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“What?” Maxwell was pulled from his silly reverie of how Garrett threw his head back when he laughed particularly loudly after a few drinks to see Rhast looking at him with yellow swirling on his cheeks and his dark eyes wide and concerned. “Oh no, no, he’s fine. He’s just resting.”
“Just like you should be.” Rhast’s mother took Rhast’s hand with an apologetic look at Maxwell. “Am I cleared, doctor?”
“You’re cleared.” Maxwell stepped back. “Thank you.”
“You know”—the qeshian woman fixed him with the sort of strict look mothers of every species had perfected—“you really ought to get some rest, y—”
“Whoa there, easy, brother!”
Maxwell’s blood ran cold.
Rhast’s mother broke off as everyone in the temple turned to see Kurt Buck stumbling through the church doors, laboring under the weight of two other men—a qesh and a human—who had their arms slung over his shoulders. The human had bandages wrapped around his midriff, and the qesh struggled along with a huge cast.
Kurt laughed as he rebalanced them from the human’s stumble. “You’ll take us all out like that.”
“Well, move a little faster, you oaf. I’m trying to sit down.” The human wheezed as he laughed but leaned heavily on Kurt’s shoulder.
“We’re all trying to sit down,” the qesh snapped back without any malice, and the three of them made their way to a bench along the wall, Kurt’s muscular arms bulging as he supported the two other men.
Their injuries looked serious but no longer urgent. Maxwell took a few steps back into the crowd. Someone else could easily tend to them. Maxwell didn’t have to get involved, and Kurt hadn’t seen him yet.
As though the very thought summoned him, Kurt turned his head just as he set the qesh down. He locked eyes with Maxwell, and a handsome grin spread across his face. “Sweetheart! Just the man I needed.”
All eyes in the room turned to Maxwell, and Maxwell wished he could simply self-immolate and end it all. Why did Kurt have to—
No, that was a stupid question. Maxwell knew why he did it.
He clenched his jaw, forced a smile onto his lips, and approached the little group. He couldn’t let it seem like he didn’t care about people. “You look like you have it well in hand, Buck.”
“These two, yes.” Kurt grinned sheepishly, then peeled his bloodstained shirt up off his abdomen to display a nasty laceration. “Me, not so much.”
Gasps went up around the room, and Maxwell rushed forward.
“Kurt, for the love of—” He snatched up a wad of dressing from a box next to the bench and pressed it to Kurt’s wound. It wasn’t like the man would bleed out, but Maxwell couldn’t exactly ignore it either. He ground his teeth together and glanced up at Kurt; now so close, all Maxwell could smell was the familiar scent of his sweat. “You always did love to make a scene.”
“I didn’t even notice until now, I swear.” Kurt leaned back against the stone wall and grimaced down at Maxwell with his hands pressed across his abs. “Hurts like a bitch now, though.”
“I’m sure it does,” Maxwell muttered.
Kurt pushed himself back off the wall with a show of effort. “I can make it back to the clinic, though, if you can stitch me up.”
Maxwell shook his head and tugged Kurt’s arm to bring him onto the bench. “We don’t need to go to the clinic.” And no way in hell was Maxwell trapping himself in a room alone with this man. He sent an apologetic smile to the two men Kurt had helped. “Do you think you could make it just a little farther? I don’t want to move him more than I have to.”
“Of course.”
“Not a problem.”
“He saved our lives.”
The two men sang Kurt’s praises a moment longer before stumbling off back into the arms of friends and families and leaving Maxwell and Kurt with some modicum of privacy.
Maxwell knelt beside Kurt’s legs and eased up on the pressure so he could peek at the wound under the dressing. “I thought you were going on a supply run somewhere else on Carta.”
“We were. We did.” Kurt sighed and settled into the bench, his muscles loosening and his face creasing with genuine pain now that they were alone and he wasn’t putting on a big show for everyone. “The all-powerful Cartel’s got a few more splinter groups than just those pirates, it seems. The branch we were making a supply run to didn’t want to give up the supplies.”
“Did anyone else get hurt?” Maxwell pulled over the box he’d gotten the dressing from and dug around it, hoping beyond hope it’d have everything he needed and that they wouldn’t have to go back to the clinic after all. He wished Garrett were here.
“Nah.” Kurt shook his head, then snorted a laugh. “Well, no one on our side, at least. Now Zyk and Ha’ral are setting off on some tour of their franchises to ‘put the fear of the goddess’”—Kurt lazily made a couple quotation marks with his fingers—“into the rest of their people. God, I’d love to see that.”
