Bears & Beauties - Complete by Terra Wolf, Mercy May Page B

current position in life. I was solid.
    So of course when I saw the mutilated and brutalized man slumped up against a dumpster in the alleyway I was passing, you can imagine why my eyes nearly jumped out of my skull. It was, to say the least, surprising.
    Even with four years of medical training, on top of two decades of being bombarded by the gruesomeness of the Internet and Hollywood, the sight of the man’s bloodstained flesh was enough to send a wave of nausea through my body.
    Shit! I thought to myself, forcing my feet to carry over to the man. He looked rough, but judging by the steady rise and fall of his chest, I could tell that he was still breathing.
    I knelt down in front of the man, tossing my backpack to the side, and doing my best to clear my thoughts and tone down my alarm. I was ready for this. I’d been trained for this. No one would be better prepared to handle this situation that I was. Well, no one in shouting distance anyway. And by the time an ambulance got there, it could very possibly be too late.
    “Sir, can you hear me?” I asked the man, but to no avail. He didn’t so much as flinch or flutter one of his long, gorgeous eyelashes.
    First things first, I held two fingers against the man’s throat, checking his pulse. The faint drumming of the man’s carotid artery let me know that he wasn’t too far gone, and I immediately went to inspecting his body for wounds. The most obvious wound, and likely the reason he was slumped up against the garbage in the first place, was a pair of deep gashes in his shoulder. The blood looked like it had begun to clot and I shook my head in disbelief at that. Judging by the amount of blood on the man’s bare chest and back, as well as the pool of the stuff surrounding him, he should be dead, not in the process of forming a scab.
    In addition to the puncture marks on the man’s shoulder, there were a series of scrapes and cuts all across his body, from head to toe. His sides were heavily bruised and at least a few ribs were fractured. Beyond that, he looked solid. Or, well, as solid as a half-dead man in an alleyway can look. Whatever had happened to the guy - I was guessing a mugging-gone-wrong - he’d somehow managed to stay alive. That, in itself, seemed like a miracle to me.
    I reached over to my discarded backpack and unzipped it. I always kept a spare sweater with me in case of nippy weather, so I pulled it out of the bag and started to spread it out. Even with my curves, the sweater still dwarfed the man’s massive size. He was, I noticed, one of the beefiest looking guys I’d ever seen. From head to toe, the man was pure muscle, and his broad shoulders reminded me of Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine. He was, to say the least, quite the specimen.
    I bit my lip and just stared at him for a second. I’d never been this close to someone so well-formed before. Especially with them being naked. He was a marvel to behold and, honestly, there was something incredibly alluring about him. Something…familiar.
    I shook off the thoughts and went back to work, grabbing my scissors from my backpack. I accidentally nicked myself on the blades, cutting just deep enough to draw a small stream of blood. I dismissed the cut, wiping the blood off on the sweater. I then started to shred the sweater. In a matter of seconds, I’d come up with a few makeshift bandages, and began to work them onto the man, wrapping them carefully over the wounds on his shoulder. If I’d have had any antiseptic with me, I’d have lathered the sweater up first, but as it stood, this would have to work. I wrapped up the man’s shoulder, ensuring that the bleeding had stopped completely, then sat back to examine my work, wiping the blood on my hands off onto pants as I did. Given the resources I had, I thought I’d done pretty well. Even if the man’s miraculous healing had done most of the work for me.
    Just then, the man’s eyes flashed open, revealing two orbs of perfect green that delved