Staring up at the ceiling, I make myself count the tiles to avoid thinking about Tessi’s soft touch, the way her hands move up my thighs, the quiet sounds of her breathing, and the lightly musky scent of her.
My cock flexes.
I promptly grab the sheets and draw them over my crotch.
Tessi giggles softly. “Fuck, me. A wolf shifter with a body like this? I mean, what kind of a dumb ass would I be if I didn’t at least try to steal a chance to touch you? I was thinking I was going to get stuck in a harem with a Ginarigon and a bunch of catty women and hate the rest of my life.”
“Hey,” the Ginarigon whines, bracing a fresh bandage over his side. “We are good to our females.”
Tessi wrinkles her nose and smiles over at him. “I’m sorry. ButIdon’t like to share.”
His mouth hangs open like he’s never heard such a concept before.
“Or I’d get picked by Vinym,” Tessi continues with a shrug, “and need inoculations before mating.”
The Shifter in me squirms, wanting free the moment she says the m-word. I wrestle him back into submission. But I can’t stop my growing erection. It betrays the best of my control.
“Thorians sound like assholes,” she adds.
“They are.” I try to adjust my position on the bed so I can bunch up the sheets a little better and conceal from her how easily she’s getting to me.
Tessi stops cleaning the wound she’s working on and helps me prop myself up.
“But they are good fighters, the Thorians,” I offer. “We don’t get along very often, but we did when the empire threatened our worlds a few months back.”
She smiles down at me with her starlit eyes before bashfully looking away. “I suppose there are good and bad traits in all of us, depending on who’s judging who.”
Tessi has, at some point, put on gloves, grabbed gauze, and now tries to stop the bleeding from my deepest wounds in my right thigh.
I tilt my swimming head back and try to comprehend how my brother could remain so distant while Tessi, basically a stranger, has jumped in to help patch me up. When I reach out to touch her and make sure she is real, I feel a tug on my arm.
Someone has put a needle in it that leads to a bag of pale blue liquid.
“That’s your IV. The doctor put it in a few minutes ago.” Tessi eases me back and braces my arm. “You look confused.”
“I don’t remember.”
“That’s okay. I do. And I’m staying until you’re good to leave.” Tessi grabs a piece of damp gauze and begins cleaning my arm.
“The blood doesn’t bother you?” Human females tend to avoid it. A few can handle it, nurses mostly. But everything I studied up on said that I should protect her fromeverything.“They told us when we signed up to keep you from seeing this side of war whenever possible.”
“Been on my own for years, since I was barely a teen. You think I haven’t cut myself open?” Tessi snorts. “I carry a trauma kit in my gear pack. Stitched myself up a few times. But I also had a contact in the medical field, so I learned a few things from her.
“I prefer having numbing agents on hand, but they’re expensive. Radar has needed care a few times, too. And he doesn’t have thumbs, so I had to do it.”
The doctor returns with a blue case. “Took me a while to find the Mindoran dermal repair kit. You’re going to need a Madmyn shot.”
“Already up to date,” I tell him. “Military requirement for everyone on Spec Ops teams.”
Tessi removes her gloves and stays out of the doctor’s way as he draws my wounds closed and presses down a layer of blue dermal tape to seal them.
“What about Tessi?” I ask him. “If she got any Myndrous blood on her…”
“I’m vaccinated.”
We both look at her.
She gazes toward the end of the medical bay and the Leosantian still sitting on his bed, his broken wing, hanging limply from his shoulder. “Myndrous hunted me on Earth. My medical contact gave me the shot.”
