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once-white fabric gave all the way to Morrow’s waist. An extremely convincing masculine chest lay beneath, meticulously crafted from broad shoulders and moderately muscled pectorals, right down to the sparse thatch of hair embedded within the shadowy, textured skin. A quick sweep of his fingers assured him it was definitely synthetic skin.
    Thank God.
    The disguise was so good that for a moment there, he’d wondered if he wasn’t losing ground more quickly than he feared. For all Hatch’s reassurances, where would he and Morrow be then?
    Jared crammed the insidious doubts back into their box and locked the lid as he ran his fingers up the right side of the prosthetic chest, locating the row of hooks that sealed the edges of the molded rubber together, as well as the second set hidden along the ridge of her shoulder. He popped both rows almost as quickly as he’d popped the buttons on that grimy men’s dress shirt, biting back an instinctive whistle as he cracked the false chest open and pushed the phony pecs to the side.
    Any doubt he had left vanished at the sight.
    What lay beneath was definitely all woman.
    Generously so. Right down to the stiff nipples crowning the twin ivory swells. Swells that had captured the intermittent starlight filtering through the pines of the Rebelian forest to gleam softly amid the shifting shadows. He ignored his body’s sudden, inappropriate reaction to the sight and leaned down to press the disk of his stethoscope into the upper curve of the woman’s left breast, blocking out the nocturnal symphony around them as he focused on the gradually strengthening heartbeat pulsing through his ears.
    Relieved, he withdrew the scope.
    He lifted the woman’s shoulders and slipped the stethoscope between the rear of the prosthetic and her equally bare back, timing the rise and fall of her lungs as he evaluated their capacity. Satisfied, he withdrew the scope and hooked it around his neck. But as he settled that mop of matted brown hair into the pillow of pine needles, his fingertips brushed across a row of tiny, tightly spaced bumps tracking up the woman’s scalp, mere millimeters inside the hairline, just behind her right ear.
    Stitches?
    Possibly the cause of that coma? Before he could lean down close enough to find out, the body beneath his shifted. Stiffened.
    â€œWhat the hell do you think you’re doing?”
    He stiffened. Unfortunately he also dropped his gaze. Stared. And damned if he didn’t flush. He ripped his gaze from those taunting swells, hoping the darkness would conceal the damning tide rapidly spreading up his neck. The moment he met the dark-brown fury leveled on him, he knew it hadn’t. He eased his chest up from the woman’s exposed breasts. “I beg your pardon. I was…examining you.”
    â€œReally?”
    Given the circumstance, her dry sarcasm shouldn’t have stung. But it did.
    Why he even gave a damn what some nerdy, hermaphroditic geologist thought was beyond him. He’d saved the man’s hide, for Christ’s sake. Jared shifted to his haunches as that same geologist sat up and closed the prosthetic over those firm, telling breasts. Okay, he’d saved the woman’s hide. Didn’t that earn him at least one get-out-of-a-faux-pas free card?
    Evidently not.
    What it earned him was an unobstructed view of the woman’s entire torso as she scrambled to her knees, the false chest swinging wide as she swayed suddenly. He reached out to steady her, but the fury cutting through the coke-bottle lenses that had somehow survived their harrowing flight stopped him cold. He anchored his hands to the ends of the stethoscope at his neck and settled back onto his haunches, ignoring his burning hamstring as he noted the raw edges of the intravenous needle site on the back of the woman’s hand.
    She hadn’t been out of that coma for long. It was best not to push her. At least, not until