Lily glanced up from the computer where she was finishing a notation on the last of four teens who’d presented to the walk-in clinic that morning with complaints of intestinal distress. Apparently they’d decided to pick their own blueberries the afternoon before. After she’d determined what they’d eaten was a close relative of a blueberry, not quite as well-tolerated by the human intestinal tract, but fortunately, not poisonous, she’d prescribed some symptomatic relief and given them all a pass on the day’s activities.
Expecting to see another of the group, she half rose behind the counter in surprise. “Chase!”
“Morning, Lily.”
“Did you just get back?” She’d looked for the Jeep out her bedroom window as soon as she’d risen and hadn’t seen it. Chase looked surprisingly awake after what Lily presumed was a night of work. And Lily’s morning took on a new dimension of expectation. Chase.
“Got in a few minutes ago,” Chase said. “Sorry, I thought you’d be done by now. I just need to grab some antibiotic ointment and a couple of four-by-fours. My med kit needs restocking.”
Lily tilted her head, feeling as if she’d missed a step. Her first thought had been that Chase had come to see her. Apparently not the case, which was embarrassingly disappointing. “Sure, but do you usually restock from here? Because I’ll have to adjust my threshold for reordering inventory if that’s the case.”
“Not usually, but Sarah doesn’t mind if I top off in an emergency.” Chase shrugged and then winced. “I’ve got a full day here and don’t have time to get down to the station to resupply.”
“I thought you were out on a call about a bear,” Lily said, coming around the front of the desk. “Did someone get injured? Is that why you were out all night?”
“No, just took us all night to track the bear, get her back to her home territory, and track down the asshat owners who were running hunting dogs on restricted public land.”
“Long night. So, the bandages?”
“Big bear, restless sleeper. While we were getting her strapped in, she rolled over and took a swipe. No malice intended.” Chase grinned, a crooked grin that would’ve been charming if Lily’s antennae hadn’t already been reading high on the BS meter.
“Who got injured, Chase?” Lily repeated slowly.
Chase averted her gaze for a second and then sighed. “I might have a scratch on my shoulder. It’s damn hard for me to reach back there by myself.”
“A scratch,” Lily said coolly. “I see. Let’s go on back to the treatment room, and I’ll take a look at it.”
Chase glanced at her watch. “I don’t really have time, and it’s just—”
“I haven’t tested the extent of my authority here, but I suspect if I called Nat and told her you aren’t fit for duty, she’d have to find someone else to take your calls.”
Chase narrowed her eyes. “You wouldn’t.”
“Try me.”
“Come on, Lily,” Chase muttered, but dutifully trudged toward the hall and the treatment rooms.
Lily got a good look at her back as Chase walked in front of her. “Chase, your shirt’s shredded, and there’s blood on it.”
“The shirt looks worse than me. My turnout vest got the worst of it.”
Lily was still processing. She’d handled rat bites, dog and cat bites, even horse bites. This, as with so much with Chase, was new territory. “You were mauled by a bear, and you didn’t go to the emergency room?”
“Lil,” Chase said, glancing over her shoulder, “we field-dressed it. It’s fine. Like I told you, we had to track down and deal with the dog runners. We’ve been trying to catch this particular crew for the last six weeks.” She grinned, something of a feral grin that struck Lily as extremely sexy, which seemed totally inappropriate in the moment. Was totally inappropriate.
“You went off to arrest…miscreants…while you were injured.”
Chase stopped walking so abruptly, Lily nearly bumped into her. Chase slid both hands to Lily’s hips and cantered her head as she whispered, “It’s a scratch.”
Lily’s heart thundered beneath her ribs. A familiar scent clung to Chase’s skin, something sweet and tangy that she finally recognized as the way that the air smelled first thing in the morning. Mountain air, clean and pure, dense with life. Chase teemed with the energy of life. Just being near her stirred Lily’s blood the way nothing ever had, even before the soul-numbing last few years. She swallowed, aware that Chase’s mouth was a fraction of a breath away from hers.
“I’ll be the judge of whether it’s a scratch or not,” she murmured.
Chase eased back a little, and that mouth, so sensuous and so tantalizing, slid into the smile that told Lily Chase knew exactly what she was feeling.
“You’re the doctor.”
Lily pressed both palms to Chase’s chest and gently gave her a little push. “So nice of you to notice. Treatment room. First door on your left. Go.”
“I know where it is.” With a chuckle, Chase turned, walked in, and, even though Lily was only a few steps behind her, somehow had her shirt unbuttoned and was shrugging it off.
By the time Lily closed the door, Chase’s back was to her. A white bandage covered a quarter of her back beneath a black tank top, extending from her trapezius to below her shoulder blade and almost to the edge of her latissimus beneath her arm. Four parallel streaks of blood showed through the white dressing.
“You’ll need to take off your tank.”
“I could use a little help with that,” Chase said. “It’s a little hard raising my arm.”
“How fond are you of this tank? Because cutting it off is going to be a lot simpler.”
“Good thought. I’ve got others.”
Lily pulled the bandage scissors from the top drawer of the equipment cart that stood next to the treatment table, walked around behind Chase, and cut the tight support tank up the back, well away from the lacerations. “Are you allergic to any drugs?”
“Nope.”
“Did you have any antibiotics administered in the field?”
“I took two 500 mg capsules of cephalexin.”
“I’m going to take off the dressing,” she said, pulling on gloves. “I’m sorry, it’s probably going to hurt.”
“Go for it.”
With the dressing removed, Lily got a good look at the four surprisingly neat gouges in Chase’s back. She bit back an oath. “Whoever saw this and didn’t send you to the emergency room needs to be written up for—”
Chase turned and rested her hips against the edge of the stainless steel table. “It’s okay, Lily. It’s been treated. We do things differently out in the field.”
“Oh, don’t give me that. You weren’t in a war zone. You could’ve left.”
With exaggerated patience, Chase said, “No, I couldn’t. We had a three-hundred-pound mother black bear, with two cubs out there somewhere alone, who’d been chased out of her territory by three dogs. She somehow decided to lure them away rather than kill them, and we needed to get her tranqued, on a sled, into the back of the transport, and home where she belonged. And then, like I said, I had to deal with the guys who set those dogs loose on her.”
Chase was angry and Lily could hear it. Furious, in fact. She gave up arguing in favor of treating her. She laid out gloves, a bag of sterile saline and a sterile basin, Betadine, and the dressing she’d need to rebandage it. “How did you know who they were?”
“Their dogs were wearing GPS collars—that’s how the guys follow them through the forest. The bear was tagged too. So we knew her home range and that she had cubs.”
Lily sighed, defeated. Of course Chase would have stayed until the call was finished. “Up on the table so I can get this cleaned up. These are deep—at least one is down to fascia. God, Chase, how did you function after this?”
“I’ve got some numbness in that area. That probably took the edge off.”
“I see,” Lily said, and she did, as the surgical scar that ran from the base of Chase’s neck down the middle of her back, and likely the injury beneath, would have damaged some of the sensory nerves. Her stomach churned as she assessed in her mind’s eye what the damage must’ve been, and the level of pain and fear, and a recovery as painful as the injury. “What level was your break?”
“T-four five,” Chase said.
“God, you were lucky,” Lily murmured.
“Yeah,” Chase said in a flat tone. “They kept telling me that. Took me a long time to accept it.”
Lily laid a hand gently on Chase’s uninjured shoulder. “I’m sorry. I know what you lost, and you must’ve worked mercilessly in PT to recover the way you have. But you’re here, moving, doing what it seems to me you love to do.”
The rigid tension in the muscles beneath her fingers drained away. “You read that right, Lily. I was lucky. I know it.”
Lily removed her hand and straightened. “Well, you were lucky again last night. If I’d seen you right away, which I should have,” she said, her voice hardening with exasperation, “I could’ve cleaned this out and possibly sutured it. Now, this long after the injury, that’s not a good idea. The risk of infection is much higher with delayed closure of contaminated wounds like this.”
“I hear you. Got a look at it with a mirror last night. Ought to close all right.”
“Yes, it should.” Lily worked as they talked, irrigating away the few clots with a dilute Betadine solution before irrigating with saline again. “And if you’re careful, you don’t have to go on the injured list.”
Chase swiveled on the table to face her head-on. “You weren’t even thinking of that, were you?”
“Yes,” Lily said with asperity, “given that you’ve been mauled by a bear, that had crossed my mind.”
“This was not a mauling. You have to trust me to be the judge on this.”
“Really? Because you are not prone to take chances, or consider yourself superhuman?” She was angry too, and not doing a very good job of hiding it. The injury could have been so much worse. What if the damn bear had swiped six inches higher and a little more forward? It would have severed Chase’s carotid. She could have—probably would have—bled out right there. And Lily would not have known. Could not have helped. Would have lost someone else—someone whose face, whose laugh, whose stubborn strength and gentle touch had emerged from the mass of faceless hundreds she’d tried to save and couldn’t to awaken her soul. Lily’s stomach churned.
To her surprise, Chase grinned. “My sister has been talking to you again, hasn’t she? She’s always accused me of being an adrenaline junkie. Undeserved, I have to say.”
“As a matter of fact, no, Sarah is innocent. That conclusion was relatively easy for me to come to on my own.”
“I know my limitations, Lily, and this is not a problem. I’ll take my antibiotics, I’ll keep it clean, I’ll be careful to avoid any undue physical strain, and it’ll heal up in a week. It’s no more of a problem than a bad sunburn.”
Lily laughed, she couldn’t help it. “I don’t think we can equate a second-degree burn with a little blistering to being clawed by a bear!”
“Just as annoying.”
Lily shook her head. “I’m starting an IV and giving you an intravenous dose of cephalosporin. Then you report here every twelve hours for the next two days for a wound check. If you’re not willing to do that, then I’m getting on the phone to Natalie right now.”
Chase gave her a long stare, and Lily’s chin came up. She’d had a lot of practice dealing with difficult patients, and even though this one annoyed her more than most, she was willing to go to the mat to see that her orders were carried out. Chase was a classic risk-taker. From everything Sarah’d said, and the things Chase had revealed about her childhood and her free-climbing, Chase was into extreme physical challenges. Now, deprived of her natural outlet of climbing, she answered any emergency call, even when it wasn’t her primary responsibility. She either lived on the adrenaline rush, which was pretty typical of extreme sports or risk enthusiasts, or she had something to prove.
Right now, Lily didn’t care which. Her only concern was to see to Chase’s safety and health.
“Well?” she asked when Chase only smirked. Definitely a smirk, not a smile.
“I have to check in with you every twelve hours. Take my shirt off, alone with you somewhere?” Chase’s eyes glinted. “Not a hardship, Lily.”
“Not personal, Chase.”
“Whatever you say.”
“God, you are so annoying.”
Chase laughed. “You say that to all the patients who irritate you?”
“As a matter of fact, no, I do not. You are an exception.” Lily waved a hand. “Now turn back around so I can get this dressed.”
“Go ahead, get this done. I want to get the day started.”
“I’m serious—you need to take it easy.”
“All I’m going to be doing is walking. I won’t even carry anything heavy, I promise.”
“I’m going to keep an eye on you today to make sure you follow through on that.”
Chase laughed softly again, and the sound brought heat to Lily’s midsection. “That’s not going to be a problem either, Lily.”
* * *
After all the other campers in the cabin left for breakfast, Marty sat on their bunk, opened their backpack, and took out all the items one at a time to double-check they had all the required gear for the day’s hike and would be able to find it when needed. Mentally reviewing the list they’d gotten the day before, Marty put their water bottle in the side pocket, already filled with fresh cold water, their field first-aid kit, snakebite kit, compass, waterproof box with matches, flashlight, and MREs inside, and strapped their heat resistant thermal blanket and individual pup tent—compressed into its own go-bag—onto the back of their twenty-five-liter backpack. The tent wasn’t strictly required, but they’d never set out on a hike without it, so it seemed they should take it along even if this was just an exercise. Since Marty hadn’t backcountry camped since the fall before with their dad, this was a good refresher. They slipped on the pack, adjusted the straps, checked that the load was evenly distributed, and had just swung it off again when the cabin door opened.
Ford and Shannon bounded in on a storm of laughter, accompanied by a strong waft of weed. Marty hadn’t seen either of them earlier and had just assumed they’d gone to breakfast. Maybe not.
Shannon halted abruptly and cocked her head as if discovering something strange in her path. Weirdly, Ford looked chagrined.
“Oh, look who it is,” Shannon said in that tone of voice that could be construed in any number of ways, from mocking to just trying to be friendly, “it’s…oh, who is it today? Would it be Martha? Or Martin?”
“Come on, Shannon,” Ford muttered.
Shannon shot her a look, her red eyebrow perfectly arched as if to say What? Did I say something wrong? She smiled, and it wasn’t a smile Marty could possibly misinterpret. They’d never really known before what the phrase cruel smile referred to, but they recognized it now. Disdainful and angry, for some reason. Which was weird too, because they didn’t even know these girls.
“So?” Shannon said, her gaze swinging hard to Marty. “What are you feeling today? A little bit boy or a bit more girl? Because, you know, I don’t want to misname you, or whatever.”
“Marty’s fine anytime.” Marty headed toward the door, swinging wide of the pair who stood just inside. For just an instant, they thought Shannon might sidestep and block their way. That was new—until now, name-calling and snide remarks were the worst Marty’d had to deal with. But they knew enough to be wary of possible physical encounters. They slowed, their heart racing. Everyone else was probably already down at the lodge, a good quarter of a mile away.
“I have to get my things,” Ford said, crossing between Shannon and Marty, as if interrupting the line of fire. “Come on, Shannon. You haven’t even started to pack.”
“Like I care about some stupid hike,” Shannon snapped, but she stomped over to her own bunk and out of Marty’s way.
Marty hesitated, watching as Ford swept a number of loose items lying on her bed into a backpack. Ford didn’t take the EpiPen but seemed to intentionally push it aside.
“I’m good,” Ford said, straightening. “You ready, Shann?”
“I suppose,” Shannon said scornfully. “Like, there’s no way out of it, is there?”
The two of them turned in unison and walked past Marty as if they’d suddenly become invisible, another familiar occurrence. They had no idea why Shannon didn’t like them. Well, they knew why Shannon didn’t like them, but not the reason beneath the dislike. From the minute they’d introduced themself and said their pronouns, Shannon had had issues. The why didn’t really have anything to do with them. But there it was. When Marty was alone with just Ford and Shannon, or Shannon solo, Shannon’s comments were even nastier. Marty sighed.
Not like they hadn’t heard it all before, and sometimes worse. They glanced back at their bunk to make sure they had everything and then, for some reason, back at Ford’s, the bottom bunk across from theirs. They picked up Ford’s EpiPen, slid it into their back pocket, and walked out the door.