Page 30 of Out of Control

He half carried Spencer into their room. The guy was all but unconscious from the pain before Drago was able to lay him across the bed. He hurried back to the Land Rover to fetch a med kit out of his gear, grabbed a bucket of ice on his way back to the room, and went to work on Spencer’s wounds.

He had very few actual cuts, but the guy was going to be black and blue from head to foot from the beating he’d gotten. The best cure for that was lots of ice and painkillers, and rest.

As soon as he got ice packs on the backs of Spencer’s knees and most of his face, he dug out painkillers and shoved a massive dose of morphine down Spencer’s throat.

“Spence, when you’re able to move, I’d like to take you to an emergency room and get your head X-rayed.”

“I’ll bet you’ve been waiting to say that for a long time,” Spencer replied dryly.

Drago smiled a little, relieved that Spencer’s sense of humor was intact.

“No X-ray,” Spencer muttered. “Hospitals generate reports that make their way back to the American consulate, to the agency, and my unit, which will generate questions by my bosses about how I got hurt.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nobody can question my physical fitness for duty. When I’m… a little better… I need to get out of Tel Aviv. ”

“That’s crap,” he burst out. “We need to find them and those assholes need to go down.”

Spencer murmured, “Those guys are leftover collateral from an op my team ran here a while back. We busted up an arms smuggling ring. Killed the guy in charge. Those were a couple of his sons. They only wanted a little revenge.”

“All the more reason to take them out,” Drago started.

Of course, the morphine chose then to kick in, and Spencer zoned out. Or maybe he used the excuse of the morphine to check out of the conversation. But either way, Spencer closed his eyes and clearly didn’t plan to say any more on the subject.

Well, hell. Two more minutes of useful consciousness out of Spence, and he’d have had those assholes’ names and addresses. But as it was, Spencer appeared to fall into a restless sleep. Granted, that was much better than the agonized pain from before. But still. This conversation wasn’t over. No way were a couple of local assholes getting away with beating up his—

Hiswhat?

What was Spencer to him?

And why was his brain shying away from putting a name to the messy stew of feelings sloshing around in his gut?

Okay. Fine. Spencer was more than an ex-lover. More than a work colleague. But how much more?

A voice in the back of his mind whispered,A lot more.

Well, fuck.

What was he supposed to do about that?

No answer came to him as he lay beside Spencer, listening to every labored breath the man took. Even in his sleep, Spencer was still in pain. The degree to which that pissed Drago off was illuminating. And not in a good way.

His life was built on a foundation of solid things like facts. Logic. Reason. Action. Decisiveness. Nowhere in the skill set that made him a great covert operator was there room for pesky little things like emotion. Feelings. Connection to others. Hell, relationships.

The alarm on Drago’s watch chimed, and he woke Spencer up, made him spell his name and count from one to ten and ten to one. Repeating the procedure every hour through the remainder of the night, he got no sleep as he wrestled with how he felt about Spencer and what to do about it. No answers came to him as he lay perfectly still on the king-sized bed beside Spencer, careful not to jostle him or even touch him between concussion checks.

Around dawn, as his alarm dinged yet again, Spencer’s eyes opened. Without lifting their heads from the pillows, he and Spencer stared at each other for a long, intimate moment. Gratitude broke through the fog in Spencer’s gaze, and relief no doubt filled Drago’s own eyes. That had been a damned close miss with disaster last night.

“Welcome back,” he murmured.

“Thanks.” A frown creased Spencer’s brow. “Speaking of coming back, why’d you come back last night?”

“They were going to kill you.”

“But you got away from me fair and square. You could’ve split and been long gone by now.”

“True.” He paused, then asked lightly, “Are those assholes likely to come after you again?”

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