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Her eyes took a minute to adjust to the sudden brightness. Once they did, she focused on her patient. His color was just fine and his pupils fully responsive. “Funny, I don’t remember seeing you at the housewarming party.”
A smile tugged at one corner of his mouth. “I built this house. I know the layout well enough.”
“Oh.” That rang a bell. Maybe her father or, more likely, one of the handful of former classmates she’d run into had mentioned something about Tyler starting a construction company several years back.
He stood in the middle of her tidy kitchen, looking incongruous and extremely masculine next to her lemon-yellow curtains and matching dish towels. Heavens, he was…something. The mature, logical voice in her head momentarily regressed to high school and squealed, Oh. My. God. Hell-raising, cherry-popping Tyler Longfoot is standing in your kitchen, about to drop his pants. Then she remembered why. Shaking off the disturbing mental lapse, she inched toward the door. “Let me get some supplies. I’ll be right back.”
Get a grip, Ellie. He’s the one who should be feeling light-headed, not you. She hurried to the hall closet to retrieve her medical bag.
Slightly winded, she skidded into the kitchen and saw him standing with his jeans undone and hanging low on his hips, hands propped on her solid, butcher-block table.
“This work for you, Doc?”
Depending on the caliber of the bullet and where, exactly, he’d been hit, she could have a comparatively easy extract-and-stitch job, or something requiring sedation, an MRI, and a couple hours of intricate surgery. Better to keep him upright and theoretically mobile until she determined the severity of his injury.
“Yes, that’s good,” she replied in her best calm doctor voice. After scrubbing her hands in her deep farmhouse sink, she took a pair of rubber gloves from her bag.
She snapped them on, moved a chair into position behind him with her foot, and sat. Then she dug around in her bag and placed supplies on the table. When she had everything organized, she said, “Okay, I’m going to lower your jeans and shorts as gently as I can, but you might feel some tugging if any fabric adhered to the wound.”
“Well, Doc, I’m behind on my laundry, so it’s just jeans tonight. Hopefully that simplifies things.” He twisted to look at her as he spoke, causing the jeans to sink lower. A heartbeat later she heard his quick intake of air as she pulled one side down to give her better access to the wound.
“Sorry. This could be painful. We should probably stop right here, slap a pressure compress on and call an ambulance.”
“I’m fine, Ellie,” he insisted through a clenched jaw. “Just do what you gotta do.”
“Okaaay. Face front and be still.” He turned around, and she concentrated on the matter at hand. Within a moment, she’d carefully probed the thin, fairly shallow line of the wound and located the…bullet? Pellet? She was no munitions expert. It was a small metal projectile, embedded about a quarter-inch deep in the spectacularly carved indentation of his buttock, between the gluteus medius and the gluteus minimus. But when she gently separated the margins of the wound for a better look, her patient sucked in a harsh breath.
“Son of a— Are you amputating half my ass back there?”
“Not yet. Don’t distract me.”
“Take your time.” His clenched jaw didn’t quite muffle the sarcasm.
She loaded a syringe with local anesthetic. “Can you count to three for me?”
“Sure. One, two—”
Ellie jammed the needle in and depressed the plunger.
Tyler swayed like a palm tree in a high wind. “Jesus effing Christ! What happened to three?”
Ellie pulled the needle out and placed it on the table. While waiting for the anesthesia to take effect, she explained, “Three is where you tense up and a little shot ends up feeling like a knuckleball hitting your muscle at ninety miles per hour.”
“Oh, well, thank you very much. That felt like eighty-five miles per hour, tops.”
“You’re welcome.” Using gauze, she dabbed blood away from the injury. “Let’s give it a minute to work, and then I’ll remove the bullet and you’ll be as good as new in no time.”
A skeptical grunt served as his reply.
She selected a long, slender pair of tweezers from the table and lightly touched the wound. No reaction from the patient. “Want to tell me how this happened?”
“Would you believe, self-inflicted?”
She laughed. “Not a chance. Nor will I believe your dog, cat, bird, or iguana accidently discharged your gun. Nor, at this hour, will I believe it was a hunting accident.”
“Worth a try.”
“Try the truth,” she recommended, enjoying a moment of triumph as she snagged the small metal round between the tweezers and extracted it. She flushed the wound and pressed more gauze to the site.
