Page 15 of The Woman Left Behind

“No point in it,” she muttered after a moment of struggle with her stubbornness. “I don’t have a first aid kit with me.”

“Maybe you’re not prepared,” he shot back, “but I am.” He pulled a small yellow kit from his left thigh pocket. She had one just like it... in her car. She didn’t carry anything she didn’t think she’d need, and she hadn’t thought to get it from her car before she started out. Of course, she hadn’t planned on stepping in a water-filled drainage ditch, either. And it was just like Levi to point out her error.

But her feet were hurting like blue blazes, and some bandages would keep the damage from getting worse. Scowling, she sat down on the rock and began unlacing her boots. She peeled off her wet socks and surveyed the blisters on both heels, and across the tops of her toes on both feet. “Crap.” This was going to be a pain for a couple of days.

She held out her hand for the first aid kit, but instead Levi crouched in front of her and lifted her right foot onto his knee. Her mouth dropped open, and a flurry of words crowded into her throat, fighting to come out. “What? Hey! I can do that!” That wasn’t all her words, but they were the coherent ones.

She tried to pull her foot back, but he closed his long fingers around her ankle and firmly held it in place. He flicked a glance up at her. “I’ve got it.”

Abruptly her heart was pounding like a sledgehammer. She stared at his big hand, feeling the heat of it burn through her skin. He was so big and muscled that he made her feel overwhelmed, as if he had her flat on her back—Whoa!She shut that thought down in a hurry, but she was so unnerved that her whole body jerked.

Again the cutting glance. His eyes were so dark she couldn’t tell the difference between his irises and pupils. “Be still,” he said, and there was something in his voice, some subtle inflection, that she couldn’t decipher but nevertheless went all the way to the bone and froze her in place.

Levi looked back down at the slender foot he held and concentrated on keeping all reaction out of his face. It was just a foot, for fuck’s sake—a girly foot, with bright pink polish on the toenails, and a glittery stripe painted diagonally across each nail, but still just a foot. The hard truth remained, literally, that he’d been less turned on by looking at a completely naked woman than he was by holding Babe’s bare foot. He was touching her skin. Not the skin he preferred to be touching, but still, her skin.

And it was skin that needed some first aid. The blisters on her heels had broken open and could easily get infected.

“How did your feet get wet?” he asked as he opened the kit and took out a squeeze-pack of antibiotic salve.

“Drainage ditch. I didn’t see it until I was in it.”

He gave a brief nod. Shit happened to everyone. He’d gotten his feet wet a time or twenty, about half the time on purpose. You had to plan for it, because dry feet were essential. All of them were former military, except for her. The importance of keeping their feet dry had been drilled into them, but he’d overlooked getting her in the same frame of mind. These blisters were his fault.

“I should have told you to always pack extra pairs of socks,” he said, trying to ease the curtness of his tone. He fought a constant battle when he was around her, and only by erring on the side of asshole could he keep things completely hands-off. Now, in spite of himself, he was touching her, just like when she’d started to fall off the rope and before he knew it he’d grabbed her to keep her from getting hurt. Keeping his distance was getting tougher by the day. He didn’t have a noble bone in his body; his dick was pointing at her like a bird dog toward a nice fat quail, and telling his dick no didn’t come naturally to him.

But she looked as if she’d jump like a scalded cat if he barked at her, or moved too fast, so he had to tone it down. Getting her feet taken care of was more important than keeping his distance. “My fault,” he said calmly. “I didn’t think about it. But in the future, always keep two or three pairs of socks with you if we’re in the field—as well as a first aid kit,” he added pointedly, squeezing the salve onto the broken blister on her right foot.

“I wondered when you’d get around to that,” she grumbled.

Deftly he plastered a bandage over her heel, then took care of the blisters on top of her toes, using one bandage to cover two toes, taping them together, then another bandage on the other two small toes on that foot. Only her big toe had escaped blistering.

On her left foot, all five toes were blistered. He shook his head. “If you’re in a jungle and don’t take care of your feet, you’ll end up with jungle rot, and that’s a bad deal.” As he bandaged that foot he told her about the time he’d overlooked taking care of his feet in humid conditions, how he’d spent six days in sick bay, completely pissed off because his team deployed without him. All the while he talked, in a separate part of his brain he was thinking what it would be like to crawl up between her legs and put her flat on the big rock. He already had her foot in his hand, all he had to do was move it to the side, stand, and he was there.

With his hands on her foot and ankle he could feel the fine tremors that were quaking her, though when he glanced up she was staring fixedly at her right foot as if she could will it to heal. Her cheeks were pink, though, and he could see her pulse fluttering at the base of her slender neck. Instinctively he looked lower, to where twin little points tented her tee, and his mouth started watering like a damn teenager’s. He wanted his mouth on those nipples. He wanted his mouth on her, period, wanted her under his hands, underhim.

Fuck.

He set his jaw and finished slapping bandages on her left foot. Then, to give himself something to do, shifted around to sit beside her and picked up her boots, running his fingers around the inside to feel for any rough edges. Granted, her feet were soft, but she’d rubbed up those blisters faster than he’d have thought, even after getting the boots wet.

No seams or edges. He frowned and looked at her socks, noticed that they were oddly lumpy. He turned one inside out and pieces of foam fell on the rock. “What the hell?”

“Foam,” she said, picking up the pieces and slipping them into her pocket.

“I can see that. Why do you have foam in your socks?”

“To keep my boots from flopping up and down on my feet and rubbing blisters.” She scowled. “Doesn’t work when everything’s wet.”

She could effortlessly punch buttons he hadn’t even known he had. Just the idea—“Why the hell don’t you just buy boots that fuckingfit?” he snapped. At first they’d all tried to watch their language around her, but as the days had gone by they’d slipped back into their old habits, and she never paid any attention to their language or reacted in any way. But sitting so close to her, being turned on by her and knowing she reacted the same way to him... sayingfuckwasn’t the smartest thing he’d ever done, because it took his thoughts right back to the track he’d been trying to get out of.

She whirled toward him, amber and blue eyes spitting fire. “Because they don’tmakethese boots that fucking fit,” she snarled back at him. Then she caught herself and turned facing forward again. “At least not that I’ve found. I need size seven narrow, with extra narrow heels. These are medium width.”

They looked like a kid’s boots to him, but then he wore a size thirteen. Again he felt an unaccustomed surge of guilt, because he should have realized she wouldn’t know how to find the proper boots—though, damn it, she could have asked.

“How in hell have you been running?” Because she had. She’d had to work up to their stamina, but now she pretty much ran as much as the rest of the team, unless she was on drone training.

Defiantly she pointed toward the foam. “That and insoles. Low tech, but it’s mostly worked. I stuff the foam around my heels. I guess now I’ll start putting it over my toes, too.”

“No, now we’ll find you some boots that damn well fit. Where did you get these?”

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