Free Shattered by Joann Ross

his knees, his tongue creating a hot, wet swath up her thigh.
    “Or maybe I’ll take you this way in the shower.”
    His arrogance was pure Night Stalker. But as his mouth clamped on the damp crotch of the panties he hadn’t yet taken off, the heat alone nearly making her come again, Kirby decided it was well deserved.
    “Then, after I wash every inch of that delicious cover-girl body, and make you come with just my mouth, I’ll carry you, wet and slick, to bed.”
    He stood up and scooped her off her feet, bloody boots and all.
    “Then,” he said, “after I helmet up, I’m going to come inside you.”
    “Oh, God.” She never realized she was multiorgasmic, but just that promise was nearly enough to push her over the edge.
    “Did I tell you I grew up on a ranch?”
    “I believe you mentioned it.”
    It was then that the image of that tight butt in boot-stacked Wranglers, smelling of sweat and hay and horse, had become permanently emblazoned on her mind.
    “Well, we have a saying out West,” he said as he carried her the few feet into the bathroom that was scarcely large enough to turn around in.
    “Save a horse.”
    He bent his head and gave her a deep, tongue-tangling, soul-stealing kiss she could feel all the way to her toes.
    “Ride a cowboy.”
    “Oh, God,” she practically whimpered as he sat her on the undersized trailer toilet, turned on the shower, then got busy unlacing her boots.
    It was the last thing she would say for a very long time.
     

 

     
     

    15
     
    Landstuhl, Germany

    Although it wasn’t easy finding out information on any member of the Special Forces, Kirby called in some markers throughout the military medical community.
    It took a while, but eventually she learned from an Army captain, who’d heard it from a SEAL, who’d heard it from a member of the 160th Airborne, that the Russian copter had taken Shane first to Bagram, where he’d been stabilized, then to Ramstein Air Force Base, and then to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center.
    Using a bit of political pull from her Army days, aided by the lucky fact that one of the surgeons at Bagram had been her superior officer at the 28th CSH, two weeks after Shane had shown up at the refugee camp, Kirby managed to hitch a ride on a C-17 carrying six wounded soldiers—one who was unconscious from a head wound, two with shrapnel wounds to the legs, lying on litters, and three ambulatory, one of whom told her he was suffering from severe headaches and PTSD—and the attendant medical crew.
    Landstuhl was not only the largest military hospital in Europe, it was also the best. With a survival rate of nine out of every ten soldiers who reached the LRMC, Kirby took heart in the mere fact that Shane had made it here.
    After landing at Ramstein, she and the others were loaded onto bulky American buses. The buses, painted dark blue with white crosses, looked like toys next to the gigantic cargo jet.
    Weaving in and out of rows of parked aircraft, the buses made their way across the tarmac and through a base the size of a small city.
    After passing though the gates, they continued down a long, wide highway off-limits to the public, then beneath the autobahn, on through the wooded mountain hamlet. Unlike Heidelberg, her last posting, which had been a bustling German city of one hundred forty thousand, Landstuhl was charmingly picturesque, with winding, narrow streets befitting its fourteenth-century beginning. There were several stone churches, houses were mostly whitewashed with red tile roofs, and a few trees were beginning to sprout early spring green leaves.
    At any other time, Kirby might have enjoyed the scene that could have appeared on a postcard from the local tourism bureau.
    But not today.
    With nerves in a tangle, she waited until the wounded were helped off the bus and met by waiting medical teams clad in cammie BDUs and purple latex surgical gloves.
    There was also a woman chaplain, who, Kirby noted, greeted each patient—even