able to get this one working. And if not then, I dunno, maybe Daz can think of something else. Improvise.’

Harker nodded sleepily.

‘Okay,’ she said, ‘I’m going in. And this looks pretty deep, I’m guessing it’s wiggled in further as you’ve moved around, so it’s going to take some digging. Okay?’

He grunted.

‘Harker–’ she broke off. Well, he was going to wake up as soon as she started digging deep in his shoulder.

She took a deep breath, reminded herself that she was a competent, intelligent person on a mission of mercy, and stole a glance at Harker’s face, angled slightly towards her as he rested. His hair was starkly black against the white of the pillow, his eyes shadowed by dark circles and his jaw by more than its usual level of stubble.

What would you look like clean-shaven?
she wondered.
Would you be handsome, or are you too harsh, too strong for that? Are you too bitter, too hard and worn?

She touched his face with the back of her hand, his jaw rough against her skin, and said gently, ‘Harker? I’m going after the bullet now. It’s going to hurt.’

‘More?’ he mumbled.

‘There’s that possibility.’

He took a breath and opened his eyes, his warm, gunmetal eyes, and met her gaze. His hand came up, touched her face just as she’d touched his. He nodded.

Eve dug into the wound.

It was deep, maybe two inches, and she thought she saw bone as she moved aside, as carefully as she could, layers of torn skin and muscle. She heard Harker’s harsh intake of breath, felt his whole body tense, and determinedly kept her eyes on the wound.

There it was! A dark ball of metal, hidden behind something pink and squidgy she had no wish to identify.
It could be important. A nerve or artery or – no. Worry about that and you’ll lose your own nerve.
She angled her tweezers, but couldn’t quite grasp it.

‘I’m going to have to try and nudge it a bit,’ she said. ‘It’s stuck.’

‘Leave the bugger,’ Harker said through gritted teeth.

‘I will not! I’ve spent all night digging out tiny fragments of plastic, I’m not going to leave a whacking great ball of metal in there.’ She peered closer. What she needed to do was nudge it a bit to the right, and then hopefully, she could grasp it with the tweezers. If only they weren’t so slippery with all that damned blood …

‘Your dedication is … impressive,’ he panted.

‘Yes, it damn well is. Now, you know what I’m going to do?’

‘Cause me more pain?’

‘Uh, yes. But, I’m going to remember what it was that made Britain great. What made the Empire so huge that the sun never set on it. And you know what that was?’

‘Lunacy?’ Harker muttered.

‘Of a very specific kind. We succeeded,’ she slipped the tweezers into the wound, ‘because it never occurred to us that we could fail.’

It was a terrible line, but Eve squared her jaw, chased the bullet out into the open, and yanked it out without allowing herself to consider how much it would hurt Harker.

Judging by the blood trickling from his lip when she finally looked up at his face, that hurt had been considerable.

She dropped the bullet into the glass. It went
glunk
.

‘All done,’ she said, and when he opened his eyes she smiled at him. He gave her a rather weak smile in return.

‘All done bar the stitches,’ he said, and Eve’s shoulders slumped. ‘Oi, don’t you make that face. It’s me going to have the needle stuck in me.’

She shoved her hair out of her eyes with the back of her arm and nodded. She’d already sterilised the needle and thread but forgotten about them. Well, how much stitching could there be to do? There weren’t all that many long or deep cuts.

When she’d sewn the last one, she poured a little more gin over the lot, especially the bullet wound, and handed the bottle to Harker. ‘Finish it.’

He lifted his arm and looked at the half-inch left in the bottle. ‘Sure you don’t want a sip?’

‘Like you wouldn’t believe,’ she said, ‘but I think you need it more.’

He gave her a crooked smile that did strange things to her insides. Eve put it down to exhaustion and the complete surrealness of spending the evening doctoring first a keyboard, then a hard, lean man who complained more about her explanation of history than the fact that she was sticking sharp pieces of metal into his tortured flesh.

‘Okay,’ she said, yawning. ‘Dressing?’

‘Mm,’ said Harker, eyes closed again. ‘Prefer undressing.’

Eve ignored a low stab of heat and said, ‘I meant bandages.’

He grunted again. ‘Clean the gin off first.’

‘Sir, yes, sir.’

‘And don’t call me sir.’

‘I’ll call you what I damn well like,’ Eve said, ‘I’ve still got this scalpel, you know.’

He smiled at that, but he didn’t open his eyes.

‘And while I’m cleaning the gin off,’ she said, wetting the last towel, ‘you might try washing your face.’

At that, Harker’s expression turned to such little-boy sulkiness that she laughed.

It helped if she thought of him as a little boy, not as a rather large, hard-muscled, brave and stoic man. Because thinking of him as a large, hard-muscled, brave and stoic man made more strange things happen to her insides, and she wasn’t quite ready to deal with them yet.

Eve made him sit up to wrap the bandage around his chest and shoulder, which brought her into disturbingly close proximity with his hard, naked torso.
Dammit,
she thought,
he’s doing this on purpose. He’s being all lean and sexy on bloody
purpose
.

She let him fall back to the bed with a slight thump, which Harker didn’t even seem to register. His head fell to one side, his hair feathering against his cheekbones, his breathing deep and even.

‘I can’t believe you’re asleep,’ she said, and jumped when he murmured, ‘’m not. Stop staring at me.’

Eve stuck her tongue out.

‘Saw that,’ he mumbled, snuggling against the pillow.

‘Liar,’ Eve mouthed, because his eyes were closed, and started gathering up all the kit she’d used. She threw the bloody towels in the bathtub, washed the implements and left them in the bowl to dry, then splashed water on her face and scrubbed at her hands until most of the blood had come off.

‘What, will this hand never be clean?’ she muttered, looking at the pink stain around her nails. ‘How can he have heard of Stoker but not Shakespeare?’

When she went back into the bedroom, the last oil lamp was guttering, so she turned it off, then did the same for the dim overhead electric lights. The fire in the sitting room had reduced itself to ashes a long time ago, so she left it.

Her shoulders ached, her limbs were heavy with fatigue, and as she stood in the doorway to Harker’s bedroom, cold crept over her. She thought of her chilly little trundle bed in the room she shared with Martindale, who was probably still being operated on, and Tallulah, who was assisting with the operation. The thought occurred to her that she maybe ought to go down and see if they needed any help.

‘No,’ she said out loud. ‘I can’t bear it.’

Besides, she was so tired she’d be useless anyway.

She shivered in the cold, dark room. Funny how she hadn’t noticed the heat fading away while she was working. But then, Harker had been generating enough heat of his own.

She frowned.
Hope he’s not getting a fever.

Maybe I ought to stay and keep an eye on him
.

As her eyes adjusted to the dim moonlight, she watched him sleeping. At least, probably sleeping. He was bare to the waist, and without decent light she couldn’t see most of the scars marring his body. All she could see was his flat stomach, his broad chest, the curve of his hipbones before they disappeared below his waistband.

There was no fat on him, none at all, and none of the showy muscle she’d become used to with the over-pumped backing dancers who’d gyrated on stage with Grrl Power. Harker didn’t have the sort of carefully designed physique generated by hours of weight training in the gym. She doubted he’d ever even seen a gym. What he had was a lean, hard body, with the narrow waist and broad shoulders of a man who’d been used to hard physical work before he’d even finished growing.

She regarded him for a long time, her head on one side.
Would you be handsome?
No, he never would. But he was already quite beautiful. Gently, she pulled the quilt over him. ‘Harker,’ she said softly. ‘Are you asleep?’

He didn’t stir.

‘Harker?’ she said, louder this time. ‘Charlie’s outside with a gun pressed to her head. She’s going to kill herself because I’ve spent so much time in here with you, all alone.’

Nothing.

‘That’s after she’s killed us both.’

Still nothing.

Sleep softened the harsh lines of his face. The moonlight made the bandage on his chest gleam stark and white, rising and falling with each breath.

‘Harker,’ Eve said softly, and watched him a while longer before whispering, ‘I think you’re amazing.’

Then, without entirely working out a valid reason other than
I really, really want to,
she toed off her boots, unbuttoned her shirt, and crawled into the bed next to him.

In twisted dreams Harker watched, over and over, Martindale’s body jerking in the air. And over and over it became, as injured friends inevitably did, James White, the tattered ribbons of flesh on his back leaping with each thrash of the whip, even after his body had gone still, sagging in its bonds.

Mary White lay curled on the floor, her hands tied and her mouth gagged, beaten and bloody and flinching with each cry of her baby. Harker couldn’t forget the sound of that baby. In the lonely hours of the night it haunted him, screaming and screaming with pain and fear.

He woke with a start into a silent room, pale daylight creeping past the open curtains. The day was grey and misty, impossible to tell how early or late it was.

His right shoulder throbbed. His left was weighed down by something.

The right shoulder made sense. He remembered the failed raid, the keyboard that had probably saved his life, and Eve’s subsequent care. Well, if you could call it ‘care’, when she’d bitched and argued and poked him with the tweezers until he’d very nearly burst into tears.

What confused him was the weight on his left shoulder and the warmth pressing against his body. It felt almost like a woman curled up next to him, but that made no sense.

He cracked open one eye.

He quickly shut it again.

Okay, he was still dreaming. There was no way in hell Eve was curled up next to him; and not just next to him but half on him, too, her arm stretched across his waist and her leg propped over his. Her other hand curled in his hair, and that was curiously more intimate than the rest of it.

The quilt had slid down so he could see that she was wearing an undershirt and trousers, which answered one question – thank goodness he hadn’t done anything he’d forgotten about – but raised another. Namely, what the hell was she doing there?

He opened his eyes, and she was still there.

Well, damn.