“Al” kept down the broth. He kept down the crackers. When she started giving him analgesics at regular intervals, he managed to keep those down, too. But despite her precautions, despite her efforts, during the night, he started running a fever.

At the rate it was rising, chances were, it was only going to get worse unless he got some antibiotics in him and fast. She hoped to God that it wasn’t too late, that sepsis hadn’t set in. She’d have a dead man on her hands and explaining to do.

They’d want to know why she hadn’t contacted the police and called for an ambulance. At the very least, she would lose her license and her livelihood. She’d have to go begging to her nurse practitioner sister for an office job, and their clinic was well-staffed already.

At the worst, she would end up wearing orange and marking the days until her release. How many years did they hand out for manslaughter?

He cracked open his eyes. They were bright with fever.

Shit.

She put the back of her hand on his cheek. “Al, do you feel how cool my hand is? If you want to live to see another day, we’re going to have to call someone. If I do it, it will be to 911 and you’re going to have the authorities involved.”

“Get my phone,” he ground out between his teeth. “If I can’t get a signal in here, you’ll need to redial the last number called. Ask for Dom Visconti. Tell him Matteo needs a medic. He’ll know where to send him.”

Dom Visconti.

Holy hell. Al’s name was Matteo, and he worked for a mob boss.

She’d been worried about losing her livelihood. Now she was worried for her life.

She’d found his cell phone with everything else when she laundered his pants. She ran to fetch it from the dryer and brought it to him. Matteo turned it on, unlocked his screen, and frowned.

“One bar,” he said. “I’ll try, but you might have to take it and talk to him.”

He punched in numbers, hit the button to call, and put the phone to his ear. “Pop?” he rasped. “Pop? Can you hear me?” There was a long moment of silence. “Fuck. You need to do it. Find a good signal and call him back. Tell him to send a medic. Remember.”

Beth took the phone from his fingers. Heading out the door, she hurried down the hall to the living room, constantly checking how many bars were lit up.

She got three in the kitchen near the range hood and redialed the number.

“Matteo? What the hell is going on?”

“I’m Beth. Bethany Shelton,” she said. “Please, I need to speak to Dom Visconti.”

“You’re speaking to him,” the authoritarian voice said. “Where’s Matteo?”

Matteo’s father Pop was Dom Visconti. A Dom—and not in the BDSM sense of things.

Her nightmare just turned ten times worse.

“In bed with a post-op fever. He needs a medic and antibiotics and probably a transfusion, as much blood as he lost. How soon can you get someone here?”

He was already barking orders. “Sixty minutes,” he said. “He’ll be there as soon as he can. Stay with him. Oh, and Miss Shelton? You do not have to worry about bloodborne pathogens with my son. I’ll have the doctor bring a written report if you’d like to see it.”

Dear lord. What kind of father made sure that his son stayed clean? Oh, right. Mob boss. He’d have to be prepared for bullets and gunplay and God knew what else happened in a crime family.

“Thank you.” She was sincere in that, at least. Working in a hospital, you worried about things that the general public only paid attention to when they made the evening news.

“Call me if his situation worsens.”

“I will,” she promised.

Sixty minutes.

She prayed that she could keep him alive that long.

Beth took the phone back to Matteo’s bedroom and set it on the nightstand. He cracked open his heavy-lidded eyes. They were glazed, glassy with fever. She needed to get him in a tub of cold water and slow the climb, but she didn’t know if he was strong enough to get that far on foot.

“Matteo,” she said firmly, making certain that she had his attention. “I talked to your father. The medic’s on his way, but he won’t be here for an hour. We need to get your fever down. Do you think that you can walk? I want you in the bathtub.”

Quicker than a home shopping show could part people from their money, he caught her hand and pulled it to his groin. Pressing her palm against his erection, he curled her fingers around his girth and thrust his cock into her hand.

Flaccid, he was impressive. Erect, he was magnificent.

“No tub,” he rasped. “A bed is better.”

“But—”

He abandoned her hand and reached for her braid, pulling her until their noses were nearly touching. “I shouldn’t want you,” he grated, his breath still minty from when she’d helped him brush his teeth after supper. “But I can’t stop thinking about you. With the cashier. With that mother at the checkout. You, without a stitch, lying on the seat of my SUV, looking so peaceful. So pure of heart. I promised myself that I wasn’t going to touch you again. You don’t know who I am. What I’ve done. What I’ll have to do as soon as I can go again. There’s a monster out there who needs put down. He takes women, shares them with his club, and kills them. He raped my cousin. I promised to avenge my family’s honor. I failed once. I won’t rest until he’s stopped.”

Stopped…as in dead.

Matteo was not the kind of man that most parents envision for their daughter. He had no qualms about killing someone who deserved it. He was willing to be judge, jury, and executioner if it meant that justice would be served when the legal system failed.

The intensity in his eyes was mesmerizing. She wet her lips and swallowed hard.

“You should have run away as far and as fast as you could go.”

“You pointed a gun at me.”

“It was empty. It’s still empty unless you found bullets and reloaded it. But I needed help. I’m just sorry it was you.”

He thrust himself against her hand. Beth realized that her fingers were still wrapped around his girth, or as far as they could reach, anyway.

He still needed her, but the nature of his needs had taken a very carnal turn. In another time, another place, she might have been seduced into having a one-night stand with a handsome, well-dressed man possessing an air of danger and an impressive cock. But now…

If she fought him, she could hurt him. If he didn’t take it easy, he could start bleeding internally again. This time, she might not be able to stop it.

He was clean. Would it really be so bad, to give herself to him just this once? No right, no wrong. Nothing but elemental need and what it took to assuage it.

“Matteo—”

“You were my angel of mercy,” he murmured, his voice grown rough with desire. “Have mercy on me now.”

He cupped her head and urged her face down to his. Rather than risk hurting him, she surrendered to her own rising passion.

They came together with opened mouths and parted lips. Tongues thrust, twining around each other in a dance as old as humankind. Forsaking her hold on his manhood, she unzipped her pants, hooked her fingers in the tops of her panties, and shoved everything down. Kicking them aside, she climbed on the bed and straddled him, riding the ridge of his cock and stimulating his length while his mouth continued to consume hers.

He claimed one breast with his good hand, splaying his large fingers, rubbing and squeezing it. Her hardened nipple prodded his palm. Catching it between his fingers, he rolled and tugged on it, a pull that she felt all the way to her core.

She threw off her shirt, wanting to feel his mouth on her breasts. Pushing them together, she offered herself to him, rising to meet his mouth and welcoming the feel of his lips claiming one, then the other. He took a nipple between his teeth and teased it with his tongue, licking, flicking, curling around it and sucking it inside. He feasted on her flesh like a starving man, a desperate man, a wounded man with an uncertain future, seeking to make the most of the time that was left to him.

She didn’t want to think that he might die. She wasn’t ready to accept that this might be the last act of his life. The last time that he’d know the joy of a woman’s body and the comfort of her touch. She gave it to him, all the while bargaining with God to do what He could to save him. He might be a dangerous man, but he wasn’t a bad man. Not really. He was lonely and vulnerable and likely as scared as she was that things might not end well.

“It’s okay,” she whispered, seeking to reassure him when he pushed down the front of his sweatpants and freed his cock. “It’s okay,” she said when he bent his knees and started to enter her, skin to skin, with nothing separating them. She wasn’t about to raise the subject of condoms with a man who might be dying.

He claimed her in one desperate, searing thrust that took her breath away. Dear God, it felt good. He felt good—despite his wound, despite his fever, despite having only one arm free to hold her. The passion in his eyes, in his touch, in each panting breath beguiled her. The sensation of being more than filled by him held her magnificently enthralled.

She started to move, her hips churning against his, building in strength and speed until she was taking his length inside her deep enough to touch her very soul. She braced herself above him, keeping her weight off his chest, taking care to not hurt his shoulder or reopen his wound.

Acutely aware of the fevered heat of his skin, she did her best to hurry him along. Squeezing his length with her vaginal muscles, she used two fingers to pinch and twist his nipple in a move that made his hips snap to meet hers.

With those washboard abs and a perfect Adonis belt, he obviously kept himself in excellent physical shape. Under normal circumstances, they probably would have screwed off and on all night. But this was not her norm and far from his. Once he became proactive, it didn’t take long for his balls to tighten and his rhythm to break.

Sensing his imminent release, she started to raise herself, intending to let him finish in her mouth or in her hand. But he refused to let her go. Grabbing her waist, he drove in deep and exploded inside her, shooting stream after stream of cum until the pulsing waves subsided.

He might have needed this, but having sex hadn’t done his fever any favor. Beth knew that she had to get him into the tub and fast.

“Matteo, let’s take a bath,” she said, hoping that temptation might succeed where logic failed. “We need to be clean and ready for when the doctor gets here. I can’t go to the door like this. Come on, now. I need you to get in the chair for me, but I’m going to need you to sit sideways, with your legs over one arm. That’s the only way it will fit through the door. I know it won’t be easy, but nothing worth doing is, right? I promise that I’ll make it worth your while. Come on, mister. Let’s get you in the tub.”

It took a herculean effort on both their parts to do it. She would have settled for the shower, but she needed every inch of his skin to be in contact with the water if she was going to get him cooled down and give him his best chance at survival.

Aspirin was out of the question, not without talking to a doctor. It would thin his blood when he likely needed the opposite.

Once Matteo was settled against the back of the tub, she plugged the drain and ran cold water into it, noting that the temperature in July was considerably different than January. But it was what her patient needed. The colder, the better.

The soaker tub was large enough to easily handle a couple. She climbed into the other end and washed in record time. Besides being too damn cold, she needed to be dressed and ready to answer the door when the doctor came.

Once she was clean, she climbed out and knelt on a towel beside the tub. Matteo watched her, his eyelids at half-mast, his eyes bright with fever. Taking a sponge, she covered where the water didn’t reach, squeezing it over his shoulders, bathing his neck, washing his face and the dark scruff of beard that shadowed his jaw.

Occasionally, she let some water out, added cold, and returned to her ministrations. Given her experience with therapy sessions, she was a pretty good judge of time. After thirty minutes, she told Matteo that she needed to leave him for a minute. “I have to unlock the back door for the medic when he comes. Doctors think nothing about having us wait on them, but Heaven help us if they’re the ones kept waiting.”

“Stay,” he rasped.

“I’ll be right back. I promise. I’m just going to unlock the door. I’ll be quick.”

She grabbed his phone and her clothes and dressed as she went, zipping up her pants before unlocking the back entrance door that they had used. A quick glance at the microwave clock showed that fifty minutes had elapsed from when she’d spoken to Dom Visconti.

The doctor should be here soon.