Rehabbing the Beast

by Abbie Zanders

  From the time he was returned to his room until his next session, he’d feel awful. Beyond awful. But every time he saw her, treating him as if he wasn’t a complete sack of worthless shit, he’d do it all over again, because if she hated him even half as much as he hated himself, he could make sense of his world.

  She didn’t hate him, though, or at least she hadn’t appeared to. No matter what he’d said or done, she’d always made him feel special. Like a man, not a cripple, not just another wounded warrior to cross her path. When he had abandoned all hope, she’d stood quietly behind him and pushed him ever forward, until he actually started to believe in miracles again.

  Seth sat down on the bed and dropped his head in his hands. His recovery had been a miracle. Quinn just wasn’t a talented physical therapist, she was an honest to God, bona fide healer. If he’d thought she was too good for him before, now he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt.

  He never should have kissed her. From the second he saw that she was alive and doing well he should have turned around and gotten the fuck out of Dodge. But no. He’d had to give in to temptation. He had to taste those pretty pink lips just once, telling himself that once he did, he would leave, just turn around and go. That he would be able to put her behind him and move on.

  Except ... now that he’d tasted her, he didn’t think he could survive without doing so again.

  The beast within lifted his head and yowled.

  He knew what he should do: leave. Leave and never look back. If he had any honor in him whatsoever, he would sacrifice his own happiness and leave her alone. Hell, there were plenty of fine men here who could make her happy. Men who weren’t scarred and broken both inside and out. Men who hadn’t said horrible, vile things and made her cry.

  But none of them loved her like he did, with a soul deep ache that killed a little more of him each day he wasn’t with her.

  Siobhan’s words echoed in his head, as unbelievable now as they had been when she’d spoken them. What did Quinn want, he wondered. If he left, would she be disappointed or relieved? Dare he even think for one moment that Quinn’s grandmother had been right in assuming that Quinn cared for him? That all this time, Quinn might have had feelings for him that went beyond the typical therapist-patient relationship?

  It hit him then. The real reason Quinn had always stayed by him, no matter what. Why she had never asked to be reassigned. Why she had never missed an appointment, even coming in on weekends when she wasn’t scheduled to take care of him.

  His inner beast lay down and put his head between his paws. He was well and truly the biggest arse in the world.

  Chapter Twelve

  “He’s not coming, Gran,” Quinn said. The small clock hanging on the wall read 12:30 pm. Siobhan heard the ‘I told you so’ Quinn wisely withheld, for the sweet child had been certain he would not come. She took no satisfaction in being right, her hopes of being wrong crushed beneath the weight of the truth.

  Quinn hid it well, her face revealing only what appeared to be mild disappointment, but Siobhan felt the lass’s pain in her own heart. It wouldn’t do to speak of it, though. Quinn should be allowed to keep her dignity intact.

  Siobhan shook her head, staring out the window. “I doona understand it,” she murmured, more to herself than Quinn. He’d had the look, Siobhan was certain of it. The man was every bit in love with Quinn as she was with him. It was there in his eyes, plain for all to see. His shock had been nearly as obvious. Clearly, the two shared the same gift of denial as well.

  SETH FORCED HIMSELF to put one foot in front of the other, his hip and knees screaming out in pain. He was walking under his own power, yes, but it was only in the last several weeks that he’d been able to accomplish such a feat. To complicate matters, he was operating on minimal sleep and the mountain was fucking steep.

  He looked at his watch, cursing as he did so. 12:30. Shit. He had misjudged the time. Even allowing himself an extra hour from what he thought it should have taken hadn’t been enough; he’d had to keep stopping along the way lest his legs give out completely. For the hundredth time, he wished he’d been able to drive his car, but the locals had assured him it would not be able to handle the cart path that was little more than a trail of switchbacks from the village to Siobhan’s secluded cottage. They’d been right.

  Just when he thought he could not take another step, he saw the tendrils of smoke rising from the chimney just ahead. That gave him the extra incentive he needed.

  He had just lifted his hand to knock when the door was thrown wide open. Quinn took one look at his pale face and the sheen of sweat covering his skin.

  “You walked!?!” she practically yelled at him. “Are you insane?”

  He blinked as the sweat dripped from his forehead. It wasn’t exactly the reception he’d been hoping for.

  “Gran, help me,” she called, and suddenly he felt Quinn wedging herself beneath his right arm, her hand around his waist. Siobhan was on the other side, doing the same. He was about to protest, afraid that his weight would crush one or both of them, but he didn’t have enough breath left to do so. As it turned out, like her granddaughter, the spry old woman was a lot stronger than she looked.

  They got him over to the couch and Quinn was gone, only to reappear a moment later with a glass of brandy and a cool towel. As she dabbed gently at his face, he was stricken by the look of worry and concern he saw on hers. He’d seen that look so many times, glimpsed it before she’d had a chance to hide it away behind a mask of quiet determination. Why had he never recognized it for what it really was?

  “You... care... for ... me,” he said as he began to catch his breath.

  “Of course I do, you big idiot!” she snapped impatiently, though it was worry in her voice, not anger. “What were you thinking, walking all the way up here like that! You haven’t been off the walker long enough to attempt something like that!”

  No, he hadn’t, but... how did she know that? Was she a mind reader, too? That possibility had the color creeping up his neck. If she had any clue the kind of things he’d been thinking all the times she’d been touching him...

  “How ... do ... you know ...how long?”

  A sudden rush of guilt suffused her features. Quinn tried to move away but he caught her wrist and met her eyes, demanding an answer.

  “Ah, well, I may have called Deiter a few times,” she admitted hesitantly.

  Seth blinked as relief flooded through him, only to have his inner beast sitting up, alert. She’d been checking on him this whole time, when he thought she had simply turned around and never looked back, never given him a second thought? No wonder Deiter took his pound of flesh every day. The big son-of-a-bitch must have suspected how Quinn felt about him.

  “His legs?” Siobhan asked, reminding them of her presence.

  “Yes,” Quinn confirmed. “Let’s get these jeans off.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Seth said, trying to sit up as they ignored him completely and each slipped off a sneaker and began to tug at his pant legs.

  Quinn rolled her eyes, the action filled with female scorn and distinctly un-Quinn like. “Like you have something I haven’t already seen a thousand times.”

  He felt the color rising in his cheeks. Yes, technically that was true, but that was before he knew she liked him. When he could use cruel words and a scowl to push her away before she got too close to the truth.

  “No way around it. We’ve got te strip ye down te yer braies. Now be a good lad and lift yer hips a bit. My, but he has a nice tight arse, Quinn.”

  Seth stared open-mouthed at Siobhan, even as Quinn cried out, scandalized, “Gran!”

  Taking pity on him, Quinn grabbed a small lap quilt and handed it to him. He snatched it from her hands and wasted no time in spreading it over his personal areas. Siobhan smirked, but said nothing.

  They managed to get his jeans off without too much trouble, now that Seth had his security blanket and was being a bit more cooperative. Then Siobhan sat down and
instructed Quinn to get some of the special oils she’d mixed earlier.

  “Wait,” Seth said, his impending sense of panic overriding his breathing difficulties when he saw Siobhan putting the oil in her hands instead of Quinn’s. “I want Quinn to do it.”

  Siobhan smiled. “Are ye here te court my granddaughter, Seth O’Rourke?”

  “Well, yes, but—"

  “Then ‘twould be improper for her te attend te ye with such a state of familiarity. I will have none of that, do I make myself clear?”

  Seth looked to Quinn in a desperate plea for help, but she just smiled (or was that a smirk?) and held up her hands in a ‘what can you do’ gesture. He thought she seemed much less bothered by the prospect of her grandmother touching him than he was.

  His inner beast lay down and covered his head with his paws.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “So, your legs are feeling better?” Quinn asked, trying to hide a smile. They sat on the porch, drinking iced tea, enjoying a spectacular sunset painting the sky and mirrored on the lake below. Mercifully, Siobhan had allowed him to put his jeans back on.

  “Yes,” he grumbled, but there was no real bite to it. He sighed. “At least I didn’t have to worry about hiding wood like I did whenever you touched me.”

  Quinn’s eyes widened, then she laughed. He’d never heard her laugh before. The musical sound filled his chest with light. Before he knew it, Seth was smiling, too.

  “You are the only one who’s ever believed in me, Quinn,” he said quietly, slipping his hand over hers. He concentrated on looking at her fingers. Slim and dainty, but with surprising strength. “I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out why, but I just can’t come up with anything.”

  “You’re not so hard to believe in, Seth.”

  “But I said such awful things to you, Quinn. How could you even stand to be around me?”

  “You didn’t mean them,” she said quietly, looking down to where their hands intertwined.

  “You couldn’t have known that.”

  “But I did,” she insisted. “And believe me when I tell you that I’ve been called worse. It stings a lot more when it’s genuine, trust me.”

  “Your family,” he said knowingly.

  He saw momentary puzzlement, then her features cleared in realization. “That’s how you found me, isn’t it?”

  He nodded. “Danny?” she guessed.

  Seth nodded. “He seemed like the most reasonable of them.”

  “Danny is only a couple years older than me,” Quinn said. “He doesn’t remember our mother as well as the others. Her death hurt him, too, but not as much as the ones who had more time with her.”

  Seth nodded. That was exactly what Danny had told him. “They blame you for her death.”

  “Yes,” she exhaled heavily. “And they’re right, you know. My mother died giving birth to me. If not for me, she’d still be with them.”

  “You don’t know that,” Seth said, slipping his arm around her shoulders. It felt so natural, so right to offer her comfort. The beast purred at the feel of her against his side, pleased when she made no attempt to move away. “Destiny isn’t something that can be thwarted. If it was her time, it was her time.”

  She turned moist, hopeful eyes to him. For several long moments, his heart stuttered. “Do you really believe that?”

  “Cupcake, I spent nearly ten years as a soldier in the worst pits of hell you can possibly imagine. I’ve seen buddies of mine walk away from horrendous shit that not even a cockroach should have been capable of surviving, and I’ve seen others die from little more than a scratch. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, nothing comprehensible to our minds, anyway. Bottom line: there IS a plan. We just don’t know what it is.”

  They sat in silence for a while, rocking back and forth on the porch swing until the golds and reds darkened to purples and blues. “If there is one thing I have figured out, though, it’s that I want to be with you. I’ll understand if you don’t feel the same. Hell, I can’t imagine why you would. I don’t even know what I’m going to do now—”

  She put a finger to his lips. “We’ll figure it out together, Seth.”

  “I don’t deserve you, Quinn. I am so sorry. For everything I said, everything I did.”

  “I know.” Quinn curled tighter into his side and that was enough for now.

  His inner beast purred.

  “I’m sure not looking forward to the walk back down the mountain in the dark,” Seth said, when Siobhan peeked out and told him, in no uncertain terms, that his courting time for the evening was over and he’d best be on his way.

  “I’ll drive you,” Quinn said. “Just let me get my keys.”

  “Drive me?” Seth said, astonished. “Cupcake, I know you’re amazing and all, but not even you could drive down that path.”

  She blinked, bemused. “Don’t be silly. Why would I use the path when there’s a road just out back?”

  Seth narrowed his eyes at Siobhan. “You never mentioned a road.”

  “Ye never asked,” Siobhan sniffed. “Besides, she’s already made it far too easy on ye. Ye needed te work a bit at courtin’ her, as any male of worth should.”

  Seth glared at her for a moment, then pressed his lips together and nodded. After how he’d treated Quinn, he deserved to walk that path a hundred times over, maybe more. And for her, he would do it without complaint. “Fair enough.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “So how long does the official courting ritual last?” Seth asked two weeks later. They had been the best two weeks of his life. Each day he spent as much time with Quinn as Siobhan would allow, and each day his feelings for her grew stronger, as did the beast’s need to have her. Seth had always been strong of body and mind, but every minute spent in Quinn’s presence threatened his control like nothing else ever had.

  Ever since that first kiss, Seth had craved more. More kissing. More touching. More. And while he loved sitting beside her, holding her hand, gazing into her eyes, his need to have her in other ways continued to grow with an intensity that was beginning to scare him. The daily dips into the icy cold lake weren’t helping enough.

  Nor were the grueling workout sessions he put himself through when Quinn and Siobhan were doing their thing. He found the men in the village were more than willing to help him regain his strength and mobility, especially when it meant they got to beat the crap out of him every day. They were careful to keep those little sparring sessions amongst themselves, however, and kept the blows below the shoulders where the bruises could be easily hidden from Quinn’s assessing gaze.

  “Oh,” Quinn said, averting her eyes. It was a look Seth had become familiar with, the one she gave him whenever she wanted to avoid a particular subject, like her family. For whatever reason, she no longer seemed determined to hide the emotion in her eyes around him like she once had. Or maybe he was just better at reading it.

  “Quinn?” he prodded, regulating his breaths to keep his tone even.

  “Well, technically, all you have to do is ask Gran for my hand in marriage.”

  Seth stared at her. All this time he’d been playing extra nice, thinking he was appeasing the old woman and following her courting rituals to gain her favor. All he’d had to do was ask? The beast let out a mournful moan and dropped his ears.

  “Forgot to mention that, did you, Cupcake?” he said, his tone soft and oh-so-dangerous.

  Quinn averted eyes and bit her lip. “Not exactly.”

  “Not exactly?”

  “Don’t be angry with me, Seth,” she said, biting down on her lip harder. Now that she wasn’t trying to completely hide her feelings from him, he noticed she did that a lot. It drove him crazy, because all he could think about when he saw her biting that full bottom lip was that he wanted to do that, too. There were, in fact, quite a few parts of her that he and his beast wanted to bite and lick and sink their teeth into.

  “It’s just that, well, I’m really enjoying this time with you. You
know, going out to dinner, taking long walks, sitting in the boat and looking up at the stars.”

  Her response puzzled him, until an idea occurred to him. “And you thought that would stop when your grandmother gave her permission?”

  She nodded, looking sheepish. It was all he could do not to crush her in his arms and kiss the daylights out of her. “Yes. That’s how it usually works, right? As long as a man is courting a woman, he takes her places, brings her flowers, stuff like that. After her family approves the marriage, he doesn’t have to try so hard anymore.”

  “I see.” He could, kind of. She liked the romantic stuff. He could do that. He wasn’t the smoothest guy in the world, but he was a quick learner. Anything that made Quinn happy was more than worth the effort.

  “This is all kind of new to me,” she explained shyly, suddenly finding the hem of her shirt very interesting. “I’ve never been on a date before, and—”

  “I’m sorry, what did you just say?” He couldn’t possibly have heard that right. Quinn was twenty-five years old. He knew she wasn’t a high-profile type of girl, but to have never dated?

  “You’ve never been on a date before this? Seriously?” She shook her head, the color in her cheeks deepening. “No dinner? No movies? No dancing or county fairs?” She kept shaking. “How does something like that even happen?”

  She kept her head down and studied her hands.

  Seth was thunderstruck. She was so beautiful. So kind and funny and intelligent. How could everyone fail to see that? How could they not have been knocking her door down all this time?

  Then he thought about the men in the village, about all the male therapists at the rehab center and he knew. They had been beating at the door. She’d just never opened it before. Not until him.

  His voice was thick when he spoke again, and he had to clear his throat a bit to get the words out. “I promise, Quinn, that for as long as you let me, I will never stop courting you.”