Tempted Ch 15
OK, we are almost done with what turned out to be an absolute marathon of a fic (for me, at least!). One more chapter after this, and that will be all folks. Here it is, 'Tended', in which John is.
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“Get in here,” Ellie ordered John, and he raised one brow. Then, surprising her with his compliance, he unlocked the clear door and moved inside. The instant he was in, Ellie realized her mistake - he took up so much room in the small space, and what felt like all the air. But she’d rather deal with that than with how she’d felt when he was ignoring her. Taking a deep breath, she gestured him into the chair she’d vacated. “You injured that arm,” she said brusquely. “Let me look at it.”
The skin around John’s left eye crinkled as he squinted it at her. She firmed her lips and glared at him. She’d dealt with recalcitrant patients before - violent patients, patients in DTs or high on any variety of street drugs, patients just plain off-their-rocker psycho. “I once wrestled a three-hundred-pound meth head to the floor,” she told him sternly, ignoring how her heart was pounding with his nearness as well as the fact that it had been a whole team, nurses and security besides herself, who’d gotten that particular patient down. John didn’t need to know either of those things.
‘Need-to-know’, hah. How nice to usurp one of his spy-phrases.
“What about need-to-know?” Now both laser-blue eyes were squinting at her. Damn, she’d said that out loud? She had thought she’d conquered that little problem.
“Nothing, not important. Now I’m going to assess that arm, so don’t give me any back-talk.” Back-talk? She heard herself with amazement, even as both his eyebrows flew up. It wasn’t back talk that she feared, it was the gun he wore! And all the things she was certain his finely toned body was capable of even without that weapon.
Maybe especially without that weapon. She’d experienced the signature work of those lips, for example, and those large blocky wonderful hands ...
Oh, for crying out loud. Hormones - down! If ever there was an inappropriate place or time ...
Casey stared down at her with an unreadable expression, and then he sat. Ellie nodded in satisfaction, trying to ignore the irrelevant fact that his physical proximity was creating sparks which threatened her nerve endings. A medical assessment was just the thing to get her mind off ... things. This was what she did, after all - figure out the problem, and fix it. Despite her surroundings, the routine was as familiar as breathing.
“Shirt off,” she commanded. His chin lifted at that. She pursed her lips and kept her face stern. This time, John’s mouth bent in what looked like amusement to Ellie. Pleased to have broken that expressionless façade, she waited patiently.
Finally, he shook his head resignedly and pulled the edge of his black T-shirt up. He only got so far, though, before running into trouble; the left arm just wasn’t cooperating. Ellie moved in to help, a little belatedly due to the clenching of her abdominal muscles in reaction to the sight of his finely sculpted ones. “Good arm out first,” she told him, maneuvering the material up over his working shoulder and then his head. Beneath every incidental touch of her fingers, his skin was warm and smooth over hard muscles that moved with clean orchestration. Ellie swallowed as she carefully pulled the left arm out of its sleeve and dropped the shirt to the floor. The nearness and maleness of him were again causing her hormones to rise up, in revolution against her fear. How was that possible, after all the craziness she’d been through this morning? Besides that, right now he’s a patient - and you’ve worked on attractive ones before. Which she had. Just never one she was this attracted to.
Of course, she’d never been quite this attracted to, well, anyone. She cleared her throat. Focus. She turned her attention to the injury at hand. The tissue around the shoulder socket was swollen and beginning to bruise; impact trauma, she judged.
“Make a fist,” she told John, and frowned when he couldn’t. He couldn’t fully rotate the arm, either, though he turned white with the effort. She palpated the area. He didn’t make a sound, but she saw his teeth grit together.
“This is dislocated,” she told him.
He nodded. “I figured.”
“How you were able to use two hands to ...” Ellie’s voice tapered off as for the dozenth time the image flashed through her brain, of him standing with his gun up just after shooting her hostage-taker dead.
John knew where her thoughts were. “Adrenaline,” he answered shortly. “A body will do surprising things given the right motivation.” His eyelids shuttered.
Ellie stared at him, caught in his expression. There was something there, in the tight jaw and hard eyes ... something edgy but, she thought, covertly vulnerable that stole her breath. She parted her lips.
“What motivation?” Her voice wouldn’t come out at any more volume than a whisper.
John met her gaze solidly, his brow furrowed and his lids crinkled in a look she didn’t understand. “Fear,” he answered, gruff and low.
Fear. The single word didn’t mean anything to her, at first. But then Ellie was the one to look away from him. Fear for her, he meant? Fear so strong that it impeded the pain impulse and gave him the use of an unusable arm in order to kill what threatened her?
There was welling warmth in her chest and hot wetness forming in the corners of her eyelids, surprising her. She blinked against both and cleared her throat with an effort. You’re just a little shocky. Business. Focus. “I could help you with that,” she said huskily, with a nod at his shoulder, “but I don’t expect you have any pain meds in this place.”
“Pain meds ... no.” The way he said it made her wonder what kinds of drugs they did store in here, because clearly, there was something.
Well, memory-wiping ones surely seemed likely, now, didn’t they?
“Let’s just do it.” John’s tone was commanding, causing Ellie to cross her arms and roll her eyes at him. This made his lips quirk again, enough to crinkle the skin around his eyes in that sexy way he had. It made her yearn to lay hands on him and do some very non-doctorly things. It was simply wrong, Ellie groused mentally, for a man to look that good when he was injured, and sitting there half-smirking at her.
“This isn’t some stupid action movie where the hero runs his arm into a post and pops everything back into place, with a little bit of pain but no problem,” she admonished. “In real life, reducing a dislocated bone hurts, and it’ll still be tender for a few days after. That’s when it’s a simple dislocation - you’ve got all this impact damage to the tissue to deal with, as well.”
“I’ve dislocated it before, I know what to expect,” John returned.
“All right then,” Ellie nodded efficiently. She’d done her job informing him; it was his decision. “It’s pretty simple. You’re just going to move your right hand back over your right shoulder with your elbow out, like you’re about to pitch a baseball, but slowly and steadily.” She reached for his right fist to guide him through the maneuver. Now touching him, she became cognizant of his line of sight while he was seated and she was standing in front of him. Parts of her contracted in reaction. Stop that and concentrate, she reprimanded herself. Reducing an anterior dislocation, that’s what we’re doing here. Ignore everything else. Ignore the lovely expanse of his chest. Ignore the beautiful way the muscles of his arms shifted, crying out for her to put her hands on them. Ignore how she could sense his body heat as if he were a furnace and she an empty, cold house needing to be warmed.
John was frowning, and though her heart rate was high from her mental meanderings, Ellie yanked her attention to what she was doing. While her thoughts strayed, the fingers of her hand bracing his bad shoulder had wrapped too tightly around his clavicle. She loosened them, hoping he didn’t see the way her cheeks flushed. Then she remembered who he was. He makes observations for a living, you idiot. He probably knows every thought going through your head. Including her current, escalating desire to wrap as much of herself around him as she could and not let go.
John was regulating his breaths well, drawing each one in slow and deep. Ellie’s fingers tightened again on his shoulder as with satisfaction she felt the head of the humerus move into the glennoid and correctly socket itself home. Air moved over John’s vocal chords in something that wasn’t quite a growl, and he relaxed beneath her hands.
“There we go,” Ellie murmured, her voice calm and professional. “How does that feel?” On his shoulder, her fingers spread out to unkink themselves, rubbing across his skin.
“Better,” he answered. He lowered his right hand from behind his head with Ellie’s still wrapped around it - well, as far around it as possible. While completely proportionate to the rest of him, his hands were so big. There were calluses here and there, and she now knew that those were from many many hours spent holding a gun. She’d seen the precision with which he could shoot, and imagined it took a lot of practice to get that good.
“Pretty good right now, actually,” John spoke again, his voice turned grating. His head was cocked wryly to the side. Ellie realized with a fresh rush of blood to her face that she’d been - well, caressing the hand that she was considering. Her fingers straightened as though she’d been electrified, but she was kept from moving away by the hand she’d been holding. John’s blunt-tipped fingers curled up over hers, wholly encapsulating them.
His were rough and warm and she stilled. After all, she didn’t want to get away, and if he was going to hold her, any part of her ... that was what she did want. Very much. She tried to swallow, staring down at the top of his head as he turned it toward their joined hands. He cleared his throat, but if anything, his voice came out even more gravelly than before.
“Ellie.”
She opened her mouth to respond somehow, but before she got any words out he moved from sitting to standing. She’d been close to the chair, and now found her nose literally brushing his naked chest. Her heart rate spurted. She levered her head back preparatory to tipping it up to see him, but before she could he’d run his good hand into her hair and cupped her skull, surrounding it with warmth. He tilted her face up himself, and held her there, one forearm bracketing her shoulders, swamping her remaining uncertainties with his heat and power and integrity. She met the questions in his intense eyes fiercely, willing him to read her heart in hers.
Maybe he did, because his grasp on her tightened and his eyelids dropped to half-mast. Both her hands were free, and so she occupied them by lifting them to the magnificently naked shoulders spread before her. His respirations were deep and irregular; at her touch he let out a long breath that rumbled. She ran her fingers over his scapula, being careful of the bruised one, but on the right letting them dig in; first caressingly, and then demandingly. He dropped his head to hers with a full-throated growl at that, echoing the depth of her wanting.
Both sets of eyes were open when, with an achingly slow firmness, his lips molded themselves over hers. No light brush, no tentative touch this. It was certain and deep, a tandem movement that stirred the flickering sparks between them into a fire. Ellie’s nerve endings caught and burned wherever John touched her. When his tongue moved out to dampen her upper lip, she gasped at the sweet ache of desire that furled through her. She tilted her chin further to capture that tongue with her open mouth, and when it slipped over her teeth she keened quietly and went up on her toes to reach him better.
Heat spread from her nerves to her veins as she increased their points of contact, seeking him out with her hands and forearms, elbows, knees, even shins. Her clothed chest met his bare one, then pressed when he lowered his right arm to clasp her and pull her flush against him. Now everything touched, lips and tongues, hands arms and torsos, thighs - and it was inflaming and yet not enough. Ellie molded both her hands on his back, reveling in the lack of his shirt because it let her touch all that naked skin as she’d been fantasizing.
She skimmed her palms up along his spine, delighting in the sensation his muscles created as they moved - for he was touching her, too, his mouth moving on hers and his left hand dropping to trace her waist while his right clenched the fabric of her button-down shirt into a fist. That lifted its hem so that, at her waist, he found bare skin too. Ellie shuddered. He tilted to kiss her neck; panting, Ellie dropped her head back to give him better access. He rumbled something unintelligible and leaned her further, back over his supporting, uninjured arm, then bent over her to mouth and even suck on her skin. At the first touch of his tongue there, Ellie’s nails bit without volition into John’s back. He growled against her, sending vibrations through to the soles of her feet and causing her toes to curl under.
He was holding her literally single-handedly and without difficulty, the muscles of that supporting arm flexed and firm beneath her back while those under her nails slipped and slid like well-oiled machinery. She was surrounded by power when John held her, Ellie thought fuzzily, while his hot hard mouth moved back to hers as if pulled by gravitational force. But it was orchestrated, controlled power - harnessed strength, strength she knew without a doubt he would only ever use to protect her, to help her, to support her. And that was what made him So. Damn. Sexy.
She became cognizant of John’s lips moving in a way that wasn’t kissing. No, that was a smile; and he tipped his head back just slightly from hers, without letting an inch of space between them otherwise. “Are you talking while I kiss you?” he asked in a bemused tone.
Ellie frowned, or thought she did - most of her muscles seemed to have turned to melted puddles, liquefied by his heat. “Maybe,” she admitted, and she felt herself flush, though it probably wasn’t noticeable to John given her overall excited state. Her voice came out in a croak.
“What could you possibly have to say that’s so important that it couldn’t wait a few min- a little- a good, long while?”
Ellie giggled, feeling giddy. She was light-headed, likely from how rapidly she was taking breaths. If John wasn’t holding her, she doubted she’d have been standing.
“Just my thoughts out loud,” she told him honestly. “A problem I’ve had around you for awhile, you may have noticed.”
He snorted, and quirked a grin at her. “Yeah. All right, get it out. What were you saying?”
Right. Well, why not? It wasn’t like he didn’t know. Ellie shook her head ruefully. “I was saying ...” she moved, sliding her hands up his spine and then his neck to frame his square jaw. Her voice grew almost as gravelly as his could be. “So damn sexy.”
His eyebrows had a small seizure, and instead of a snort, this time John let out a full-blown laugh. The banked fire in his eyes flared, and he moved his mouth to mutter into her ear. “You and me? Understatement of the year.”
He reached for her hair - Ellie could feel that it had become rather rumpled under his recent ministrations - and tugged out a few tangles. “That all you needed to say?” he demanded.
Ellie bit her lip. “Essentia-” but his lips were back on her without giving her a chance to finish the word. Before she could do more than return the pressure, though, John had tilted his head away again. Frustrated to keep losing his mouth, Ellie frowned; but John tipped his forehead over her shoulder at something behind her. When she turned her head, she blanched. On the other side of that clear door stood two people she’d managed to completely and utterly forget about in the past heated minutes; Sarah and Chuck.