When he stood up, I put one foot up on the ledge and tried to climb out.
“Whoa, where do you think you’re going?” he asked.
“To shower?” I said with wide eyes.
He shook his head. “You don’t have time to shower. You’re not done yet.”
Oh hell. I settled back into the tub just in time for Hans to sit down in front of
me.
“Hello, Rachel,” he said cheerfully, wagging his erection at me. “This is my cock
and he’s very pleased to meet you.”
I scowled, but my heart blipped with deviant excitement.
“Really?” I asked Julian, who was watching while he soaped his body with leisurely
strokes.
“Do you feel better now, Rachel?” he asked with an indulgent smile.
“Much,” I said in a heartfelt tone.
“Then you’ll feel even better after you’re done with Hans. Now get busy, slave. We
have work to do.”
Fighting a smile, I got to work.
* * * * *
During lunch, I sat on two ice packs and watched—wet, smelly and unkempt—as Julian
and Colin ate slices of fresh, hot bread and bowls of fragrant stew. Intermittent
growls from my stomach made them both smile, and though I tried to pout, I was too
bizarrely happy to do anything but smile back at them. Bree would blow an artery if
she could see me right now.
Afterward we went back and finished our tour of the hospital floor, including the
medical labs, nursing stations and several state-of-the-art intensive care rooms.
Then we stopped at the office with the printer and Colin handed me a red three-ring
binder so heavy I almost dropped it.
“Here’s a little light reading for you, otherwise known as the Operation FrankenDom
playbook,” he said. “Learn it. You may be called upon to assist another surgeon, if
necessary.”
I grinned. “Is it really…”
Operation FrankenDom
was indeed printed in big black letters on the cover. The subtitle underneath was
Vascular Surgery
.
And underneath that,
McBride of FrankenDom
.
“You’re insane,” I told Julian. “You know that, right?”
“The proper term is mad,” he corrected. “Mad scientists only become insane when they
lose their sense of humor.”
“I suppose your title is Igor?” I asked Colin.
He grimaced. “No, which is why I’m careful to keep my playbook hidden away in my room.”
When I stared at him questioningly, Julian said, “Can’t you guess? He’s
FrankenDom’s Fuckhole
.”
I cleared my throat. “Um, yeah, I’d keep that hidden in my room, too.”
From there, we went back to the operating rooms and they walked me through the basics
of the procedure.
“You’ll work with Dr. Lang on severing the patient’s blood supply while another team
of vascular surgeons severs the donor’s at the same level,” Julian explained. “Then
you’ll both accompany the patient’s head to the other OR and reestablish the blood
supply, reinforcing the common carotids and jugular veins with bio-absorbable mesh
stents.”
“I assume they’ll both be hypothermic?” I asked. Reducing the body’s core temperature
by a significant amount would slow the metabolism, allowing the patient’s brain to
survive longer without oxygen.
“Yes they will,” he said with an approving look. “With you and Dr. Lang working on
both sides of the patient at once, you’ll have sufficient time to connect all the
major arteries before brain damage occurs. It should go without saying that the cardiovascular
system will be the last severed and the first restored in both subjects, and you’ll
be suturing faster than you’ve ever sutured in your life. Once the integrity of the
patient’s vascular system has been verified, a state-of-the-art heart-lung machine
will rewarm the patient while the spinal cord is fused. This will, of course, be the
most time-consuming portion of the procedure. Afterward, the skull will be temporarily
attached to the spine while muscles and ligaments are reattached.”
“That sounds like a very long day.”
“We estimate the entire process will last at least thirty hours, assuming no there
are no complications.”
“It could be months after that before you have any idea whether or not the procedure
is successful,” I pointed out.
“That’s the nature of the beast, Rachel. Much of scientific research, and even medicine,
is a waiting game.”
“I know.” I sighed. “So who’s the first patient?”
“He prefers to remain anonymous, for obvious reasons.”
I stiffened. “Julian, I don’t operate on anyone without knowing who they are. For
obvious reasons,” I added tartly.
His eyes narrowed. ““Sarcasm ill becomes you, Doctor.”
“Sarcasm is a body’s natural defense against stupidity,
Doctor
,” I fired back.
“Indeed,” he replied stiffly.
Too late, I realized just what I’d said, and to whom.
“I’m sorry, Sir,” I said at once, trembling with dismay. “I didn’t mean that at all.
I was channeling my sister Bree. She says that all the time, and it just popped out.
That’s no excuse, I know, and I’m appalled that I said it to you, of all people. Please
forgive me.”
When he said nothing, I took a deep breath and went on, “You need to understand, Sir,
that I
cannot
go into this operation blindly. It already stretches the limits of our credibility
as scientists, and if it fails, we could be all crucified by the media, and shunned
by every medical and scientific community in the world. We could lose our licenses
to practice medicine in the US. We could be sued for wrongful death. And no matter
what assurances the Montanevan government has given you, we could even go to prison.
I refuse to risk my career and my reputation without knowing exactly what I’m signing
up for. Hell, for all I know, it’s the president of the US and if he dies, I’ll be
arrested for assassinating him.”
Julian sighed. “Rachel, I promise you, it’s not the president. He doesn’t have Bain’s—although
the vice-president’s father does, and we may eventually be called upon to perform
the same procedure on him.”
Turning, I headed straight for the door. “Sorry, Sir, but I’m gone.”
“Stop.”
I spun on my heel. “What?”
“You will not reveal this to anyone, Rachel. He couldn’t live with the details of
his transplant being leaked to the public.”
“I signed the confidentiality agreement and I’ll honor it. He has nothing to fear
from me.”
Julian sighed again. “Very well. The patient is my brother Jordan.”
“Oh…God,” I said faintly. That handsome, smiling, active young man in the photographs
was in the final stages of Bain’s Atrophy? “I’m so sorry, Sir.”
Julian scrubbed his hands over his face. “That was the bad news I received the day
Colin came home and said he’d upset you. I think I went a little mad that day.”
“I’m sure.”
“I hadn’t really begun to make headway into Bain’s yet, had barely conceived this
half-baked germ of an idea about how to tackle it, and suddenly I was fighting for
my brother’s life. That’s why I took Colin and disappeared. I didn’t want to abandon
you, but the clock was ticking and I had to focus every ounce of energy and every
brain cell I had on finding a cure.”
“I understand,” I said softly.
“So you’ll stay? You’ll still participate in the surgery?”
Sighing, I nodded. How could I refuse? “Of course I will.”
He hesitated and then said, “Thank you. I am forever in your debt.”
* * * * *
That evening, Julian was called away, so Colin had our dinner and ice packs delivered
to my bedroom while I showered. Then I lay naked on my stomach, with the ice packs
draped over my rear end, and let him sit on the cedar chest and feed me bites of roasted
lamb, herbed potatoes and baby carrots between sips of red wine.
“So tell me about you and Julian,” I invited.
“What would you like to know?”
“Everything. But that’s probably a lot to cover in one evening, so why don’t you start
with how you got into a D/s relationship with him. Were you already into that?”
He grinned as he finished chewing a bite of his own meal. “A little, but from the
other side, which you probably already guessed.”
“I was actually really surprised to find you bottoming for Julian,” I said, grabbing
my wine glass off the rolling cart. “You seem like a total top to me.”
“I
am
a total top to you.”
I rolled my eyes. “You know what I mean.”
He sat there quietly for a while, eating and thinking. Then he finally poked a bite
of potato into my mouth and said, “I was a top, but I wasn’t in any way worthy of
the title Dom. I just liked the thrill of topping, the risky edge to it. I didn’t
care about the girls I tied up or what they got out of the experience, besides an
orgasm or two.”
I nodded thoughtfully. That fit with what I’d seen of him for the first of those two
years.
“Actually, I wasn’t just an asshole with women. My father died when I was a baby,
and my mother spoiled me pretty badly all my life. I graduated high school at sixteen,
finished medical school at twenty-three, and by the time I met Julian, I thought I
was God’s gift to neurology. I had the brains and the hands to become a world-class
surgeon and I knew it. But I was also impulsive, insensitive and hardheaded, and while
Julian saw incredible potential in me, he also saw incredible potential for disaster.
When he expressed interest in mentoring me, he made it clear that he was doing it
out of sheer terror for my future patients, and at first I was offended enough to
walk away. But he kept challenging me, saying I couldn’t take what he’d dish out,
and when he finally said it in front of another resident, I said, ‘Fuck that. You’re
on, old man.’”
Smothering a laugh, I said, “I’ll bet he took that well.”
Colin chuckled, too. “Yeah, he dressed me down like a drill sergeant, spitting on
my face while he yelled at me right there in the hall. I took it just to show him
I could, but I was supremely pissed and spent the next few weeks spewing attitude
in private and in public. One day I told him I was leaving before the end of my shift
because I had a girl to tie up, and he laughed so hard he was doubled over when he
said ‘You think you’re a
Dom
? That poor girl.’”
“Ouch.”
“Mm-hmm. I kind of lost it then. I threw a punch and missed, and before I knew it,
he had me on the floor with my arm twisted behind me back and his knee in my kidney.
He pulled my head up by my hair and informed me that no Dom was allowed to dish out
anything he couldn’t take. ‘How much can you take, Dr. Carter?’ he asked me. ‘I’m
guessing precious little.’”
Enthralled, I said, “Oh boy.”
“Yup. I couldn’t let that challenge go unanswered, so I agreed to go with him to a
real dungeon and prove myself. I wasn’t as confident as I acted, though, and when
the dungeon turned out to be in his basement, I almost backed out. Kind of like you
today, I’d never really been disciplined. My middle school principal had given me
a few fairly public swats with the Board of Education, but those were meant to hurt
my pride more than my ass and I’d laughed myself silly afterward. Julian was going
to test my pain tolerance in a very isolated place, and I was suddenly very afraid
he’d prove I had none—and then just keep going. It was a shock to feel that…vulnerable.”
“Oh, Colin,” I sighed. Such a bad boy.
“Did you get enough?” he asked, gesturing at the plates. When I nodded, he pushed
the cart away and stood up. Plucking the ice packs and towel from my rear, he dropped
them on the cart and traced a sore spot with his finger. “He got you pretty good,
didn’t he, Miss Tenderbottom? You’ve got some bruising.”
I tried to get a look at it but my neck didn’t twist that far. “Really?”
“No, I just said that to make you say
really.
”
Blowing him a raspberry, I slid off the bed and went to look in the mirror. Wow, there
really were some mottled marks all over both cheeks. I couldn’t decide how I felt
about them.
“What’s the matter?” Colin asked, rubbing my butt and watching his hand in the mirror.
“Is it bad that I’m kind of excited he left marks?”
“Not at all. It’s pretty normal, actually—just don’t try to manipulate him into leaving
more or he’ll figure out some other punishment you’ll hate a lot more.”
I shuddered. “No thanks. I hated that one enough already.”
After he pushed the cart out into the hall, he ducked into the bathroom and I heard
the echo of urine splashing in the toilet.
“Hurry up and get back to the story,” I said loudly. “The suspense is killing me.”
“You’ll live.”
By the time he came back, I’d gotten under the covers, and he stripped and climbed
in with me, pulling me against his chest.
“So where was I again?” he teased.
“About to back out of a well-deserved beating from Julian.”
“Ah, right. So anyway, I almost backed out again when he said subs had to be naked.
But I forced myself to peel anyway, and when he stood there and looked me over, I
was…” He shook his head and sighed. “It was a really ugly shock to get a hard-on for
him. I’d never even thought about being attracted to a guy, but when he looked at
me with those scorn-filled eyes, the damn thing refused to go down. I wasn’t even
thinking about sex—in fact, I was pretty damn scared, but that only made me harder.”
Breathing a little rapidly from the excitement of the past, I slid my hand under the
covers and found his cock well on its way to excited in the present. Exploring him
eagerly, I asked, “How did Julian react?”
Colin rubbed circles on my shoulder with his palm and spread his thighs wider in invitation.
“He smiled and said, ‘Now that’s what I like to see, a sub impatient for his beating.’
I started to deny it, but then I realized I’d be admitting I was hard for something
else. I knew then I was in deep, deep trouble. I was an infant compared to him, ignorant
as hell and totally defenseless. I didn’t move a muscle when he walked in a circle
around me and pronounced me a very pretty boy. When I didn’t answer, he said, ‘The
proper response to a compliment from your Dom is
Thank you, Sir
,’ so I said it without even hesitating. That’s when I knew my life of doing whatever
I wanted and acting however I pleased was over.”